Inside Our Bid to Rescue Weebly from Square

As thousands of you know, in 2023 Drew and I started Articulation. We were generally driven by our lack of interest in the product roadmap provided by Square. We also knew that we could provide an alternative to current Weebly users that were, and are being left behind by Square's lack of support. We saw the opportunity to do something we loved, and we took it.

Drew and I are fortunate enough to have been with Weebly since some of the earliest days. Drew was the first engineer and I joined a bit after. Our passion for Weebly is entrenched in nearly 15 years of working with millions of Weebly customers. Square purchased Weebly in 2018, and while we were happy to have the outcome of our hard work have meaningful value, we were continuously disappointed with the stewardship of Weebly under Square's leadership.

In May 2024, we saw another opportunity. Articulation was a very different product back then. We'd spent months building an editor, but didn't yet know how to spread the word. We hadn't even built our Weebly conversion tool, and had no clear intention to yet.

And so, we tried a different path. Here's our story.

The choice was clear: Try to buy Weebly

We leveraged our friends and family, we leveraged banks, we leveraged private equity. We had a viable and ready option for a significant amount of money to try to bid. The type of numbers that made it difficult to sleep. We were throwing everything at this for the sake of the future of this wonderful brand.

We understood the business of Weebly very well, and we'd even quietly put together a team of former Weebly executives to provide us with guidance and legitimacy for our bid. We were all-in, and we'd built one heck of a plan to get through it. We were ready.

We took our pages of documents, our presentations, our hopes and dreams that would have impacted millions of Weebly websites by providing a new path forward, and we asked our former colleagues a simple question: Are you interested in divesting Weebly?

We can't speak to most of the internal and behind-the-scenes details and conversations, but we knew we were in the ballpark for an offer. We knew we had the ability to do things that no other bidder could. We could separate Weebly's editor and infrastructure from Square, and we knew we could move quickly.

We also knew that we had to move quickly, as the Weebly brand was being actively tarnished on a day-to-day basis. Every day that passed meant that Weebly lost customers, as it is an abandoned product within the Square umbrella.

To our surprise, Square's leadership showed interest. We'd broken the ice appropriately, and we were beyond ecstatic. I called our largest investor. They were happy for us, but showed restraint. They were right.

Our process was straightforward

We met with members of the Square M&A team a handful of times. We presented our data, and we presented our offer. We presented the best path forward for Weebly customers. Ultimately, as anyone reading this now knows, it was not successful. We were not given the opportunity to provide a counter-offer, and we were not given the opportunity to provide the best home for your websites.

In a single, 3 sentence email, it was over.

We reached out to find a way forward. We did not get a response.

It's not clear why Square/Block didn't continue the conversation with what was likely the most qualified bidder.

We truly believe that it's becoming clear that Square no longer cares about this asset they acquired to much fanfare in 2018. It's not publicly clear why they'd throw away this business.

Perhaps the customers here have outlived their usefulness to such a company, focused on financial tools and products that never really had anything to do with Weebly in the first place. As with any large company, the future of certain products is based on the ever-changing whims of a select few. Weebly doesn't seem to have made the cut for the current regime.

We're always happy to reconsider, and we hope that one day we can find a path forward for every Weebly user that supported us in the past.

Until then, we've made it easy to convert your Weebly site to Articulation.