SurveyMonkey S-1 • Hacker News Board

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#11

Post by sciurus » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 8:38 PM UTC

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

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.

https://www.cpajournal.com/2017/10/30/u-s-research-developme...

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#12

Post by mikkelewis » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

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.

Good luck.

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#13

Post by deusofnull » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #10

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

Out of curiosity, how do you think a company that does not have a team of engineers would survey people?

They'd use survey monkey.

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#14

Post by whorleater » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 8:42 PM UTC

perryh2 wrote: post #5

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

Does it also surprise you that DocuSign is a company worth over $10B?

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.

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#15

Post by mrmikes » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

jameslevy wrote: post #8

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

You could say this about pretty much any unicorn SaaS company. A quick look at the pricing page can make some of this clear: https://www.surveymonkey.com/pricing/ Disclosure: former employee of SurveyMonkey

Hi James!

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#16

Post by youeseh » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

There's more to this than "forms".

- Their survey tool was one of the earliest and pretty easy to use - they have brand recognition. #uuge.

- If they support any intelligence (skip-logic), then they take bread away from bigger market research companies.

- Their biggest competitors in this space (Facebook, Google Docs) require signing away your life to create a simple survey.

But back to the brand recognition. They've built something simple that captured the market early and have basically dominated.

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#17

Post by misterbowfinger » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

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?

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#18

Post by clay_the_ripper » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

deusofnull wrote: post #13

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how do you think a company that does not have a team of engineers would survey people?

They'd use survey monkey.

Exactly

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#19

Post by par » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

but you didn't ask a sincere question, you were making a snarky comment.

Re: SurveyMonkey S-1

#20

Post by shawn » Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

daxorid wrote: post #2

edit: Disregard, can't ask an honest question on HN. Understood.

Hmmm. FWIW, I saw your question earlier and came back just now to see the answers. Disappointed it was met with hostility.