Intuit Buys Docstoc for a Price of Up to $50 Million to Round Out Small Business Services
Intuit has acquired Docstoc, the electronic document service aimed at the sale and storage of a wide variety of documents for businesses. — While the well-known Silicon Valley-based business software company …
Context & Ripple Effects
Intuit has been reassembling its small-business franchise through serial acquisition: Homestead Technologies in 2007, Mint.com in 2009, and Demandforce for $424 million in 2012. The September 2013 drastic overhaul of QuickBooks Online — built partly on visual cues from Mint — signaled the strategy's center of gravity: a cloud-native suite competing harder for small businesses than at any point in the product's history.
Docstoc, a service for storing and selling business documents, fills a content-and-workflow gap in that stack for a price of up to $50 million — a modest figure next to Demandforce, consistent with a tuck-in rather than a transformational deal. The announcement drew same-day pickups from VentureBeat, TechCrunch, PandoDaily, Gigaom, Inc.com and Forbes, reflecting how closely the small-business software crowd tracks every Intuit move.
First-order effects
- Docstoc's document library and storage tools become part of Intuit's small-business offering, giving the revamped QuickBooks Online another adjacent service to bundle alongside accounting, payments and marketing.
- Docstoc stops competing as a standalone destination for business documents, and its team and catalog are absorbed into Intuit's organization.
Second-order effects
- Independent document- and form-services startups lose their most obvious acquirer-independent positioning: with Intuit owning documents end-to-end, their realistic exit narrows to selling into someone else's suite.
- The accumulating string of deals — Homestead, Mint, Demandforce, now Docstoc — raises the bar for rivals overhauling their own small-business clouds to match suite-level bundling rather than compete tool-by-tool.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, small-business software consolidates around full-suite platforms where documents, marketing and finance are features of an accounting core — echoing the analyst concern from 2009 that merger waves benefit startup founders seeking exits while narrowing the open ecosystem of standalone services.
The trend: Intuit is methodically assembling an end-to-end small-business platform around QuickBooks Online through modest tuck-in acquisitions, and each purchase further squeezes the standalone services market it buys from.