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Zuora S-1

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Re: Zuora S-1

#31

Post by xfour »

Boxbot wrote: post #26
trjordan wrote: post #12

My experience with Zuora is that it's a feature-complete payments subscription that's an unholy pain to work with. We chose them over Stripe before Stripe has ACH. My favorite part is that 25% of their revenue is professional services, and their professional services are sold essentially at-cost. You're going to need somebody to help you get set up, but at least the pricing on that extra headcount is fair :) They're…

Not gonna argue that integrating with their platform is a gigantic pain in the ass, but I feel that part of it is the flexibility (and complexity) of their subscription model. Would you say different? Not too familiar with the other players in the field so I don't know how they compare really. Definitely some reliability and performance concerns, though. I feel like half the pain is just having to shove so much defen…

Stripe specifically has a great subscription model. When Zuora was getting started and gaining momentum they didn't. We've recently onboarded a Stripe Subscription with their connect accounts even and it's been extremely smooth.

Re: Zuora S-1

#32

Post by valuearb »

manigandham wrote: post #30
erik_landerholm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that good? It basically said nothing. Cool.

I guess it again comes down to "you're not the right customer". They didn't file an IPO because they couldn't make any sales. 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.

Why did they file an IPO? Revenue growth is unimpressive, they don’t make any money and their product is terrible according to those who have to implement it.

Re: Zuora S-1

#33

Post by manigandham »

valuearb wrote: post #32
manigandham wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it again comes down to "you're not the right customer". They didn't file an IPO because they couldn't make any sales. 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.

Why did they file an IPO? Revenue growth is unimpressive, they don’t make any money and their product is terrible according to those who have to implement it.

To make money.

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).

Re: Zuora S-1

#34

Post by valuearb »

manigandham wrote: post #33
valuearb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did they file an IPO? Revenue growth is unimpressive, they don’t make any money and their product is terrible according to those who have to implement it.

To make money. 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).

“making money” always means profit. Losing horrendous amounts doesn’t “create” money, it burns it.

And its not growing rapdlit, and nor was its $100M in revenues built in a year.

Re: Zuora S-1

#35

Post by gobluebackstage »

I'm a former Zuora customer who transitioned to Stripe last year. Zuora is a good product for B2B businesses only. Their product roadmap and more importantly their data model for B2C businesses is beyond terrible. Their definition of an active subscriber was a clear mistake almost a decade ago that they have stubbornly stuck to.

Re: Zuora S-1

#36

Post by manigandham »

valuearb wrote: post #34
manigandham wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make money. 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).

“making money” always means profit. Losing horrendous amounts doesn’t “create” money, it burns it. And its not growing rapdlit, and nor was its $100M in revenues built in a year.

I'm asking you if you've built something bigger and faster to be criticizing the revenue growth, since you claimed it wasn't impressive. How fast were you expecting it to be? Most companies are lucky to get this kind of double digit increases every year, if ever. And profit is what an IPO will let them do. You realize at some point profit does need to happen for the company to stay around right?

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?

Re: Zuora S-1

#37

Post by gobluebackstage »

gobluebackstage wrote: post #35

I'm a former Zuora customer who transitioned to Stripe last year. Zuora is a good product for B2B businesses only. Their product roadmap and more importantly their data model for B2C businesses is beyond terrible. Their definition of an active subscriber was a clear mistake almost a decade ago that they have stubbornly stuck to.

and forgot to mention - bc their data-model is so poor they email us constantly like we are a still an active subscriber and sometimes like a completely new lead but never like a winback customer

Re: Zuora S-1

#38

Post by atak1 »

gobluebackstage wrote: post #35

I'm a former Zuora customer who transitioned to Stripe last year. Zuora is a good product for B2B businesses only. Their product roadmap and more importantly their data model for B2C businesses is beyond terrible. Their definition of an active subscriber was a clear mistake almost a decade ago that they have stubbornly stuck to.

Agreed. I was the engineering lead on our company's integration a couple years back, and we wound up cutting ties and sticking with our own solution.

The biggest pain points during the integration were:

* Zuora is run on a legacy tech stack (SOAP interfaces, inflexible and inextensible WSDL), and will continue to do so b/c a substantial part of the architecture & coding were outsourced overseas (as told to me by an integration consultant)

* Getting data in and out of their platform is very difficult, error-prone, time-consuming, and does not meet the high-volume demands of a digital subscription business

* ZOM (Zuora Object Model) is monolithic and hard to evolve your business around

* You need someone at your company (possibly 1+ engineering resources) to deeply understand and keep up to date with Zuora's platform. For engineers who want to learn and grow, this project is a potential de-motivator.

To be fair, we did this transition back in 2015, when Zuora was in its early stages with their REST api. Not sure how far they've come in that department since then.

Zuora appears best for transitioning brick-and-mortar shops to a digital business via their UI. If you're running an online-subscription-based business, I'd recommend:

* Stripe + keeping your data models in-housed * checking out a modern / extensible platform like Recurly * checking out an open-source solution like Killbill and see if it meets your set of needs

Re: Zuora S-1

#39

Post by valuearb »

manigandham wrote: post #36
valuearb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“making money” always means profit. Losing horrendous amounts doesn’t “create” money, it burns it. And its not growing rapdlit, and nor was its $100M in revenues built in a year.

I'm asking you if you've built something bigger and faster to be criticizing the revenue growth, since you claimed it wasn't impressive. How fast were you expecting it to be? Most companies are lucky to get this kind of double digit increases every year, if ever. And profit is what an IPO will let them do. You realize at some point profit does need to happen for the company to stay around right? I find it strange tha…

Kind of a straw man argument isn’t it? You don’t have to run a company to understand how to value businesses, or that when we are in a bubble Wall Street will try to push out any poop thru an IPO.

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.

Re: Zuora S-1

#40

Post by KLVTZ »

yladiz wrote: post #28
thelevante wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That video and therefore the UI is not current.

What do you mean? Besides the color, the UI looks essentially identical to the UI I'm used to working with when I've previously worked with Zuora.

I would say more than color. Here is an example:

https://files.mtstatic.com/site_5921/2761/0?Expires=15214353...

But the way they organize data is similar.

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