"ZUORA BRINGS FREEDOM TO THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY" What the fuck does that mean!
There is a new world of their product, and even though it's 2018, they're not in it. It might feel like Spotify has won, Netflix has won, and so on, but in other verticals, subscriptions still aren't the norm.
Remember when Dollar Shave Club started selling razors by the month and got bought for a billion dollars? P&G needed to find a way to transition to subscriptions, and they paid up for it.
The subscription economy is a real trend, and it's not something you can just convert to overnight if you have a business that's a going concern. You have to figure out how to put out some new offerings, and the way people pay for these new subscriptions have to work with your existing business processes.
Zuora sells to those companies. Companies that want to sell subscriptions, but can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. They want to work with a company that understands that subscriptions are the new important thing, but not the only thing.
Zuora makes a lot of money with their “bad” website, so it obviously doesn’t matter very much.
[0] "We have incurred net losses in each fiscal year since inception, including net losses of $48.2 million, $39.1 million, and $47.2 million in fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017, and fiscal 2018, respectively, and we expect to incur net losses for the foreseeable future."
But it's true, I'd never heard of them either.
Interestingly, their sales deck is one of the best (as considered by Andy Raskin who's very good at marketing): https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-e...
Zuora builds payments systems and other services to help companies who want to offer subscription-based products and services - a trend that has been seen in pretty much every industry from software to groceries.
Was that a serious question? It doesn't matter if the product is terrible as long as they can make sales, revenue growth looks fine (unless you've built a $100M business in a year?), and they definitely do make money unless you're talking about profit, which in VC-funded companies is traded for faster growth and exit (like an IPO).
And its not growing rapdlit, and nor was its $100M in revenues built in a year.
I find it strange that you say they aren't growing fast enough but yet say they don't make any money when they are delaying profits precisely for growth. Have you ever actually started or run a business?
In this case, they are nowhere near profitability. They need the IPO to forestall bankruptcy, they are 12 months from running out of cash. Their profit margin is still a massively negative -35%. There are no signs this business can ever be significantly profitable.
And if that’s not good enough for you, companies I’ve founded have raised over $20M in VC funding, and one was 2 months from an IPO we pulled because though we were profitable our growth had fallen to “only” 20%. We sold that business for $100M to a public company.
Case in the point, this fucking title tag: Zuora is unifying order-to-cash for a dynamic subscription world
What the fack is order-to-cash and a dynamic subscription world???
Someone needs to put down the dictionary and put their copy through a "grading" tool (https://readable.io/)
And dynamic subscriptions means they have a way to change elements of a subscription (term length, renewal period). Dynamic means it’s something that changes.
It's a real thing. I wouldn't have known before I worked on it.