Question

Case Summary

The SurveyMonkey case portrays the evolution of the company from its founding in 1999 through to 2014. SurveyMonkey was launched by Ryan Finley, a young computer science graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to address the dearth of easy-to-use, affordable online survey tools on the market. In 2009, Finley sold the company to Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital Ventures, having recognized the need for a partner to help the company achieve its full potential. David Goldberg, an entrepreneur and former Yahoo! Executive, took the helm as CEO and immediately put in place his plan to set the company on track to scale at a consistent and rapid pace of growth. Goldberg’s primary initiatives in the early days were to hire a strong management team, rebuild the entire technology platform, and expand internationally. As it made substantial progress on these fronts, SurveyMonkey completed several acquisitions and began to expand its feature set and product offerings to include SurveyMonkey Audience (panels of survey respondents) and survey templates, among others. The company completed an $800 million secondary financing raise in 2012 to provide liquidity to employees and investors in lieu of an IPO and charged forward on its efforts to transform its survey tool to a full-blown platform. Though SurveyMonkey had established itself as the dominant player in the direct-to-consumer market in 2013, it began building out an enterprise offering to compete against the other large players in the growing enterprise feedback management space. Having achieved tremendous growth in its 15-year history, the majority of which took place since the 2009 acquisition, as Goldberg and his team looked ahead to 2014, they faced the critical question of how to prioritize SurveyMonkey’s avenues for growth-international expansion, quality initiatives enterprise, platform growth-so as to best position the company to achieve its full potential.

Question: How should SurveyMonkey prioritize their avenues for growth-international expansion, quality initiatives enterprise, and platform growth so as to best position the company to achieve its full potential?

Please answer the question in 2-3 paragraphs min.

Answer 1

For prioritizing their avenue for growth and international expansion, Survey monkey should maintain 20 different sites, each with its own language, currency, and cultural nuances, it is because a custom-fit site for all does not work. It should also Focus on solidifying their position in the international markets they have already secured as well as Outsource the maintenance and services of international sites and finally Find a cloud-based translation platform to easily translate their website to different language. SurveyMonkey needed to keep the existing tool running while implementing a complete rewrite of the infrastructure in the background. Matters became more complicated when SurveyMonkey announced two acquisitions, both of which were in the process of being integrated with the product platform.

SurveyMonkey should use a cloud-base translation platform that enables them to reach new international markets by being able to automatically translate website content. This platform would automate the process of coding and translating, decreasing the amount of internal resources needing to deal with language and cultural nuances on their 20 different international websites. With the cloud-based translation platform, SurveyMonkey will be able to streamline their entire localization process. SurveyMonkey’s web content will be stored on the cloud platform and then when request, the web content is translated in any chosen language the user clicks on. There is minimal coding, only translation of content. This centralized cloud platform will allow managers, developers and the translation provide to increase consistency and speed, while reducing costs. We also recommend on hiring a company to provide us with the cloud-based translation platform, rather than making one customized. There are companies that offer translation platforms that are ready to use that fit all the requirements of translating strictly web content and do not compromise the quality of SurveyMonkey’s services.

Conclusion - In order to focus on going global, major issues that prevented this were time to code and launch an international site, complexity with managing 20 sites in different languages, lack of internal resources, and costs. This will allow Survey monkey decrease the amount of time and resources used to create coding for languages, decrease internal drain by not having to manage 20 different websites with automated processes, and costs are fair with high return on investments through increase in web traffic.

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