LessAccounting Claims They Turned Down Acquisition Offer From “Low Moral Fiber” GoDaddy

I’ve found this story reads best when listening to Hulk Hogan’s intro music. I’ve embedded a video below for your reading pleasure.

On Wednesday, I reported that GoDaddy acquired cloud-based financial management application company Outright, with all 24 employees joining GoDaddy. Now, web and mobile app developer LessEverthing tells me they turned down an offer from GoDaddy in 2009.

LessEverything’s first product, LessAccounting, is small business accounting software—and an outright Outright competitor. [Pause for laughter] The company claims it has had over 30,000 sign-ups and processes billions of dollars per week.

The founders, Steve Bristol and Allan Branch, tell me GoDaddy was in the market for an online accounting application for small businesses in 2009 and LessAccounting was very high on their list. Bristol tells me financial terms were not discussed, as LessAccounting rejected the offer after a number of phone calls.

Obviously, this raises the questions: how far down the list was Outright if GoDaddy started shopping for an accounting app in 2009? And why did it take GoDaddy three years to acquire one?

Yesterday, Branch, owner of the world’s greatest facial hair, posted about GoDaddy’s Outright acquisition on his company’s blog.

“GoDaddy didn’t share our ethic of trying to make things easy for people, their support sucks, and they have low moral fiber,” he writes. “That’s not something we want to be associated with.”

Branch said he wrote the post because it “seemed like a fun post to put out there.” Here’s the really fun part:

“We don’t have anything against the folks at Outright, and we wish them the best. It’s just we are a firm believer in “you are who you associate with.” For those of you who feel the same or have a moral object to using Outright now that they are part of the GoDaddy family, use the coupon code “NoDaddy” for four months free of LessAccounting.com.”

Translation: You seem like a really nice company, Outright. But we think your new partner sucks and we’re going to do our best to take all of your customers. How’s it taste?!?The post goes on to advise users to stop using GoDaddy and switch to a different web host.

“In 2009, Go Daddy was looking at expanding its product line and had discussions with numerous companies,” GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman said in an emailed statement. “Ultimately, Go Daddy decided to not pursue an acquisition and/or partnership at that time in order to focus on our existing products. When we were introduced to the Outright team, it made sense for Go Daddy customers because Outright brings more to the table than just a SMB solution; they also have a very talented team and we knew we wanted to work with them going forward.”

Play us out, Hulk.