Internet Marketing Interview with SurveyMonkey’s Ryan Finley
Welcome to the fifth installment of the Internet Success Series Interviews. In this issue we are featuring a series of the animal variety, SurveyMonkey.
SurveyMonkey is an online surveying solution that features a free and paid for version. Both versions offer excellent surveying, data collection, and customization features. We here at WebAdvantage.net have used SurveyMonkey.com in the past for our own, and our clients’ surveys. We like it so much we thought that we’d get a hold of the founder and president of SurveyMonkey, Ryan Finley, and pick his brain a bit for glimpses of eMarketing genius.
BACKGROUND
SurveyMonkey was started in the fall of ’99. At the time, Ryan was a web developer at Sonic Foundry, a local music software company in Madison, WI. At the time, he was working with marketing on creating surveys for the website and researching a number of the web-based tools.
According to Ryan “I realized that there was a large and growing market for self-administered web survey software. After about 6 months of pretty intense coding, the first version of SurveyMonkey was released to the public.”
THE INTERVIEW
WebAdvantage: There has always been free survey and poll software on the net. Why do you think SurveyMonkey has risen to the top of these survey solutions?
What differentiates SurveyMonkey from the others??
Ryan: I think there are two major reasons:
1. Ease of use. From the very beginning, SurveyMonkey was designed around the idea that someone with absolutely no programming skills should be able to use the program. Any new features are added only if they won’t add a layer of confusion. Based on customer feedback, we’ve been able to gradually improve certain areas of the website that give users the most trouble.
2. Low cost. I realized very early on that SurveyMonkey could capture a large share of the market if it undercut other companies on price, while still offering a comparative level of features. When the economy went south, we were able to grow, since many people began to defect from higher priced products.
WebAdvantage: What are your online goals? How well are you meeting them?
Ryan: Right now, we are the #2 website on Alexa in our category.
Our goal is to move from #2 to #1.
WebAdvantage: Please summarize your marketing plan in 3 to 4 sentences.
Ryan: Since we rely primarily on word of mouth advertising, our plan is to make sure that customers are satisfied with their experience. Even if there is a problem, we want customers to come away from their experience feeling that we did our best to take their concerns into account. There are no hidden fees or cancellation charges, and we are always willing to refund a customer’s money if they are unsatisfied for any reason.
WebAdvantage: What forms of online marketing have worked well for SurveyMonkey?
Ryan: About a year ago, we were using Google’s Adwords advertising, and it was working quite well. We decided to discontinue it when they added the bidding system, coupled with the fact that we were growing steadily through just referrals from other customers.
Our major form of marketing comes from the nature of SurveyMonkey itself. When a customer sends out surveys, they are implicitly promoting our website by including the link to SurveyMonkey.
WebAdvantage: Have you marketed SurveyMonkey offline via advertising, PR, news… etc. What has worked? What bombed?
Ryan: I originally sent out a press release at the the beginning of 2000 through an online press release service. We received a writeup in a local Madison paper, but there was nothing beyond that.
In 2000 and 2001, a friend and I promoted the website by dressing up in monkey suits at tradeshows. We traveled to New York and Chicago, and walked around handing out flyers. We got good feedback at the tradeshows, but I don’t think it helped much. But it is kind of hard to quantify.
WebAdvantage: Your current structure seems to market your site via the jump page back to the SM homepage after users complete the free surveys, while other sites have utilized such a placement for paid advertising, you do so to spread awareness of SurveyMonkey. What led you to this choice?
Ryan: It was originally thought of to increase awareness of SurveyMonkey, but it’s greatest utility is in encouraging being to upgrade to professional. Most people want to link back to their own page, and it’s a great way of getting people to upgrade.
WebAdvantage: How do you define growth?
Ryan: We use the metric of our monthly subscriber count. We ignore quarterly and annual subscribers, and measure just the number of monthly subscribers at the beginning of the first day of each month. Defined this way, we have had only one down month in December, when there was a slowdown over the holiday season.
Otherwise, since the beginning, every new month has been greater than the last.
WebAdvantage: What has been your biggest online challenge?
Ryan: The biggest challenge has been keeping up with customer support as the site has grown.
WebAdvantage: Have you beat that challenge? How?
Ryan: There are three things that have helped.
1. Hiring my brother to help with customer support and sales. He comes from a managerial background, and has great experience in dealing with customers. Within a matter of weeks, he was able to get up to speed and take over a great deal of the load.
2. Creating a help guide. This will be done in a matter of weeks, and we anticipate that it will eliminate a lot of common questions.
3. Improving the overall ease of use. Based on feedback from customers, we are able to find what areas trigger the most questions, and work to eliminate those areas of confusion.
WebAdvantage: Finally, where do you see the web taking SurveyMonkey in the next three years?
Ryan: I think we’ve reached a point where the technology of websites is staying quite stagnant. HTML will be here for a long time, and we are now competing with other website in terms of features and usability, rather than having the latest and greatest technology.
For more information or to set up an online survey, please visit SurveyMonkey.com
LINKS TO OTHER WEBADVANTAGE.NET SUCCESS SERIES ARTCILES:
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