Squarespace S1
sec.gov
sec.gov
I know people say this stuff:
"You can't transfer your site away" - I know, but I can build a reasonable site in ~2 days, so the tradeoff is worth it and the sunk cost is lower
"But I want a fully custom design" - Yeah, fair enough, there is a cap on the high end of design with it but I think that cap is pretty high, especially in 7.1
"But it is making the whole internet look the same!" - Not really, between colors, photos and sections in 7.1 I just don't think this is true. If you use unsplash for all of your photos then maybe, but if you are doing that you are probably too small to care, worry about that when you hit 2MM in revenue
"But Wordpress is user friendly too" - No it isn't
As I write these I think that maybe it is just the perfect thing for my subset of clients (SMB), so read this from that perspective. I know this isn't really the discussion on this thread, I just wanted to see what experiences of others have been.
* The developer mode is poorly supported. For example: you can't copy your site if it is in developer mode (which means you can't setup a staging environment and everything you push to your site will be live instantly). The local development server is also very buggy and inconsistent with the production behavior. It feels like something that they developed early on in their road map and haven't spent much time on since then. If I could go back and do this over again, I'd pick an existing theme and just customize it instead of building out a whole theme in developer mode.
* The site is S-L-O-W with tons of bundled assets that it injects into your theme. I have no idea what any of it is doing, but it definitely increases page load.
That said, if you find yourself wanting a solid CMS that has the full breadth of WordPress like features but don't want to deal with the hosting, SquareSpace is a solid choice.
Most sites I've created are _usable_ in about ~500ms, though they take quite a bit longer to fully load. There do appear to be tons of scripts and tracking crap loaded after initial load, but through (what appears to be) above-the-fold handling and a pretty quick (200ms) time to first byte they appear fast-ish.
Do you add a lot of custom scripts?
This is exactly that.
Beyond the mom-and-pop flower shop down the street or the friend that needs a portfolio site...not so much. Squarespace is good for the aforementioned users because the platform makes it hard for them to create bad designs and do stupid things. Putting either of those types of users on a Wordpress site would just be a total nightmare.
HOWEVER, if you're even mildly tech-savvy, Squarespace (or site builders like Wix) become frustrating and limiting almost immediately.
This is why I believe Webflow is ultimately the answer. It addresses all the downsides of Wordpress with none of the limitations.
I think 5 years from now, Squarespace/Wix will completely own the mom-and-pop and portfolio space.
I think Webflow will ultimately own the space inhabited today by Wordpress (as well as static site generators), and be powering the marketing & content sites for most businesses. Which is where the real money is.
For example, take position: sticky. This CSS property is basically one-to-one mapped to a dropdown in Webflow. So I thought it would just work. But alas, just like the CSS pendant, it only works if the parent element has the correct properties. Also it only works in browsers that support it, and isn't polyfilled automatically.
Maybe what I'm asking for is technically not feasible, but then the UI should disable the option in such cases and not hide this in a support page imho.
I think a truly powerful website builder would have to leave the CSS paradigms behind and invent something new.
Creating HTML/CSS through a realtime updated UI is just so much faster and the better experience IMO. Its a great example of "Inventing on Principle," re: this great Bret Victor talk https://vimeo.com/36579366
That said, coding from scratch, while slower than using Webflow, isn't the real pain point for me. But I can see how someone less technical might see that as the real value.
The real hassle in building static sites from scratch is the nightmare of NPM, git, bad static site generator defaults, complicated headless CMSs configurations and fragile dependencies.
Not sure about static site generators though. They already have a pretty big head start. Netlify, Stackbit and others are constantly adding services for both tech savvy and non technical folks.
The area where Squarespace sets itself apart is really their available themes. Most are way better than Wordpress themes, and easier to change to suit your needs without much work. Static site generators like Gatsby just don't have the depth of themes like WP and Squarespace do. Its kind of the app store comparison. One is Apple and Android with millions of really good apps (WP, Squarespace) and the other is the MS app store which has a limited, sort of the run of the mill stuff (Gatsby, Netlify, Stackbit).
If WebFlow can offer better designs out of the box, then I agree, they will most likely own the space. Design will always be the X factor to me.
You know, that's alright with me in many cases. The internet is a utility, and consistency can allow for providing people with a normalized, accessible, fast, fine-tuned experience. A lot of the internet would benefit immensely from that. If it comes at the expense of your website not looking super cool or unique, that's probably fine - a lot of internet users aren't all that concerned with that.
I'm not saying squarespace offers that. Just – a lot of the internet being uniform isn't in and of itself a bad thing.
Only millions disagree. No big deal.
From an investment perspective, that's a pretty big positive. High switching costs locks existing customers in.
Frankly, from a product perspective it's short-sighted. Let people leave. Find out why. Fix the problem(s). But if you hold them hostage you're holding your own product back _and_ you're creating ill-will towards your brand. Lose, lose.
That's not forgivable.
Yes, there are higher migration costs if you use Squarespace. For a lot of people those are reasonable in exchange for lower up-front and maintenance costs. People should absolutely consider the lock-in factor but there's not a universal correct answer.
There's always a tradeoff.
If being able to easily lift and shift is important to you, no one is keeping you from hand-coding your site and/or using some sort of static site generator and hosting it on a generic platform.
If you write an application using AWS-specific services, you're not going to be able to trivially migrate that either. It's a tradeoff.
For me, it's not clear how Squarespace will be able to grow if their market is mom-and-pop shops. There are better economies of scale in targeting 1 enterprise accounts over 10 consumer accounts.
1. Support (fielding calls, answering emails, etc)
2. Updates (copy, design, patching)
3. Admin (billing, contracts)
And that's just off the top of my head. Having a client is rarely about just handling the hosting. You effectively become a technical resource and field all the duties that entails.
If you are on something that can't get hacked (static site) it is because you are a developer or at least pretty technical and the ease of use doesn't apply to you.
Again, this is all targeted at US (West Coast to be specific) SMB.
If hacked sites were really that much of an issue, then WP wouldn't be as popular as it is for business sites.
In any case, if you have a mature website, it's going to be complicated to switch from WP to Squarespace and vice versa. But with WP you still have the flexibility to host wherever you want, on whatever you want.
For backup, I either end up paying as much as Squarespace (WPEngine) or have to keep an eye on it to make sure its working.
I have no global stats on Wordpress hacks, of the clients I have running it (40???) I think probably 10 have been hacked. Zero have been hacked since moving to WPEngine (which is the first thing we do when we take over management), which is certainly something.
I'm not sure what the exact definition of mature website is, but I'm not sure it is that difficult. Certainly if you have 100s of pages, posts, articles etc. then it could / would take a while to make the move. At that point we're just talking about target market. Most of my clients have stopped posting tons of news / blogs because they were only doing it for SEO and it didn't really work anymore. In my world where sites have 25 pages with semi-limited complexity it just doesn't take long to move anymore.
I do certainly have clients with more complicated needs (member areas, ecommerce, etc.) but most of the time I just recommend they link out to that content and use another service (client portal in their main line of business app, shopify, etc.) rather than building it into their site.
Business owners have no idea how often they get hacked. They get hacked because business owners want a DIY approach and start installing plugins willy nilly without sandboxing and testing them, making their sites vulnerable to attack
September 2020:
Millions of WordPress sites are being probed and attacked with recent plugin bug
The sudden spike in attacks happened after hackers discovered and started exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in "File Manager," a popular WordPress plugin installed on more than 700,000 sites.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/millions-of-wordpress-sites-ar...
That's a hell of a vector for a hacker. Target one plugin - hit over 700K machines? Unreal.
You're not going to have any support with that though and lacking the CMS part of it, and if you want to use any of the more advanced features like Ecommerce then you're going to have to spend a while building that.
$5/yr for a whole site is simply not worth even talking about. It's not relevant.
The main caveat is that theoretically your costs could spike for some reason given you're paying based on usage. But if you're not doing anything complicated, I consider that pretty low odds.
I'm cheap when it comes to spending money on tech. I'm glad people are questioning the price.
We need more competition. It seems like we are just giving into the bigger companies, and I don't see the innovation I saw a few years ago.
(Fwiw I tried squarespace and found the UX awful)
Curious to see how the reception'll be for this, given they're not on the 'if we're not on a loss, we're not spending enough money to grow' path
> CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME/(LOSS) (In thousands)
Doesn't that mean they're not profitable? Or am I reading that wrong?
The section includes income, or loss, depending on the situation. Losses (negative income values) are typically represented with parenthesis.
Income of $25000: 25
Loss of $25000: (25)
168 million on R&D, 260 million on marketing&sales, 54 million on running the business, 10 million in interest payments
Wonder what all that R&D is for. Maybe they are working on a coronavirus vaccine.
Context is that Companies prefer to spend capex, because it produces “depreciable assets” (your soon to be legacy software system), that make financials look better.
Then they use this to allocate a proportion of the salary towards one bucket or another.
Of course the lines are fuzzy and arbitrary in many cases, but 80/20 Cap/Op is the typical net distribution in departments that employ software engineers, from what I’ve seen.
The problem with following US GAAP 350-40-05-1D[1] to the letter is that if you capitalize development costs then you generally should only do this for internally developed software. If you "externally market" said software (which is now a capitalized asset on the balance sheet), which usually means selling to external customers upon which your revenue is then derived, you have to derecognize the capitalized asset before you can record any revenue.
IFRS differs from FASB (US GAAP) in this regard; it's more in line with what you noted. Having said this, since Squarespace is based in the US and subjects themselves to US GAAP, they expense all of their R&D costs. Skimming the S-1 it was interesting to note the $10.6MM in R&D credits for 2020 only (possibly due to the pandemic; not sure).
[1] https://fasb.org/jsp/FASB/Document_C/DocumentPage?cid=117617...
One tidbit I recall about that is there are often tax grants for business development that include R&D expenditures. So while it often feels weird to think of your primary product as tangental to "research", there are potentially some tax benefits to categorize it as such.
Squarespace and Shopify would be an super combo. Individually they currently suck at the other's main area of focus - Shopify has weak design capabilities, Squarespace e-com is too basic - but together they would offer great value in terms of online presence for businesses and still keep their edge.
There are companies with large market caps that have small cash reserves and no structural access to large debt. In contrast there also companies with smaller market caps that have large cash reserves, established lines of credit and perhaps other instruments to leverage debt.
Wall Street is surprisingly bad at valuing those things (or maybe surprisingly good?).
People want to trade stocks that have unrealized value. That's why solid stocks like VZ and T barely can keep up with the S&P 500 growth. They are seen as companies with fully realized value. There's not too much for those companies to do besides solidifying their monopolies.
VIAC and AMC didn't fare well for additional stock offering while TSLA did it quite regularly in the last couple years.
Not that I know anything about this specific instance but the story can be... complicated. For example, would you say CenturyLink acquired Level 3 or did Level 3 subsume CenturyLink?
If you read the news headline, you'd probably say CenturyLink bought Level 3.
> CenturyLink to acquire Level 3 for $34 billion
> Telecommunications company CenturyLink is upgrading its network with the acquisition of Internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications in a deal valued at $34 billion.
> In the cash and stock transaction, Level 3 shareholders will get $26.50 and 1.4286 shares of CenturyLink stock for each share of Level 3 stock. At $66.50 per Level 3 share, that represents a premium of about 42% over Level 3 closing share price of $46.92 on Oct. 26. Included debt brings the deal to $34 billion, the companies said.
> When the transaction closes, expected by the third quarter of 2017, CenturyLink shareholders will own about 51% of the combined company, with Level 3 shareholders owning about 49%.
However, the new CenturyLink/Lumen CEO is the Level 3 CEO.
> Jeffrey K. Storey (born May 12, 1960) is an American business executive whose career has focused on the telecommunications industry. He was the president and chief executive officer of Level 3 Communications between April 11, 2013, and the company's acquisition by CenturyLink in 2017, at which point he became president and COO of the combined company. He became CEO of CenturyLink on June 1, 2018.
Accel/General Atlantic/Index Ventues own 80.8% of class A shares, but have total voting control of 14.8%.
CEO Anthony Casalena owns 75.7% of class B shares, and has 68.2% of voting.
this is what job security means.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699096835/squarespace-anthony... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC-dFd7Ekhk
Way for founders to raise money without giving control of the company to VC firms / hedge funds.
Settings - Advanced - Escape Key - flip the switch
Difference of $300m in operating income from sg&a (2020) and then $500m+ in balance sheet assets on the next page...
> Approximate date of commencement of proposed sale to public: As soon as practicable after this registration statement is declared effective.