Square to buy Weebly for $365M (opens in new tab)

I 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?

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.

Great 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.

I'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?

At 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?

How 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.

As 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.)

I'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.

About 10x, as they raised $35M in 2014: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/weebly

My 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.

After 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-intervie...

Square looking to take on SquareSpace.

A 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.

I 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.

They where evaluated 4 years ago at $455 Million. Raised $35 million on this evaluation.

https://outline.com/EzRTkg

This 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.

Not 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.

Congrats drusenko and team!

I checked out their site and their example sites look really nice. Seems like Weebly.com is running on their platform too (good sign).

Ah, well... Consider this a winning lottery ticket that I didn't pull the trigger on. Could have joined pretty early.

It'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.

I 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?

How many square employees freaked out when they went public at $12/share and sold off.

Wonder what most people do in that situation...

I adore Weebly. This seems like a bargain!

How will this affect Shopify stocks?

For a moment there I had vision of a sweet Figaro Castle themed website template.