Surveymonkey
is an online survey development cloud-based company founded in 1999 by Ryan
Finley. SurveyMonkey provides free customizable surveys as well as high end for
purchase services such as data analysis, sample selection, bias elimination,
and data representation tools. SurveyMonkey also offers large-scale enterprise
options for companies interested in brand management and consumer-focused
marketing. SurveyMonkey has approximately 25 million users and has annual
revenue of $113 million.
Survey
monkey has extremely high revenue as well as an extremely valuable platform,
yet only has three patents. SurveyMonkey has been around for almost 15 years,
however, like many other unicorns, has not had much success with the USPTO.
SurveyMonkeys’ two largest competitors are Formstack and Qualtrics. Formstack
has no patents, which is not a big concern for SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey’s
other big competitor Qualtrics, is used at many big research universities like
Berkeley. I have personally used Qualtrics surveys in my Haas elective courses
when the teacher is trying to get feedback about the course. Qualtrics has one
patent, and that is its media management system for mobile devices that was
granted very recently on December 31, 2015. Neither SurveyMonkey nor its
competitors have serious patent portfolios, which could be a problem in their
attempt to counter sue others in patent litigation cases against eachother.
If
SurveyMonkey wants to increase their patent portfolio, I would suggest they try
and patent certain features in their premium service line. They have so much
power in their data analytics platforms that could be very valuable in
royalties down the line as everything becomes digitalized. SurveyMonkey could
also go about merging or acquiring other companies to gain access and control
to their patents.
Hi Ryan, I enjoyed reading your post about SurveyMonkey and their patent portfolio. It is interesting to see that SurveyMonkey actually has a few different and lucrative business lines outside of the surveys people generally see, such as enterprise data analytics. I definitely agree that their innovations in this space need to be patented, especially that their two main competitors seem to be vulnerable with regard to patents as well. Good job!
ReplyDeleteHey Ryan,
ReplyDeleteGreat post. I liked how you talked about gave a brief introduction to the company and even included your personal experience about Qualtrics in your post. I think it's really interesting that Survey Monkery has no patents at all, given that it is big in the tech business. I also enjoyed your suggestion to increase their patent portfolio. I wonder what the cost-benefit analysis of patenting their features would tell us. It may be easier if you could have cited sources/added links of patents if someone wanted to analyze this further. Thanks for your post :) Looking forward to reading more.
Srushti
Hi Ryan,
ReplyDeleteReally great read! Honestly, even though it's been around for 17 years, the revenue seems relatively low for what I think of when I think Unicorn. Regardless, it's interesting that they only have three patents. I agree this isn't a ton but it seems like their competitors aren't doing much better in that department. Although the survey platform market is not something I'm ultra familiar with, I agree with your statements on expanding their data analytics platform.