Twilio Positions Itself for an IPO After Logging $100M in 2014 Revenue
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Also note, Twilio brilliantly dances between concerted efforts in grassroots developer campaigns such as hackathons while bringing down tier 1 enterprise contracts at the same time. This is awesome and not easily done. Developers are smart and ultra-wary of hackathons as thinly veiled API marketing attempts.
Over the past year, I've pitched a developer API startup to countless VCs, many of them top tier, and Twilio has almost always come up as a point of reference from the other side of the table. In many, many cases, the VCs will have passed on Twilio, not liking either the developer tool or enabling tech aspect of the company, and are now face-palming a bit...Only a bit...show me a VC that will wholeheartedly admit to making a mistake ;)
Overall, the venture sentiment towards developer tools is definitely shifting. A year from now I expect to see quite a lot more activity in financing this space, albeit, in domains that largely coincide with VC comfort zones. Twilio offers communications and telephony, which is a market a lot of folks are comfortable in, compared to education, health, government, or creative industries.
Certainly nothing we'd rather be doing.
This seems to be driven by a few phenomena:
- For large companies, developer hours are becoming a large source of cost, so companies can charge a premium by lowering developer time demands.
- For independent developers, these services enable rapid prototyping and increases probability of finding product market fit.
It always surprised me that developers don't identify this from the start. Sure, Stripe's APIs are a little easier to work with, but the extra time you'd end up spending implementing a cheaper competitor pays for itself pretty quickly when transactions start rolling in.
What was a bit disconcerting was that that was the focus - "why not stripe?" The rest of the service didn't even get much of a look, yet... every non-dev I showed the service too didn't bat an eye about paypal.
Also PayPal constantly tried to make your customer their customer and makes the whole process overly complicated with the login.
> as recently as 3 years ago
Maybe he lives in a universe called the present rather than the past? And even if you had a point, there's no need to be rude about it.
I have developed an application that uses Paypal's subscription plan API's. I just looked up the invoice that I sent to that client I did work for: 20 hours of work, including custom integration into their word press platform.
Are you suggesting that if Stripe were available at the time, this work would have been reduced to 2 hours?
My prototype was just that - a prototype - it took all of about 3 hours to put together, and throwing a paypal form on it was, as I said, about 2 minutes. I said nothing about "integrating ecommerce solutions for large companies".
This is the world's biggest understatement.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/
I don't even use Paypal as a payment gateway for any site I operate currently. I'm using Authorize.net at the moment. It took about a day to implement. It wasn't as easy to use as I'd hoped, but it wasn't that bad. Certainly not worth a higher transaction fee.
Personally, I think any difference in price pays for itself in developer time, unless you have billions of dollars in yearly revenue. The PayPal API always makes me want to gouge my eyes out, whereas the Stripe API is so pleasing to use that I'm looking for reasons to integrate Stripe into things.
You don't need billions in revenue to recoup the cost of a few extra developer hours. Pay pals new REST API doesn't even look that hard to use, either (I've only used their older APIs)
Even if the cost was fixed and upfront, a Paypal integration isn't an intelligent thing to prioritize for most startups. There are likely hundreds of other things a startup could do to increase its revenue by more than they would save in CC processing fees, so they should focus on those things first.
Eventually a Paypal integration will make sense, but likely not for a processing discount. Instead it will become useful for international payments, and even then most startups have enough headaches with Paypal that they choose to keep Stripe as the default checkout option, and use Paypal as a secondary option.
I don't think there is any business decision involving costs that I want to make assumptions about or blindly select a "default option". Especially not one that represents a percentage of raw revenue.
The difference between a paypal implementation and stripe is not as significant as people make it out to be. I understand the intense paypal hate and it's well deserved, but from a pure cost perspective it often makes more sense than stripe.
The less-overt (and perhaps more important) message from that billboard is to developers that they should know it.
Whoever came up with that billboard is awesome at their job.
Most start-up companies in SV and the bay area are either co-founded by ex-Yahoo or Xooglers (of late, the Facebook/Twitter alumni has joined in as well). Is working at/working of Twilio different than working at/working of the start-ups that are founded by founders from other companies?
Is this because there's nothing to say ("Of course they're IPO'ing, everyone doing telephony uses Twilio, this makes total sense")? Or because the haters have all taken vacation and aren't around to draw comparisons to other recent IPOs?
... or are IPOs no longer news to the HN community anymore?
Took a lot of work to get here - stoked to hear you are finding it well.
What is the significance in taking in $100M in revenue if you had to spend > $100M to get it?
Cough BOX Cough
Also, how many customers do they have who pay them more than 100-250K/year? Where are these "big deals" coming from? In my experience, Twilio was quite expensive (i.e. not cost-effective) compared to other Telephony service providers.
I really like their solid platform, and at the same time I'm a little surprised by the IPO move right now. Have they already burned through the $70M in funding they took in 18 months ago?
Not that this proves anything at all, but I don't think they marketed nearly as hard as Box. But there does seem to be very little in regards to competition. Every single big internet company has their own "cloud storage".
¿Qué? - https://twitter.com/anniebp_/status/567243532805476352
One billboard doesn't disprove a claim that a company doesn't do much advertising, especially if it's just a personal anecdote about how many ads he's noticed.
Whats more important than net expenditures is CAC/LTV/Churn, etc. I would expand more but it's more eloquently put here: http://a16z.com/2014/05/13/understanding-saas-valuation-prim...
People often forget that many of the companies featured here on HN are venture businesses which means their returns are high risk-high return financial structures, and their profits are being predicated on EXTREMELY profitable business models coughFB/Googlecough.
> Also, how many customers do they have who pay them more than 100-250K/year? Where are these "big deals" coming from?
Take a company like Mavenlink or Basecamp who might be bringing in $50-$150mil in revenue every year. They would easily be coughing out $250k+ on Twilio. No idea if those companies use Twilio specifically, but it's foreseeable many CRM/PM tools would.
Looking forward to seeing their S-1...
Whole lot more work between here and there - glad you could be a part of it with us.
Sounds cooler than saying "growing 50% per year".