It’s no surprise that a founder who built a reputation on leveraging evolving trends for super enterprises like Proctor & Gamble would capitalize on a SaaS opportunity himself. Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy, returned for his third visit with the GetLatka team in four years to share the latest updates on his consumer insights platform. The former agency founder and bestselling author of YouthNation shared how he views his competition, what surprising lever he’s dialing back to reduce net burn, and why he refers to his model as “farm-to-table”.
- $60m ARR
- 400 customers
- $12,000 ARPU
- 70% gross margin
- Team of 300, with 80 engineers, 80 sales, including 25 quota-carrying reps
Suzy focuses on fulfilling the needs of $5B+ enterprise brands
Two decades as an agency serving massive brands like Gillette and Coca-Cola gave Britton the insights he needed to incubate a SaaS inside his agency, MRY. After spinning off the SaaS and having his agency acquired, Britton became Founder and CEO of the newly rebranded Suzy, a consumer insights platform used to provide customers with custom quantitative and qualitative feedback. “Our clients, $5B plus brands, make thousands of critical business decisions throughout the product development lifecycle. Suzy gives them the rigorous feedback they need to increase their chances of success,” explained the CEO.
Focus drives Suzy’s ACV from $60,000 to $150,000
When Britton visited in 2019, Latka recollected that his ACV was around $60,000. Today, that number is at $150,000. Britton attributes the increase to several factors, including shedding smaller brands to focus on more targeted customers: brands over $5B in revenue in specific verticals like tech, food and beverage, packaged goods, and financial services. Initially, his sales team focused on the early product development research needs like packaging, pricing, and naming. Now, “It’s whoever hires us first in the product lifecycle,” quipped Britton. He added that once his team closes a project within an enterprise, they double down on expanding both vertically and horizontally within the organization. “We also realized that the big TAM is with the agencies and the market research agencies, as they focus on super enterprise companies,” shared the CEO.
Crowdtap: 1m data points, 50-100,000 active monthly, but the quality matters most
At the heart of Suzy’s success are the 1m diverse users on Crowdtap. Unlike his competitors, Britton has leveraged a gamification strategy to engage users who earn digital rewards in exchange for feedback. Britton explained, “Our focus is on the quality of the users. There is a lot of fraud, spam, and bots in the market. We need to ensure our users are well-intentioned and giving honest answers.” He added that they’ve developed Bioitic, a patent-pending spam and bot detection tool, to support their efforts, noting, “We have the highest quality audience in the industry, and quality is all that really matters in online market research.”
10-15% monthly expense: reward to users, but Suzy delivers “Farm-to-Table”
Latka queried Britton if user rewards still represented 10-15% of expenses. The Founder replied yes but explained, “We are farm to table. We are mining our own data and serving it to the customer. Competitors have to buy samples from 3rd parties. Overall, we are more profitable, plus our model opens up features and functionality.” Crowdtap is the game where users earn points for answering questions anonymously on behalf of brands. They cash in points for digital rewards and currency. Suzy sits on top as the platform allows our customers to launch these complex research projects.
Suzy delivers 70% gross margin
Britton shared that Suzy’s gross margin of 70% is the highest in the space. And while their 10-15% user expense sits above the line, it’s below the line for their competitors. When asked to identify his biggest competitors, Britton remarked, “Our two biggest competitors are Qualtrix, the gold standard. They started at universities and are working their way up. And SurveyMonkey. They rebranded as Momentive and are struggling to move upmarket. We started at enterprise and may eventually move our way down.” He added, “I don’t think about competitors. I look at our metrics: conversion ratio down the funnel, growth YoY, listening to customers, and NPS. I’m more focused on our business.”
Suzy Live: a consumer research game-changer
CEO Britton further pondered the competitive landscape question and noted, “Suzy Live is an innovation others don’t have. Quantitative to qualitative. We can pull you into a Zoom interface for a detailed discussion in one workflow that started with a quantitative question. Let’s say we have a red, white, and blue dress. Responders who say they like the red dress and answer that it’s because it makes them feel good can be immediately dripped into a Zoom to find out why it makes them feel that way.” The Founder concluded, “It’s the holy grail of enterprise researchers in a condensed and efficient form.”
Land and Expand within organizations with sales team of 80
“Our land and expand is horizontal and vertical,” explained Britton, adding, “We might start at packaged goods company with ad testing or packaging, then we pick off other departments. Maybe with Gillette, we go from packaging to ad to price. Then, we expand to other brands within the enterprise.” He added that their vertical expansion includes packaging, ads, pricing, innovation, product demand, merchandise, and retail testing. Their new Suzy Home sends physical products to consumer homes for instant feedback. “Any design decision you make, Suzy can be there,” quipped the Founder, adding, “Research has traditionally been slow and expensive through agencies; now we can immediately validate decisions.”
Team of 300 at Suzy, sales productivity grows with tenure
The team at Suzy has expanded to 300, with 80 engineers and 80 salespeople. According to Britton, about 25 carry a quota. “We found that our sellers grow predictably with tenure. Because we are planting seeds each year and selling vitamins, not aspirin, sellers accrue pipeline and relationships. They get more productive each year,” revealed the CEO. He added that the sales team is divided into net new, who need to understand the product, expansion, who need to understand the company, and renewal.
Suzy slows $25m net burn by slowing R&D
“We had a high burn profile over the last couple years, hitting $25m last year,” Britton shared, adding, “Not all burn is created equal. Our burn was coming from an overinvestment in R&D. We were at 60-65% of revenue at our peak, but we had to catch up with Qualtrix. Now, we are getting there and can slow down the R&D ramp to get it to 30-35% and get our burn under control.”
Suzy targets cash-flow positive by Q4 next year
With $100m raised to date (Series D in July 2021 of $40-50m at nearly $400m valuation), Britton is targeting being cash-flow positive by the 4th quarter of next year. “You have to have an efficient GTM process and high gross margins. When the lever you can pull is R&D expense, the pace of innovation dips a bit, but you can keep your revenue growth but drop your opex growth. The second you have to dip into that sales and marketing expense to get there, then you have a company not making money and not growing,” concluded the Founder.
Suzy targets 50% growth to $90m next year
Britton forecasts that Suzy will hit $90m next year. Latka asked about his plans at $100m. “Normally, you would IPO, but who knows in this market? We will probably wait 2-3 years for that, when we hit $200m,” adding, “We have enough on the balance sheet to get to the other side.”
Famous Five
Favorite Book: Founder and CEO Matt Britton again chose The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz as his favorite book, noting, “I keep reading it over and over.”
CEO he’s following: “Elon Musk, just to see what he’s going to do next,” quipped Britton.
Favorite online tool: Britton chose InsightSquared, a data visualization tool for Salesforce, as his favorite tool.
Balance: 47-year-old Britton sleeps 7 hours nightly. He is married with 3 children.
What does he wish he had known at 20? “I wish I had known how important your network is. We got Suzy off the ground by calling people I knew who trusted me and would take a chance on it. Keep your network alive and growing,” Britton revealed.
