Opinion
Britton: SaaS companies selling to other SaaS are a house of cards
“I think a big house of cards in SaaS right now is SaaS companies who have a customer base that is other SaaS companies.”
Insight
Cutting R&D preserves software revenue growth better than cutting marketing
“So when the lever you can pull is R and D expense, right. And you feel like you're just going to, the pace of innovation will just slow down a little bit. Then you can actually keep your revenue growth, but then drop your OPEX growth, right? The second that yo…”
Opinion
Britton: SurveyMonkey failed in enterprise by not prioritizing customer service
“Survey Monkey is really focused on a small business, and to some extent, middle market. They were really never able to correct the enterprise because they didn't really prioritize servicing, which is a kind of a necessary evil, if you will, of going to market …”
Prediction Partly held up
Britton: Suzy will reach $100M ARR by mid-2025
“We will be there in the middle of 20, 25.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Britton: Suzy maintains a 75% blended gross margin despite including services
“Our gross margins are 75%. Blend it, including the services which really shows you that we really are running a SaaS business and not a tech-enabled service business, which traditionally runs in the mid to low sixties.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Britton: Programmatic audience providers frequently deliver survey responses from bots
“When people try to buy an audience to respond to a survey from a programmatic audience provider, what they often find is it's a lot of bots that are answering the questions.”
Opinion
Britton: SurveyMonkey faces headwinds moving upmarket into enterprise
“They've had a lot of you know, struggles and headwinds just based upon their capital structure and really based upon what seems to be struggles they've had with getting into the enterprise and moving up market.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Britton: Suzy had $20M to $25M net burn in 2021
“No, closer to twenty-twenty-five million.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Britton: Suzy expects to reach cash-flow positivity by Q4 2023
“And in that regard, we expect to be cashflow positive fourth quarter
Next year.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Britton: Suzy will reach high $80M to low $90M ARR by late 2023
“We'll, we'll be in the high eighties to low nineties a year from now.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Britton: Suzy will likely IPO in two to three years at around $200M ARR
“So who knows what, when we'd be able to IPO, I would say likely in the next two to three years, but probably closer than we're at two hundred million ARR versus a hundred.”
Insight
Britton: 99% of corporate decisions are made without data
“99% of decisions that are made at companies are not made with any data. They're guesses. They're hunches. They're based upon my epic thinking.”
Assertion Contradicted
Britton: All market research competitors must buy users from programmatic platforms
“We own the app. We own the brand. We own the users. Every other company actually has to buy users from a programmatic audience platform. If they want to provide an audience, we were almost, we have a vertical model.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Matt Britton: Influencer marketing will never become fully programmatic software
“Influencer marketing, in my opinion, is never going to become a fully programmatic software solution.”
Opinion
Britton: The agency model is political, not a meritocracy
“The agency model is not a meritocracy. It's not the best work wins. It's really the people who can play the best politics wins where I think a software business, your product could really stand apart.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Britton: TV and digital convergence will return power to ad agencies
“When TV and digital come full circle, it's going to go right back into the hands of the agencies and it's already starting to go in that direction as everything kind of starts to shake out in that space.”
Assertion Supported
Britton: Qualtrics holds less than 2% of the $80B research market
“Qualtrics is a 1.2 billion dollar revenue company in an eighty billion dollar market. So you're looking at less than two percent market share for the leading digital player in the research space.”
Insight
Britton: SaaS startups must productize services to protect their gross margins
“What's important though, is that you have to productize your service offering. So it's scalable. You can't be an agency. And the real litmus test is your gross margins.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Britton: Suzy achieved nearly 130% net revenue retention in its enterprise segment
“We ended this year close to a 130% net revenue retention within the enterprise and enterprise defined by that two billion plus number, or I think it's one and a half. I can't remember the last definition we had. It's about 80% of our business. So we have that …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Britton: Suzy maintains 96% enterprise logo retention and low-80s GRR
“If you're looking at gross revenue retention in the pure sense we're probably in the low eighties and definitely higher within the enterprise. However, our logo retention with the enterprise is 96%.”
Insight
Britton: Overspending on R&D is safer than overspending on sales
“If you have a high burn because you're overspending on R&D, you can easily turn that dial down and maybe you have slightly less product innovation, but it's not going to impact revenue. A lot of companies have high burn because they have bad unit economics whe…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Britton: Suzy will burn under $10M in 2024, achieving cashflow positivity
“We ended at a run rate closer to burning a million a month. And we're going to be sub ten million burn in 20, 24, and then cashflow positive in 20, 25.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Suzy spends 10-15% on panel rewards with 70% gross margins
“It's exactly 10 to 15%. However, we're able to really maintain the overall gross margin profile in the mid to low seventies.”
Opinion
Britton: Qualtrics sets the gold standard for online market research
“Qualtrics has really set the gold standard for online market research.”
