Former Cudo CEO Billy Tucker’s new business 57Signals has spawned four separate start-ups, with Tucker today unveiling the first – Yabbit.com, a customer feedback site.
Yabbit, which has been bootstrapped and went live earlier this week, allows customers to provide direct feedback to businesses they interact with.
Businesses that register for the service promote it to customers, who then give their feedback through a private channel back to the business.
The start-up, which Tucker says will be a global play “straight out of the gate”, is the first spin-off venture of 57Signals, the data consultancy Tucker started when he quit as Cudo’s first CEO last year.
There are currently three other enterprises that Tucker is set to launch, with a further start-up also in the pipeline.
“We work a lot with data and we realised that there is a gap at the service end – customers leave unhappy from a business and they don’t do anything from it,” he tells StartupSmart.
“Customers are often passive in person and then aggressive online. They are happy to whinge online but don’t want the confrontation of directly challenging the business owner about bad service.”
“We’re providing an avenue to the business owner, the one who has their mortgage on the line if customers are unhappy. The business can then respond with an apology or voucher.”
Tucker says Yabbit has already had 100 businesses sign up to its service, primarily from Australia and the US.
It’s free for customers and businesses to sign up to the site, although businesses are charged a small transaction fee of around $1 if they choose to respond to feedback.
“A major concern among small businesses is cashflow and I wanted to pitch an idea to them that didn’t cost them a cent [to sign up to],” he says.
On his development of a raft of start-ups so soon after launching his own business, Tucker says: “It wasn’t what I had in mind initially, it just evolved very quickly.”
“I’ve really enjoyed interacting with the start-up scene in Australia, it’s a lot stronger than I thought it would be.”
This article first appeared on StartupSmart.
