After creating the Survey for my Managerial Economics class at BYU, we needed some way to get students to take it. Using the email system on BYU’s BlackBoard we started our email campaign to get anyone we could find to take our survey. Luckily BYU students are kind and helped out tremendously.

In our brainstorm for ideas, Mari (my awsome girlfriend) and I were trying to think of something to write in an email to her marriage prep class. We made an impetuous decision. We came up with this completely sarcastic email:

SUBJECT: Marriage Prep: PLEASE HELP ME KEEP MY BOYFRIEND!

Hi Everyone,

My boyfriend is doing a VERY SHORT survey for one of
his classes at the business school. He needs as many
BYU students as possible to take it. He promised me
that if I get 300 people to take it, he will
propose; and I am really trying to apply what we
have learned in this class so far. It would be great
if you guys could help out.

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=677631
(click this link to take the survey)

If it works out, I will thank you in the wedding invitation

Thanks a million,
Mari

Our devious plan worked! Loads of people from her class took the survey! I thought sarcasm was dripping off this email. Apparently, we were not sarcastic enough for our sober BYU peers. Here are ten hilarious responses that Mari got back from her marriage prep class:

“why do you want to marry a loser who will only propose if you do his homework for him?”

“doesn’t sound to stable”

“I dont know who you are but if he’s bribing you with a ring then there may be some very serious issues that you two havent discussed. i think that you should seriously look at and examine your relationship before you go doing his bidding. sincerely, concerned”

“If the only reason he’ll marry you is if you help him out with a school project, then I wouldn’t marry him. Haha, sounds like you can do better.”

“hey, yeah of course i’ll take the survey, but you should probably drop him. anyone who will only propose to you on a condition that you get him what he wants isnt worth your time! he should propose to you if he loves you and wants to be with you, not if he gets 300 surveys taken. think about what we’ve learned in class…it kinda sounds like he’s got you on a leash hun! best of luck- [name]”

“I took the survey. There’s one less person to get! Good luck!”

“I hope it all goes well! [name]”

Here is one comment from the survey:

“to the dude whos making his girlfriend do this for a ring. you are freakin whacked!”

LOL! Yes, I can agree that I am a loser and I can’t figure out why Mari is dating me. And as you have learned reading this blog, I am probably not the most stable person either. BUT the email was just a distraction to get you to take the survey! I suppose I owe an apology to those who though the joke was real. But thanks for taking the survey! You’re the best!

This survey stuff is a hoot. We need to do this more often.

We are running two surveys right now, one here at BYU, and the other is on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Turk is a system that allows you to pay people all over the world to do little tasks for pennies). Here are the links to take the surveys and the links to see the results:

BYU Journaling Survey:

Click here to take the survey

Real-Time Summary Report Preview

Amazon Turk Survey (almost the same):

Click here to take the survey

Real-Time Summary Report Preview

Here is a comment that should be addressed:

“This sounds like a great idea, but I hate getting roped into stuff that I have to pay for more than one time (like monthly or annual fees). If it was a one time fee, and then a fee every time I wanted to publish my journal, I would totally go for it!”

Response: Let me know what you think of this?

16% of those surveyed so far say that they journal every 6 months or less. It would be hard to justify a monthly or yearly fee for just 2 journal entries a year. One possible solution would be to have you “pay-as-you-go”. You pay a small fee that buys you unlimited journal entries and a couple of GBs of photos, all of which pyxlin’ would store indefinitely. When you run out of photos in a year, or ten years, you just pay a little more once again for some more photo storage. For the occasional journaler this could be very helpful. For anyone else this would be a solution to avoid “getting roped into monthly or annual fees”.

Once again, let us know what you think.

Marketing to Mormons?

“Please do not market this specifically to mormons. Don’t take advantage of stupid people who will buy anything because they think it has some specific link to the [LDS] church. However, Its a great idea, I think tons of people would be interested. Broaden your horizons…market to every journal writer. Plesae don’t use the ward list next time. I nearly swore myself.”

Response: We are not planning to market pyxlin’ to just Mormons. In fact, I am guessing that the market outside of the Mormon culture is much larger than inside. Take Oprah for example, she thinks you should have 8 journals. Oprah is definitely not a Mormon. She might be someone we may partner with in the future. This is a BYU survey not a Mormon product.

Privacy & Security: here are some more comments from the survey

“My journal is very personal, I don’t think I would like it to be available online, or to have workers that would put it together for me look through it”

“I would be concerned about the privacy. My journal isn’t something I want the whole world to have internet access to.”

“What are the chance of someone hacking into the system? It may happen!”

“I would not want an online journal, because if someone found out my password, they could break in and read my journal. I would literally rather die! Also, I think a journal is the best when authentic. Sometimes i type my entried when pressed for time, but actually writing down my entry, I believe is more valuable. Good idea about the pictures though. I would be interested in some kind of online, photo journal, with each photo put a little snip it about where it took place, or what you did, and then have it bound, in book style, now that would be cool. Interesting survey!”

Response: Privacy and security are super important. We are building into pyxlin’ a 128 MB encryption password login. We will be writing a blog post about this issue later, but that encryption is the same encryption used for online Banking.

Handwriting Comments

“I think that this is an interesting idea with great potential. However, to me, half of the value of journal writing is having it handwritten. Also, some feelings cannot be expressed in a typewritten record like they can be with a pen and paper. If my journals were put into a book, or online, I would feel like the personal and human side of it was lost.”

“i think this is a really great idea! i love the fact that you would be able to pull it up at anytime and see all the past entries! the only thing i would miss but i am grown up now would be to see the handwriting and how it changes but i guess it wheres out so i love this idea!”

Response: Yes for many, handwriting is a huge deal and yes I think that it looses something. I suppose you just have to weigh out the pros and cons. Handwriting vs Speed, Photos, Security, Usability, and Archive. pyxlin’ will not be for everyone.

Here is another great comment:

“This differs from Google’s services (blogs, sweet email(aka: journal), etc) by making it printable into a book, but I’m not going to pay money for stuff Google already provides for me. I think what you’re doing is great, but unless I am capable of customizing the book PRECISELY (before printing), then quite frankly I’m not really interested. I would suggest that you get into the AJAX programming that Google utilizes to create little web apps so a person can interactively position pictures, text, etc. Particularly Google Notebook and Google Docs, as they already have a built-in publish to PDF feature. If I could send you a PDF and you could print my book exactly as the PDF looks and then send it back to me (including several options for page sizes, etc) then you have yourself a customer.”

Response: I loved this comment. Everything this person talked about from customizing PRECISELY to AJAX are already in the works. We are currently building the world’s first online typesetting system (meaning you won’t be stuck with internet fonts). I think you will be pleased.

Learning the proper amount you should charge for a service or a product is difficult. On Friday we started a survey here at BYU to learn how much we should charge for pyxlin’—I know, BYU is the worst test market world-wide because you can’t duplicate the demographic anywhere in the world, but it is a start. Over 350 students have already taken the survey, but we need a lot more to get accurate results. If you have not taken it, you can do it by clicking below:

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=677631

We put a nifty link at the end so that you can see the results. Here is a peak at what is happening:

• About 75% of those surveyed so far here at BYU keep a journal.
• 8.98% of those surveyed keep a journal daily.
• 17.37% of those surveyed keep a journal weekly.
• 22% of those surveyed keep a journal at least monthly.
• The rest are less frequent but they do keep a journal.

Here are some of my favorite comments on the survey so far:

a few fun comments:

“can i have your phone number?”

“I think if I did keep a journal, then this journal would be the shiz! Someday when my wife starts making me keep a journal then I’ll jump on it with this system.”

“This is a great entrepreneurial idea! Truth be told, it’s long overdue considering the proliferative nature of web blogs and photojournals. If this proposal proves to be cheap (or even better, free in some cases), viable, and of sufficiently good quality, I’d love to learn more and participate. I’ve had a couple years experience in publication work, so this has my interest and I would like to know the plans as they develop. Thanks. ”

“That sounds like a cool idea and I’ve actually been thinking lately about how to transfer my blog into journal type form so that I can hold it, flip through it, etc.”

“If this works out that would be awesome! Honestly:) I love writing in my journal!”

“I think this service would be better suited for my parents.”

“Sound like a great idea! Congratulations on figuring a way to make journaling easier for the ones who wouldn’t otherwise do it!”

“I’m not interested in this service, mostly because I don’t feel like my journals are valuable yet for any reason. My dad, however, is in the process of having his journals published, so he’d be interested. In addition, the published journals looked more like flashy story books and not as quality as I would be interested in investing in if I were to buy this product.”

“This is a great idea. I was just thinking about this type of thing today and how good it would be to have it. I would definitely be interested in using it!”

“This sounds like a very interesting idea. I like it, and would probably use my journal much more often if it were on a computer! I would definitely pay for this service, and would publish my journal about once a year.”

“good idea, my professor, Brother Walker had shown one he did for his family, and I wondered how I could get one.”

“Fantastic Idea, especially for things like missions…Keep an electronic journal for 2 years then you can have a bound printed version of your mission experience! Wow…this really is a great idea! ”

“Great idea. Sounds well planned, but I would try to make the money from the printing rather than online service…. I would bwe more likely to spend more money on binding if the online service was less expernsive”

“I’m not a big journal writter, but if I was It would be a cool service and I’ld be willing to pay to have the cool features that it offers.” RESPONSE: We need to make sure we put spell check and grammar check on the system.

If you didn’t get a chance to make a comment, but have one now, feel free to comment here.