Would it have gone private if it was such a great business at this moment ?

Squarespece looked like a fairly competent company, even as they were perhaps overspending on advertisement. Their competitors don't seem to be doing that much better except for Automattic perhaps.

Yes. Private equity likes cash making business machines.

The bet is they make money now, but could be trimmed and squeezed to make even more.

Like Sears and Hertz?

There are different strategies. You can buy up dying companies and try to turn them around with management changes (and debt), you can sell off companies for scrap, you can buy up money printing machines and run them hotter.

Just to show that these bets are not without risk, the Sears bet failed bigtime. Lampert lost a ton of money.

People love to vilify PE for destroying companies, but a lot of these companies were dying anyway, and PE was trying a last-ditch, high-risk reorg to save them.

It's still possible to make money in this situation. Buy a company, then have it buy itself back using debt. The PE firm gets most of its initial capital investment back then secures a revenue stream in the form of management fees. The company can still go bankrupt, but as long as it sticks around long enough to pay back enough to the parent company that it turned a profit, things worked out. The bond holders can fight over the scraps post-bankruptcy.

Ah, but stock market investors also like cash making business machines.

If private equity is able to outbid the stock market, they must have spotted a way they can extract more value. Sometimes that's by raiding the pension fund and cranking up prices. Other times it's a distressed business and better management can turn it around.

Neither is exactly good news for customers.

The market care more about growth

There's Wix, Webflow, and others already. Seems pretty crowded.

Which is a pretty good sign the market is viable.

You only need to "be better".

And here "better", means eveything on can think of, including NOT spending money.

Sadly that often amounts to being more heavily marketed

That has been the game, money was "free" and VCs wanted that unicorn status. But that is also a huge liability.

When the asteroid came, only the small mammals survived.

Of course I'm talking about one way that could possibly lead to a sucessful business. There are many ways, nothing is garanteed but that also applies to failure.

That means the TAM is fully owned and you have to work that much harder to grab a slice.

"Competition is for losers."

I suppose if you're really passionate about the space, go ahead, but it's incredibly crowded with dozens of players. Some are even owned by the fintech giants.

There's a whole ecosystem of adjacent services-for-SMBs providers in hosting, domains, online advertising etc. and all the companies are running the "commoditize their products complements" playbook. Anyone trying to enter the market is competing against prices that don't even make sense in isolation.

I'm curious, have MBAs made anything better for the masses, ever?

Couldn't you ask the same of most programmers? One way or another, everybody is pushing paper or pixels. Is the adtech developer at Google, FB, Amazon somehow morally superior to a finance bro that takes a job at Carlyle Group?

Depends on how you interpret what a programer's role and skin in the game is. by the Google/FB/Amazon level, the programmer is just another cog in the machine being told what to make by a director, who reports to/with some MBAs.

For smaller companies, I'd say programmers have done their share of good and evil. the AI sector is in real time gray area with some very malicious actions not too long ago to try and be first to market.

Better here usually means finding a path to lower cost of acquiring customers.

Of course retention helps too but my gut is that Squarespace had reasonably low churn but increasingly elevated customer acquisition costs along with no real enterprise traction.

Most young folks don't understand URLs anymore? "Find us on App Store" or "Find us on Social Media" is the new internet. QR codes that takes you directly into a walled garden is the new web.

Id argue that QR codes are doing pretty well at keeping bespoke URLs alive (although it pains me to see people use qrco.de or other qr code generators that automatically shorten the URL and thus could, at any point, maliciously redirect people to ads or malware instead. I don't see bitly doing this but it's unnecessary risk).

I agree, it's sad to see the QR URL redirects which may go offline and are presumably tracking when a pure option is built into the OS: https://education.apple.com/resource/250011714

I see people using "linktree" to crosslink all their different social media accounts together and it really bums me out in a way I can't describe.

Linktree became the go to because social media networks only give you a single link to display on your bio.

And they also don't like it when that single link points to onlyfans.

Who'd guess why, Onlyfans (and related) spammers are the scourge of the Internet these days.

Google is the scourge.

I don't see OF spammers blasting Google with spam, but I see tons of OF (and other porn) spam on Twitter and Reddit.

Sure, but depending on another single point of failure - as opposed to linking to a url you actually own - is what distresses me

Seeing the proliferation of Linktree makes me feel bad for the folks like about.me who had this idea years and years ago and never caught fire.

Linktree seems like the natural evolution of About.me.

Rember AOL keywords?

Most people never understood URLs.

There's always a crowd of incumbents. They always think they have their little piece locked down. That's what makes it a good time to move.

When PE steps in, it usually means the growth is gone. They are often operators with teams who know how to run a lean business. If Squarespace had some huge growth estimates, PE would not have been able to afford to take them public.

So there may be an opportunity, but finding customers and funding will be hard.

I'm on it.