
SurveyMonkey S-1 - coloneltcb
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1739936/000119312518261892/d494258ds1.htm
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abakker
Longtime SurveyMonkey customer here, but, I have largely switched to
SurveyGizmo and Qualtrics. 2 primary reasons:

1\. I work with Panel Providers, and their Quota tools and panel integration
tools are just a bit clumsier. They don't really have Data Quality checks,
they don't have cross-logic quotas, they don't have a kind of survey flow
tools.

2\. Analysis stack: They are currently chasing analysis in a rather
frustrating way. (e.g. Online). SurveyGizmo and Qualtrics both have stronger
features to export to SPSS files, which is the survey industry standard. SPSS
files are read by many tools that specialize in survey analysis - R, Q,
Wincross, etc. As an actual enterprise survey user, I will never use the web
reporting tools for anything more that casual sample monitoring. I can't build
my final products on those, pretty much no matter what they do. I'd rather
they invested in better downstream exports.

Things I wish that they, or anyone in the industry would do:

1\. Export to some kind of database, where data attributes could be stored. I
don't know whether this is just a bundle of CSV + Pandas code to get the
survey into a data frame, or a sqlite file where the data connections are
preserved (e.g. logical groupings of multiple choice, multi select questions).
SPSS files are a _good start_ they get almost everything right, but, they are
proprietary-ish, and they leave a lot to be desired in workability.

2\. Would be nice to see more up front indications of the types of analysis
that various survey questions can provide. i.e. indicate to users/survey
authors what kinds of actual relevance the answers to their questions have.

I like survey monkey a lot, and, if you need something lightweight, low touch,
and long-running, they are great. but, if you need to do market research there
are more full-featured tools to use that will make the whole process easier.

~~~
projectramo
I like that survey monkey finds an audience and induces them to answer your
questions.

I also know roughly how much it will cost.

I can't tell pricing from SurveyGizmo or Qualtrics after several seconds of
clicking around.

This is their pricing tab: [https://www.surveygizmo.com/team-
enterprise/](https://www.surveygizmo.com/team-enterprise/)

come on!

~~~
abakker
SM's audience product is good if you are consumer facing, not B2B. The costs
are nice, and the revenue model for the people helps avoid garbage data. (SM
donates to charity on behalf of the survey taker, rather than paying them
directly). In B2B surveys that I run, I end up paying a lot more per complete
(for, say, a VP of infrastructure at a company over 1bn) and I still have a
high disqual rate and low incidence.

SM is a good product, don't get me wrong. The team is great, their support is
great. The reasons I outlined above are the _only_ reasons I am moving away
from them.

~~~
projectramo
But the audience product is _the_ product. They don't charge for anything
else.

Is there something comparable that finds an audience for you?

Or, to put it another way, for B2B I take it you have to find your own product
"by hand" anyway, right?

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calcsam
These financials don't look great.

They earned $219M last year and $205M the year before. That's a top-line
revenue growth rate of around 6% -- more common for an old-line company like
IBM.

SaaS startups are supposed to have revenue growth >30% when they hit IPO, and
the best ones have even higher -- Twilio had ~70%.

~~~
InterestBazinga
Interesting. I thought start ups are commonly not in profit

~~~
yumraj
It was founded in 1999
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SurveyMonkey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SurveyMonkey)).

It's not a Startup, it's a 19 year old company providing Internet based
service.

------
drc500free
This is a pretty informative example of how hard it is to apply GAAP
accounting to tech-based growth companies. If you look at F-7 Cash Flows, you
can see the struggles.

In "Cash Flows from Operating Activities," you start with the book profit and
work your way through all the excuses that get you to cash flows. Positive
numbers are cash that you have but really shouldn't count, and negative
numbers are cash that you don't have but should. The interesting ones being
Deferred Revenue (subscriptions that have been paid but not fulfilled on) and
Depreciation/Amortization (Assets that are wearing out, including intangibles
like software).

GAAP tries to match expenses to revenues across time, so you know how much
your widgets cost. It struggles with matching across years, and it REALLY
struggles with indirect expenses like software development.

There is no direct expense to tie to the deferred revenue, because a lot of
the cost of getting a customer is not earmarked 1:1 to that customer (hence a
massive gross profit but an overall loss).

And because this is a tech development business, the costs are actually over
in the Investing section. Instead of a direct expense, the developers have
some of their time put into direct expense, some of their time into overhead
expense, and some of their time capitalized for creating an intangible asset.
The intangible asset is then amortized over time, under the assumption that it
gets "worn out" to service the business.

So we get a weird statement like this. The gross profit is massive, but the
business runs at a loss. There is plenty of cash, but it's actually not
supposed to be there - it needs to be set aside to account for stock options,
and for the work of servicing their subscriptions. But they can't quantify the
cost to service a subscription, because it is covered by the depletion of
technology written years ago, as though it's a finite resource that wears out
like a truck at a fixed rate.

So the cash doesn't tell you anything that useful, but neither do the GAAP
statements. This could be a great business or a terrible one, just looking at
the financial statements - and if you can't judge the health by looking at the
statements, what's the point?

------
Agnosco
Now I work for a consultancy specializing in customer loyalty and the
connection between customer experiences and profitability, so our needs are of
course not representative of all users. We ended up passing on both
SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics when we decided to move from our home-built
solution and ended up going for Confirmit.

SurveyMonkey is a good survey tool, but although they have some extra
additions once you have set up the survey and collected data (visualization
and insights sharing), the product just doesn't do enough. If you only want
the solid and robust surveying tool, you are almost better off going for
Google Forms - simple surveying tools abound. If what you are doing is market
research only, then SurveyMonkey doesn't really cut it - there are much
stronger tools out there to handle panels, quotas and all the logic that you
need to not get bogged down by manual processes.

Most of these Survey tool producers are pivoting into Customer Experience
management and are starting to provide tools for handling much deeper parts of
organizational processes related to these challenges. This means not only
automating customer feedback processes for when it is most relevant for the
customer to provide such, but also allowing for collection of data through
other means than just surveys, action management systems for automatically
creating and managing cases for customers having experienced e.g.
unsatisfactory events, allowing for CRM integrations via API, etc.

In the market for handling customer experiences (as well as those for
employees), I think SurveyMonkey is in a squeeze.

------
mbloom1915
take a look at their VC history, could one assume the BAC, JPs, TRowes needed
this exit soon?
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/surveymonkey](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/surveymonkey)

~~~
adventured
It's a pretty great time to exit if you're ever going to. The stock market is
going gangbusters, most valuations are on the ceiling. If they can't fetch top
dollar for their business in this environment, they never will. It would suck
to wait 18 months because you tried to time it higher, have the market sink
into a bear, and then be stuck with either staying private for many years
waiting for the next wave, or pushing an IPO in a very poor environment.

------
misterbowfinger
It's weird that they go on and on about how traditional Enterprise approaches
suck, but they then offer SurveyMonkey Enterprise as a market opportunity. How
are they different?

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liveoneggs
just use foresee :)

~~~
paulie_a
I literally hope that company goes out of business as soon as possible. If I
have a few moments my feedback on sites that use it is literally "get rid of
this annoying foresee bullshit"

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daxorid
edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

~~~
perryh2
Does it also surprise you that DocuSign is a company worth over $10B?

~~~
whorleater
I was originally going to say "man that's wild", then I realized all the
documents I've signed electronically lately have been through DocuSign and
maybe 10B is actually undervalued.

~~~
paulie_a
I haven't been forced to use DocuSign for a few years, but there ux was
complete shit. I would rather go to an office and physically sign something
than deal with their crappy interface.

~~~
nojvek
Docusign would also go down all the time. My agent and I both absolutely hated
it. Much easier for me to wireless print stuff, sign it, scan it and email it
from an HP printer. It was a reliable system.

I was willing to go through that friction because docusign was just absolutely
horrible. UX was aweful, wouldn’t work on mobile well, emails wouldn’t send,
site would be down yada yada.

But this says something about enterprise companies. With a powerful
salesforce, you could dominate a field even with a shitty product if it’s a
niche field.

