We’ve got great news here at VerticalResponse! We announced today that we’ve been acquired by a wonderful company …

Why did we do it?

I’ve always told our employees, our loyal investors (12 years loyal!) and even our customers that one day we’ll find the right match with a company that values us for our ability to:

1. Be experts at what we do with our talented team
2. Acquire and retain small businesses worldwide
3. Be profitable for many years while still being able to invest back into the company to grow

In my opinion, if we found a company that would value us for all of these things, want to acquire us and pay us what we’re worth, then all our shareholders would benefit. After all that’s where my responsibility lies. (Did I mention it’s 100x harder to take money from your family and friends than from VCs or a bank?)

Over the course of 12 years we’ve had many conversations, and I mean many. Companies big and small, public and private, too many to even think about. And every time we walked away from a conversation it was because the company didn’t value us for our abilities and wouldn’t have given our shareholders what they deserve.

But this one was different. It was great, it was time and it was perfect.

But Janine, they PRINT CHECKS!?

Yep they do, and they do a killer job at that. But they do a ton of other things just as well that you might not even know about, including:

• A web hosting business
• Business email so you can have john@yourbusiness.com.
• A logo design business for folks just getting started.
• Pay-per-click and search engine optimization services through award-winning Orange Soda – another company they acquired that’s got a pretty cool name.
• A web-to-print service, PSPrint, that’s also located in the Bay Area, but serves a national customer base.

But what’s missing for any small business in this list? You got it. Email marketing and social media. That’s where we come in.

I must say it’s with mixed emotions that we sell right now. We’re on the cusp of a brand new product (coming soon!) and we’re geared for greatness all on our own.

So I had to weigh it all, taking care of customers, employees and shareholders. And with a great brand like Deluxe and millions of small business that trust them with services that help their companies grow, it feels like the right thing, at the right time and the right way to take care of everyone.

The Next Chapter 

Deluxe also shares a vision we’ve had here at VerticalResponse for a long time: To be the best destination for small business marketing. This gets them even further to completing a pretty cool picture.

What’s going to change? A lot, but for the better. Soon you’ll see a new version of our email marketing and social media product roll out, and it’ll be faster and better than ever! You’ll see features flying out the door quicker then you did before (cheers to our product and engineering teams) and you’ll see a whole new look that we’ve been working on before this deal was in motion.

What’s more, over time you’ll see other services offered by Deluxe through our new product so it’s even more seamless to do all your marketing from one central place.

To my very much-loved VR employees, this is going to be pretty fun. Now we’ve got 4 million customers that might just need our services. Are you ready? I am!

So did we get acquired by a company that prints checks? Nope. We got acquired by a company that wants small businesses to save time, money and ultimately Work Happy. We can get behind that. 🙂

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