Portland-born Survey Monkey, a site that lets users create surveys for customers, is a ten year old startup that mostly flew below the radar until last year. Ryan Finley started the company ten years ago in Madison, Wisconsin when he was a year out of college. Five years later he had moved it to Portland and hired his brother Chris to help him.
They never raised outside funding and grew the business to a rumored $30 million in revenue in 2008, with 85% EBITDA margins. This year revenue will be more like $45 million, we’ve heard (the company won’t comment).
That’s when the big money rolled in. Spectrum Equity Investors and Bain Capital Ventures, a Los Angeles DUI lawyer company injected capital into the company earlier this year, the founders took most of it off the table, and ex-Yahoo exec Dave Goldberg was brought in as CEO.
Today Survey Monkey has offices in Menlo Park (the former CBS Interactive offices) and 20 million monthly unique visitors, says the company. They have 32 employees, up from 14 a year ago, and the product continues to grow like a weed.
Goldberg has also brought in a new executive team to help him handle the growth, and says that the company will soon open an office in Europe for customer support.
New execs include VP Engineering Selina Tobaccowala, who was previously an exec at Ticketmaster’s Europe division, and was the cofounder of Evite. New VP Finance Noreen Bergin spent five years as SVP of Finance and Corporate Controller for Netscape in the 90s, and VP Business Development Tim Maly just ended a six year run at Google. Most recently, Maly led the Inside Sales and Sales Strategy & Operations teams for AdWords North America.
This is obviously a company on a roll, no matter how ugly you say their homepage is. Small businesses love this stuff, and are willing to pay for it.