Zuora S-1

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1423774/000119312518085792/d481302ds1.htm

by louis-paul • 8 years ago

64 37 8 years ago

pg_bot2• 8 years ago

I have never heard of this company before and if you told me their website was a parody of an enterprise software company I would believe you. It shouldn't take more than 10 seconds for me to understand what you do.

"ZUORA BRINGS FREEDOM TO THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY" What the fuck does that mean!

endlessvoid94• 8 years ago

It means you aren't their target customer.

clay_the_ripper• 8 years ago

I think the importance of a website is vastly overestimated. The only question a business owner generally cares about is “does this solve my problem”. Ive learned pretty quickly when searching for solutions to ignore both smarmy marketing nonsense and slick, perfectly designed websites alike.

Zuora makes a lot of money with their “bad” website, so it obviously doesn’t matter very much.

pg_bot2• 8 years ago

I would amend that statement to they hope to make a lot of money with their "bad" website.[0] If your messaging is incoherent I will have no idea if you are able to solve my problems in the first place.

[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."

mgazzer• 8 years ago

Website has words, words that don't make sense.

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/)

unepipe• 8 years ago

It means what it says. They simplify how a company can take an order and get the money. It’s a product for businesses.

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.

TYPE_FASTER• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quote_to_cash

It's a real thing. I wouldn't have known before I worked on it.

dmode• 8 years ago

Order to cash is a core part of any ERP module and SAP and Oracle have been selling it for decades.

jedberg• 8 years ago

Maybe they saw this, or maybe they are A/B testing, but I saw, "Zuora creates cloud-based software on a subscription basis that enables any company in any industry to successfully launch, manage, and transform into a subscription business. the subscription economy", which makes a bunch of sense to me.

But it's true, I'd never heard of them either.

trjordan2• 8 years ago

Consider a company that used to sell stuff by the unit. Boxed software, DVDs, whatever.

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.

Confusion• 8 years ago

Minor note: Dollar Shave Club was bought by Unilever, not P&G.

manigandham4• 8 years ago

You're not the right customer.

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...

erik_landerholm• 8 years ago

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

tdumitrescu• 8 years ago

Numbers for the lazy: "For fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017, and fiscal 2018, our total revenue was $92.2 million, $113.0 million, and $167.9 million, respectively. We have made significant investments to grow our business, including in sales and marketing, infrastructure, operations, and headcount. As a result, we incurred net losses for fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017, and fiscal 2018 of $48.2 million, $39.1 million, and $47.2 million, respectively."

trjordan2• 8 years ago

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 after large customers, and this is what they get.

"As a substantial portion of our sales efforts are increasingly targeted at large enterprise customers, our sales cycle may become increasingly lengthy and more expensive, we may encounter still greater pricing pressure and deployment and customization challenges, and we may have to delay revenue recognition for more complicated transactions, all of which could adversely impact our business and operating results."

xfour2• 8 years ago

This so much. Worst company I've ever had the misfortune to interact with, integrating with them is a disaster, don't waste your time. As a developer or CTO somehow they seem to get the ear of someone in business management or finance or accounting who believe their reporting lies, and they may attempt to cause this company to be forced upon you. Do not acquiesce, they are terrible, just so terrible. And if you let them in you're stuck with them and their professional services etc. We ended up just hiring one of their now former employees full time just to make sense of it. Bottom line if you're a big enough company for Zuora, you're big enough to negotiate a deal with stripe for reasonable pricing.

Heed this warning!

FunnyLookinHat2• 8 years ago

Yup. Literally the worst. I've implemented 4 different payment providers and they're in last place, far behind any of the others.

abakker2• 8 years ago

Out of curiosity, who were the other? Aria? Stripe? PayPal nee Braintree?

whalesalad• 8 years ago

We had horrible interactions with Zuora in terms of integration. Worst vendor ever.

Boxbot• 8 years ago

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 defensive programming in our integration.

xfour2• 8 years ago

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.

mikikian• 8 years ago

For those wondering like me what the UI looks like, here's a video:

https://youtu.be/9Vca8JBIiUY

thelevante• 8 years ago

That video and therefore the UI is not current.

yladiz• 8 years ago

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.

deathtrader666• 8 years ago

Can anybody chime in on how they are different from ChargeBee for subscription businesses?

abakker2• 8 years ago

Enterprise focused, aiming at integrating with big, complex, multinational, multi currency ERP kinds of projects.

gobluebackstage2• 8 years ago

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.

gobluebackstage2• 8 years ago

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

atak1• 8 years ago

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

Zuora S-1

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