Sligo, Ireland is located in the upper Northeast corner of Ireland (about 135 miles from Dublin), and has a population of about 17K. Says Wikipedia, “Sligo's Irish name ‘Sligeach’ - meaning shelly place - originates in the abundance of shellfish found in the river and its estuary, and from the extensive 'shell middens' or Stone Age food preparation areas in the vicinity. The river (now known as the Garavogue) was originally also called the Sligeach.”
More relevantly to Sexy Widget readers, Sligo is home to to PollDaddy – the bootstrapped, profitable, widget powered, distributed polling service founded by David Lenehan.
I first met David (aka “Lenny”) at a Netvibes party about 18 months ago. At that time, PollDaddy was most known for having a mildly sexually explicit logo – a very young girl, licking a lollipop.
Since then, PollDaddy has come a long way. They’ve toned down their logo. They’ve successfully powered high profile polls for big traffic sites like TechCrunch and CNET. And they are putting up monster numbers:
- 100,000 polls are generated each month on PollDaddy
- PollDaddy widgets are viewed about 100M per month
- 11M votes are submitted via PollDaddy per month
A few weeks ago, I noticed a PollDaddy module showing up in SproutBuilder’s widget publishing tool. This turned out to be a precursor to what PollDaddy announced today – an exposed API that lets developers build on top of the PollDaddy polling tools.
And that wasn’t the only announcement made by PollDaddy – they also announced PollDaddy Jr., a mini app that contains all the features of PollDaddy.com, but that can be installed onto any site. It will live initially as an OpenSocial app for social networking sites.
Says Lenny:
This is all part of a grander plan to increase distribution and get
our application in front of more people. Partners can now choose to
use our API, or if that's not suitable then we can deploy PollDaddy JR
into their site with little work needed on their side. This lets them
offer poll services to their own userbase. In a sense we are trying to
widgetize our whole platform.
I think these are fantastic moves. Since I’ve been following PollDaddy, they seem to have done everything right. The fact that they are bootsrapped AND coming from a part of the world not exactly known for social media startups makes it even more impressive.
When polling company Sodahead announced that they had raised an $8M round bringing their total funding to $12M, my immediate thought was something to the tune of: “Imagine what PollDaddy could do with some resources.”
(PollDaddy says that they would buy a fighter jet)
I know of at least one US based VC scouring Europe for investment opportunities. If it were me, I’d make sure Sligo was on my itinerary.
