The Cint Story

In 1998, my wife, Eva, and I together with our three kids, at that time aged 12, 10, and 5, went to the Canary Islands for a holiday. Flying us there was a “cattle-freight” company called Premiair. Getting there was no problem, but leaving certainly was. We waited for almost 24 hours before we were finally asked to step on board the plane back home.

Needless to say, I was not in my best mood, sitting there in the waiting room of a lacklustre airport in the Canaries without any information. I went around, mad as hell, trying to get at least some support from my fellow travelers! To my surprise there was little or none. Instead most people just told me things like "It is always like this, flying Premiair" and "Oh, dear, this happens all the time".

Something was clearly very wrong. Everyone, but me, seemed to be in the know.

On the flight back the business plan for Cint came to life. It consisted of four pretty simple ideas:

• create a platform where people could share their experiences of different products and services
• sell these opinions in an aggregated form to companies
• sell the access to those that had given opinions, to companies in order to simplify finding very targeted groups of people
• name the company Cint, since pronounced the same but spelt sint, it means "angry" in my dialect, the Swedish dialect of Jaemtska. (Our free survey tool SurveyPirate actually has a language version in Jaemtska, in order to cover the “enormous” market of 100.000 people.) Cint is also an abbreviation of “Consumer Intelligence”, but that is more for official use.....

Since I didn´t know anything about internet media and even less about market research, we employed people to run the company. Unfortunately, our bid to the market was about 5 years too early – the most common reaction in the years 1999-2003 was "Well, isn't that information taken from the internet, and if that´s the case, it is not trustworthy, so we can´t use it".

In 2003/2004 we revamped the firm, reduced the number of employees to four, I started as the CEO, and we started to build on the access part of the idea. Instead of using opinions as a base for targetting we acknowledged how the market research business actually works, and created a marketplace where the traded asset is the possibility to access a private person for the purpose of doing market research.

After having proven that the business actually worked, we did a financing round in 2007, and Creandum, a very well-renowned venture cap firm in Sweden, invested circa 3 MUSD in the company, to finance a broader geographical expansion.

Today the firm has grown to over 50 employees, we are present in 9 different locations across Europe and the US, there are over 100 panel partners, offering access to over 3 million consumers in more than 40 different countries. Plus we offer a fantastic array of time-savings services, that have a great potential, partly because the market research industry as such is coming of age when it comes to understanding the value of efficient solutions for procurement and operations.

We can proudly say that we have launched a number of industry firsts, such as a SaaS marketplace for direct access, Cint Automated Tracker and others.

We want to connect everyone who has a question, large or small, to anyone wanting to give his or her opinion. We have covered some ground so far, but we are at best, only at the end of the beginning!

Bo Mattsson
Founder & CEO