Context
Squarespace has a clear story for people running a business. But it didn't have one for people starting a business. LLC Formation is the first product designed to fill that gap.
People come to Squarespace to start something: a website, a store, a booking page, a domain for a name they believe in. Many of them haven't made the business itself real yet. There's a meaningful step missing between "I've started" and "I'm running a business." LLC Formation is that step, made native to Squarespace, built in partnership with ZenBusiness, and available to any Squarespace customer, whatever they started with.
The gap is most visible in Domains, where customers reserve a name for their business and then quietly stall. That's where the product meets them first. But it was never meant to be a Domains feature.
Problem
This isn't a feature. It's a new product category for the platform, and the design work had to behave accordingly. Forming an LLC is a legal action with consequences that outlive any subscription. The customer's EIN letter, formation documents, registered agent records, these are evidence that their business exists. If they lose access to them, they lose access to proof of their company.
That single fact ruled out the most obvious version of the product. We couldn't anchor LLC Formation to a domain, or to any other Squarespace subscription that's allowed to expire. The customer's business is more permanent than any single product they buy from us. The product had to be too.
Approach
The architectural decision was to make LLC Formation its own product, anchored to the Squarespace account rather than to any individual domain or subscription. That sounds like an organizational choice. It's actually a duty-of-care decision. A customer should still be able to download their EIN letter five years after canceling their domain. To do that, the LLC has to live at the account level, with its own dashboard, accessible regardless of what else they've kept or let lapse. The same decision is what makes it a product for all of Squarespace rather than an add-on to one corner of it: any customer can form a business, whether they arrived through a website, a store, or a domain.
That decision shaped everything downstream. A new account-level surface meant designing a dashboard that sits alongside Websites, Scheduling, and Commerce as a peer, not a tab inside something else. It meant the formation status, document library, and renewal information all needed to be reachable from a stable URL that doesn't depend on any other product staying active. It meant the permissions model had to treat ownership of an LLC differently than ownership of a domain.
Rapid prototyping was the working mode throughout. The entry point, the plan selector, the dashboard, the end-to-end purchase flow, each existed as a working prototype before the design was finalized, which let cross-functional decisions get made against something concrete rather than against slides.
The work also lived across a partnership boundary. ZenBusiness brought the regulated service and the existing flows for purchase, fulfillment, and post-formation support. Our job was to translate that model into something Squarespace-native, reconciling their lifecycle, coverage dates, and English-only constraints with a multilingual, multi-product Squarespace experience. The seams between the two systems are where the trust either holds or breaks. Most of my time on this project went into making sure they hold.
Solution
The customer-facing work split across three surfaces, all answering the same question: how does a brand-new product type earn trust in the moment a customer meets it?
In Domains, the entry point sits in a promo slot in the navigation rather than in the page flow. The framing matters. This isn't another upsell ad fighting for attention. It's a new navigation item that surfaces for the customers it applies to and stays quiet for the ones it doesn't. The merchandising page that opens from it explains the product on its own terms, before checkout starts.
The plan selector separates the recurring Squarespace subscription from the state-mandated filing fees, with copy that makes clear which dollars stay with Squarespace and which pass through to the government. Design pushed hard for that transparency from the start. The fees aren't hidden in fine print; they're surfaced as their own line item with their own explanation. Add-ons like rush filing are presented in the cart with their own pricing and renewal behavior, so the primary package story stays clean.
The content layer carries the load that the architecture can't. The product is called LLC Formation, which is what it is. The framing across the experience is "form your business with Squarespace," verb-led, not service-led, so the brand promise reads as enabling rather than transactional.
Impact
LLC Formation launches in 2026 as the first product of its kind inside Squarespace. The work establishes a pattern other forward-looking partnerships can follow: a partner provides the regulated service, Squarespace provides the customer relationship and the surface, and the product feels native to the platform rather than bolted onto it.
For growth, it opens a new direction: a next step for any Squarespace customer who is starting a business, not just running one. It's an especially clear one for Domains customers, who have had a starting point for years without a clear "what's next." Wherever customers arrive from, LLC Formation gives them a meaningful workflow to come back to, a recurring relationship, and a real product to call theirs.
