Las Vegas-based startup Wedgies offers easy online polling

Porter Haney, 30, is the co-founder and CEO of Wedgies, a social media polling startup based in Las Vegas. The company counts The Wall Street Journal, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Delta Air Lines and Tinder among its clients. Wedgies also powered online polling for President Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. Prior to running Wedgies with co-founder Jimmy Jacobson, Haney worked as a marketing manager and was a self-described “ski bum” in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Question: How did you get started?

A: We participated in a lot of startup weekends and hackathons, which are short weekend-long events where you work with a team and build a simple digital product, like a web app or a mobile app. And we’d done that enough to know that we could build products in a short amount of time.

So we sat down on a long Fourth of July weekend and we built the first iteration of Wedgies, which was like really simple, one-question, two-answer Twitter polls. We wanted to give people a way to aggregate responses on social media. Right away we had about 100 or so friends that used it, and in that first group of friends, we had people at USA Today and other major papers see it and want to try it out themselves. From the first month or two of doing this, we had pretty good interest and traction from real customers so we took that and we said, “All right, I think we can build a business around this.”

Q: Did the focus of Wedgies change over the last few years?

A: Thirty years ago to run a poll you would call people on their home telephone, and 15 years ago you would email them a survey in their email and they’d click a link and go to a landing page. The idea (for Wedgies) has always been like to integrate and put the survey right in front of where people spend time online, and I would say like three years ago we were kind of ahead of the curve on that, both in terms of what technology would allow and also how open-minded customers were. So we’re just starting to see really amazing penetration in this market, all these people are spending all their time on apps on their phones and the companies that run those apps need ways to collect information from their users.

Q: It sounds like you’re trying to meet users where they are and be more immediate?

A: That’s exactly it. Every time you try to move users from your app to a landing page or from an email to a landing page, you lose a huge percentage of people in those processes. So step one is to put it where the people are and step two is to make it really friendly on a mobile device. All of the (Wedgies) surveys are not only optimized to fit on your screen, but you can vote with your thumb by tapping a button versus trying to tap a really small button or trying to input a bunch of text in a field that (is too small) on your phone.

Q: Can you walk me through the process of a recent client that you had where they had maybe a campaign or a survey they wanted and how you planned that out?

A: Tinder has done some pretty cool things in the last few months. They did a promotion with Rock the Vote, which is a voter registration nonprofit. They essentially let their users swipe through specific issues related to, at that time, the primary candidates for president, and based on how you answered those issues, they matched you to a specific candidate and then prompted you to register to vote at the end of that. So you’d swipe through issues on everything from abortion to gun control to the economy, it would match you with a candidate that represented the way you felt about those issues, and then there was a huge digital registration drive through Rock the Vote with that.

Q: As far as next steps for Wedgies?

A: We like to say “more wedgies in more places.” And what that means is, we work with a handful of these networks now, it’s really integration across all these networks and making it really easy for you to go to one place and anywhere you’ve built an audience on the web deploy a survey out to that audience.

Q: Fun fact?

A:We bought (the domain name) Wedgies.com from a guy that was in jail, convicted for a felony. So while he was out on appeal, we bought the domain name from him.