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.
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.
I wasn't sure if you were saying SurveyMonkey is missing SPSS export - it supports exporting to SPSS AFAIK. Is it that the export is missing data or features for your needs?
It has them - the features for naming every individual choice, specifying labels, and otherwise tweaking that output in SurveyGizmo are much stronger. This isn't a dealbreaker, but makes archiving past analysis, reports, and data files easier and more descriptive than e.g. "Q1_2". It also makes it a bit nicer if you don't have to do the renaming downstream, since it just avoids another step where you can introduce errors. SurveyGizmo also has some features specifically for R, though I haven't used R yet.
Long term, the whole survey industry should probably move away from SPSS to something fully open source, with a file type that is truly standard that can be read into all the different systems.
PS - I know that there are APIs for individual questions, data, etc. But, as an analyst first and programmer much much later on my list, I find them too complex to really be worth it. A lot of survey analysis is one-off.
I'd love a pandas/numpy/python call that just looked like:
get_survey_as_dataframe (surveyID, API_key, any other stuff).
We make an easy-to-use statistical analysis tool, and we were acquired by Qualtrics in 2016 (and rebranded as "Stats iQ").[1]
There's a lot of situations where I could imagine preferring to analyze data in SPSS or Python or something (e.g., complicated transformations, exact same analyses run routinely, advanced analyses that we can't do yet). But, to my mind, ideally you'd not need to export so you can just stay in one tool and work on the one canonical version of your data.
I'm speculating here, but is it possible that your complaint isn't with the fact that the analysis is online per se, but rather that no online analysis tool you've used is anywhere close to as good as the standard offline ones? Or are there really features that you couldn't imagine existing online that you really rely on?
Asking partially b/c it makes my shilling more informative and interesting, but partially because I'm genuinely curious. (Apologies for the shilling, folks, I know it's not great form, but startup habits die hard.)
So, it is interesting, but the big issue isn’t just the analysis, it is the presentation. If a company is doing analysis for its own sake, then I could see the process working well using StatsIQ (I have a license, BTW) but, in the end, my reports end up in PowerPoint with custom style sheets and templates.
Until my customers are ready to consume a web interface, and the tools produce a set of web-ready charts (maybe with something like plotly?) it doesn’t do me much good.
Another problem is that I work with plenty of analysts that are not going to get qualtrics licenses, or access to my surveys. I also have a team of people that codes surveys in qualtrics but doesn’t really do analysis. Right now, the licensing doesn’t favor me giving a bunch of users access to the survey tool, and doesn’t have fine grained enough control to manage them if I did.
Long story short, for me, analysis and publication are tightly coupled, without an end to end solution that changes my current workflow, having portable files and PowerPoint charts remains the most effective solution that still enables some specialization of skills in my team.
Been out of that realm a few years, but if using panel providers anyway, Sawtooth was pretty much only software that didn't make me want to smash my computer. Especially any online builder tool, yuck. Never did run into anything we couldn't make it do.
Another lesser known survey analytics tool that just came out recently is Surveyking.com. They have a lot of really advanced features that some of the smaller companies don’t have and it was all coded by one guy apparently. From the pricing, it looks like they are only $19 a month for everything. https://www.surveyking.com/pricing
Companies like Research Now, Mindforce Research, SSI, etc. They allow you to buy completes for specific research surveys. The completes are anonymous, but the respondents wive categorical information like Role, Title, Company Industry, Size, etc. Respondents are paid for taking the survey.
As an aside, panel data quality has gotten a lot more iffy in the last year or two. Seemingly, bots are getting much more sophisticated at "faking" a valid looking response. I now spend more than half of my actual surveying time on response validation. For those of you interested, you need to have logic that cross-validates, (i.e you said you were using AWS in one question, but don't use public cloud in another) and you need to read open ended responses. Even if you don't want open ended responses, I would not do any survey without at least 2 open ended response questions.
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%.
Supposed to? I dunno, 6% is respectable and if I were an investor, it sounds like a safe bet. Unlike 30-70%, that just tells me they've been dedicating resources on growth, probably using backhanded techniques, instead of their product and profitability.
Plus as another commenter pointed out, it's not a startup, it's nearly two decades old now. What were their growth rates 20 years ago?
The OP is using "earned" in the colloquial sense to refer to revenue. Earning before interest and tax (EBIT) were a loss of $35 million in 2016 and a loss of $21 million in 2017
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?
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.
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.
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?
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"
You were downvoted and edited out your comment, but apparently you said something along the lines of survey monkey is not that impressive because it just hosts forms.
That's not how they make money.
They make money by getting people to answer the questions on the forms. You pay approximately $1 per response.
If you want to know if users think that they themselves are willing to pay more for electricity, you can just ask them.
People are expensive. And they're a profitable company, so they must be doing something right. The market doesn't care that they "host forms." The market cares that SurveyMonkey solves their problems.
I promise you that there is a palpable undercurrent as a company grows where you go from "everything is so easy, just be scrappy and talk to the person next to you" to "wow, there are all these scaling edge cases, not everyone is a senior dev/design/marketing/hr who has worked at the company since it's infancy, communication is hard and not everyone is like you" such that you need to spend money on hiring/infrastructure to solve this as the efficiency per person/project/team goes down.
If you replace the phrase "Research and development" with "paying developers", is it any easier to swallow? Because AFAIK R&D is an unintuitive, tax-favorable way of saying just that.
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.
I was surprised to begin purchasing a house recently and have the documents go through dotloop instead of docusign. It was my first evidence that docusign isn't completely dominant after all.
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.
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.
It may have been unfair of (a limited number of) people to presume snark when you didn't intend it, but your edited version of the comment was super-snarky too and panned the entire HN community.
You could have just said "hey sorry all, didn't mean to sound snarky, here's what I meant...", and a great discussion could have ensued.
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.