SurveyMonkey S-1

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.

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%.

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?

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.