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Comment by jonathanjaeger | Hacker News Reader

I've never used a site like Weebly, Wix, or Shopify, though I have seen Squarespace's interface when someone was building a site one time and my dad used Weebly after I recommended it to him (seemed easy to use).

I'm curious their main sources of customer acquisition. I assume a lot of its word-of-mouth and organic, but I'm curious how much marketing they do. Squarespace has been huge in the podcast space doing advertising and did that big Super Bowl ad splash. Wix seems to have been around for a while so I see many of their out-dated designed sites.

Edit: I did just get retargeted via Facebook ads exchange after visiting Weebly's site, so they are doing at least some advertising :)

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I have a small, niche website business so I know a little about this (we aren't on the scale of these guys but do low 7-figures).

Wix and Squarespace at least are spending a ton on PPC customer acquisition. One analysis we saw put their AdWords spend at $10-25K per day (though, I'm not sure how accurate that is).

Also, both Wix and Squarespace advertise on terrestrial radio and television. Squarespace had a Super Bowl ad and I regularly see their ads on Shark Tank (ABC). I hear Wix ads quite often on AM radio.

Squarespace was on Inc's 5000 list in 2011 with 2010 revenues of 11.7M.

Wix went public recently. They had 2012 revenues of $43.68M with a loss of $15M [1].

In the "general purpose business website" space, I think all 3 (Wix, SS, Weebly) see it as a "winner take all / own the market" play (it probably is). So, they are all spending as much as possible to acquire customers.

Wix clearly isn't profitable. I doubt SqaureSpace is. I think it's admirable that Weebly is ... but I almost wonder if they need to spend more to compete.

Won't you include Godaddy in the "general purpose business website" space?

If you do, you need to also throw in Godaddy competitors like 1&1 etc. Many have website builders of their own.

afaik SS is claiming it is profitable and it was always breaking even. There was an interview somewhere where the owner said until recent the only outside money was $30K loan from his dad (I think it was one with Alexis Ohanian).

Got a link? Wikipedia confirms the $30K loan from dad, but can't find the interview on google.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGPj5SOUrn8 I think thats the one. Anyways - imo its extremely interesting and worth watching.

They raised $40M last week [1] ... $78M in total [2]

Almost 300 employees, spending a ton on ad/marketing, and raising that much money–I can't see how they're profitable. I could be way wrong though.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/04/15/squarespace-r...

[2] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/squarespace

I run a small web shop and have dealt with Wix. Big warning to those considering it or recommending it to friends. Wix uses AJAX extensively and doesn't support 301 redirects. If you are moving a site to Wix there's no way to file 301 redirects (kiss your search engine placement goodbye). If you're moving from a Wix site, the hashbangs used in the file URL's make it almost impossible to create redirects to your new site's pages.

Haven't checked out Weebly yet but I hope they took a "standards approach" to their sites/code and allow for proper redirects.

Update: Very pleased to see this: http://kb.weebly.com/301-redirects.html

Wix comes from a flash site only background where SEO/Standards are hard to make work.

That explains it! I was shocked when my client called me in a panic because their site dropped off a cliff in regards to their rankings. Cost them in the neighborhood of tens-of-thousands of dollars in ad revenue and member goodwill.

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