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Comment by daxorid | Hacker News Reader

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

edit: there's a lot of stuff they offer beyond the basic surveys - https://www.surveymonkey.com/what-is-surveymonkey/.

You were downvoted and edited out your comment, but apparently you said something along the lines of survey monkey is not that impressive because it just hosts forms.

That's not how they make money.

They make money by getting people to answer the questions on the forms. You pay approximately $1 per response.

If you want to know if users think that they themselves are willing to pay more for electricity, you can just ask them.

That's amazing.

People are expensive. And they're a profitable company, so they must be doing something right. The market doesn't care that they "host forms." The market cares that SurveyMonkey solves their problems.

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.

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...

> research and development

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!

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.

I was surprised to begin purchasing a house recently and have the documents go through dotloop instead of docusign. It was my first evidence that docusign isn't completely dominant after all.

I haven't been forced to use DocuSign for a few years, but there ux was complete shit. I would rather go to an office and physically sign something than deal with their crappy interface.

Docusign would also go down all the time. My agent and I both absolutely hated it. Much easier for me to wireless print stuff, sign it, scan it and email it from an HP printer. It was a reliable system.

I was willing to go through that friction because docusign was just absolutely horrible. UX was aweful, wouldn’t work on mobile well, emails wouldn’t send, site would be down yada yada.

But this says something about enterprise companies. With a powerful salesforce, you could dominate a field even with a shitty product if it’s a niche field.

Not at all, given all the businesses (and public sector agencies) that have built essential workflows around it displacing paper processes.

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.

I can think of about a dozen organizations who collectively spend 10x this on tools like Cognos, PowerBI and Tableau.

Easily 90% of their use cases could be fulfilled by excel.

Solutions cost money.

Excel isn't scalable, repeatable, auditable and so on.

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

They host a lot of forms. Forms that do fancy things. And engineers cost a lot of money in the Bay Area. Hope that helps.

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

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

I was legitimately curious, and there was no snark at all.

It may have been unfair of (a limited number of) people to presume snark when you didn't intend it, but your edited version of the comment was super-snarky too and panned the entire HN community.

You could have just said "hey sorry all, didn't mean to sound snarky, here's what I meant...", and a great discussion could have ensued.

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