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SurveyMonkey Acquires Wufoo (YC W06) (wufoo.com)
183 points by unfoldedorigami on April 25, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



I'm curious what they do in revenue and it's not listed anywhere. Here's a first stab:

Surveymonkey did $45m in 2009 revenue with 20m monthly uniques which is $2.25 yearly for 1 monthly visitor. Wufoo does about 1.5m in monthly uniques which is about $3.5m/yearly revenue.

On revenue comps, if we assume 5x-10x multiples, the purchase price implies a $3 to $7m/yr.

Based on the $30 plan being most popular, and 10% of users in the most expensive plan, I'm assuming a blended $52/mo or $624/yr per subscriber. With our $3m to $7m revenue range, that implies 5k to 11k paid users. With a 5% conversion from free to paid, that is about 100k to 200k free users. Which implies a 6%-12% visitor to registered user conversion based on their 1.5m visitors/mo. Seems like in the range!

Finally, for returns, PG and Buchheit invested 100k for 10% (mixergy interview), and YC took 7%. So assuming a 20% option pool, and net of the angels, the 3 founder got $22m or about $1.5m/year.


Also interesting: they do $200,000 in payments a day, which is $73m/yr, from which they generate no revenue. If the merchant fee is 2.9% and wufoo gets a .5% referral fee, that's another $3m/year in revenue, which is still in our $3m-$7m range.


Interesting. I show 10.5M-ish monthly uniques to SurveyMonkey, as of March 2011: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/surveymonkey.com/

Where did you get the 20M uniques from?



Keep in mind that Compete is almost always laughably wrong.


It's usually under-estimates more than it over-estimates, at least for US traffic.


(This is mostly for future readers when both posts have fallen off the front page, but more discussion is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2481576 on an AllThingsD story.)


Dammit, Kevin, I was planning on stopping in Tampa to see you guys in a few weeks, as I'm on my way to Georgia and North Carolina, and you guys are gonna be in California where I won't be visiting again until at least next spring. Did you consider my feelings in this decision, at all?

But, I guess I'm happy for you. Congratulations.

I'm not at all surprised, though. I never had any doubt Wufoo would be a big success and make a lot of money.


Oh no, Joe! We actually might still be here when you come. Please still let us know what you're schedule will be when you're down here. We'd love to see you and pay you back for all the hospitality you showed us when we visited Mountain View!


I'm a partner in a joint working space in downtown Tampa. If you make it down and want a place to work for a day or two, let me know.


wufoo is my favorite web business. I really thought they could take on the world. I'm very happy for their exit but a little bummed they weren't the ones buying survey monkey.


Congrats to WuFoo! As rishi says I was hoping you'd take over the world ... still, it's a great exit, and a real testament to everything you've accomplished -- product, company, and happy customers.


From the FAQ page linked in the post:

Wufoo also seemed like a perfect compliment to their growing suite of services to offer amazing data collection tools to their customers.

I'm sure Wufoo is very polite and all, but you probably meant "complement". Unless you didn't, of course.


Thanks! Fixing that now.


Congrats! Wufoo is awesome, and you deserve the acquisition.

With the new engineering resources, I'd love to see some awesome features like:

1. 1,000 field entries per form instead of 100 (http://wufoo.com/forums/discussion/3020/workaround-for-100-f...)

2. A "Form Building API" so we can programmaticaly create forms. (http://wufoo.com/docs/api/v2/#makeforms)


Congrats to Ryan, Chris and Kevin -- you guys have worked hard and killed it! Excited to see you'll finally be joining us on this coast as well :)


Congrats to the Wufoo team!


Awesome! Congratulations to the Wufoo guys!


This article is twice on the front page, note to pg it would be nice to have a 'merge' refs capability.


Wow, congrats guys!


Congrats! I wonder what the ROI is!


Here I would've assumed that the situation would be reversed. I thought Wufoo was huge (in revenue) and Surveymonkey was an upstart.




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