11 Paid Accounts in the First Year: How Zigpoll Grew

11 Paid Accounts in the First Year

In December 2019, Jason Zigelbaum shared Zigpoll’s results from its first year. After about six months of development, he had launched the survey tool that April. It had attracted 472 users, but only 11 paid accounts. The business was not yet bringing in enough to support his life, but he planned to improve it around the features paying customers used most. The small product’s plans for the next year were already shaped by how its customers used it.

He was a developer who had spent years leading technology at an e-commerce agency, where he saw online stores up close. While building Zigpoll, he supported himself with income from an app he already ran and his savings. He kept developing without outside investment, retaining ownership of the product and control over its decisions.

One spark for the idea came from watching Product Hunt talk with people on Twitter. Short questions asking for recommendations or opinions drew comments, and users kept the conversation going by bringing others in. Jason thought he could create the same kind of interaction on websites, so he built an embeddable polling tool.

Customers found uses that fit their own needs. They collected information by showing questions when visitors first arrived, added items to their carts, or completed a purchase. Store operators in particular were interested in getting answers at specific points in the buying process. Jason developed the product around these use cases and focused on surveys for e-commerce.

In August 2019, he announced the launch of the Shopify app and emphasized how easy it was to install. Store owners could choose a ready-made survey or write their own questions, and add email capture giveaways and contact forms to their pages. The tool let operators set up surveys themselves instead of going through a developer.

Customer Answers Changed Business Decisions

One of Zigpoll’s main use cases is the post-purchase page. After someone completes an order, a store can ask how they discovered it or what influenced their decision, then link the answer to the actual order. Operators can review each response alongside the order value or products purchased. The survey’s placement and the context attached to each answer made the results more useful.

The experience of Kanga Coolers, which sells insulated beverage coolers, shows how this works. The company initially thought its main customers were men in their twenties. But post-purchase surveys revealed older buyers and purchases made as gifts. For Father’s Day, women bought gifts for fathers or husbands; during the holidays, buyers wanted gifts for their sons or grandsons. Once Kanga distinguished the product’s users from the people paying for it, it also changed whom its advertising needed to address.

Kanga adjusted its seasonal ads and sales pages to match those findings. For Father’s Day, for example, it showed reviews describing how fathers or husbands enjoyed their gifts. In an interview published by Zigpoll, Kanga said these changes improved the sales page’s conversion rate by 15–20%. Customer answers led directly to changes in its ad copy and page layout.

Yay’s Snacks, a food brand, asked visitors a question as they were about to leave without buying. One issue that emerged was that people found it hard to imagine what the product tasted like. The company improved its social content to help people understand the flavors. Once it knew what visitors were unsure about, it had a clearer idea of what to explain.

As responses accumulated, Zigpoll added ways to review and use them. It used AI to summarize recurring themes in open-ended answers and connected survey results to services such as Klaviyo, an email marketing platform. Customers could send messages or trigger follow-up actions based on people’s answers, widening the path from collecting information to using it in their work.

Customer Friction Became the Next Fix

The pricing model also changed in response to customers. At first, Zigpoll charged based on page views that loaded a survey, but customers found that approach burdensome. In November 2019, Jason changed the billing metric to the number of survey responses actually submitted. Customers who received many useful answers would move beyond the free tier into a paid plan, tying the price more closely to usage and value.

In 2024, Jason received a message from a customer whose notifications for several surveys were all going to a single Slack channel. The surveys belonged to different workflows, and the mixed alerts were confusing the team. He received the request on Monday and had changed the product by Thursday so each survey could send notifications to a different channel. The short path from a customer explaining a problem to the developer understanding and fixing it was clear in this example.

That responsiveness also appeared in public customer reviews. In 2026 Shopify App Store reviews, Imperia Caviar said a needed integration feature was built in two days, while TearRestore said a requested feature was added within a week. Store owners considering the app could use these reviews to judge the support they might receive when they ran into a problem.

One Agency Led to Many Stores

Jason saw agencies managing multiple clients as a sales channel early on. In the affiliate program he started in December 2019, he offered referrers 30% of revenue for as long as the customers they introduced remained on a paid plan. The program was designed so agencies could install Zigpoll in the stores they managed and continue sharing in the revenue.

In a July 2026 interview, he said about one-third of new signups came from the Shopify App Store and about one-quarter from word of mouth. Much of that word of mouth came from agencies and freelancers installing the same tool across multiple stores. Someone would try it in one store, then bring it to the stores of their next clients.

For a while, though, the product and plans were designed around the internal teams of individual stores. Some integrations sat in higher-priced plans, which also added costs for agencies adopting Zigpoll across several stores. After reviewing information collected during signup, Jason made integrations available in lower tiers and focused on making the product easier for customers handling multiple accounts.

The survey-copying feature he announced in July 2026 was a concrete result. An agency operator said it was tedious to rebuild a carefully refined post-purchase survey from scratch for every new client store. Jason added a way to copy surveys, including their questions and branching rules, into another account. He said this cut the task from about 30 minutes to 10 seconds, allowing customers managing multiple stores to reuse settings they had already tested.

In September of the same year, Jason shared that average monthly revenue per customer had risen from $42 at the start of the year to $56. Making needed integrations available on lower plans, while agencies added stores and brands increased their usage and moved to larger plans, helped the product expand within its existing customer base. Giving customers more ways to use the product translated into additional revenue from those customers.

The Scale of a One-Person Business

In the second half of 2025, Zigpoll’s monthly recurring revenue was $68,000. About 90% of revenue came from Shopify, and in an interview Jason discussed both that platform dependence and future hiring. He was considering offering customer feedback tools to other subscription software businesses, building on the foundation he had established in e-commerce.

By the end of June 2026, monthly recurring revenue had reached about $125,000. Annualized, that was about $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue. Jason said it took roughly two years for the business to gain real traction, after which revenue grew by about 2x each year.

In August of that year, he said 2,455 brands were using Zigpoll and he was still its only employee. He also emphasized expansion among existing customers: agencies that started with one store added more, while brands that began on smaller plans grew and increased their usage. Jason saw those numbers as evidence that many companies were entrusting part of their customer research to software he ran by himself.