

Twilio Positions Itself for an IPO After Logging $100M in 2014 Revenue - sethbannon
http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-16485

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adamboulanger
I quite liked this article for associating Twilio's success with strategic
decisions to treat developers as customers with particular implications for
evangelism and growth. This approach isn't obvious because of the pressure to
tie tool adoption to large-sized recurring enterprise contracts, often losing
the individual developer as the engine of that model.

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.

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guelo
I came across a Twillio billboard the other day and the entire message was
"Twillio. Ask your developer." I thought it was pretty bold marketing. No
explanation of the service, they're just selling the fact that developers know
it and like it.

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dragonwriter
> they're just selling the fact that developers know it and like it.

The less-overt (and perhaps more important) message from that billboard is
_to_ developers that they _should_ know it.

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tptacek
Thinking about what it was like selling ideas (or, more accurately, failing to
sell ideas) in meetings on a marketing team, all I can say is:

Whoever came up with that billboard is awesome at their job.

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jeffiel
Hi - Jeff from Twilio. We're here to build the a great company for developers.
The real story is APIs, not IPOs. Anything else is pure speculation :)

~~~
lmg643
It's amazing how easy Twilio's APIs are to use. I've used them in C# several
times, just add them to the project, add a line, and you are up and running.
Nice work.

~~~
jeffiel
Thank you lmg643, glad we could help!

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cyen
I'm intrigued by the fact that this has been on the front page for hours with
no comments.

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?

~~~
akavi
I think it's mostly the former. Unlike some IPOs, there's just nothing
controversial about it. Twilio's a great product and they've got solid
financials.

~~~
RobSpectre
Rob from Twilio here - thanks a lot of saying that akavi.

Took a lot of work to get here - stoked to hear you are finding it well.

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TimFogarty
Congratulations to them. I've worked with their developer evangelism team a
bit and they always bring their A-game. The company really seems to understand
how to engage the community and they have a very solid and easy to use
product.

~~~
RobSpectre
Very kind of you to say Tim. They put in an enormous amount of work to be
prepared to serve you in the field. Lot more preparation ahead, but stoked you
found it helpful.

~~~
jMyles
Awwww. I love it when we're all so happy!

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jaytaylor
I don't see any information on Twilio's net expenditures. Am I missing
something?

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?

~~~
dubcanada
I rarely see Twilio ads. When Box was big there was not a site that I visited
that I didn't get at least one Box ad, and dare I ever type Dropbox into
Google. Nothing but straight Box ads for weeks.

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".

~~~
sjtgraham
> I rarely see Twilio ads

¿Qué? -
[https://twitter.com/anniebp_/status/567243532805476352](https://twitter.com/anniebp_/status/567243532805476352)

~~~
corin_
Well that's sorted then, dubcanada must indeed see Twilio ads all the time!

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.

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urs2102
Awesome - Twilio to me is the example of a simple, well priced product that
has been nothing but just a really well made tool.

Looking forward to seeing their S-1...

~~~
RobSpectre
Much obliged urs2102.

Whole lot more work between here and there - glad you could be a part of it
with us.

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mwetzler
Impressive, but not quite a impressive as the title alludes. Should be $100M
Annual Revenue Run Rate (projected revenue) vs actual revenue in 2014. WSJ has
corrected the title on their site. Twilio truly blazed a trail for API
companies. Thank you for that, Twilio :)

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johnrob
> Twilio told Venture Capital Dispatch it is adding another $1 million in
> annual recurring revenue every seven days.

Sounds cooler than saying "growing 50% per year".

~~~
taf2
50% per year sounds pretty damn cool to me ;)

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MattGrommes
Based on his evangelism, which accounts for almost all of what I've personally
heard about Twilio, I hope you guys are going to reward patio11 somehow. :)

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iask
I like Twilio. I've been following them since they started and currently using
some of their services in my personal home automation projects. Once you go
public you have to answer to shareholders and then prices become an issue. I
wish them success. And yes, they really have a savvy marketing team.

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mehrzad
Curious about something: with companies like Heroku we often see open-source
alternatives being developed. Is that possible for something like Twilio and
is it "FSF-compliant" to use their APIs? Not that that is a requirement for
me, but I've never seen people discuss this.

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some1else
Good news for early-stage Twilio employee's current startups?

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curiously
one thing im curious is their pay as you go model. we rarely see such pricing
plans but wonder if there's any extensive study or analysis into this vs
recurring payments.

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pyrrhotech
I don't get the point of these posts. If I cared, I'd pull up tech crunch.
What relevance does this have? I know this sounds hypocritical as I cared
enough to comment, but I'm tired of X company is IPO!!! taking up a precious
spot in the otherwise interesting board

