Once the product is ignored and over-marketed, the business empire will fall in an instant.
Pencil Trail Author |Recently, an American unicorn announced its closure.
On January 4, local time, the CEO of Invision posted on its official website that after careful consideration, the company will suspend business at the end of 2024.
If you're in the design industry, you've definitely heard of Adobe. In a way, Invision is a competitive teammate for Adobe. It's a collaborative design tool, like drawing product prototypes and collaborating with your team**.
It happened suddenly. In recent years, although Invision has declined, the news of its sudden closure still stunned the industry.
The inflection point occurred in 2022. In 2021, Invision's full-year revenue was about $100 million, but in 2022 it slipped to $50 million, a whopping 50%**. Looking at the pattern of the TOB industry, this decline is unheard of.
What mistakes did Invision make in business management?
Jade Foster, an entrepreneur familiar with the design industry, told Pencil Dao: "This is another version of the story of 'picking up sesame seeds and throwing watermelon'. The company lost itself in the process of rising, gradually neglected the product, paid too much attention to marketing, created opportunities for competitors, and was eventually squeezed out of the market. ”
Founded in 2011, Invision was ahead of the curve. Before it appeared, its competitors were only a few companies such as Adobe and Sketch.
There are also clear opportunities in the market. For example, Adobe's products focus more on standalone and desktop applications, while Invision focuses on "cloud collaboration".
Another example is Sketch, a tool that lacks native prototyping capabilities, and Invision fills that gap.
In the first few years of its founding, InVision quickly became synonymous with the industry and quickly became the favored object of capital. In 2012, Invision closed a $5.5 million seed round of financingIn 2014, it completed a $11 million Series A financingIn 2015, it completed a $4,500 Series B financingIn 2016, it completed a $100 million Series C financingCompleted in 2017 1$1.5 billion Series D financing.
However, around 2019, Invision's product power gradually lost.
A long-time customer who has been using InVision for 4 years said that as a founder and designer, he initially thought that their products were unique and ahead of the times, but then the products rarely made useful improvements.
The customer said that he had participated in more than a dozen invision report meetings within one year, during which the product did not improve substantially.
Since 2019, we have stopped using it. What's even more ridiculous is that I watched them put their money into areas other than the product, like marketing, sales. They can put millions of dollars into these areas and the product isn't outstanding. ”
This gives opportunities to competitors such as Figma – which was founded in 2012 but launched its first product in 2015 and has only been competing with Invision for five years.
Until 2018, there was still a competitive gap between the two: at that time, Figma had only closed a $15 million funding round;And Invision has raised hundreds of millions of dollars;From a commercial point of view, it took Figma 8 years to achieve its first $1 million in revenue.
In the following years, due to the more prominent product strength, Figma gradually occupied the market share. One of Invision's bank customers said that once it was available internally, Figma would immediately become a hit and no one would use Invision again.
One employee recalled on Glassdoor** that Invision was slow to develop some of the features that customers desperately needed, such as a simple "Organize Folders" feature that took up to 5 years.
Of course, there are many reasons for the closure of Invision.
For example, in terms of pricing, Invision is more inclined to large enterprises, while Figma is more friendly to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, in addition to the free starter version - these factors have also caused Invision to lose some customers.
It is worth noting that due to the difference in the market environment, domestic "collaborative design" unicorns are still relatively rare, and mainstream players include Modao, Instant Design, Blue Lake, Gimmick, Pixso, etc.
Among them, the relatively large one is Blue Lake, which has completed a financing of 1 billion yuan in 2022 and is among the unicorns, and the rest are between the A and C rounds and are in the growth stage.
The enlightenment left by Invision to domestic enterprises is that the track of collaborative design is bright, but the competition is fierce, the product is the king, and the marketing is second.