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Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

investors.squarespace.com

231–240 of 414 posts

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#231
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been procrastinating transferring my domains after Google sold them to squarespace. Now they're getting sold again... Are domains the new junk loans?

Wait until you get Domain Backed Securitization.

Oh gosh wait until Amazon sells securities based on their v4 addresses then aggressively starts making their services v6-first lol.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a fair amount of business internationally and WhatsApp is increasingly becoming a default. There is Signal, Slack, Telegram, iMessage, etc plus a multitude of many other options including uploading via our website. Places like Japan and Germany are still pretty big on faxes so I guess it depends where on the continuum the customers are. Thus far our only email issues have been on the client side and they're the…

That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications. It just screams unprofessional. You’re not going to see Meta employees do business over WhatsApp, and it’s their product. Like, sure, you could probably get away with it. Once at most places. And even then, it wo…

Again, I think that view is US centric. Many other countries have WhatsApp as the default. I'm not even suggesting that they should have WhatsApp as the default, just describing the reality as I am seeing it. And yes even the biggest companies and government entities are using WhatsApp. When I was traveling through LATAM they were taking pictures of passports on their phones and sent off for checking via WhatsApp - a US passenger freaked out over it and I had to explain to her that this is just how it's done in LATAM.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#233

I hear that PE destroys products and culture to make money at all costs, but i don’t get how that can net them back the >$6 billion they paid for a company with <$300 million yearly revenue and negative profit.

those are quarterly revenue numbers. they are at >1B in revenue

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#235
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#236
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#237
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm already self hosting an e-mail server with no problems in deliverability or receiving. No limitations on aliases. No more artificial limits. Cyrus-imap + postfix. If I need to scale up, can migrate from sqlite to postgres.

Over 3 years running mailinabox. Zero problems after first month of hiccups. Installed a second server last year. That had 0 problems since day 1. I feel like people overblow the whole email thing. Want you to pay for tuta et al when you can build your own and manage it. I havent updated both servers in a year. Zero problems. Again, people maybe confuse miab and other email servers maintenance with maintaining nextcl…

Similar here, but mailu (docker-compose) setup... which works very well, aside from deliverability issues to some outlook.com domains. Gmail, and most others (even other MS domains) deliver fine.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#238
post #77

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.

I was part of some social computing facilities and burnt my own and friends’ money to offer basic stuff for people to publish basic html pages, small twitter like service, one nextcloud and one invidious instance. Within weeks, nextcloud was filled with pirated content sharing, html pages were hosting fake bank login phishing pages and moderation became horror. Our colo provider sent us some written warnings to sort this out immediately.

While I still inspire to launch a twitter 1.0 plain old less featured version, but the thought of moderation kills my motivation immediately. :(

There are still public computing facilities here, like sdfeu, envs.net etc, am not sure how they handle the moderation of spam and pirated content attack.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications. It just screams unprofessional. You’re not going to see Meta employees do business over WhatsApp, and it’s their product. Like, sure, you could probably get away with it. Once at most places. And even then, it wo…

Again, I think that view is US centric. Many other countries have WhatsApp as the default. I'm not even suggesting that they should have WhatsApp as the default, just describing the reality as I am seeing it. And yes even the biggest companies and government entities are using WhatsApp. When I was traveling through LATAM they were taking pictures of passports on their phones and sent off for checking via WhatsApp - a…

> I was traveling through LATAM they were taking pictures of passports on their phones and sent off for checking via WhatsApp - a US passenger freaked out over it and I had to explain to her that this is just how it's done in LATAM.

You had a mid-sized to corporate business sending passports over WhatsApp? I highly doubt that.

This is not even coming from a “US-centric” view. This is coming from a “that will never pass any sort of compliance or hell corporate governance” sniff test.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Squarespace spent 40% of revenue and nearly 60% of gross profit on marketing and sales last quarter [1]. You could literally generate over $200mm in free cash flow by cutting marketing in half. This is a forced pivot from growth to sustaining a good business. [1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001496963/d08174f...

It would be interesting to get better SaaS metrics, specifically on customer churn. I can't find that in the linked document. They are growing, but how much of that marketing spend is needed for growth vs just maintaining the customer base? I don't know what the customer makeup of Squarespace is. It could be that by volume their typical customers are business that fail a lot, or have a high amount of churn (think sol…

> could be that by volume their typical customers are business that fail a lot, or have a high amount of churn...significant amount of this marketing could be required just to maintain a constant customer base

If this is the case, Permira and its lenders are bailing the public out of a shit business on their own dime.

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