Pivoting with Purpose: How Suzy Reinvented Consumer Insights with Matt Britton

Lenny Murphy chats with Suzy CEO Matt Britton about his journey from agency founder to insights tech pioneer. Matt shares how a bold pivot turned a struggling company into a research powerhouse, why blending storytelling with data drives Suzy’s success, and how AI—especially voice tech—is reshaping the future of insights. He also teases his new book Generation AI, exploring how Gen Alpha will transform business and culture.

Get your copy of Matt's book here and use code GENAIMAY25 at checkout for 25% off! 

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of our CEO series. My guest and today I am joined by Matt Britain, founder and CEO of Suzie. Welcome Matt.

Matt Britton: Thanks for having me.

Leonard Murphy: It's good to have so I have followed the progression of Suzie all the way back in the crowd tap days for a long time and think it's just a great story. So I'll let you tell it in your words to kind of give your origin story so our listeners can get as grounded in the business as I am.

Matt Britton: So, our company's really interesting. The origins of Suzie actually dates back to 2002 when I founded a marketing services business first called Mr. Youth which later became named MRI and…

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Matt Britton: MRI was one of the first social media marketing firms that existed right at the dawn of the social media era.  So to give you context I personally registered for Visa on Twitter. helped establish social media practices for companies like Visa and Coca-Cola and Microsoft in through 2008 period. And when we rebranded as MRI, one of the things we did is we created software to help manage and measure the earliest iterations of influencers or creators if you will. a lot of them were college student reps and other people who wanted to essentially represent brands on campus or in their community and earn rewards for doing so. and before that we were just managing them via Excel spreadsheets and that became a little wonky, And what started to happen was a lot of other agencies and publishers asked if they could license our software. and I saw a business opportunity there. So I decided to spin out this company which was named Crowd Tap into its own business, put in the CEO and helped that company raise their series in funding way back in 2011. I continued to run the agency which eventually became acquired by the publicist group. I did my earn out of the publicist group through about 2015. and then at that point the board had asked me to come to rejoin Crowd Tap.  I never was really running it full-time, but I'd incubated in my agency and to basically take over the company as CEO. and in 2016, end of 2016, after a lot of back and forth, decided to do so. And when I joined Crowd Top, the business was not in a good place. Crowdtop's business model had evolved. They essentially were offering a service to let brands easily get into the news feed by essentially having a network of what they called creators but early influencers essentially take pictures with the brand or create content with the brand and share it on Facebook at that point. But unfortunately for crowdtop at that point programmatic tools from Facebook were just surfacing and there were much easier ways for brands just buy ads and get in the news feed with what they created.  So having a platform that incentivized users to post content just kind of slightly fell out of favor and the company had taken on some debt. They didn't raise a next round that they take in debt and the interest was hard to service and they weren't really in a good position in terms of their place in the market. They almost positioned themselves as a media company but at the same time fancied themselves as a SAS platform. but companies really just buying them to get impressions. So I knew that the company was in desperate need of reinvention and it was running out of money and quickly. So the first thing I did when I joined in 2016 is I took the staff down from 110 people to 30, which was never an easy thing to do. some of those people I knew from back in my agency days when we were first incubating the business, but I had to do what I had to do to keep the business alive. And I quickly jumped on the phone with all the customers that CrowdPap had. And the only ones that were really happy with the service were using Crowd Tap for a different purpose than what the company was marketing itself Instead of them using Crowdop to generate user generated content, they were using kind of this very sneaky little tool within Crowd Tap that allowed companies to do polling. So instead of asking Crowd Tap's user base,…

Leonard Murphy: Mhm.

Matt Britton: which at that point had about a million US consumers on it to create content, they asked them for feedback on packages or ideas or new ads and those are the only customers that were happy using Crowd Tab.  So I made the tough decision to essentially pivot the entire business there. That polling business was only 5% of the revenue was doing about 10 million in revenue. About 500,000 was in this what was called Crowd Tap Insights at that point. And I decided to basically move away from the 9.5 million and focus on the $500,000 in revenue because I saw that as really a solid foundation to build on. it was a much bigger total addressable market research that is. And even though I didn't know anything about it, I still don't know too much about it relative to a lot of my peers, but I knew enough about it because I was actually using Crowd Tap when I was running my agency to test concepts to pitch clients So I knew kind of the benefits of having a easy tool to get consumer feedback. And what I had seen throughout my agency life was that so many CMOs were making decisions in the dark without the benefit of data. So made the decision to pivot. I also knew we needed to rebrand the company because Crowdap had been around for too long at that point to just say they were doing something else out of the blue.

Leonard Murphy: Mhm. Yeah.

Matt Britton: So decided to keep the Crowd Tap name for our consumer panel or audience. It turned into a panel and rebrand the B2B brand as Suzie. and we launched in early 2018 at South by Southwest and the rest is history as they say.

Leonard Murphy: So I'm really glad we went down that path because I think that it's fascinating when you hear how companies just pivot and evolve from the original vision.

Matt Britton: Yeah, a lot of people think that's just you start a business, you see other people on Instagram quote unquote killing it and they think it's just you're going to start a business and there you go. But, Susie was an overnight success two decades in the making, if you will. because again, it dates back to when I started an agency 20 years ago, 22 years ago now.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, it's interesting too. So, I, full disclosure for the audience, I know when you went with private equity, I was involved in doing a competitive assessment, the private equity backers. and the reason I bring that up is that you were kind of a best-kept secret, You weren't really engaged with the broader research industry as much. Right.

Matt Britton: Yeah. Because I wasn't in it, I didn't have the curse of knowledge.

Leonard Murphy: I get that. So, yeah,…

Matt Britton: I think that helped us. I think when we started I was almost too dumb to know otherwise because if I knew everything that I know today about the research industry I never would have started why would we enter a space against a survey monkey or qualric or these companies that have much more sophisticated tools and methodologies I didn't know anything about it and I think sometimes there is a curse of knowledge where too much and that stops you from diving in and I think Susie is a great example of  Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: I would agree. and Yeah, the tunnel vision of this is how it's done but you guys went about things in a very different way. Even back in the crowd tap day when I was aware that you were doing it had a resource component. that's amazing, right? Let's yeah tap into this specific population. Is it going to be good for everything? No, absolutely not. but for testing concepts, those type of things that are line more towards agencies and marketing even at that time thought that's a really brilliant idea. It was,…

Matt Britton: Of course.

Leonard Murphy: Very innovative overall and I've seen that continue to progress across Susie. so hats off. I think that's great. and you guys have accomplished a hell of a lot in the intervening time and continue. So my perspective as well often when companies get to the private equity stage you don't see as much of a focus on innovation consolidation those type of things right it's about driving growth…

Matt Britton: Right. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: But that has not been the Susie story I have seen you guys continue to drive new solutions adopt AI early out of the gate you just recently launched Susie speaks the voice platform So, what's that been like in continuing to kind of maintain this attitude you came from of I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but this seems to make sense. Let's do this and see what happens. And it being successful versus we're just going to focus on arbitrage and it's just about iba and it's just management versus really driving growth.

Matt Britton: A couple things I want to clarify. So, the private equity investment you're referring to was not a majority buyout, which generally happens when private equity comes in. It was actually their equity fund where they gave us growth capital.

Leonard Murphy: Okay. Okay.

Matt Britton: A lot of times what you'll see companies do is they say, " we just raised $200 million." But no, it means private equity came in and bought out the majority of the company for $200 million. And when that happens, often the innovation goes out the door in favor of financial efficiency and financial engineering. When HIG Capital came in, it was their growth fund and that money went on our balance sheet with a growth mentality.

Leonard Murphy: Got it.

Matt Britton: So we are not majority owned by any private equity firm. and even if we were, I don't think I would run a business that way because I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I'm a builder. I've started and sold many businesses and I do it at this point in my career because I love building on behalf of brands. I have a passion for the consumer. another point I want to add as you talk about our evolution is in 2020, a woman named Katie Grath, who I brought on, who's now our president, I brought her her on because I realized that as we went upstream in the market research industry, my kind of naive wasn't enough, right? I needed somebody…

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Matt Britton: who actually knew the research industry front and back, and that is Katie. and she has since built a tremendous team of people who come from the research establishment. Companies like, Canar and Ipsos and Neielson and, who are born and bred market researchers. And I think one of the beautiful things about Susie is this is kind of like peanut butter and jelly combo of people like me who come from the advertising industry that are storytellers that understand the consumer and people like Katie that are research experts. And when you put those two things together, I think then you unlock kind of the sophistication and domain expertise of research with the power of storytelling. And I think that's how Susie has continued to be successful at scale.

Leonard Murphy: All right. That I appreciate that. Thank you for making

Matt Britton: So to answer your question, how do we keep innovating? it's hard to do the larger you get because companies kind of get into a routine and you end up having more layers and it's easy to slow down. I think about 18 months ago, when AI first came on the scene, the first thing I did is gave it to our engineers to figure out and we didn't really get anywhere. I think it's a very hard thing for engineers to figure out because it's not a new technology like mobile or…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Matt Britton: It is a whole new realm of the way that humans interface with technology. So I basically took matters into my own hands, so to speak, and learn how to code and learn how to build an AI. I'm not an engineer by trait, but I kind of figured it out and I first started to build things for myself personally. I built a health bot which could help me stay alive longer, and I took then a lot of the things that I was successful in an approach for building things on my own and I applied it to Susie and the first thing I started to do is help drive a series of internal tools that allow Susie to work more efficiently and then over time started to kind of direct a lot of that that focus towards improving our product and that's how we ended up at a place where Susie speaks which is an AI generator moderator that essentially conducts qualitative research at scale and that's one of any new features that Susie's rolled out with to really kind of embrace some of the incredible opportunities that AI unlocks in the market research industry.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. What have you so if you look at the competitive set right obviously everybody's rolling out some version of AI and…

Matt Britton: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: and the easy thing was the internal efficiency components and…

Matt Britton: Of course.

Leonard Murphy: the second I would say the lowest yeah letting yeah

Matt Britton: Easy But Are you go Leonard or Lenny. So, a lot of companies aren't doing it. They're talking about it, but they're not really rolling out internal efficiency and internal productivity tools the way that I see our company doing. there's a lot of talk and…

Leonard Murphy: Sure.

Matt Britton: Not too much action when you peel back the layers of the onion. But that being said, go on. Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Fair enough. And yeah, what I have seen that where has been done is from a product standpoint has been the lowhanging fruit. Transcription. Right. Right.

Matt Britton: Right. summarize answers, things like that.

Leonard Murphy: And now we're seeing from an analysis standpoint of, the expansion to data analysis. We hadn't seen much of people changing methodology. not in the established players and Susie is an established player now, right? but yeah, you're different than that. You have been rolling out new methodologies,…

Matt Britton: Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: new approaches to engage within the insights process. which is refreshing. What so when you think about the future of if we can call you a leader from an innovation standpoint and I think that is a fair statement where do you see this going because fundamentally you are a research company you are a research platform that enables lots of different ways to engage with consumers quantum qual and those boxes we tend to think about but things are changing Now, so what does that look like for you without giving away your secret sauce, right?

Matt Britton: Yes, they are. So, I think if you look at the history of market research, back in the day, somebody would knock on a door to door and capture surveys. And then when the telephone was invented, there was telephone surveys. And then in the age of direct mail, people did direct mail surveys. And then, of course, in the '9s, you had mall intercept surveys. And then in 2000 when this thing called the internet was proliferated obviously the market research industry saw a great opportunity to kind of take market research to a new level and that's where companies like Survey Monkey and Qualrix who are real pioneers in our space adopted these kind of complex tools that they built on their own to really allow companies to splice and…

Leonard Murphy: Yep. Yes. Yes.

Matt Britton: dice data in a million different ways.  And the best way to get human feedback into those systems were through surveys, And if you think about surveys, they aren't really a natural way of humans giving feedback. if you traveled somewhere really cool, you went to Mexico on a vacation and I asked you, "How was your trip to Mexico?" You wouldn't fill out a survey and give it back to me. You would tell me about it and you say, "I love this place. I didn't really like this place, etc."  The reason that surveys exist is that they really fit perfectly into a very rigid analysis format. Right? however, AI is that next realm. So, just the internet changed at research and brought on this new way of intensive methodology and research. I actually think AI is going to generate the next wave of the ways that companies actually interact with humans to get feedback. And I actually think that's going to be a much more human natural So no longer I don't think you look 5 10 years from now are people especially people who grow up in the TikTok era, right, that are used to doing this all day.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Matt Britton: Are they going to sit and answer a 20 question survey about shampoo or deodorant? It's just going to be such a miss in terms of how their brains are wired, right?  And now you have this incredible technology that allows people to interact with technology the way they interact with other humans. And as a result, I think that's going to become the de facto way that companies are going to extract feedback from humans is through natural interactions. And that's really what we're first trying to unlock through Suzie Speaks is great because it transcribes what people are saying. But we're working on new technologies that can actually see what their emotions are when they're talking about something or they're seeing things by computer vision and actually seeing the emotions that come out, visceral interactions, if you will. I think that's where it's all going, which actually reduces a lot of friction for humans to create feedback. Makes it much easier because we both know that when people are filling out 20 question surveys, there's no way their answers are going to be as fresh on question 18 as it was on question one. But, the people who are analyzing the research don't actually look at it that way. But ultimately, we're just humans and nobody likes filling these things out. So, I think the surveys will be going away.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Matt Britton: Is it going to happen tomorrow? No. Are there sort of legacy researchers who are going to hold on tightly? Of course. When I walked into Hershey Foods in 2007, they said that their brand would never stoop to the level of advertising on people's computers. You always have people that hold on, but I think that the growth and innovation curve of this technology is unlike anything we've ever seen. So, I do think it will change the way that human feedback is collected at its core. Yep.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, I agree 100%. and I've been saying it for quite some time that the future is the way we think about things is qualitative at scale, right? the form factor, the interaction will be what we think about as more of a qualitative approach.

Matt Britton: Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: And I still have a hard time imagining let's say a conjoint exercise not being visual. So I think there will still be some components where we interesting.

Matt Britton: there'll be visual stimuli that the consumer will react to, but they're going to react to it the way a human reacts. So, it doesn't mean they can't be looking at something visually to respond to it. I actually think this unlocks a better iteration of that.

Leonard Murphy: On this topic, you've got a book coming out that is around that. And I should say for me personally, and I think all right, we'll get to that in just a second. personally I have not engaged with AI from a voice standpoint. I'm just not there yet. Gener I'm 54 years old. It just feels a little too weird. You would think that I would because I was a Star Trek fan.

Matt Britton: Yeah. Mhm. You mean like talking to it? You don't feel comfortable talking to AI?

Leonard Murphy: Right. we text, type all day long,…

Matt Britton: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: But I don't feel comfortable with it yet. That still feels just a little too weird for me.

Matt Britton: Have you ever used Siri or Alexa before?

Leonard Murphy: No, I have not. Yeah.

Matt Britton: Okay. It's not for everyone. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: So I have not adopted the voice interface. but I also am firmly aware that that is my own ludite tendencies. that could be somewhat generational could just be if I understand kind of your point of what you're talking about in your book is I'm going to just fall by the wayside people like me because this will be the defining technology and generationally people will engage but I don't want to steal your thunder. So, tell me what I missed in kind of your thinking about your book.

Matt Britton: Yeah. So 10 years ago I wrote a book called Youth Nation and that was at the point where social media was really taking off and the thesis behind Youth Nation was that young people were now in the driver's seat of the future of business and culture and society because for the first time they had a voice, right? It was before that whatever clear channel played on heavy rotation on radio became the songs people listen to whatever the big three TV stations put on TV they dictated a culture…

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Matt Britton: But now in the age of YouTube and Instagram at that point I had said that young people were in the driver's seat and that has obviously turned out to be true and obviously with AI as I mentioned earlier it's going to create a similar but in my opinion much more structural and impactful shift that we're going to see in business culture  society. And as I got my hands on these AI tools for Susie, kind of like a light bulb went off in my head in terms of, wow, this isn't just going to impact me or my company. This is going to impact every industry in every corner of society. and I start to just write down ideas of how it's going to impact society in terms of parenting, in terms of education, in terms of commerce, finance, the workforce, people's career journeys. And I just had so much in my head. And I went back to my publisher WY who I'd worked with for the first book and they're like yes let's do it and decided to write this book generation AI and the subtitle of is why generation alpha and the age of AI will change everything and basically the book goes through a variety of the kind of the core pillars of our society and tries to paint a future of what it means and most importantly what everybody should be doing about it.  What should parents do to prepare for Gen Alpha, which is going to be the first generation that will know nothing else but the world with What do people in the workforce do if you're a lawyer or you're accountant and there's tools coming out that essentially just intermediate your job? Where do you focus next? What do you do? And I really tried to make the book in a way that really allowed people to take value home and really try to change or evolve the way they look at the world and they look at themselves and their professional journey because whether it's right or wrong or good or bad, we're not going backwards and every company large and small is going to be faced with the choice of adopting this or really becoming roadkill on the AI super highway if you will, right? the same way Blockbuster was.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Britton: And we know all the stories.

Leonard Murphy: No, that's great. So, when's the book come out?

Matt Britton: The book comes out May 6th and it's already on pre-order everywhere books are sold.

Leonard Murphy: All right. So, encourage everybody obviously check it out. This is a topic that agree there is no going back and we will only progress forward from here and that will demand change in the broader implications we're just going to have to figure out as we go as a society …

Matt Britton: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: But here we are. So yeah...

Matt Britton: And I do talk about I'm an AI optimist, but I'm also not blind to a lot of negative implications going to bring to society. And I do discuss those in the book as well. But I think every technology has positive and negative aspects that, it brings to society and that's kind of the way life works, right? but I definitely address those things as well. Deep fakes and things like that and…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely concerning.

Matt Britton: and in the research industry we are seeing the negative aspects of AI as well. You see bots and fraud impact panel quality and we've had our own issues with it that we built a technology called biotic to get our arms around it. But it's creating a lot of trust issues within the research industry because you have these sophisticated bad actors coming in and replicating human voices and fooling brands that are trusting their research to make big business decisions.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. That a couple years ago in the grit survey, which I'm sure somewhat familiar with,…

Matt Britton: I read it every year.

Leonard Murphy: We Good.

Matt Britton: I didn't hear it.

Leonard Murphy: Thank you may remember about two or three years ago because we talked about it quite extensively in the report that there was a very large sample of bots but they were very difficult they were basically synthetic respondents.

Matt Britton: Right. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: So the only way that we could identify them really was that the verbatims were too good. So even a few years ago in the early stages of this we were seeing that right.

Matt Britton: Yeah. Right? And think about how far AI has evolved and its capabilities. If it was hard to detect then, think about how hard it is today.

Leonard Murphy: So you mentioned voice I mean are you actually encountering fully AI generated voice respondents that are participating.

Matt Britton: We have not encountered that yet, but we know it's coming.

Leonard Murphy: Okay. Yep.

Matt Britton: And deep fakes and bots are, invading the social media sphere. And it's only a matter of time. And we are getting ahead of it with Suzie Speaks by actually building our own patented, voice detection tool and technique as well as facial recognition for humans. And it could be a separate business opportunity as well that we're pursuing. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. So, quite a few companies that are emerging in the panel space are incorporating, video and audio components as part of the registration process as well as, going as you're participating in surveys. And yeah, we're just going to have to do that. So, okay. Yep.

Matt Britton: But I do think the voice of the human is going to continue to matter so much. A lot of people are talking about synthetic, but synthetic audiences don't know what it's like to ride a roller coaster or, go to a great restaurant or fall in love or all these things. And I think that's that emotional side of humans is where brands are born, right? We're not rational beings when we buy things and when we interact with the world. And I think that's why humans and their voice will continue to matter. So in a world of AI, we're really doubling down on the human voice. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, makes perfect sense. So, want to be conscious of your time as well as the listeners. we've kind of touched on, the kind of our final question on lessons learned. you certainly talked about, pivoting and evolving and…

Matt Britton: So,…

Leonard Murphy: Adapting. but What would you add? just kind of you as a leader. some key takeaways on lessons learned that you would pass on to emerging leaders.

Matt Britton: I think first and foremost, the power of your network is so incredibly important. When I launched Suzie, I didn't have any contacts in the market research industry. And the way I got it off the ground was calling people I had relationships with and saying, "Hey, we would your agency or your brand mind testing this tool?"  And our first 10 clients were all people who I knew personally because who else would work with a little known brand to trust their research with. And that's just one of many examples where at times of transition times where you really need to lean into people with my book, your network is everything. And I think the best time to establish your network is early stages in your career. I've made a lot of mistakes early on where if I didn't see a PNG or Nike badge on someone's shirt at a conference, I wouldn't sit next to them at lunch. But you never know where the world's going and you really just have to be interested in everyone's journey because it's a long road. And always put yourself out there every night that during the week that you can be at a company event, go when you're younger because that will expand your network and you think you have a perception of what going to event will be, but you really never know until you're there.  And it just takes that one meeting to change the trajectory of your career. I think that's one. I think one thing I've done well as a leader is when I see talent, no matter how old or what experience somebody has in the past, I basically support them with reckless abandon and I push them and I build around them and I build under them because a 10x talent is somebody you should always triple invest in because those are going to be the people who become the staples of your company. And I think a lot of times leaders look at that person say, " they're too young. I don't enough experience. Let's give them another couple years. But and that's always been a great thing. I think the third thing is yet, you can't let perfect be the enemy of good. was Susie Speaks the perfect when we launched it? No. But it's already world's better than it was when we launched a month ago. And now we're building with our clients.

Leonard Murphy: Mhm. Sage advice,…

Matt Britton: And I think especially in the research industry with which so much obsesses itself on perfection and data sometimes that can get in the way of innovation and you find yourself two years later saying why is everybody else doing so many great things and we're still doing the same thing. so I think you really just have to dive in especially in the wild west of a business world that we're all operating in right now.

Leonard Murphy: Matt. Sage advice.

Matt Britton: Thank you.

Leonard Murphy: So, is there anything that you wanted to touch on that we have not?

Matt Britton: No, I mean I think that you run a great podcast and I'm a big fan of your work and I just appreciate the opportunity for having me on today.

Leonard Murphy: Thank I appreciate that. and Ditto Mutual Amorish Society. And you have a podcast as well. So, you've got a book. Where can people listen to you?

Matt Britton: My podcast is called The Speed of Culture. It's in partnership with Ade and you can find it anywhere where podcasts are found, Spotify, Apple podcast, etc. And we interview leading CMOs. It's twice a week. We've done over 250 episodes. It's been a great platform for myself and Susie. you can learn more about Susie at suzie.com and more about me and all the other things I'm doing, including the book, at mattbritton.com.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool, Matt. Thank you. really appreciate it.

Matt Britton: Thank you so much.

Leonard Murphy: And best of luck.

Matt Britton: Keep up the great work.

Leonard Murphy: And thank you to our listeners. We appreciate you taking time to spend it with Matt and I. We'll be back with another episode real soon, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.