Scholarship Winner Just Wanted to Have Fun with Friends

Date: August 02, 2016

Anthony Humay of Sammamish wins NFIB young entrepreneur award for social polling platform

Scholarship Winner Just Wanted to Have Fun with Friends

Anthony Humay’s small business fits perfectly into an election year. Like during any election, political pundits will debate the importance of hundreds of polls, and campaigns will try to put their own spin on the result.

Although Humay isn’t dealing with election numbers, Midzy—the company he started when he was 13—polls his community on a wide variety of topics.

It all started when he was bored and wanted to create something fun for he and his friends to do. Humay started out by trying to make a Q&A-style computer game for them to play, and eventually it evolved into midzy.com.

The site, which won him this year’s NFIB/Washington State Leadership Council Young Entrepreneur Award, allows anyone to create a poll, gather data, and insert photos and video on any question they want to learn more about. The site is popular at his local church and with soccer teams in his community, but it took a lot of effort from Humay to get his site off the ground in the beginning.

“It’s kind of weird marketing a platform like this,” said Humay of Sammamish, Washington, who graduated from Eastlake High School.

To garner interest, Humay talked to local groups he knew of and suggested ways that they could use polling to improve their organizations and events. From there, word of mouth started to make the site more popular. Its gone from getting a few hundred monthly visitors to as many as 10,000, he said. But he isn’t satisfied with that.

“It’s simple to get people to come to the site, but it’s a struggle to get people to stay for a long time,” Humay said.

Moving forward, Humay wants to take his polling platform to the next level. He’s currently hiring contractors to help him with web development, and he would like to analyze the data collected on the site to run targeted ads toward individuals who use his site, he said. He is attending Stanford University in the fall to study computer programming.

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