(Ep 23) SUZY -> Real-time consumer feedback💡

Matt Britton | Founder & CEO

Sep 23, 2020

Hey friends,

Back again with another edition of The Founder Newsletter - this is Episode 23. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.

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Mission control:

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And who am I?

I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.

Let’s get it.

This Week’s Episode (Ep 23)💡

Guest -> Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy

Mission -> Suzy is building a software platform that enables companies, both large and small, to rapidly access and engage consumers in real-time to help drive better business decisions

Episode available on -> Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website

In this episode we talk with Matt about…

🔮 The future of marketing and advertising

🥑 Understanding the Millennial and Gen-Z demographics

👎🏻 What it’s like to turn down Mark Zuckerberg

🕺 Building an empire as a club promoter

⚡ Understanding the power of a brand

Summary 🔍

What is Suzy and how did Matt get started?

Matt is a serial entrepreneur and hustler, getting his start at Boston University and becoming somewhat of a legend as a club promoter in the area.

After building a reputation, he began to engage with local companies who wanted to advertise at his events and leverage his network of 75 college student promoters to help promote their businesses.

That was the foundation for his first marketing agency, The Magma Group.

After a couple of twists and turns and the dot com crash in the early 2000s, he ultimately started a second agency called Mr. Youth (which later rebranded to MRY), a full stack marketing agency and one of the first to run social marketing for big brands.

As a part of MRY, he built software called CrowdTap to help manage and incentivize a massive network of college reps, not too unlike the network of college promoters he had built in his early days.

CrowdTap was the foundation for the business he runs today called Suzy.

Today at Suzy, Matt and his team have built a software platform that enables companies, both large and small, to rapidly access and engage consumers in real-time to help drive better business decisions.

The Suzy team and business are growing like crazy, launching like a rocketship in 2018 and now supporting over 100 employees and 250 enterprise customers.

In a digital-first landscape with rapidly changing consumer sentiment, companies like Suzy are the future of market research.

Here’s why I’m a fan and excited about the future for Suzy:

The trend in the market research space is shifting towards a desire for more rapid, real-time access to information. Companies want to be able to understand shifting customer sentiment on a month by month basis vs the traditional year by year model. Suzy realizes this and has built one of the most powerful real-time research platforms on the planet
Contrary to most research platforms that start with a tech layer and then find an audience (either by building one themselves or buying via a panel provider), Suzy already had a network of engaged college students through it’s predecessor platform, CrowdTap, and then built the software layer. This enabled them to to test fast and truly build what their early customers wanted
Matt isn’t born and bred in the traditional research industry and I think that helps Suzy long-term. In addition to having relationships at many of the Fortune 500, Matt understands the power of a brand and is building Suzy with a brand-first mindset. Many of the traditional research players bring an outdated and overdone brand to the table. Companies of the future will expect their partners to care about brand and culture just as much as they do. I think Suzy will win at this game long-term

Matt’s Startup Manifesto 📜

What’s a Startup Manifesto?

At the end of every episode, I ask all of my founder guests the same question:

If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?

Here’s what Matt had to say:

Never underestimate the value of cash.
People are everything.
Done > perfect. Too many people perseverate and suffer from analysis paralysis.
The customer is everything. You need to understand everything your customer is thinking and feeling if that’s who you’re building your business for.
Never quit.

What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔

After reflecting on my conversation with Matt, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:

Evaluating competition 🤯

During our conversation, Matt shared a refreshing perspective on how he thinks about competition.

In the hyper-competitive research space, there seem to be new competitors popping up every week.

I asked him how he reacts when friends, colleagues, or investors come across a new competitor and send him an email asking him to check them out (likely expecting a nervous/worried response).

This was his philosophy -> “I’d rather spend time improving my own business than worrying about what anyone else is doing. Why spend 30 minutes obsessing over a competitor when I could take that half hour and check-in with one of my customers?”

He said, as long as Suzy’s numbers are improving month over month and they are listening to their customers, he knows they will be in a good position.

He has his teams obsess over the numbers. Each month he looks at the amount of cold emails his sales teams send and the percentage hit rates on those emails. Then he looks at the number of demos being scheduled and the conversion percentage on those demos to paying customers. He also looks at customer retention and churn.

His theory is that if all of those numbers are increasing month over month, there isn’t possibly anything else worth focusing on (on the sales side).

And I agree with him.

Competition is largely just a distraction for the following reasons:

You have no idea what is actually going on under the hood. You’re liking seeing the best that competitor has, and chances are, it isn’t as good as it seems.
You can’t do anything about it other than copy what they’re doing. No move you make is going to compel your competitors to make a change, and while you are moving sideways, they are moving forward.
Your authenticity and individuality is likely your differentiator. Your customers like you because you’re you. If they wanted something else, they would go there on their own. By changing to copy a competitor, you lose some of that uniqueness.

Admittedly, competition is hard to ignore. As someone who is trying to build a couple of different media brands, seeing more successful “brands” than you post something compelling in your space does make you stop in your tracks and start to go through the “am I good enoughs?”

I’m learning to make it fuel me. The reality is this, there are a lot of people out there to serve. There’s always more room in a niche if you create a quality product with a high level of reliability/service/consistency.

It may feel crowded, but you’re only one article/song/post/video away from doubling your following and building more traction.

Keep going!

Wrapping it Up 📕

I hope you found this interesting and inspiring! If so and you want to help support my journey to bring The Founder to millions of people across the world, here’s a couple things that would be really valuable to me and the show:

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Till next time ✌️

Kallaway