The Quiz That Learned to Stop Paying for Answers

The useful thing about a quarter is that it can buy an answer. The dangerous thing about a quarter is that it can buy an answer. In Jebbit’s first incarnation, those two facts were the whole business. College students logged into a website, learned something about a brand, answered a question and earned 25 cents. The advertiser paid 50 cents. Jebbit kept the difference. At its peak, roughly 200,000 students had joined, tempted by a reported earning rate that could reach $19 an hour. Revenue came in. The founders became uneasy.

They had discovered a wonderfully measurable form of attention and a rather questionable form of interest. Some students formed genuine connections with brands; others wanted beer money. Jebbit also had to recruit both audiences and advertisers. It was a marketplace when the founders wanted to build software. So in 2014 they switched it off.

The company that began with an ignored Hulu ad

Tom Coburn arrived at Boston College intending to study biology and become a doctor. He and his roommates wanted to start something - anything, at first. Jebbit was reportedly their fifth idea. Coburn’s spark came while ignoring a pre-roll ad on Hulu: what if an advertiser paid only after a viewer correctly answered a question about the commercial?

Coburn, Jonathan Lacoste and Chase McAleese developed the idea through Boston College’s venture competition. The working name was Additupp until a cease-and-desist from Bank of America encouraged fresh thinking. Coburn’s mother suggested “Jebbit,” after an early teammate named Jeb. The name survived longer than most of the product.

A $250,000 seed round gave the founders enough confidence to leave school. HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah became the first investor after seeing Coburn pitch at a miniature Shark Tank event. The team entered Techstars Boston in 2013, and ten early employees and founders lived together in a house in Brookline. That year, Data Point Capital led another $1.25 million round.

“We knew the problems with the first version of the product, but we hadn’t landed on what the new version was going to be.”Tom Coburn, on the 2014 pivot

The board had one useful constraint: do not expand the team until revenue justified it. Jebbit experimented badly and cheaply. In mid-2015 it launched a thin website bar that dropped down, asked questions and directed visitors elsewhere. Mazda, Expedia and eBay signed on. Average contracts ran about $40,000 to $50,000 a year, and the widget carried the company to roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

One ugly phone screen changed the product

At a 2016 meeting, a Constant Contact marketer pulled the Jebbit bar up on his phone. The responsive desktop site had shrunk. Jebbit’s little bar sat on top of it. The result was technically functional and experientially ridiculous. Meanwhile, shoppers were arriving from Instagram while standing in coffee lines, not settling down to browse 50 nearly identical pairs of jeans.

The team kept its backend and rebuilt the surface as an immersive, full-screen, mobile-first experience. A shopper could answer five questions, receive a recommendation and buy or email the result. The business tripled in the first year after that redesign. A $6.8 million Series A followed in 2017, led by Manifest Investment Partners.

The quiz was never the product

In 2018, Coburn and Lacoste asked customer CMOs a blunt question: what would Jebbit need to do for you to spend ten times more? The customers liked the speed of the builder and the engagement of the experiences. But they kept returning to the answers. Marketers were spending heavily on third-party data that guessed at intent. Jebbit let them ask.

That observation turned interactive content into “declared data”: preferences, motivations and intentions a person volunteers. Jebbit expanded the analytics and integrations around those answers, then raised a $12 million Series B led by K1 Investment Management in 2019. The category language may sound grand for a product finder, but the distinction matters. A click tells a brand that you looked at a boot. An answer can say you need a waterproof boot for city walking under $150.

That exchange is Jebbit’s real difference from an ordinary form. A form mostly benefits its owner. A decent product finder benefits the person completing it. A&W’s playful experiences reported 96% completion among people who started and 85% lead submission. ASICS reported a 90% completion rate and an average 21.5 data points per profile. Evenflo’s stroller and car-seat matcher beat its usual conversion rate by 46% while reducing bounce. These are company-published case-study figures, not a promise that a quiz sprinkles conversion dust on every catalog.

What BlueConic actually bought

BlueConic acquired Jebbit in July 2024 for an undisclosed amount. The fit was architectural. Jebbit could collect a good answer; BlueConic could attach it to a customer profile, join it with transactions and behavior, build a segment and activate the next message. In February 2025, the companies launched real-time synchronization. Two months later, the experience builder became native inside the BlueConic customer data platform.

Today the product is called BlueConic Experiences. Marketers can build quizzes, product finders, preference flows and guided-selling journeys without code. An AI Builder Agent can draft an experience from a prompt; an Insights Agent answers performance questions in plain language. Responses can flow to CDPs, email platforms, CRMs and commerce tools. The standalone quiz builder became the collection layer of a larger customer-data system - an ending Coburn says the team had imagined as far back as 2017.

The copyable play is smaller than the platform: ask one question the customer wants answered, give something useful back immediately, and send the answer somewhere it can change the next interaction. It works when a brand has enough traffic, a meaningful choice to simplify and a system ready to use the response. Without those conditions, the “experience” is a survey in a jaunty outfit.

There is a technical footnote too. If an experience runs on Jebbit’s default domain, modern browser restrictions can make it harder to connect that visitor to the same profile on the brand’s site. BlueConic now recommends a first-party hostname for joined-up tracking. The broader lesson is almost comically consistent with the company’s history: an answer becomes valuable only after the incentive, interface and plumbing agree on who it is for.

The durable Jebbit idea was not “people enjoy quizzes.” It was that a person will disclose surprisingly useful things when the question helps them decide.