I understand the bull case that they are a market leader in a growing market. But as one of those small businesses that use Klaviyo, I can say they have 3 major things working against them, and if I had balls enough to actually short stocks, I would short Klaviyo.
- They only have one source of revenue.
- That one source of revenue is heavily under attack
- They don't have a good enough product to withstand that attack
I get charged a monthly fee to send emails and texts based on the size of my subscriber base. That's it. They have to hope I get more subscribers or lots more people sign up the the service. They don't have a service to build the funnels for me. They don't have a service to promote my service. The offer me nothing else. They are already nearly 2x as expensive as competitors, and now that Wall St is going to want a return, they are going to have to raise prices (which they just announced a 15-25% price increase today) because they have no other way to grow revenue. I remember back in the day wanting to short Sirius/XM
Shopify is building a Klaviyo replacement which will be a Klaviyo killer. If not, Mailchimp, Omnisend, Sendinblue, Mautic and others are reasonable options getting more and reasonable as Klaviyo gets more expensive. Attentive is probably building their own as well. You pay Klaviyo to make sure your emails get delivered, but if you are a real company and aren't spamming, it's not that much of a risk.
Their platform isn't that good. It's not that different than anything out there. There are no barriers to entry and every coder worth their soul is working on some platform to help enterprises communicate with their audience more efficiently and with less flexibility and there are already a few that are aping Klaviyo and just charging less.
Note they are currently worth nearly $10 billion and lost money last year on $500 million in revenue.
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