5 ms·

Congratulations 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

Congratulations 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 9y ago
Thing 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 9y ago
  What about negotiating a lower rate at that volume or do they only want to target small businesses?
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    Presumably negotiating with competitors will save even more.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Most businesses starting on Weebly (or similar) will never grow over $200k/month. Most small business isn't like the tech industry...it doesn't scale exponentially once market fit is found. It scales based on number of widgets and number of employees and how many physical locations or whatever the business has, most small business growth is governed by the laws of physics.
  - aylmao 9y ago
    +1. I'd like to add that there's businesses that just don't want to grow after a certain size. Where I'm from there's plenty of small businesses that will make enough the family that owns it and their employees, and they're perfectly fine keeping it that way. Not all businesses are about taking over the world.
  - z3t4 9y ago
    I guess most "businesses" is just side projects, and doesn't make any money at all. But most importantly: They keep paying the monthly fees, (the same fee as those who actually make money).
  - ccccccccccccc 9y ago
    Also, once a company reaches $200k/month they're likely to move to a more powerful ecommerce platform like Shopify.
    - letientai299 9y ago
      Why is Spotify a better choice for that scale, snf not from the beginning, but only after that?
      - fouc 9y ago
        Weebly is likely to be simpler or more user-friendly for people just starting out. They might not know what level they will grow to yet, hence starting out with something more basic initially.
- traek 9y ago
  Once you hit any significant volume on Square, you can call them and move to a cost-plus rate.
  - ecommerceguy 9y ago
    Wow lots of bad information being said in the comments. My take as a B&M and online shop owner: If I see a business using Square that's not a coffee shop, I will probably not go back because I expect them to not be in business too long. It's a terrible platform. Same goes for Weebly. If I see an ecommerce website ranking well and using weebly for ecommerce I will have a team member research the market and then we beat that website in ranking. That being said I've yet to run into that for weebly platform specifically. It's that BAD. 2.4 mm annually is considered a small business? On what Planet? My experience says that's a very successful SB to say the least. 200k per month and not on Amazon? And your using Stripe/Square/Weebly and not getting InterX Plus? Tell me your website again..? Considering rates, square is usable at 5k/mnth or below, avg ticket $10 or below. Now if you were laundering money square is great since they do 0 background checks. I'm looking at pizza joints in Brooklyn... you know who you are. TLDR Square and weebly are terrible platforms for people that dont know any better. Ditto for Wix. I LOL IRL when someone says they use either of these platforms.
- elvirs 9y ago
  can you name a company that will accept any card like square does while halving the processing fees?
  - benmowa 9y ago
    larger volume typically means better rates, a bit outdated but for an overview of the landscape see: http://www.businessinsider.com/list-credit-card-processing-companies-2016-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/list-credit-card-processing-c...
- rco8786 9y ago
  I’m curious where you came up with $200k/month as a floor for “normal”
  - dexterdog 9y ago
    2.4m in revenue per year is a pretty small business.
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      It's not small for a business starting on Weebly. That was my point above. Weebly isn't where a business doing $2.4m in annual online revenue goes for a website. They have a team, or at least a person or contractor, responsible for building the website and ecommerce. All of my comments above were about the cottage industry where Weebly shines. There's a whole bunch of people making a little bit of money online...they aren't big clients for Square, but in aggregate they add up, and some of them will grow and Square will keep them as customers as long as they provide paths for growth. I think there's just a breakdown in what kinds of business we're talking about in this conversation. Yes, in many segments, $2.4m annual is a small business (it's well under 50 employees, probably well under 25 employees). But, as businesses with their sites on Weebly go, it's pretty big. Weebly has always been a place to go for a first website, particularly for non-technical businesses...it's just not the place you go when you're building a multimillion dollar business. So, both things can be true: $2.4m annual revenue is a relatively small business, and most businesses on Weebly will never grow to that size.
- pbreit 9y ago
  Do Stripe and Square still not compete much (ie Stripe mostly online, Square mostly offline)?
  - mootrichard 9y ago
    Square actually has APIs for online processing now. https://squareup.com/developers https://squareup.com/developers
    - pbreit 9y ago
      I knew they had them, just haven't seen much enthusiasm behind them. I would think a large majority of Square's offline customers also take payments online and would imagine a small minority are using Square for online. The credit card processing APIs seem to get lost in all the rest of the POS/order mgmt APIs. And they're already on an incompatible v2 which doesn't really seem all that much better, just different.
tintor 9y ago
"... the top one I would have wanted to invest in had I been in a position to do so ..." hindsight is 20/20
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Yeah, that's true. But, my foresight was pretty spot on about Weebly, too. I think the first time I said basically the same thing here on HN was in 2007 while we were still in YC together (and, multiple times since then). Certainly by 2008, I'd said it a few times in public places. Edit: Here's a few... 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352445 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216633 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37589
  - da02 9y ago
    How did you find these links? Google? Or did you write your own search app?
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      There are several HN search implementations. I happened to use: https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ But, Google would work with the `site:news.ycombinator.com` feature.
  - ec109685 9y ago
    You really nailed your Facebook prediction though ;)
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      Yeah, but lots of people predicted facebook's success at that point in time. I think the person I responded to was very much in the minority in thinking facebook wouldn't be able to ring the cash register when the time came. I'm more pleased to have been right about Weebly. They weren't necessarily the hottest company from our batch with investors at the time, and they weren't the odds-on favorite to be among the biggest YC exits. There have been, what, maybe a half dozen bigger exits in all of YC history, thus far, if that many? I haven't really kept up with YC companies that I don't know personally, and I'd guess that in five-to-ten years this may seem like a quaintly small exit by YC standards, but for now, that's a lot of money. I liked them based on their execution and pragmatism, not on their credentials or merely being smart (everybody in YC was wicked smart...it's the first time I'd been in a room where I was pretty confident that most of the folks in it were smarter than me), and I think investors may have been occasionally looking first at the companies out of Stanford/MIT/CMU/etc. I doubt they had trouble raising money but I never recalled them being widespread favorites among the Valley's cognoscenti either.

StudentStuff 9y ago

Thing 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 9y ago
What about negotiating a lower rate at that volume or do they only want to target small businesses?
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  Presumably negotiating with competitors will save even more.
SwellJoe 9y ago
Most businesses starting on Weebly (or similar) will never grow over $200k/month. Most small business isn't like the tech industry...it doesn't scale exponentially once market fit is found. It scales based on number of widgets and number of employees and how many physical locations or whatever the business has, most small business growth is governed by the laws of physics.
- aylmao 9y ago
  +1. I'd like to add that there's businesses that just don't want to grow after a certain size. Where I'm from there's plenty of small businesses that will make enough the family that owns it and their employees, and they're perfectly fine keeping it that way. Not all businesses are about taking over the world.
- z3t4 9y ago
  I guess most "businesses" is just side projects, and doesn't make any money at all. But most importantly: They keep paying the monthly fees, (the same fee as those who actually make money).
- ccccccccccccc 9y ago
  Also, once a company reaches $200k/month they're likely to move to a more powerful ecommerce platform like Shopify.
  - letientai299 9y ago
    Why is Spotify a better choice for that scale, snf not from the beginning, but only after that?
    - fouc 9y ago
      Weebly is likely to be simpler or more user-friendly for people just starting out. They might not know what level they will grow to yet, hence starting out with something more basic initially.
traek 9y ago
Once you hit any significant volume on Square, you can call them and move to a cost-plus rate.
- ecommerceguy 9y ago
  Wow lots of bad information being said in the comments. My take as a B&M and online shop owner: If I see a business using Square that's not a coffee shop, I will probably not go back because I expect them to not be in business too long. It's a terrible platform. Same goes for Weebly. If I see an ecommerce website ranking well and using weebly for ecommerce I will have a team member research the market and then we beat that website in ranking. That being said I've yet to run into that for weebly platform specifically. It's that BAD. 2.4 mm annually is considered a small business? On what Planet? My experience says that's a very successful SB to say the least. 200k per month and not on Amazon? And your using Stripe/Square/Weebly and not getting InterX Plus? Tell me your website again..? Considering rates, square is usable at 5k/mnth or below, avg ticket $10 or below. Now if you were laundering money square is great since they do 0 background checks. I'm looking at pizza joints in Brooklyn... you know who you are. TLDR Square and weebly are terrible platforms for people that dont know any better. Ditto for Wix. I LOL IRL when someone says they use either of these platforms.
elvirs 9y ago
can you name a company that will accept any card like square does while halving the processing fees?
- benmowa 9y ago
  larger volume typically means better rates, a bit outdated but for an overview of the landscape see: http://www.businessinsider.com/list-credit-card-processing-companies-2016-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/list-credit-card-processing-c...
rco8786 9y ago
I’m curious where you came up with $200k/month as a floor for “normal”
- dexterdog 9y ago
  2.4m in revenue per year is a pretty small business.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    It's not small for a business starting on Weebly. That was my point above. Weebly isn't where a business doing $2.4m in annual online revenue goes for a website. They have a team, or at least a person or contractor, responsible for building the website and ecommerce. All of my comments above were about the cottage industry where Weebly shines. There's a whole bunch of people making a little bit of money online...they aren't big clients for Square, but in aggregate they add up, and some of them will grow and Square will keep them as customers as long as they provide paths for growth. I think there's just a breakdown in what kinds of business we're talking about in this conversation. Yes, in many segments, $2.4m annual is a small business (it's well under 50 employees, probably well under 25 employees). But, as businesses with their sites on Weebly go, it's pretty big. Weebly has always been a place to go for a first website, particularly for non-technical businesses...it's just not the place you go when you're building a multimillion dollar business. So, both things can be true: $2.4m annual revenue is a relatively small business, and most businesses on Weebly will never grow to that size.
pbreit 9y ago
Do Stripe and Square still not compete much (ie Stripe mostly online, Square mostly offline)?
- mootrichard 9y ago
  Square actually has APIs for online processing now. https://squareup.com/developers https://squareup.com/developers
  - pbreit 9y ago
    I knew they had them, just haven't seen much enthusiasm behind them. I would think a large majority of Square's offline customers also take payments online and would imagine a small minority are using Square for online. The credit card processing APIs seem to get lost in all the rest of the POS/order mgmt APIs. And they're already on an incompatible v2 which doesn't really seem all that much better, just different.

tintor 9y ago

"... the top one I would have wanted to invest in had I been in a position to do so ..." hindsight is 20/20

SwellJoe 9y ago
Yeah, that's true. But, my foresight was pretty spot on about Weebly, too. I think the first time I said basically the same thing here on HN was in 2007 while we were still in YC together (and, multiple times since then). Certainly by 2008, I'd said it a few times in public places. Edit: Here's a few... 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352445 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216633 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37589
- da02 9y ago
  How did you find these links? Google? Or did you write your own search app?
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    There are several HN search implementations. I happened to use: https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ But, Google would work with the `site:news.ycombinator.com` feature.
- ec109685 9y ago
  You really nailed your Facebook prediction though ;)
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    Yeah, but lots of people predicted facebook's success at that point in time. I think the person I responded to was very much in the minority in thinking facebook wouldn't be able to ring the cash register when the time came. I'm more pleased to have been right about Weebly. They weren't necessarily the hottest company from our batch with investors at the time, and they weren't the odds-on favorite to be among the biggest YC exits. There have been, what, maybe a half dozen bigger exits in all of YC history, thus far, if that many? I haven't really kept up with YC companies that I don't know personally, and I'd guess that in five-to-ten years this may seem like a quaintly small exit by YC standards, but for now, that's a lot of money. I liked them based on their execution and pragmatism, not on their credentials or merely being smart (everybody in YC was wicked smart...it's the first time I'd been in a room where I was pretty confident that most of the folks in it were smarter than me), and I think investors may have been occasionally looking first at the companies out of Stanford/MIT/CMU/etc. I doubt they had trouble raising money but I never recalled them being widespread favorites among the Valley's cognoscenti either.