How Suzy CEO Matt Britton grew Suzy to $82M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

Susie is helping big Enterprise plans like Procter and Gamble at Gillette do market research they've got over 400 customers paying an average 150 000 bucks a year just past a 60 million dollar AR run rate call it this week this month up from 40 million just a year ago up and passing about 20 million back in 2020 so really healthy growth rate they did burn 25 million net burn last a year but obviously that was the Heyday now they've recorrected things they've got plenty of Runway to get through uh the end of next year and even further where they hope to break a sort of 80 90 100 million dollar run rate hey folks my guest today is Matt Brittany he's the founder and CEO of Susie and best-selling author of Youth Nation not your 86 at the top you got it all right now you're a regular man I I like I I had you on back uh gosh for the first time in early 2020 and then another time in 2021 and your story is unique in that I think you had your own agency that you sold before you went into your SAS is that accurate yeah we incubated what became known as Susie lay while still running my agency mry the agency was acquired but we had spun out the software company before the agency was acquired and then after my earn out ended the agency I rejoined the CEO back then it was called crowdtap rebranded the Susie and we launched in 2018. so that's amazing so talk about what you're working on today and sort of maybe give an example of how customers using you guys live yeah so Susie is a consumer Insight software platform that's used primarily like by large Enterprises uh we our ideal customer profile is what we call Super Enterprises the companies do over 5 billion a year in Revenue we primarily focus on technology food and beverage package Goods financial services companies in in those uh in that overall Revenue tier and what Susie provides is essentially a an on-demand platform that allows these companies to talk to their target consumer and gain feedback quantitatively and qualitatively in a really rigorous form to allow them to make critical business decisions throughout the product development life cycle so whether it's early on figuring out what product to launch or what should the packaging look like or which we call it or what should the pricing be or which of the advertising be at every single stage when these large companies launch a new product there's decisions that have to be made and we have built with Susie a research tool that allows them to run those decisions by the consumers that matter matter so you can be more empowered and ultimately making those decisions and increasing their chance of success now there's a lot of research tools sort of in this space whether you're a software company wanting to test a new flow or a toothbrush company wanting to test the bristle strength on a new toothbrush right what's interesting about Susie is you are you are vertically integrated here you actually own a platform that users engage on actively and then that's how you collect some of these survey based feedback when we last spoke these gamified apps you told me had between 50 and 100 000 monthly active users on them what's that number look like today is it grown um we haven't even focused as much on quantity and you're talking about our crowd tab Consumer Panel um which we have a million registered users on and on a monthly basis you are correct it's anywhere between 50 and 100 000 our Focus has really been on the quality of those users one of the big problems we're solving with online market research is there's a lot of Fraud and spam so when people try to buy an audience to respond to a survey from a programmatic audience provider what they often find is it's a lot of bots that are answering the questions so our focus on the audience size has been less about building more quantity of audience because as long as we have a diversified network of people that deliver on the demands of our customers we don't need to add more people right but we need to make sure that they are people and they're well intentioned and they're providing the right answers and that's really been our Focus we've actually have a patent pending for a product called biotic which is essentially a Spam and Bot detection tool that's built within our audience and with that we have the highest quality audience in the industry and quality is really the only thing that matters is an online market research oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview yeah guys so just to get your heads around Matt's business that's the equivalent of like he doesn't own Candy Crush but it's like if he owned Candy Crush right and then Procter and Gamble wanted to get user feedback he could basically put a survey up after you complete level three of Candy Crush and say hey we're thinking about a new type of candy do you like hard candy or soft candy Matt this is sort of a writing a good example right yeah exactly crowdtap itself is like a gain game and the users earn points for answering questions anonymously on behalf of Brands the pointer cash in towards digital rewards and currency it's exactly how it works and then what sits on top of this crowd that product is Susie which is kind of the sophisticated market research tool that our customer interfaces with to launch these complex research projects now this does obviously have you know the vertical integration is an advantage but it also does hit your margin a bit because I believe 10 to 15 percent of your monthly expenses go towards paying these consumers to engage in these surveys is that true and is it still 10 to 15 yep it's exactly 10 to 15 however we're able to uh really maintain the overall gross margin profile in the mid to low 70s so I wouldn't call it it hits our margin because we're almost like Farm to Table other companies actually have to buy sample uh some of our competitors if they're going to deliver a project for customers from a third party which is more expensive where we're actually mining if you will our own audience and delivering it directly uh to the end end customer so it actually makes us more profitable on a gross margin adjusted basis and also opens up a variety of different features and functionality that other companies can't deliver based on us being vertically integrated interesting so your competitors might put this expense we have to buy panel data below the line you're saying they end up paying more than 10 to 15 anyway you're just putting it above the line that's exactly right yeah really interesting what are I mean name two just to put us in the right space name two of your competitors you think about uh well qualtrics has really set the gold standard for online market research so I don't want them as sort of the company when we start it we want to be the next qualtrics the biggest difference being qualtrics started universities who are working the way Bottoms Up and when we entered The Fray online marketer research was a much more mature space so we did the opposite we started with large Enterprises and maybe eventually we'll work our way down so I would call them sort of number one...