Anyone have a guess as to why Smartsheet is down more than 13% in two days? I’m not seeing any news.
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Sell into earnings. Still fairly new public company. TTD seemed to normally sell lower as it approached ERs.
I did notice SMAR got beat up more than most yesterday, and also lagging today.
The P/S has retreated a bit, and if ER is good, should set up a nice pop.
My worry on SMAR is what others brought up earlier in that they seem to have a sales-intensive selling process, vs something like TEAM or ESTC or MDB that tends to be viral among developers.
SMAR reminds me of AYX a bit in that it is trying to replace Excel and be a general purpose tool. Unlike OKTA, NOW, CRM, ZEN, PLAN, TEAM, and maybe WORK, I don’t see SMAR as a “platform” but rather as a tool or feature.
I am thinking about adding a position with a small chunk of cash, but may just decide to add more to MDB or something like that. ESTC, MDB, and SMAR all report tomorrow, which should be interesting afternoon to watch.
Dreamer
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SMAR reminds me of AYX a bit in that it is trying to replace Excel and be a general purpose tool.
Respectfully, this is one of the worst comparisons I’ve seen, however, I do agree that SMAR is a substitute solution for Excel…
For clarity, SMAR is not like AYX. Not at all. Not in the least. AYX is not trying to replace Excel This is a very flawed example. AYX is working many steps upstream and downstream of where Excel lands in an analytics function for an enterprise. And it’s automating those steps and building the code and connecting to the databases and presenting the results. It replaces multiple products while making it easier to do so. That’s why AYX is one of the best stocks we follow.
If you were trying to make the comparison you’d want to look at PowerBI and Azure Machine Learning as competitors.
AYX is all about the end to end data process and making information actionable
SMAR has been focused on project management and scheduling. SMAR is also at 75% of the Fortune 500 companies today according to them. They are in their expand strategy, and as Dreamer points out, that’s not as loved being in land and expand territory.
Just a Fool’s soapbox
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I think the AYX CEO mentions excel just about every article and ER/CC.
I am not comparing AYX and SMAR as products. I am simply saying they are both going after large generic markets (where Excel currently lives). My point was on SALES CYCLES or sales process.
As a result, they both sell to BU owners and Dept heads just as much as to developers or data analysts.
In comparison, products like TEAM or ESTC or MDB tend to live mainly with the developers.
As far as whether AYX goes after Excel, I will let their CEO talk for me. You can let him know it is a bad comparison.
“Alteryx is focused on taking on an otherwise boring, complex and sophisticated subject like analytics, and turning it into an opportunity to thrill people. For people using Excel to do complex work, Alteryx has worked very hard to take them from the end of their rope to the edge of their seat,” says Dean Stoecker, co-founder, Chairman and CEO
“We had slow growth, adding eight or nine customers a quarter, charging onerous fees for our platform, going at high value use cases, and then we saw the market for self-service open up where people were frustrated with IT. They were in Excel hell, hating their jobs. Then we started just knocking it out of the park,” says Stoecker.
"Dean Stoecker
Well, I think we’ve indicated before that the primary competition we have is either people living in VLOOKUP’s in Excel for these citizen data scientists. Or it is last generation analytics platforms, typically SAS. And I’m a sales guy, myself, so I go on lots of customer calls. And I have had the last quarter a number of very, very large SAS customers ask us to help them forklift the last generation out and accelerate the use of Alteryx across their enterprise.
So, rarely do we compete on a prep and blend standpoint. Ultimately, the data preparation and blending is the necessary evil to actually get them to meaningful outcomes around the entire spectrum of analytics. And as a result of those things, we either compete with Excel, bringing all the time back to the analyst who uses our product or accelerating the use of data science and analytics across a wide array of capabilities against staff, including the productionisation of algorithm."
Dreamer
15 Likes
Jaf,
Respectfully, AYX is the one saying they want to replace Excel as the tool for Data Scientists. Constantly. In every call or press release.
Who are the 20 million citizen data scientists that Alteryx is constantly saying is their addressable market?
Read the fine print. The number comes from IDC 2017 estimate of the number of Excel users. I think it’s updated to be 30 million forecast for 2019.
Darth
5 Likes
Anyone have a guess as to why Smartsheet is down more than 13% in two days? I’m not seeing any news.
I was considering starting a position in SMAR but the unusual weakness just before earnings is making me gun shy. I have a few laggard stocks which behaved similarly prior to earnings and it turned out to be a bad omen.
With my luck, it will tank if I buy and soar if I pass on it, lol.
As Saul points out, it has great numbers but it ain’t cheap.
dave
Remmdawg,
When considering a company that is close to reporting earnings, I normally do one of two things depending on my conviction. Conservative approach - wait for report to see if firing on all cylinders and to confirm still is performing to my liking. Slightly less conservative approach - buy a smallish position and use the report to add or sell.
Either way you may miss out on a short term pop, but if really worth considering, we are buying it because we think it will continue to go up longer term.
I currently have about a 4%, and will be looking at earnings to decide on holding or increasing. I would be surprised if anything comes out that would make me consider dumping it, but you never know until you know.
Not saying it is the best approach, but seems to work better for me than buying and hoping for the “pop”.
Kevin
3 Likes
Dreamer/Darth,
AYX uses Excel as an example of what they are replacing, but it’s a gross understatement of their business…
VLOOKUP is the reference to the workflow practice of
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Querying data from a database (not excel)
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Cleaning that data if needed, then Dumping that data into an excel tab
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Cleaning / transforming that dataset to ensure it can “talk” to other tabs
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Repeating steps 1-3 until all tabs / datasets are acquired.
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Using VLOOKUP to analyze/extract data based on logic rules to calculate a result
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Iterating step 5 until all data is ready for presenting. Potentially adding summary data via pivot tables
6a. Exporting dataset as a .csv to a statistic program (SAS) to run beyond excel calculations as required (beyond excel could be because of data size or complexity of calculation)
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Visualizing via a multitude of tools, probably ending up in a PPT or a dashboard. Neither of which Excel has a plethora of options
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Repeating these steps as required for unique analysis or regular analysis.
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Building Macros if needed to have a regular live look
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Building outside of Excel solutions via Tableau that rely on R for data analysis because Tableau can’t compute and R can’t visualize
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Automating all these workflow steps via…well…can you code? Or do you just write a very detailed technical procedure.
Alternate option? Use Alteryx for 1-11 in a low-code manner.
Time is money. But time is also intelligence. Every data analysis breeds 3 more “you know what would be nice” comments. And successful data analysis breed “this would be great in a dashboard”.
Make the right decisions, faster and easier. That’s
That’s what I poorly tried to state earlier.
Just a Fool
20 Likes
I’m not a user of Smartsheets, but I hold a trial position
Love the growth rates/billing rates/gross margins/retention rate relatively low market cap
The competitive risk is the thing that keeps me pausing beyond a trial position. At the moment, I struggle to know if its CAP is high enough within the sector to offer something approaching a moat.
Companies like MDB/ZS/OKTA/AYX/TWLO have high CAP and are the top dogs in an emerging market. They are clearly the dominant disrupters in their sectors, and are “overvalued” for that reason - I own them and have no issue adding to them on weakness as long as the thesis remains intact.In the case of SMAR, it feels somewhat less comfortable
Has anyone here used/researched Airtable enough to figure out how it compares to SMAR as a product?
Today over 95,000 customers, including more than 78,000 domain-based customers and over 75% of the companies in the Fortune 500, rely on Smartsheet to implement, manage, and automate processes across a broad array of departments and use cases.
80,000+ companies on Airtable
A google search threw up a few links but the CAP question is one I haven’t yet answered to my satisfaction
https://uk.pcmag.com/productivity-2/90674/airtable
https://www.getapp.com/project-management-planning-software/…
https://mergy.org/2018/03/thoughts-on-airtable-from-a-longti…
https://comparisons.financesonline.com/smartsheet-vs-airtabl…
On a separate note, although this is essentially an ad for a research service, it’s interesting to note how prominently some of the premier tier stocks here are also covered in this video - you can easily identify them despite them not being named https://vimeo.com/339600434
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Meant to include the following link regarding Airtable https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-s…
It’s clearly significantly smaller than SMAR at this stage, by a factor of 10x in 2019, but I am trying to see how significant the product differentiation is between the two.
I guess it could be a TWLO/BAND type of situation.
Any good insight gratefully received
Agreed about AYX being a replacement for several products.
Another of the main pieces AYX replaces is an on-prem ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) such as SSIS or Microsoft’s better tool and cloud replacement of that (Azure Data Factory). It replaces those in conjunction with PowerBI and some Machine Learning.
I think what can NOT be underestimated about AYX is they are targeting non-techies. Management and analysts. Their land and expand strategy is more from the top down than bottom up.
As an example of how much easier to use AYX is just in the ETL part, I use SSIS and Azure Data Factory regularly in my work. In learning about AYX, I did some tutorials and a short 2 week trial. The usability of it, even 5 years ago, is light-years ahead of Microsoft’s free flavor today. Using a low level example of this, I took a file of data and wanted to import it into a database. With AYX, this database destination could be basically anything. Think of the file as an excel file (although it was a tab delimited text file). Anyway, using ADF 2.0 (Recently Released Azure Data Factory), the column names had to be exact; even to the case. I had case issues in the file and my options were to either change the source file (column name in the flat file) or the destination (in the table). Note, there are other ways to do this but for simplicity sake… Anyway, using AYX, it is smart enough to automatically know what the column should be. In the ETL world, there are headaches around small things like this or getting a new file with a different format or changed column order… AYX figures this out automatically.
I think this example also shows how the the targeting non-IT is very successful. Its more intuitive.
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was searching why SMAR was being down in a good market. This could be the reason:
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/smartsheet-announces-propo…
Not planning to stick around and see when they actually go ahead with public offering, instead i took my little gain and will buy again, once this story is all over.