SC

Strategy Canon

SurveyMonkey: sourced choices

32 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 1999Product · Founding Ryan Finley founded the company in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1999. SV2
  2. 1999Product · Freemium side project Finley built the product as a side project while working at a radio station; it was one of the first freemium web businesses. SV22
  3. 2008Go_To_Market · Bootstrapped profitability About $30 million of 2008 revenue at an 85% EBITDA margin, with no outside investment until 2009. SV24
  4. 2009Go_To_Market · No marketing Growth had been organic, with no marketing; referrals depended on brand awareness that built over a user's fifth to seventh survey. SV22
  5. 2009-04Product · Scale before the recapitalization Over two million registered users had created more than six million surveys and collected about 200 million completed responses. SV4
  6. 2009-04Go_To_Market · Buyers at the recapitalization Users included more than 80% of Fortune 100 companies, educational institutions and nonprofits. SV3
  7. 2009-04-28Go_To_Market · Recapitalization Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital Ventures bought a majority stake with bank debt; Dave Goldberg became CEO and the Finleys kept minority stakes. SV4
  8. 2009-10Product · Code base in 2009 A monolithic .NET application built by two or three people; 19 employees, three of them engineers. SV22
  9. 2009-10Product · Platform rebuild The new engineering team rebuilt the site one area at a time in Python and rebuilt billing for 28 currencies. SV22
  10. 2012-01Product · Languages and Audience Fourteen new language versions in 18 months; SurveyMonkey Audience sold survey respondents at $3 a response. SV5
  11. 2012-01Product · Acquired products Bought Precision Polling and Wufoo and took a stake in Clicktools. SV5
  12. 2012-01Go_To_Market · Goldberg's account of the lead Goldberg named more than 60 competitors and credited a memorable brand, ease of use, low price and network effects from 40 million completed responses a month. SV5
  13. 2013-01-18Go_To_Market · 2013 financing $794 million of debt and equity at a $1.35 billion valuation, used mainly for share buybacks and debt reduction; 14 million free users, 360,000 paying customers, $113 million revenue at a 54% margin. SV6
  14. 2013-11Product · First enterprise plan SurveyMonkey Enterprise: multi-user administration, one invoice, company ownership of survey data, phone support and HIPAA compliance; it required rebuilding the whole technology architecture. SV23
  15. 2013-11-18Go_To_Market · Enterprise launch Goldberg said control issues had kept enterprises away and the company had been a weird hybrid of consumer and enterprise; first customers included Aetna and Hearst. SV23
  16. 2015-04Product · Benchmarks SurveyMonkey Benchmarks launched in April 2015. SV28
  17. 2016-03-01Go_To_Market · Business sales cut 100 jobs (13% of staff) cut, mainly in the sales division for business clients; TechValidate's founders took over product and sales for business. SV27
  18. 2017Go_To_Market · Growth at the IPO 2017 revenue of $218.8 million grew 6%; 80% of new individual paying users arrived through the website or organic search. SV25
  19. 2017Go_To_Market · Platform of choice A 2017 study found 45% of business users of survey software considered SurveyMonkey their platform of choice, nearly double any competitor. SV25
  20. 2018-06-30Go_To_Market · Enterprise agreements More than 2,900 organization-level agreements produced about 12% of revenue; the salesforce had historically been limited. SV2
  21. 2018-09Product · Product line at the IPO SurveyMonkey, Enterprise, CX (Net Promoter), Engage (employee feedback), Audience (a panel of 1.4 million US consumers) and TechValidate. SV2
  22. 2018-09Product · Usage at the IPO More than 16 million active users in the prior year and over 20 million questions answered a day. SV2
  23. 2018-09-26Go_To_Market · IPO Priced at $12 a share, 15 million shares, $180 million raised. SV26
  24. 2018-10Product · Enterprise controls Single sign-on, domain lockdown, admin controls and GDPR compliance. SV8
  25. 2018-11-14Go_To_Market · Market value beside Qualtrics SVMK was worth about $1.6 billion as SAP agreed to pay $8 billion for Qualtrics. SV7
  26. 2019-03Product · Usabilla Agreed to buy Usabilla, a digital voice-of-customer tool used by more than 450 enterprises, for about $80 million. SV13
  27. 2019-07-29Go_To_Market · Sales operations hires Hired vice presidents of sales operations and growth marketing. SV9
  28. 2019-08Product · GetFeedback Agreed to buy GetFeedback, a customer experience tool built into Salesforce and used by 10,000 brands, for about $68 million. SV12
  29. 2021Go_To_Market · Sales-assisted revenue 2021 Sales-assisted revenue $142.7 million (up 32%), self-serve $301.1 million (up 12%); about 11,900 enterprise customers. SV20
  30. 2021-06Product · Momentive portfolio The Momentive portfolio combined GetFeedback, SurveyMonkey survey products and brand and market insights, with sentiment and text analysis. SV10
  31. 2022Go_To_Market · Sales-assisted revenue 2022 Sales-assisted revenue $181.3 million (up 27%) while self-serve revenue of $299.6 million was flat; workforce reduction announced. SV18
  32. 2023-05-31Go_To_Market · Take-private STG's consortium completed its purchase at $9.46 a share, about $1.5 billion in cash. SV16