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Square to buy Weebly for $365M
- jpdb 8y agoAt first I thought it was Squarespace since they are in a similar market, but it seems to be the financial company Square. I wonder what their intentions are?
- adpirz 8y agoVerticals for small business. Now they're a one-stop-shop for payments _and_ a website.
- seem_2211 8y agoThis seems like a good way for them to differentiate against Stripe.
- snuxoll 8y agoSquare and Stripe fit very different markets, there's some overlap in both could be used to power eCommerce sites but Square mostly targets traditional merchants selling products and services, Stripe targets developers looking to add payments to their product (SaaS, online marketplaces, etc.) Either way, this is a perfect fit for Square - they already offer simple "one-page" web stores for merchants, tying in a full-featured website or store instead makes a lot of sense.
- simonk 8y agoSquare already does websites for your online store https://squareup.com/online-store https://squareup.com/online-store easy way to get customers if you already have their website to offer a store for them as well.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 8y agoAbout 10x, as they raised $35M in 2014: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/weebly https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/weebly
- khuknows 8y agoI imagine the investors are after 10x the valuation, not the amount raised.
- minimaxir 8y ago...and apparently it was raised at a $455M valuation. Hmm. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/22/weebly-series-c/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/22/weebly-series-c/
- dhruvarora013 8y agoYeah I can't tell if the employees would be disappointed or thrilled? But I guess an exit is an exit.
- tejasmanohar 8y agoLikely depends on when you joined. The Series C investors had to get ~10% of the company for $35MM to get their money back so I doubt they did so well, but I bet it's a win for early investors, employees, and of course, the founders.
- avree 8y agoI mean, any exit could be spun as a 'win' for the founders. Still surprising that a company that was by all reports highly profitable decided to sell for what is basically a down round.
- 0xCMP 8y agoI checked out their site and their example sites look really nice. Seems like Weebly.com is running on their platform too (good sign).
- dlevine 8y agoI assume this was a strategic move - Square seems to be buying businesses in adjacent markets that are more profitable than credit card processing and that are complementary to their offering. I'm guessing that small local businesses tend to use website creators, and it's mostly profit (once you have a good tool). Does anyone have any more insight?
- vm 8y agoPrecisely. Square has a sticky customer relationship with SMBs, a customer segment that has been tough to sell to because of high CAC and high churn. Now that Square owns this customer relationship, it is selling adjacent services to those customers and making more money over time (increasing LTV). Square ecosystem partners will get replaced by Square directly over time; like how Twitter ate all its ecosystem partners with its own competitive offerings.
- aviv 8y agoI've heard rumors of Square trying to buy Dialpad.com.
- rmason 8y agoAccording to Crunchbase Weebly has 50 million users and I'm guessing they're mostly small businesses which would all be perfect prospects for Square. Not a bad outcome for them as they sold for roughly 10X what they've raised. Competitors Wix and Squarespace have raised much more money and would probably have been too rich for Square to buy. Wix is now a public company too.
- wtvanhest 8y agoProduct line acquisitions and cross selling are one of the most successful acquisition strategies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- avip 8y ago> According to Crunchbase Weebly has 50 million users I don't see that number, but Weebly cannot have 50M customers. That's a 1.5 order-of-magnutude error.
- vm 8y agoGreat exit for a team that hadn't raised much $ + great acquisition for Square given the easy upsell path to all its SMB customers. For perspective, competitor Wix is a $4B market cap company at a ~$500M revenue run-rate. Shopify, which is quite different, has a $12B market cap at ~$1B run-rate. This is a massive market.
- goshx 8y agoBack in 2004 I built a similar platform for a guy that was in love with MLM stuff. Too bad he was focusing on the wrong stuff and I was completely unexperienced in regards to entrepreneurship. We could be in a much better situation today. Sigh
- chatmasta 8y agoI wouldn’t be too hard on yourself, I think a lot of people were in this position. A GUI for creating websites was not really a groundbreaking idea; weebly hit the market with the perfect product at the perfect time, just as frontend tech became powerful enough to enable a solid GUI. I myself had dinewebs.com with the same idea for the restaurant vertical, but as a 14 year old I couldn’t even finish the project!
- goshx 8y agoThank you! I agree... that was when DHTML and VBScript were a thing. Not even JQuery was created. "AJAX" was just JS loading content in hidden frames... good times though.
- mrnobody_67 8y ago625K subscribers @ $10 per month = $80m run rate. $365m exit = 4.5x revenue compared to 12x for Shopify and 8x for Wix. Quite a discount. Late stage investors from 2014 who put in money at $455m valuation just getting their cash back. 0 return for 4 years of capital being tied up (vs. 80%+ for even an SP500 Index fund)
- toephu2 8y agoGreat exit for the founders, horrible exit for the employees. In 2014 Weebly was worth $455m [1]. 4 years later in 2018 it is worth $365m. Imagine how much more an employee could have made working for 4 years at a public BigCo with RSUs you can sell every year. This is just another startup lottery failure. Employees got screwed. [1] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/22/weebly-valued-at-455-million-amid-website-building-boom/ https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/22/weebly-valued-at-455...
- 1123581321 8y agoI hope Square can accelerate Weebly’s growth. It’s disappointing that Wix has beaten them so badly in the starter website market because, in my experience and having used both backends, Weebly’s sites are way better for the same amount of user effort.
- DanCarvajal 8y agoSquare looking to take on SquareSpace.
- jonny_eh 8y agoMore likely Square is taking on Shopify.
- amrrs 8y agoI'm not sure if anyone uses weebly these days. Back in my college, when I was running a solo business, weebly hosted my website and I proudly printed the site url on my business card. It was the same time when Wix had flash based design. And when Flash vanished one would expect similar fate for Wix. But instead Weebly vanished which is a shame. Squarespace is something that Weebly could have built. But it's ironic now to see Weebly joining Square which is another bunch of missed opportunities. The touted Jobs 2.0 Jack Dorsey never seemed to have turned around it.
- SwellJoe 8y agoI'm not sure you're talking about the same company as everyone else. Weebly, AFAIK, always had consistent growth; there was no time in the past where you could say they were doing better than today, I don't think.
- toephu2 8y agoI'm pretty sure valuation-wise they were doing better in 2014 than today... https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/22/weebly-valued-at-455-million-amid-website-building-boom/ https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/22/weebly-valued-at-455...
- SwellJoe 8y agoIs valuation what really matters? I mean, I understand from an investment perspective and from the perspective of people who were hired at that time that valuation matters. But, from a business health perspective, doesn't number of users and revenue matter (a lot) more? Aren't they up from 2014 on those metrics?
- ggg9990 8y agoA bit of a disappointing exit for what was considered an IPO candidate. I think they only knew how to make a great product and were clotheslined by Squarespace and Wix’s giant ad campaigns feeding a super optimized funnel management system.
- tlrobinson 8y agoCongrats drusenko and team!
- AndrewWarner 8y agoAfter reading about Weebly's growth on Hacker News, a few years ago I interviewed the founder about how they did it: https://mixergy.com/interviews/david-rusenko-weebly-interview/ https://mixergy.com/interviews/david-rusenko-weebly-intervie...
- AndrewWarner 8y agoI think the first time I really noticed a Weebly blog was on the bottom of Jessica Livingston's site: http://www.foundersatwork.com/ http://www.foundersatwork.com/
- AndrewBissell 8y agoMy wife and I launched a small winery a couple of years ago and Weebly has been essential for our online sales. They were the only affordable e-commerce solution offering zipcode- and state-based shipping charges and sales tax. We actually tried starting out with Square's Online Store because we were already using their PoS stuff, but it was just a bit too raw to suit our needs. Great move for Square IMO. Congrats to the Weebly team.
- benmowa 8y agolooks like the sales tax is powered by Avalara
- Romanulus 8y agoFor a moment there I had vision of a sweet Figaro Castle themed website template.
- cm2012 8y agoI adore Weebly. This seems like a bargain!
- SwellJoe 8y agoCongratulations to David, Chris, and Dan! I've always thought Weebly was one of the best startups in our batch, and the top one I would have wanted to invest in had I been in a position to do so (and I've said so a bunch of times over the years, even very early on). This is, I think, a smart move for Square. Stripe has been moving up the stack aggressively (and much faster than Square, who were very effective in the beginning, but kinda stopped innovating), making it easier and easier for people without a dedicated software team to build out an online sales channel. Weebly has a lot of that stack already built. You can build a website and sell things in a very short time with Weebly already. I imagine Square will be making the "sell things" part of it even more core to the experience. And, businesses do not change payment processing often. If you lock them in when they're brand new and tiny and using something like Weebly, while also providing paths for growth, you'll probably keep them basically forever. We've rebuilt our website and ecommerce basically from the ground up four times since we launched the company a dozen years ago and have only changed payment providers once (maybe twice, I can't remember if we launched with Authorize.net and moved to PayPal soon after or if we switched before launch...partly based on ease of deployment and management). That's a lot of money made on that initial customer acquisition. To get businesses earlier than that, you need to have a really clear path from "I don't have a website at all" to "I have a website and can sell things with it." Enjoy your private islands, or the next project, or whatever y'all decide to do next.
- StudentStuff 8y agoThing is, when you start processing normal sums of money (>$200k/month), both Square and Stripe start to bleed you in fees. If your sub-$5k a month in volume both make sense to use as a processor, but as you get up there in volume, changing to any of their (much larger) competitors can easily halve that cost and save you a few grand a month in fees.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y agoWhat about negotiating a lower rate at that volume or do they only want to target small businesses?
- zapita 8y agoI'm surprised that the price isn't higher. It was my understanding that Weebly is highly profitable, which would normally give them lots of leverage in any negotiation. What am I missing? Maybe there is a ridiculous amount of Square stock for the team on top of the price paid to shareholders? Or growth is flattening dramatically and they panicked?
- luckydata 8y agoThose businesses are not very valuable. Their clientele is highly unstable (small businesses go out of business a lot), not very profitable and the space for revenue expansion is very small. On top of that there's a healthy amount of competition.
- pbreit 8y agoIt does seem low. I think all the stock compensation was included in the published amount. According to reports, Weebly raised a Series C in 2014 at $455m/$490m valuation. Competitor Wix which is public is currently valued at $3.9b on I would guess about 5x the revenues.
- pbreit 8y agoNote: Roelof Botha on BOD of both companies.
- sssasdasd3 8y agoAsdasdasd
- eldavido 8y agoZero network effects, escalating acquisition costs as the space gets more saturated, and few other potential acquirers. Having said that, this isn't a bad outcome by any stretch so congrats to them.
- zapita 8y agoYes it is absolutely a fantastic outcome for the team, probably life-changing for many of them. If their situation was what you described, they played their hand very well.
- matthew349hall 8y agoThis is nice to hear. Weebly was how I built my first website, inspiring me to learn how to code.
- MH15 8y agoThis is nice to hear. Weebly was how I built my first website, inspiring me to learn how to code. I first used Weebly to make a website for my "lawn mowing business" almost 10 years ago. I remember trying to edit CSS rules in terrible ways and enjoying it anyway on an old Dell laptop with 512 mb of RAM.
- sssasdasd3 8y ago> Square to buy Weebly for $365M Asd
- foobaw 8y agoHow will this affect Shopify stocks?
- vit05 8y agoThey where evaluated 4 years ago at $455 Million. Raised $35 million on this evaluation. https://outline.com/EzRTkg https://outline.com/EzRTkg
- ArlenBales 8y agoAs much as I don't want it (I'm a web developer after all), I'm surprised Facebook hasn't tried to compete deeper in this space yet. They already have a firm grasp on many businesses. So many local businesses in my city only have a Facebook page and don't have a website, or if they do it's extremely outdated (hasn't been updated in years and lacks search engine ranking). Facebook is the website for many local businesses. All Facebook needs to do is add a few more features: - Online menus (most restaurants are just uploading a photo of their menus) - Online reservations, and online ordering (for delivery/pick-up) - Ecommerce store (payments, delivery, etc.) and management (inventory) for retail shops (boutiques, etc.)
- jvagner 8y agoHaving just spent some time reviewing the market of what you just wrote on behalf of a consulting client, I can tell you that this market is ripe...
- bluthru 8y agoGoogle now offers editable menus: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/News-Updates/Launch-Menus-Now-Editable-in-GMB-Web/td-p/1627781# https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/News-Updates/Launc...
- bogomipz 8y agoI thought it was interesting that the article mentioned Weebly competes with Medium. Wouldn't they be competing more so with someone like Squarespace than a blogging platform? Or am I missing something?
- notaspider 8y agoI always automatically think of Square (now SquareEnix) when I read headlines about Square.
- blairanderson 8y agoHow many square employees freaked out when they went public at $12/share and sold off. Wonder what most people do in that situation...
- z3t4 8y agoHow come these card companies can have such huge margins !? It's effectively a 3% tax on everything going directly to a small set of private businesses. The government should issue a government sponsored payment alternative with free transactions, which would also solve the problem with micro-transactions.
- elvirs 8y agothats what Dodd Frank bill did. 0.5% on Debit cards
- diogenescynic 8y agoThat’s another why reason republicans and the banking cabal want to over-turn Dodd-Frank.
- loceng 8y agoIt is quite insane something as foundational to a society, to an economy, the transaction of payments, isn't provided by the government - along with fraud protection.
- fapjacks 8y agoAh, well... Consider this a winning lottery ticket that I didn't pull the trigger on. Could have joined pretty early.
- dandellion 8y agoIt's really annoying when a page ignores my language settings and displays the language they want based on location. It's double annoying when there's no way to give feedback without registering.
- mustythemustang 8y agoNot long ago Weebly was neck and neck competing with Wix & Squarespace and had a superior product in some areas (ex. eCommerce). Unfortunately, the product became stale and lacked vision over the last 3 years. As a result deserting many of their users. This was a "take what you can get" deal for the founders. Hope Square can recharge the product with an innovative vision.