Understanding customer needs is one of the basic tenets of business. Solving your customer problems makes your business successful. Suzy is the consumer intelligence platform that enables brands to understand their customer whether its for building pipelines, product development, and gathering feedback. Launched at SXSW in 2018, Suzy is working with over 200 leading brands including Coca-Cola, P&G, Nintendo, TD Bank, and Johnson & Johnson.
AlleyWatch sat down with President Avi Savar and CEO Matt Britton to learn more about the Suzy is leveraging technology for the market research space, the company’s future expansion plans, and recent round of funding.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Suzy raised at $12M Series C led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments Inc. (BDMI), with participation from Foundry Group and Triangle Peak Partners.
Tell us about the product or service that Suzy offers.
Suzy puts the voice of your consumer at your fingertips. Whether you’re a novice or an expert researcher, our platform brings advanced tools together with the highest quality consumer audience to deliver insights in minutes. Some of the biggest brands in the world use Suzy to deliver breakthrough products and experiences backed by data-driven decisions.
What inspired the start of Suzy?
A decade ago, we built the first social media companies to help organizations create value for consumers through meaningful content and transformative ideas. Since then, the collective voice of consumers has spawned unicorns and crippled industries — rewarding companies who put customers first and destroying those who don’t. We wanted a way for brands to have the voice of their consumer at the table with them while making decisions. Traditional research is slow, inefficient and expensive and with Suzy all that can change.
How is Suzy different?
Suzy combines advanced research tools with the highest quality network of screen and verified consumers. We don’t use 3rd parties to buy responses like all of our competitors. The result is a platform that’s easy enough for a novice but advanced enough for an expert researcher – with the fastest, and highest quality consumer responses in the industry. This means you get answers in minutes without sacrificing any quality.
What market does Suzy target and how big is it?
The market research industry is dominated by large traditional service providers. In fact, 50% of the market resides with the top 10 companies — with Nelson, IQVIA, Gardner, Kantar, and Ipsos taking the lion’s share of that. That “traditional” market is 50B strong with flat growth, but broadening to 70B+ as new “business intelligence” in data/technology/analytics expands. That segment was valued at $17B in 2016 and is projected to reach $147B by 2025.
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What’s your business model?
Suzy is bringing an enterprise SaaS model to an industry that is dominated by “cost per response.” We charge customers an annual license fee that gives them “always-on” access and puts the customer at their fingertips without the need for ad-hoc budgets or cost-prohibitive response-based models.
Suzy is bringing an enterprise SaaS model to an industry that is dominated by “cost per response.” We charge customers an annual license fee that gives them “always-on” access and puts the customer at their fingertips without the need for ad-hoc budgets or cost-prohibitive response-based models.
Who do you consider to be your primary competitors?
Survey Monkey and Toluna are the tech platforms on our radar. But because we are not a “cost per response” offering we tend to see customers use us make their spends with more traditional consulting firms more efficient (ie. Neilson, Kantar, Ipsos)
What was the funding process like?
Our fundraising process was a bit of a rollercoaster ride. We have great metrics and traction as the company has grown from a dozen to nearly 200 customers in under 2 years. We met with ton of investors and really wanted to find a partner who could add value strategically and also one that wrote check-sizes that made sense. It took a lot of time and a ton of meetings before we found the right fit.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Check-sizes today are so big that as an entrepreneur you really need to think long and hard about how much and from who to raise. We did not want or need a massive amount of capital. We are a very efficient business and don’t need to throw money at growth – most investors looking at companies in our stage needed to deploy checks in the $20M range. We didn’t want to raise more than $10M and ended up expanding that number out to accommodate.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Check and growth rate were dominant factors as we have been scaling rapidly. In SaaS, it’s all about the math and the math formula. Luckily our formula works!
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Now it’s all about scale. We have some aggressive hiring goals, sales goals, and product goals. We are looking to release more product updates, expand into new verticals and pour gasoline on the math inputs that is now a proven formula.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Focus on building a capital-efficient business and focus on the most important key metrics that investors will care about in your space. We are lucky that SaaS is not new and we were able to learn from the market. Metrics matter, traction matters, and in order to show traction you need to know your numbers.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We are laser-focused on providing the best product experience possible. We know that in order to continue growing and creating value we need to keep pushing ourselves. We do not want to get complacent and we want our customers to sing our praises from rooftops – that means exceptional service, simple and easy product experience, access to trusted and relevant data, and a team they can count on.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Bond Street – it’s around the corner from our office and where we go to celebrate our victories.
Nominations are now open for AlleyWatch’s 2020 NYC Tech Influencers feature. Know someone amazing who belongs on this list? Nominate them today here. Nominations open until 2/14. Looking to drive targeted response from the NYC Tech community at scale, learn more about partnering with AlleyWatch on this initiative here.
