GoCanvas reviews

3.4

57% would recommend to a friend

(148 total reviews)

Viyas Sundaram

75% approve of CEO

49% positive business outlook

GoCanvas has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 148 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The GoCanvas employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

148 reviews
1.0
Feb 19, 2020

RUNNNN

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Snacks - Coworkers (seems like a lot of the good ones are leaving now) - CEO - I got some experience at GoCanvas and recruiters from other companies that offer more competitive pay are now reaching out

Cons

Where do I begin: - K1 (ruined company culture but I almost don't blame them because their whole goal is to trim as much "fat" as possible and then resell. They have no reason to care for the employees livelihood and happiness. That is what the GoCanvas leadership should be doing) - New pay structure does not incentivize us - Tiny amount of equity so even if we are successful it doesn't amount to much - HR tries to spin everything as a positive (90% sure some of these positive reviews are made directly by our HR team) - Everyone expects to get fired - Top performers both in mid management and regular employees are jumping ship - CRO is a micromanager with no real experience with sales (the rumor mill is saying that he's gunning for the CEO job)

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GoCanvas Response
6y
Thank you for providing your direct feedback, and I'm sorry you are not enjoying your experience at GoCanvas currently. It's with transparent notes like these that we can get together as a leadership team and try to address the core challenges our employees are facing in order to make them feel and be successful day in and out inside these walls. Change is often difficult, but it should feel like an exciting journey we are all on together for the most part! I can certainly sympathize if most days it does not feel this way, and again thank you for highlighting these points as we work towards improving them to ensure everyone feels included on our collective journey towards helping current and future customers find efficiencies within their business.
1.0
Feb 12, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

~Amazing snacks and drinks. There was unlimited Kombucha ~Some autonomy. ~There are amazing people I worked with and learned from ~The possibility to grow professionally ~I saw people wear whatever they'd like most days, even sweatpants

Cons

~Here is the truth about GoCanvas. There are too many to list. Most of the cons used to be pros. However, after GoCanvas was acquired by K1 Investments as a priority owner everything has crumbled. To give background, after the acquisition a new CRO was hired directly from the investment firm. He is now realistically the CEO without the title. He called all of the shots and the current CEO has no say. Our CEO said nothing drastic would change. Since, there was at least 10 firings to free up budget despite getting over $150 million investment money. The investment money has only benefited the Chief level team with stock options to pay them out. None of that money has gone into investing into GoCanvas. On top of all of this, the new CRO has articles from early 2000 where he threatened someone when he got caught plagiarizing on a college paper. It ruined all of GoCanvas' values by putting someone in charge who has had such a past. It went viral throughout the company. It shows because the new person in charge didn't think about the people of GoCanvas first, but only metrics. ~Sales is what creates money for GoCanvas, but there was NO investment into the sales organization. ~Inbound leads. Inbound is the engine for the profitability of the company. With that being said, the inbound leads were unfathomably bad. The marketing team has no idea what is considered a good lead. There is nothing enticing from a marketing perspective to bring a possible customer to sign up for GoCanvas compared to one of our competitors. The only reason GoCanvas wins a lot of deals, is because they are lucky that a customer signed up for only 1 software and not a competitor out of pure laziness. ~No competitive edge. GoCanvas prices are twice as expensive as our competitors, but the entire organization doesn't know why. Over the last 3-5 years, no drastic product changes proves why our prices should be more expensive, thus the team always loses out from a cost perspective. There are key functions that have never improved and it is hard to believe in the product. ~Getting fired at a blink of an eye. No matter if you've been with the company for 2 months or 8 years, there is a chance you will show up to work in the morning and get fired to save the company money. ~Career progression. There is not much progression. You can start at an entry level BDR job and hope to get promoted in 15+ months. The base pay for a BDR is only $40k for a DC area job. With a $40k job, the BDR team is expected to make well over 100 calls a day without giving the proper tools to do so. The team only receives 1 good lead at most a day. ~Unattainable Goals. It seems the goals for AE's is unattainable. I had only seen 1-3 people maximum a month hit quota even though there are over 10 people on the Account Executive team. To my knowledge, not many people ever hit quota. ~No product knowledge training. This only occurs the first week you get hired, and you never get taught the product again. Unless you are on the Professional Services team. ~Key team members resigning. All of the key team members who helped the GoCanvas engine run are leaving because the CRO is changing all of the core values that brought people to GoCanvas for the lower salary. Pure micromanaging is occurred from higher up (CRO) that is even causing the managers to have no ability to make decisions for their team. ~Company politics ~Product and sales do not interact. The product team assumes they know what is best. Maybe a certain product addition can attract 10% more customers. ~Competitive pay. I cannot emphasize this enough. ~They retroactively make commission worse for the sales team

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GoCanvas Response
6y
Hey there, I want to thank you for taking the time to share all your thoughts with the Glassdoor community! It seems from what you have shared that the beginning of your tenure was characterized by mostly pros, and I'm sorry to hear that your opinion of the team soured since then. We do agree on some things, our team is amazing, and there are opportunities to grow in skills and launch and build your career at GoCanvas. One of our GoCanvas Alumni, who began as an intern just took their dream job as a CTO after being their long tenure with us. Furthermore, K1 has brought with them a deepened level of rigor and focus. For many this has been a challenging and fulfilling journey, for others the raised standards and increased alignment with best practice have been quite difficult. There are some inaccuracies that I feel I should clear up. First, our CEO remains our CEO, and he has not abdicated his decision making responsibilities. Second, our CRO was selected by the GoCanvas Management team he was not hired by or from K1. In fact, he has never been a member of the K1 team and has not worked with them prior to joining the GoCanvas family. I may have agreed with you 18 months ago, regarding training. However we made this a priority in 2018 and since then our training team has built and delivered a series of specific training on sales skills and our product, in addition to developing our sales leaders in the areas of leadership and coaching. Of course, this remains a priority for us and there is more to come on this front in 2020, which is really exciting. Finally, with regard to our Sales team, I feel you are being unfair to your former colleagues as the stats simply don't support your view. One-third of our Account Executives exceeded their targets by 30% or more last month, a trend that has been steadily increasing. 85% of our Business Development Managers met or exceeded their targets, and all of our Account Management team achieved quota as well. Again, thank you for taking the time to share your view with Glassdoor, we wish you all the best in your future endeavors, and the next step in your career.
2.0
Feb 12, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- great product that really helps our customers - Great talent throughout the different teams in the company - Good commission structure

Cons

- Culture went from a welcome environment to one of stress and ambiguity. - Cuts in spending, marketing and staff despite getting an “investment” of 150m early in 2019? - Product vision is static, mobile forms are no longer the future and rather expected, so as more competitors come to market with more packaged solutions the market share will dwindle. - Price increases for customers with almost next to no notice alongside no real feature enhancements to justify said increase. - Overstacked technology for staff and poorly integrated - Pricing is a big issue, prices are set at the prestige pricing level, and this was fine in the past due to the market leading product we had. But this is no longer the case as customers expect better data visualisation. - Minimal useful direct integrations with other software providers that our customers use. - Recent Analytics tool was released without any market research it seems, particularly in relation to pricing. Being a SaaS company you would think a new product would be priced as a module add on per user as opposed to per form basis which is why it’s almost unsellable.

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GoCanvas Response
6y
Hey there, thanks for taking the time to share your candid feedback with the Glassdoor community. I'm glad to hear that you think the product is great, and I'm sure you saw that first hand as an Account Manager. I too am inclined to agree with you that our team is amazing, we really focus on hiring talented individuals who are also good humans. I agree that 2019 was a year of growth and change for the GoCanvas team, growth is not linear and that experience can be stressful. K1's team of experts helped the GoCanvas leaders to increase our alignment with best practices and our leaders challenged the team to deepen our rigor and focus. For many of us, this has been a challenging and fulfilling journey. We absolutely agree with your observation that mobile forms are only a portion of what our customers need. We have made increasingly over the past few years ensured that forms is only a part of the value we deliver to our subscribers and have been focusing more on helping our customers collect and share data and learn about their business. There are many further developments in this theme on the roadmap in 2020 that we are very excited about. We wish you all the best in your future career and again we appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback.
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Glassdoor has 152 GoCanvas reviews submitted anonymously by GoCanvas employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if GoCanvas is right for you.