The Suzy Story: How We Disrupted a $100 Billion Industry
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How do you change an industry, especially one as traditional as market research?
Today, brands have extremely compressed decision-making cycles. They need to make decisions faster—at the speed of the market. Whether it's launching a new product, creating a new ad campaign, developing impactful packaging, or making merchandising mock-ups for a retailer, brands don't have the amount of time that they used to conduct market research. With traditional methods, consumers have already moved on to other priorities, behaviors, and attitudes by the time brands get the insights they need.
So, how do you change an industry, especially one as traditional as market research? How can brands get the insights they need when they need them?
Two decades ago, Suzy’s Founder and CEO Matt Britton built one of the first social media marketing companies and helped organizations create value for consumers through meaningful content and transformative ideas. With consumers at the heart of his business, Matt came to understand how powerful the collective voice of the consumer is—and how it can make or break industries and businesses. With their background, they learned that businesses that put consumers first are rewarded, while those that don’t fall to the wayside.
So, Matt built a business that did just that—giving consumers a voice and helping brands meet their needs. This is the story of Suzy—and the story of how we launched a business that would change the way market research is done forever and disrupt a $100 billion industry.
The early days
It all started when Matt launched his agency, Mr. Youth (MRY), in his Manhattan apartment. The agency specialized in branded events on college campuses, tapping into Millennial culture and putting young consumers at the center of brand narratives. Quickly, Matt realized he needed a software platform to manage these early influencers. That platform became Crowdtap.
Eventually, Crowdtap became big enough that it was spun off into its own standalone business, and it functioned like a content creation platform, where users were rewarded with points for creating and sharing branded content.
Meanwhile, Matt had sold his agency. As the world began to change, and social media platforms like Facebook exploded, the initial business model for Crowdtap wasn’t working anymore. The board asked Matt to come back and run the business as CEO. Rather than killing the business in its entirety, Matt saw that in addition to content creation, brands were using the platform to get feedback from consumers.
That’s when a lightbulb went off for Matt.
“Through my career building, I learned what big brands need,” Matt explained. “But research was too slow. It was inefficient. It didn't allow them to act at the speed at which the market is dictated to make decisions.”
Crowdtap could change all that, speeding up research for brands and helping them get the insights they needed in minutes, not months.
Building a software platform: Meet Suzy
With feedback from the Crowdtap team, Matt began to ideate around what Crowdtap Insights could become. And he decided the business needed to split into two: a consumer-facing app, which Crowdtap already was, and the B2B insights side of the business, which became Suzy.
Then, he reached out to his longtime friend Avi Savar to help him run the company. Another veteran of the advertising space, Avi could bring in the technical expertise to help make Suzy a success.
Avi had spent a few years running an accelerator at a venture firm where he learned a lot about software, including taking software products to market, what successful software products look like, and what lean development was all about.
Plus, as a former agency owner, Avi knew that technology often changed the way entire businesses ran. “Many of the functions that a social media agency or a digital agency did in the early days became obsolete through technology. And then what ended up happening was those agencies eventually became the people who were manned to use the tools,” he explained.
Matt showed Avi his ideas around Suzy and how it could offer speedy consumer insights for brands.
In Avi’s mind, it was inevitable that the market research industry, controlled by just a handful of agencies, was overdue for a blow-up.
“I kind of went through my own mental Rolodex of what I'd learned over the last few years about what makes a successful software company. And this checked off every single box. It's a big market. It's ripe for disruption. There are no incumbents. The market's controlled by legacy black box agencies. B2B software as a business model was very viable,” Avi said.
They began to map out what the business could be and craft the go-to-market plan. With their connections, Suzy was able to get star-powered celebrity investment behind it—and officially launched the platform at SXSW in 2018.
Market research at the speed of the consumer
From marketing SNAFUs to product fails, many businesses were missing out on consumer input on what they were doing. And it impacted the bottom line. Instead, brands could get a quick pulse check with Suzy—generating high-quality research instantly. Brands suddenly could have access to human beings to make sure they were making the right decisions.
“Without having a tool like Suzy, it's hard to be customer-centric,” Matt explained, “because the customer doesn't have a voice. The decisions are made by the executives in the boardroom. And often those people are disconnected from the reality of what's going on with the consumer and in the marketplace.”
Suzy’s secret sauce is our audience built from a network of over a million US consumers. Incentivized to answer questions on behalf of brands on a gamified app, Suzy Audiences can deliver insights to brands in just days or weeks.
The Suzy team
Though Suzy’s leaders didn’t have a market research background, they quickly built up the chops—and hired the people to help them build a truly robust, high-quality research platform.
Suzy's team deeply understands the business challenges faced by CMOs and big brand decision-makers. They recognize why being close to the consumer is critical and know how to leverage consumer insights to drive business growth. In addition to this expertise, Suzy also has team members from the market research establishment who understand how to derive statistically significant insights from data. By drawing from the strengths of both teams, Suzy empowers brand decision-makers to move forward confidently.
Five years of Suzy
In just five years, Suzy has grown from a fast-turn quant tool to a robust market research cloud, with quant, qual, and high-quality audiences all in one platform. Demands in the market spurred rapid growth.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world closed down, brands suddenly needed new ways to speak to consumers for qualitative analysis. Nobody offered online qualitative solutions, so Suzy launched Suzy Live with live in-depth interviews (IDIs). Usually, a product as robust as a live qual tool would take a year to develop, but Suzy saw the need and was able to address the problem in just two months.
From the early days of basic quant to launching advanced capabilities like MaxDiff and TURF analysis, Suzy has constantly evolved to meet client needs and deliver the kinds of research brands need to make the big decisions. It’s thanks to the vast experience of the Suzy team—and the need to stay nimble—that have allowed the company to make smart pivots and evolve as a powerful market research tool.
“The platform evolved from this amazing party trick that allowed you to gut-check your assumptions to an enterprise-grade research cloud that some of the biggest brands in the world use daily, not just to validate assumptions, but to bring billions of dollars to market,” Avi said.
“We help companies put research and insights into the center, we're giving them a tool that's easy to use, and powerful and targeted, that allows them to conduct research to essentially put their finger on the pulse of the consumer, in real-time, on-demand,” Matt added.
What’s next for Suzy?
The evolution doesn’t stop there. Over the last year, Suzy has launched several products designed to help brands do better and faster research. From Global Audiences to online focus groups, to advanced capabilities like MaxDiff and TURF analysis, to an in-platform data analysis tool called Data Explorer, Suzy continues to up the game on market research.
With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, the role of the market researcher and industry as a whole will completely change.
“The next six months are going to be very defining for the industry,” Avi said.
And Suzy is uniquely positioned to quickly pivot and address market shifts. With that ability and the wealth of market research knowledge offered up by experts on our team, we offer the best of both worlds. We will take advantage of generative AI and use it to power up our market research cloud, giving our clients access to even faster consumer insights by creating incredible efficiencies. Soon, the Suzy platform will feature:
Generative AI
Qualitative summaries
Survey generation
Predictive models
Research recommendations
And more!
One thing that won’t change? Suzy will always respond to market dynamics. We are a company that is willing to change in real time to support the needs of our customers and the demand of the market.
Big things are coming at Suzy—do you want to stay in the loop? Sign up for our newsletter today to keep up-to-date with all the new additions to the Suzy consumer research platform.
