Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com
Canada please... there's no end to money I'm throwing your way then :->
Twilio S-1
111–120 of 229 posts
Re: Twilio S-1
#112Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com
this deserves its own Show HN
Re: Twilio S-1
#113Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com
Please do a UK version, better yet a worldwide version
Re: Twilio S-1
#114Revenue is great; sales & marketing costs are fine, competitive environment is great; the main concern here is the cost of ongoing service.
Revenue: Twilio made $166M in 2015. From Q1 2015 to Q1 2016, thew grew 80% -- so we can project a 2016 revenue of around $300M. At that pace, they'll hit ~$1B in 2018 or 2019.
Landscape: They have very few competitors, in constrast to other high-profile enterprise startups like Box.
Cost of revenue: Their cost of revenue -- servers, telecom bandwidth, customer support -- is ~45% of revenue. Typical SaaS startups run around 20-30%. I suppose this is the danger of being in the telecom space -- you do have high data costs.
Sales & marketing: Coming in at ~$50M, or ~30% of revenue is quite reasonable. Box raised concerns a couple of years back when S&M were 125% of revenue; they were able to get it down to 65% or so and then they IPO-ed. 30% is fine.
Re: Twilio S-1
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telecom/communication services like Twilio's are =extremely= sticky.
Not by most standards of stickiness. They don't have my data. They don't have a monopoly. There aren't any network effects that I can think of (they've worked the one angle here as well as they can -- developer mind share). I'm not saying they aren't a good business, but I wouldn't call them particularly sticky, any more than Rackspace is sticky. Infrastructure is a hard business to be in.
Developer mindshare is sticky though - much more so than monopolies (fragile, disruptible, unless protected by law).
Re: Twilio S-1
#116Interesting that they are "selling" base revenues. After all total revenues in 2015 were $167m, and base revenues only $137m.
The definition of the $30m "missing" revenues seems to indicate that this piece of the business might churn at any moment, or is just a brief "burst" of revenues w/o the transactional nature of SaaS.
Depending on the lumpiness of these bursts, that is a smart decision to "ring-fence" in the reporting of an otherwise sound recurring business. Guess this is a good CFO here...
Re: Twilio S-1
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have much knowledge here, but I always thought one of the main reasons to go public because you want to raise money to either expand or you are strapped for money. If anything I would be suspect of companies who are extremely profitable and doesn't need to raise money at all but going public.
Companies must go public if they have a certain number of shareholders. I think the number is 500 or more, but don't quote me on that.
That number sounds correct. I've just been reading Pour Your Heart Into It (by the Starbucks CEO), which mentions "the SEC considers a company public if it has more than 500 registered shareholders", and that they had to request a special exemption from the SEC for their Bean Stock employee shares program.
Re: Twilio S-1
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not by most standards of stickiness. They don't have my data. They don't have a monopoly. There aren't any network effects that I can think of (they've worked the one angle here as well as they can -- developer mind share). I'm not saying they aren't a good business, but I wouldn't call them particularly sticky, any more than Rackspace is sticky. Infrastructure is a hard business to be in.
Developer mindshare is sticky though - much more so than monopolies (fragile, disruptible, unless protected by law).
Your developers usually don't pay the bills, and CFOs are always looking for cheaper options that are just as good.
Mindshare is silly in a commoditized space.
Re: Twilio S-1
#119Good for them! I love their service and use it on GoatAttack.com
okay, I am still laughing and yes I used it just now.
Still how do places like yours actually get the word out?
Re: Twilio S-1
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to be on the team working on printing GIFs please.
You would use a lenticular printer for that right? Animated GIFs!
Competitors are already ahead of the game: