In November 2022, HSBA alumnus Jonathan Kurfess, founder of the market research platform Appinio, has been selected as one of the "Top 40 under 40" by Capital business magazine. An award that the magazine has given to the young elite every year since 2017. At the age of 23, he founded Appinio, the fastest and cheapest market research platform in the world, directly after his business administration studies. Today he runs a modern company that is super successful and CO2 neutral at the same time. A great opportunity to talk to Jonathan about his great success with Appinio, his passion as an entrepreneur and what drives him personally.
Be Gritty! On Passion, Perseverance and Gamified Market Research
You have just been named one of the "Top 40 under 40" by the business magazine Capital, making you one of our country's Young Elite. Congratulations, that's really very impressive. Did you expect this award?
Thank you very much! No, I didn't expect it. But it makes you realise that you are getting older. All of a sudden it says 40, although I'm still closer to 30. I wouldn't count myself among any elite and I don't like thinking in terms of elites. Nevertheless, I feel very honoured and proud of our team and everything we have achieved together with Appinio in the past years. Therefore, I was very pleased and am of course even more pleased that the work of the past years is being recognised.
You had the idea for Appinio in your early twenties. How did you come up with it? What was the trigger?
The idea for Appinio actually came to me during my studies at HSBA. Since the degree programme has a dual structure, I also worked in the marketing department of my cooperation company at some point. As a budding "marketer", I was always dependent on data from market research. Even back then, I found the process of obtaining the data incredibly tedious and very inefficient. First talking to the internal market research department, who then approached a market research institute, who then approached service providers, who recruited participants, who were interviewed and back again. The whole process took several weeks, was incredibly complex and extremely expensive. At the same time, the data was extremely poor because the only incentive for survey participants was to make money.
That was the time when social networks like Facebook or Instagram became big. I wondered why people left and right were starting to publicly voice their opinions - intentionally or not - except in market research. And when you break it down to the most basic level, market research is just that: asking consumers for opinions.
That's where I got the idea for Appinio - a social network for opinions, monetised via market research. I pitched the idea to my employer at the time, but they didn't want to pursue the concept. After completing my studies, I founded Appinio.
Did your studies at HSBA help you to realise your dream? Or to put it another way, is there perhaps a special moment, a special aspect from your time as a student that was particularly helpful?
It's fair to say that without my dual study programme, I definitely wouldn't have been able to understand and experience certain contexts, such as how inefficiently market research works. Therefore, I would never have founded Appinio without HSBA. As far as the foundation itself is concerned, it was a lot of learning by doing. You learn a lot during a dual study programme, except how to set up your own company. At least that's how it was for me at the time. That's not necessarily the purpose of a dual study programme. But I have to say that the practical experience was incredibly valuable and certainly an advantage for me compared to others. I am and will remain a big fan of dual studies!
Appinio is not a pure survey app, but rather a social network for opinion with exceptionally engaged users. The incentive is more symbolic. Can you explain that briefly?
With pleasure. As I just briefly described, there is a very central problem in market research (Mafo for short): the incentive system of the participants. Much of what happens in market research is, to put it bluntly, fraud - and almost everyone knows it. Because participants are only induced to fill out surveys and take part in studies by money. As a result, the data quality is incredibly poor and there are many so-called "survey hunters" who fill out surveys almost professionally just to earn money. If the first question of a survey is: "How many SUVs do you own?", for example, they give five, because they will then most likely receive highly paid automotive Mafo.
That is exactly what we are changing. Market research is not the core of the app for our users and not the reason why they use the app. It's because we've built a community-based social network that users love to use. They like to open the app and express their opinions. In other words, an incredible number of opinions are shared in the app, questions are asked and users can compare and question each other.
Every now and then, there is also a real Mafo survey. But since our users are almost addicted to the app, they like to fill out the surveys with a conscience. In return, they get coins and move up in levels. The app is therefore very gamified and the coins are more symbolic. You get a few cents for completing a survey. When a user has filled out enough surveys, he/she can have the coins paid out via Paypal or donate them.
This not only has the advantage that our data quality is far better than traditional market research. We can also offer it at a significantly lower price and thus make it possible for new companies to conduct market research in the first place. In addition, we are incredibly fast. A nationally representative survey with 1000 participants takes less than 1 hour.
You always wanted to make the world a little better and you actually did it. Today (as of 2022) you are a C02 neutral company and still donate 1% of your turnover to the fight against climate change. You can be more than proud. How did you manage that?
Exactly, we are a C02 neutral company and have committed to donating 1% of our turnover to climate protection. With Appinio, we also plant a tree for every survey that is commissioned from us. Appinio is bootstrapped, which means we don't have institutional investors on board telling us what we should and shouldn't do. This allows us to do things differently than other companies and competitors. For example, donating 1% of our turnover.
With Appinio, we want to set an example and show that ecology and commercial success are not at odds with each other, but quite the opposite. Sustainability is discussed and propagated a lot, but if we look at how we build companies nowadays, it is anything but sustainable. Many simply borrow an incredible amount of money for maximum growth and hope that it will work. Unfortunately, we are currently seeing that it often doesn't work out, left and right, with all the waves of redundancies. We want to prove that things can be done differently. So far with success.
We are also working on our own foundation. We want to make it even easier for other companies to do the same and also donate a part of their turnover to the environment and receive C02 certificates in return. We want to inspire other generations of founders and companies to do good and change the system from within by proving that social capitalism is the successful and sustainable, social and contemporary way to build and run a business in today's world.
Is there any advice you would like to give to our students?
I believe that patience and perseverance are often underestimated. The journey with Appinio was anything but easy and involved a lot of hard work. We were on the verge of exodus several times because we had hardly any money left in our account. If I hadn't believed in myself, the idea and especially the team at those moments, we wouldn't be where we are today. There is a word in English called "grit". Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance. If I could give students one thing, it would be "be gritty". Success is much less determined by talent than many think. It's much more about passion and perseverance. So don't give up after the first setbacks!