Squarespace Totally Gets How Deeply Meaningful A Domain Search Can Be

A website is just a website, but a domain is a placeholder for your dreams.

Squarespace gets this. In periods of rapid innovation, the best strategy is to capitalize on the wave of businesses that drive the change itself. It’s a smart approach because only a small percentage of the overall pool will succeed, but if you sell to the pool, it's easier to ride out the wave.

Silicon Valley refers to this as selling pickaxes during a gold rush. Why mine for gold or drill for oil when you can provide the necessary tools or infrastructure? It’s why John D. Rockefeller, who owned about 90% of America’s oil refineries and pipelines in the 1880s, has a name that's synonymous with extravagant wealth.

While Amazon Web Services quietly provides the infrastructure for some of the most valuable online services like Netflix, which accounts for 15% of global web traffic alone, Squarespace has emerged as the most recognizable (or at least fashionable) website builder and host. It seamlessly integrates a reliable back-end with an intuitive site builder. And on the surface, it boasts a gorgeous design aesthetic that ties everything together.

The Competitive Landscape

The website-in-a-box space is crowded. Squarespace has competition from Weebly (which Square, not Squarespace, acquired for $365M) and Wix.com (owned by Wix, which is worth $5B). Squarespace, an independently owned private company, is a unicorn in its own right with a $1.7B valuation. It's worth even more than that now because its last round was over 15 months ago, which is an entire lifecycle for many startups.

If you go to Weebly’s and Wix.com’s homepages, their messaging hints toward personal and professional fulfillment in vague terms. They're not as focused on the higher level purpose behind web hosting. Squarespace not only carpet bombs the podcast landscape with the tagline, “Make your next move with Squarespace,” they got Keanu Reeves to say, “Make it happen,” during the 2018 Super Bowl.

The previous year, Squarespace had John Malkovich as a spokesperson. Both of these campaigns feature multiple ads. (On the topic of domains, a comedic subset of the Malkovich ads follow the actor as he pursues someone who has taken johnmalkovich.com.)

These Super Bowl commercials are about as American as commercials get. They're John Locke by way of Thomas Jefferson and Don Draper; they promote the pursuit of happiness during the most American sport there is.

As valuable as it is to have Teddy "KGB" from Rounders hawk your website builder, the strength of the message cuts through on its own. Everyone has some kind of a dream and it’s easier than ever to succeed with the internet’s vast resources and distribution channels. "Make your next move with Squarespace," taps into the same well of inspiration as Uber's slogan, "Get your side hustle on!"

Building The Future

If Squarespace is the facilitator of our dreams, then the first place to start is with a domain search. This could be considered the most mundane of activities. After all, it’s nothing more than a database query.

More traditional hosts like HostGator, spoil the mood by listing prices at the outset. No offense to HostGator — they came up in the early 2000s when it was fashionable for web hosts to have animals for mascots like FatCow.

Squarespace, staying true to its Super Bowl ads, makes the most of this opportunity. (Weebly has a presentational approach as well.) The description text (what appears under a site link in Google) for Squarespace’s domain search page reads, “Your domain name search is just the start. Find a domain name for your website and bring your vision to life. It starts with your domain name.”

Squarespace's domain search is very presentational. This is not the design that you'd expect to see for something as unexciting as search results. With this page, Squarespace declares this isn't just a place to find out what domains are available, it's a chance to meditate on the infinite possibility of the future and manifest a dream in style.

Again, if it were as straightforward as a bland table, full of search results, underneath a minimally styled input field, that would be one thing. This is not that. The aspirational messaging, that's rooted in American Excellence and drives Squarespace’s growth, has permeated into a traditionally practical aspect of web hosting.

Bobos In Paradise

Startup culture may have its roots in the American tradition of entrepreneurship, but there's something new happening here. If you look at the 20th Century, there was an intense oscillation between countercultural values and (eventually conspicuous) consumption.

In 2011, The New York Times ran an article by William Deresiewicz called Generation Sell. In the piece, Deresiewicz explores how the "youth culture" of millennials is different than previous generations. After analyzing the beatniks, the hippies, the slackers, and the punks, Deresiewicz concludes that millennials are distinctly more entrepreneurial.

The conservative commentator David Brooks plays with related themes in Bobos in Paradise. Written in 2000 (just before the cultural phenomenon that is HostGator hit the scene), the book examines how the divide between the yuppie and the hippie had dissolved and the bourgeois bohemian, or Bobo, had emerged.

In the book, Brooks goes deep on the evolution of the bohemian and how the values of the bohemian were at odds with the bourgeoisie in France. Brooks concludes that wealth alone is no longer enough to achieve the highest status in modern America. The most successful people now make great money at what they love, whether they're celebrated or not.

In the intervening years, mainstream startup culture has emerged as the optimal vehicle for a Bobo. The respectability of working 60 hours a week to make partner died out in the bleach-soaked 90s, along with the romanticization of toiling away as a starving artist.

Wealth and power are a means to an end for an entrepreneur in 2019, whether they have something to build or something to say. Squarespace gets this, Keanu gets this, and now it's time to load up our food trucks and go out and get it too.