SurveyMonkey S-1

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"

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.

Thanks. Good find.

I was looking to see if they find an audience for you and put them in front of your survey. I can't tell if they do that.

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?