Toxic culture – people are insecure and that’s a sign of incompetence, they are good at kissing up to management but to peers they pose a smiling face in front of you but bad-mouth, back-stab and undermine you in your back. A very politically treacherous working environment. The company is mismanaged, with an utter lack of vision at the top and poor execution on the ground.
Doomed market – the market of social listening is mature and saturated. It’s a very small market to begin with, because there is lack of tangible ROI for social analytics if you ask the customers. The product is undifferentiated and customer churn is rampant. Custom retention rate is far below that of the average SaaS vendors in the industry. Customers want not just a pretty analytics dashboard with questionable metrics and data quality, they want to interact and engage with consumers on the social channels and drive their operational workflows. It’s short sighted and a strategic blunder to supposedly go deep on the already mature social listening with diminishing and questionable returns, and not expand horizontally with a more complete social engagement solution. Falling more and more behind other players in the social listening and engagement market, and drifting to irrelevance.
Financially not viable – the company has raised $75 millions since founding in 2004. The current fair value of the company is a fraction of the total capital invested into the company. So over the last 12 years, the company has destroyed significant value from investor capital. Early investors and common shareholders including employee stock options are seeing their shares completely worthless, and only the preferred share holders (private equity and management) in the recent funding round can recuperate some of their money in the event of a liquidation. The company needs to cut its size (employees and expenses) by at least half in order to breakeven.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from this sinking ship
