When asked how a typical customer uses his products, SurveyGizmo CEO Scott McDaniel admits, “We have 40,000 customers doing 40,000 different things.” While such an answer usually indicates a marketing nightmare, this Boulder-based company has had no problem growing right out of its office space twice in the past two years. What SurveyGizmo offers is an online toolset to create questions and collect information. As the company’s name suggests this mechanism can be used to create surveys for market research purposes, yet the flexible tool can be deployed for any sort of digital data collection. The software’s utility has resonated with a wide-audience, as the company currently boasts 38,000 users of its free version and over 1,800 paid users.
According to McDaniel, the company goes after the “fat middle” between the very basic functionality offered by many online tools and the high price tag (upwards of $10,000 annually) offered by full-service online survey vendors. The company’s differentiation from other online tools begins with “the degree of functionality it offers in a point and click interface” as well as extensive ability to include complex logic, branching and piping within surveys (asking respondents different questions depending on known characteristics or survey answers). The software also makes it easy to import data from databases (e.g. allowing companies to ask customers about specific products they have purchased) and provides easy integration with other popular software programs like Salesforce.com. The company also ensures easy one-click data extraction once survey results are in.
SurveyGizmo offers these tools through several different plans to best meet customer needs with some of the more advanced functionality only available to paying customers. Available options range from a basic free application to professional versions which range from the Pro Plan priced at $49 per month to the Dedicated Plan at $599 per month. The Dedicated Plan is a new offering for businesses seeking a more hands on touch and includes a dedicated account representative and some service hours in the package. Along with these plans, customers may pay for additional professional services time to consult with experts on survey design or to create customized tools. The company also provides a variety of free trainings and webinars online, including an on-boarding program which shows customers the basics of using SurveyGizmo with seven daily emails the first week after a customer joins.
From a growth perspective, the CEO notes that, “word of mouth has been incredibly strong for us.” While in Google search results for “online survey” SurveyGizmo appears second, McDaniel states that the majority of business comes through direct entry to the site or searches specifically for the company name. With this new customer acquisition has come an increase in staff from two to the current roster of twelve in just under eighteen months. McDaniel says the company could easily support two more on full-time staff and two summer interns once the office space is available. The company is moving to larger offices in Boulder on May 1 to accommodate these needs. Along with keeping up with its growing customer base and office space, the SurveyGizmo team is working hard to prepare for the launch of its 2.0 version. This update, expected in the second quarter, will focus on “taking all the power [currently available] in the interface and making it even easier and more accessible”, even for those with no experience in questionnaire creation.
McDaniel and Co-Founder Christian Vanek achieved something that would be the envy of many startups – profitability in their very first year. Although the profits in the first year were modest, they served as a jumping off point to profitable growth at an impressive rate since. With this growth have come new challenges such as managing a staff. McDaniel’s approach to this challenge has been to ensure that his entire team has some end to end interaction with the company’s offering: “We all get our hands in coding” and everyone “has some customer interactions. We are entrepreneurs and creators here.”
McDaniel and Vanek met while both were working at MarketingSherpa, a popular online research firm dedicated to tracking and measuring the effectiveness of different marketing methodologies. Vanek, a programmer at the company, had been having conversations with the firm’s Director of Research about what feature set would constitute the ideal survey tool, given that available products continued to come up short. Armed with this wish list Vanek began to build a platform, and soon brought McDaniel in to help him push the project forward. That was three years ago. Now Vanek is moving to Boulder from Cambridge, MA, at the same time the company moves into the new space. McDaniel could not be more pleased about the move, although he was initially disappointed at the thought of losing the current office’s patio deck; “But now we’ll have three of them,” he reports with a grin.
