Squarespace is announcing its first acquisition today, a 13-year-old company called Acuity Scheduling that allows businesses to manage their online appointments.
Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena noted that the company has been expanding beyond website building already — he said he now wants to provide tools around online presence (i.e. building a website), commerce and marketing.
To do that, Squarespace has been building its own products, but in this case, Casalena said it made more sense to just bring Acuity on-board, particularly because there’s already an integration between Acuity’s scheduling software and Squarespace’s page-building tools.
“What [CEO Gavin Zuchlinski] had built at Acuity is a great business,” he said. “It’s been growing pretty organically up until this point, with 45 employees who really understand the space and a very customer-centric culture. They have a great product. That would just be faster for us [to acquire them], versus building our own product.”
The plan is to build more integrations over time, while also continuing to support Acuity as a standalone product. The entire Acuity team is joining Squarespace, with Zuchlinski become vice president of Acuity within the larger company.
Asked whether this means we can expect Squarespace to make more acquisitions in the future, Casalena said, “I think we just are able to look at things that are going to be a little more meaningful right now … Our size kind of opened our perspective to what’s possible.”
This also comes as the email marketing product that Squarespace launched last year is coming out of beta with new features like campaign scheduling and improved analytics.
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Squarespace makes its first acquisition with Acuity Scheduling
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