Video Interview: Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy

Matt Britton started digital research platform Suzy in 2018, named it after a favourite song, worked with other non-researchers to build it, and got to $25 million annual recurring revenue 'faster than Salesforce and Qualtrics'. An interview with MrWeb's Nick Thomas - available as video or in print.


Video www.mrweb.com/drno/mattbritton.htm here: 32 minutes. The print version below is slightly abridged.


NT: A bit of personal background as ever... Tell me about your education, your ambitions, and what led to Suzy.

MB: So I went to College in Boston, and Boston University. I started my first business while still in college doing nightclub promotions. By the time I graduated I started to get a lot of inquiries from local businesses that wanted to sponsor the events I was throwing, so it could be a local pizza place or a local bakery wanting to put up a banner at one of my events or add their logo to my flyer, and essentially it started to get me to think about different ways of expanding my career beyond nightclub promotions and get into the world of marketing.

I started an agency right out of college, at first to help local businesses target teens and college students. Then my timing was fortuitous because the year 2000 it was right when the dotcom bubble started to blow up, and I saw an opportunity to go beyond local businesses to large scale Internet companies like Yahoo! and eBay and Lycos and allow them to target teens and college students, through a model I created by essentially creating a network of college student representatives. That was a very successful venture early on, but then the dotcom bubble burst and I got my first lesson in the hard knocks of business, sold the business.

I moved to New York, worked for a company called Alloy, then I started my first real agency in 2002 called Mr Youth, which is sort of the same idea helping big businesses target teens and college students with the only difference that I didn't target Internet firms as clients, I targeted mainstream - large brands like Coca Cola and Procter and Gamble etc. We were fortuitous to be in the youth marketing game in 2004 when Facebook was invented, sold the first ads ever onto Facebook and really started a long journey pivoting our company from a youth marketing shop to a social media marketing shop. We rebranded as MRY and ended up building the agency to about five hundred people before it was acquired by the Publicis Group. However before we sold the agency I spun out a software company which was originally called Crowdtap.

The original purpose of Crowdtap was essentially to create a network of everyday influencers who create content on behalf of brands. After I sold the agency, I joined as CEO of Crowdtap, which had built a network of a million consumers for creating content, but ultimately I saw a better opportunity in using that network for those people to answer questions, and become essentially a panel, and that's where the idea of Suzy was born.

So in in 2018 we launched Suzy on top of this kind of consumer network that Crowdtap had created, again an offshoot of an agency I started way back in 2002: so this has been a kind of long journey to get to where we are and really dates back to me just being right out of college about twenty years ago.

NT: How would you describe Suzy as a business: the elevator pitch / thirty second summary?

MB: Suzy's an enterprise software platform that allows large brands to essentially put their finger on the pulse of the consumer by giving them access to the consumers that matter, for feedback on demand.

NT: Where did the name come from?

MB: I knew I wanted to name the company in a human way because I saw where the world was headed, where there were tools like Alexa and Siri, where consumers are starting to talk to their technology and I was at a concert from my favorite band, called phish. They played one of my favorite songs, Suzy Greenberg and I said I'm going to name it Suzy, it's that simple. Suzy.com was ownable, no one else had used that name. And when you're naming a company, it's less about the actual meaning of the name, and it's more about is that name ownable. When somebody says it, or they Google it, are you the one that comes up?

NT: There are a lot of insight and data platforms out there - I'm very much aware of that because we cover a lot of them in DRNO! They're always comparing their performance with that of traditional research - I see you do on your web site and you're selling the benefits versus that, whereas to me they don't compare with each other enough and say what their USP is - what sets them apart from the other platforms out there. What would you say was your differentiator?

MB: I would say it's two things. First and foremost, we have a truly vertically integrated solution, so I think a lot of other players in the marketplace say they have their own panel, but in reality they really just tapping into one of the programmatic marketplaces via companies like Cint, Dynata etc. Whereas we truly have our own scalable panel, which is our Crowdtap network that has been built over a decade at this point. So I think that's a huge advantage and we think it's the highest quality panel in the marketplace and most diversified. And second, I think the background from which Suzy was formed: frankly, my background and that of our President, Avi Savar, neither of us really come from the market research world, and I think people who create new start-ups that come out of market research sort of have the curse of familiarity if you will, where they know a little bit too much about market research and then what they create ends up being in the sea of sameness. The reason that we have a tool that's so easy to use is that when we first started the business we were trying to solve a problem that we saw existed in the marketplace for decades, which is that companies made so many decisions without research behind it because research was so time- and cost-inefficient. After we created that user experience, the brand and the story, then we brought on more traditional market research experts to kind of give us the rigour we need to do really meaningful work with really meaningful brands. But I think that the origins of the business and where we came from, really ultimately is what's differentiating us in the marketplace.

NT: You mentioned user experience: what about the experience for your users, for your clients as opposed to for the respondents?

MB: I don't come from the market research world and many of the people who built the first iterations of Suzy didn't either. We sort of built it around the consumer - Who do you want to talk to? - unlike a lot of market research software [which is built around the researcher]. Much like maybe like Facebook's ad buying platform or Google: we modelled our experience over those platforms versus modeling it off a Qualtrics. Qualtrics is obviously built for the power user in market research, and what we're finding is the notion of market research is becoming democratised - every company wants to become consumer centric. If you're going to democratise market research you almost have to build a camera that looks a lot more like the iPhone than a DSLR professional camera. You look at a platform like Qualtrics - incredible company, incredible tool, but it's built for more the professional photographer, using the analogy. We're [designing] it for the everyday business person: you can go to advanced mode where you can get a lot more deep targeting and kind of deep functionality, but we also have the ability for anybody who just knows what they want to know and who they want to talk to, to jump on. And with a lot of confidence they'll get the information they need.

NT: OK so that's the end of the scale you're coming from, but looking at Qualtrics, who obviously have quite a substantial market out there based on market value, it must be tempting to be looking towards that end of things as well..?

MB: We think the market changed. We think that when Qualtrics launched fifteen years ago their big idea was bringing market research online and when they were doing so the only people who wanted to adopt it were the early adopters and universities. When Suzy launched in 2018 the market for online market research was much more mature and it went beyond sort of the power users to sort of everyday users. It's now focused more around collaboration, around data visualization, things that maybe Qualtrics didn't focus as much on when they launched because the market was different - and listen they're an incredibly successful company, I would only hope one day to be as successful as they are, but we're in a different world right now so we have no interest in copying what else is out there.

NT: Let's look very briefly at a few specific recent launches and particular features of the platform. Suzy Live first of all.

MB: So Suzy Live allows our clients to connect the quant to the qual. You essentially can conduct large scale quantitative research; take cohorts of consumers from that research and drop them into a Zoom-like interface where you can talk to them one on one or one to many. So really being able to connect the two is incredibly powerful.

NT: Suzy Solutions?

MB: Suzy Solutions is built on the back of a new team that we've built called our Market Research Center of Excellence - we've recruited the best and the brightest from the traditional market research establishment, you know companies like Ipsos and Nielsen and the like to come join our company, and take their deep domain expertise and essentially build a prototype kind of solution set on top of our software, where essentially we can help clients with much more sophisticated tasks like testing a Superbowl spot - and we will help them build solutions where they can use Suzy's platform to do so. So it's really our way of getting into deeper, much more rigorous research tasks within the enterprise.

NT: Dynamic Market Segmentation?

MB: Dynamic Market Segmentation is essentially the ability for clients to use a templated data set to be able to conduct consumer segmentation that's updated on a quarterly or monthly basis. We found the way that brands develop their consumer segmentation is often quite static, and in this world that's sort of a no-go, because what you consider as maybe your affluent buyer or your active user changes [quickly] and with our platform we essentially can take the benchmarks and the criteria that companies create for these segments and over time continually update them, so they can understand who those segments are and talk to the right people.

NT: Is your platform more geared towards certain types of project or business information than others? What's it not so good for?

MB: Sure, so we're building Suzy to be an insight system of record where we truly can go across the product development life cycle from foundational learning all the way to the consumer experience. However, the origins of the platform mean it definitely veers towards the earlier side of the product development life cycle - so foundational learning, innovation, concept testing - and less so right now on stuff like consumer experience management. That's the side we've focused on early on, but we're definitely continuing to build our tool sets so we can focus across the entire continuum.

NT: Leading on from the idea of building out... What's your policy on acquisitions at the moment as opposed to organic growth?

MB: We're doing both, you know we're well capitalised right now. You've probably noticed that there's been a ton of consolidation in this industry. What we're seeing is that there's a huge cohort of companies that are stuck at around ten to fifteen million in annual recurring revenue that are growing 25-30%, that aren't profitable and are relatively unfundable right now. In 2020-21 we saw the res tech industry grow dramatically, creating so many competitors in the marketplace and frankly a lot of noise. But now what you're seeing is a great shakeout, and coming out of this is going to be some market leaders and there's going to be a lot of companies that are going to go away or get consolidated. We plan on being the former, and we're seeing a lot of companies again that are hitting that wall, or frankly looking to be acquired or explicitly on sale, and we're looking at it right now.

NT: Would you be looking for small bolt-on acquisitions, or are you in the market for a mega-merger?!

MB: For M&A, we're working in a couple of different areas looking at functionality. So when you talk about that product development life cycle, are there pieces of functionality that we can bolt on to our existing platform that allows us to increase our average contract value and frankly offer our clients a more holistic solution? We're looking at opportunities in the audience space so we can continue to expand our own first party audience not only in the US but internationally, and we're looking at frankly, larger solution sets so that we can... maybe leapfrog some of the larger companies in the space by one plus one equals three scenario. Frankly we're looking at all three of those right now.

NT: What's your geographical coverage like at the moment, in terms of client base?

MB: The majority of our clients are based in the US, but we're servicing the subsidiaries of those companies all around the world.

NT: ...and companies that are based outside the US, there's plenty of them too..?

MB: Yep there sure are, and that's definitely an expansion opportunity for us in the future.

NT: Something you might look for an acquisition for?

MB: Absolutely, it's actually something we're currently in discussions with, and we're seeing if it makes sense.

NT: In the early days of what was called DIY research, a lot of companies that launched platforms thought it was all going to be DIY, and clients would take it over themselves very quickly. But a lot of people have said to me recently that DIT is the coming thing - Do It Together - and that people want a lot of help. What's your experience of that, and what's the trend?

MB: So the reality is - and I'm speaking about large enterprises, I can't speak to the smaller companies - if you look at a tool like SurveyMonkey, right? Another great business, they were first to market, but you look at their average contract value, it's five hundred dollars, and ours is in the low- to mid- six figures, and the reason why is they have a tool where essentially it's a point solution. They're giving people who want to do research, you know, in a very simple and easy way, the ability to fill out a wizard and launch a survey, and there is definitely a segment of the market, both smaller and larger companies that want to do that. However, when you look about at the large research budgets, the reality is that many people who are in the insights or marketing or brand functions of these large companies have never actually done research themselves in the past. They've always outsourced it to an agency so they actually don't know how to launch research because it's something they never focused on. It's something that they just outsource and they just want the results back. So to think that you're going to launch a tool and all of a sudden they're going to want to do it on their own - I think it's pretty short-sighted.

Ultimately what we're leading is a digital transformation: we are essentially trying to disintermediate the traditional supply chain in market research to allow these companies to go direct to consumer with research the same way they're going direct to consumer with their ecommerce, but in doing so it is a journey and you have to hold their hands along the way and essentially fit into their overall puzzle in terms of their organizational design. So when you're looking at the large enterprise I think it much more is Do It Together - I've never heard of that phrase before but I think it's really smart.

NT: Some of the people who have used it have suggested that as users get more familiar with the software they move along the spectrum from DIT towards DIY. Do you notice that?

MB: I think some people in large enterprises never want to do their own research. They don't want to have hands on keyboards. That's not really part of their job, so I think ultimately what they're going to want is they're going to want tech enabled services. For the user it's really about the output or the result, versus the how you get there: so if it's not in the natural workflow for a user to jump on a tool and actually launch research on their own then forcing it just for the sake of trying to push your own agenda, I don't think makes a lot of sense.

NT: Is it fair to deduce from what you're saying that most of your market share is coming from traditional research, from existing users, rather than bringing new people into the research market?

MB: I think we're doing a little of both right now. I think there's the notion of expanding the total addressable market of research based on the fact that research was so costly. That it lacked any type of cost efficiency in the past for people to essentially want to do research versus just guessing. So I think right now we see a market opportunity to compete with what was prior guesswork and that essentially expands the total addressable market. But by the same token, there's obviously a huge market opportunity to disrupt the traditional kind of research establishment and win market share from there as well.

NT: Pick a recent project for me...

MB: We work with a major CPG who was essentially hellbent on launching a new flavour of snacks, and basically they did inadequate testing and they were very close to going the market with this particular sub-brand of a very popular brand, and quickly realised that it was not only gonna be not popular but it was gonna have a long-term impact on a negative basis on how their brand was perceived, and they basically stepped on the brakes and said not to go forward with it. I often get asked 'What's the ROI of market research?', and my answer is often 'What's the ROI of a seat belt?' Unless you get in an accident you won't know the ROI, but if you do it's going to be the most valuable thing that you've ever had in your car. Right, that's a lot how I look at research in general, so that's why I picked that example out in particular.

NT: Where have they ended up?

MB: They went back to the drawing board and now have you know, six to eight additional concepts that they're going deep in right now with consumers. One of our other pieces of product functionality that you didn't mention earlier is something called Suzy Home. Suzy Home is essentially our in-home usability testing platform, where you can take quantitative research, break it down to a cohort of consumers, and ship physical products through an FDA approved warehouse on demand into their home so they can actually test the products, in real time. So that's a perfect kind of product offering for a company like this that wants to kind of go back to the drawing board and actually get consumers' responses to potential new products.

NT: You talked about the seat belt, but do you do a lot of measuring the ROI of the other work that you do?

MB: Of course, I mean, I think that's a mandate right now. I think we are entering an economic downturn globally, and I think that companies are really gonna start to take a step back and look at their investments... and figure out what is really helping them drive bottom line performance. I think in a bull market companies will try anything and open up a purchase order for anything, but in a downturn you really have to as a company prove your value: so they have to prove their value on a new flavour or a new roll-out, and we have to prove our value as a tool and solution.

NT: How do you prove your ROI?

MB: Part of it is showing them the cost benefit of using us versus other platforms in the marketplace. How expensive is it to run a similar project on Suzy versus using a traditional agency? How much time and money you save, because ultimately we are collapsing a supply chain. So if you look at the traditional market research supply chain you have agency, you have tech platform and then you have audience provider right? Those are sort of the three pillars and along that supply chain. Each of those individual units has to have a profit center within it so not only are you losing time but you're losing a lot of cost benefit because there's profits have to get eaten along the way. By us consolidating that we're essentially creating a faster, easier, cheaper solution.

NT: OK some bits of the ROI are easy to demonstrate. You say you can compare the costs with what they would have done otherwise, and say you've saved that much money, but how do you show how much money they've saved by getting there a little bit quicker than they would have done, or by doing a piece of research they would never have bothered with before?

MB: Right, it is very hard to quantify, and I think it's very situational. It's What else would they have done? What did they do last year? Every company has unique challenges in the way that they gauge the return on investment.

NT: You've talked a lot about what you're expecting to see in the future, but one thing perhaps we haven't said very much about is hybrid forms of data, merging different data sets and bringing analytics and things to add to research projects. Is that something that you're aware of... working on..?

MB: Yes - we already do it in that having our own audience or zero party data, so to speak, really allows us to take that data and mix and match it with other third party forms of data, whether it's shopper / spending data, going deeper into their behavioral profiles and really allowing our clients to leverage those deeper data sets to talk to the right people and get the right insights. So I think that's another thing that having this vertically integrated solution unlocks. Also we have a whole partnerships team right now that's speaking to dozens of data providers and working on integrations - that's only going to make our tool stronger over time.

We're in the early innings of that right now. I think Suzy overall is in the first innings, I mean, we launched in 2018 and our company got to $25 million annual recurring revenue faster than Salesforce, faster than Qualtrics, faster than some of the most successful software companies in history, so I think when you look at Suzy one of the amazing things and frankly one of the things I'm most proud of is how much we've done in such a little period of time. We are the youngest.. kind of .. emerging startup in the space right now. Nobody has our scale and our growth rate right now in the industry and I'm really proud of how quickly we've moved.

NT: Where would you like it to be in five years' time?

MB: Sure, so we want to become the insight system of record. So you look at a lot of successful companies in the marketplace and they've largely been point solutions, whether it's like a UserZoom or User Testing or SurveyMonkey. These are very successful companies and platforms that essentially provide the best mouse trap for a specific goal that a client wants. However, what we've realised over time is clients want to work with less tools, not more. And I don't think an insights professional wants seven different tools to do seven different things - they also want a tool that can help them collaborate across the enterprise in an increasingly remote and diverse workforce. So what we want to create is essentially what Adobe created with the creative cloud, or Salesforce created: we want to create the true insights cloud, with integrations really across the board and a multitude of different ways to leverage it, for every large industry out there. That's what we're attempting to build with Suzy.

NT: Is it still early days for your work with data sharing... dashboards and so on?

MB: I would call that in the third or fourth innings - we're well along the way. I realise baseball really isn't a big thing where you are in the UK so maybe I need to use a different analogy!

NT: You only have two innings each in cricket.

MB: Exactly. But yeah, I wouldn't say that we're very mature in that area, but we've launched a lot of functionality around collaboration and workflow because it's something that we saw during the pandemic. It was incredibly important for these companies as they went remote, and it's something that we really doubled down on, in terms of our product road map.

NT: It's been great talking to you Matt!


Web site: www.suzy.com.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.