Scott Wagner
Analyst · Jefferies
Thanks, Sam. And thanks to everyone for joining us today to discuss our first quarter of 2019, which is started off at a solid pace. GoDaddy revenue is up over 12% and our cash flow margins continue to expand even with the investments we're making across the business. Companies that thrive over the long term consistently focus on finding new ways to add customer value. And here at GoDaddy we're doing this through constant improvements in our entire experience across product, marketing and care, as we build not just for 2019 and 2020, but for the years to come. Today we'll spend time on three topics. First, I'll share our quarterly product progress both organically and through our recent acquisitions. Second, an update on how we're driving growth in domestic and international markets. And finally, Ray we'll cover our first quarter financial performance and outlook for the remainder of 2019. I'll start with our products. GoDaddy empowers the everyday entrepreneur by designing applications and services that help our customers look good, be everywhere and engage with their audiences. Our feature release pace continues to be rapid and in just the first several months of the year we've taken big steps forward in e-commerce, digital marketing and the WordPress ecosystem. Let me touch on each briefly. First, on e-commerce. Our functionality continues to build on what's now a multi-year effort behind both service and product commerce tools. In March we launched support for digital downloads in online stores, enabling customers to sell music, e-books, videos, art and other digital content. In April we acquired Sellbrite, a world class, multi-channel commerce suite that has tens of millions of orders and billions of dollars of cumulative GMV in channels like Amazon, Etsy, eBay and Walmart.com. We partnered with Sellbrite last year to power our first go central marketplace offer and saw strong early customer traction, by joining forces will more deeply integrate Sellbrite's e-commerce channel capabilities, inventory management and fulfillment tools Indigo Central and eventually into our WordPress offerings. Second, we continue to expand the suite of marketing tools available in GoCentral. At an enterprise or mid-market level you'll hear the term CRM and marketing automation a lot. But for our customers these functions and their digital presence are really all blurred together. And as we help our customers be everywhere, we at GoDaddy at our best when we unite these tools into a simple and thoughtful experience. Today we're tailoring marketing recommendations, using data science, in the GoCentral Dashboard and in March we launched a customer management tool called Connections, which helps entrepreneurs organize and stay close to their customers. We have deep insights into the ventures using GoDaddy and their audiences and this tool is a foundation that we'll use to help simplify, personalize and automate marketing for our customers. This is an important step as we expand what we do, enabling not only the creation of an online presence, but ensuring that it thrives. And finally, we continue to invest behind WordPress as ecosystem of third party themes which make websites beautiful and plugins which give them optionality. At the end of Q1 there were more than three million installs of GoDaddy own plugins and themes in WordPress websites around the world. In April we added to this ecosystem by acquiring CoBlocks which streamlines the WordPress website creation process and ThemeBeans which is a library of elegant and modern website themes. As we expand the resources supporting our WordPress offer, we're bringing an increasingly differentiated experience to the world's largest open source CMS through simplicity, security and elegant design. Stepping back on our products overall, the investments we're making across both GoCentral and WordPress are increasingly being recognized in the market as we pursue strategies that lead to the success of our customers. Let me now turn to our go to market efforts, where we're supporting the product momentum I just discussed by driving consideration and usage for both prospective and existing GoDaddy customers. Our underlying bookings growth accelerated for the second quarter, reflecting strong tailwinds from our brand initiatives and tactical marketing performance. Over the last several years we've grown our incremental marketing spend largely by investing outside the US which has helped drive our global scale. In 2019 we're directing the bulk of our new marketing efforts in discretionary spend in the US and we're happy with the results, including the great early performance of the brand strategy that we launched in February. Our lineup of influencers has resonated well, we're reaching a more diverse audience and our marketing execution continues to acquire customers at attractive economics. Importantly, the metrics we monitor for brand health and how well everyday entrepreneurs identify with GoDaddy are all moving in the right direction. Conversational marketing also continues to ramp nicely with a broader base of campaigns being run against a broader range of customer needs. Since the beginning of 2018, we've taken conversational marketing from a concept, a scaling channel for reaching our base in a helpful, impactful way, all while exceeding our target thresholds for returns. Our international business has been a big success over the last several years and at $1 billion run rate is now larger than all of GoDaddy in 2012 which is the year that we first began localizing international markets. As we look forward, we remain bullish on our international potential and have three core priorities to continue driving growth. First, international market growth starts with localizing our existing products, marketing and care in a targeted geography. We've done this across well over 50 markets and we continue to ramp into new and under penetrated countries, like Germany, South Africa and the Philippines. As we do this we benefit from both the tailwinds of continuing Internet adoption and developing markets and share gains from small and relatively fragmented local players which builds a nice runway in countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. The second priority is launching products and experience tailored to a markets unique needs which we've just started to do in a handful of regions. For example in Asia we're expanding support for care conversations in WeChat and other relevant messaging platforms. In India, which is a do it for you market, we have a vibrant pro community built around our web pro offering in the GoDaddy brand and in certain price sensitive markets like Brazil, Mexico and recently India, we've launched value priced email through open exchange which has doubled the run rate of email unit sales in these countries. And finally in our largest and most mature markets we look to drive deeper customer engagement which ultimately shows up in ARPU. As you know the US is our oldest market and we continue to grow at a double-digit pace, showing that strategies like conversational marketing can sustain healthy growth over the long term. A ramp of conversational marketing, along with a broader and richer product portfolio and experience has been focused in the US where we're driving significant innovation and as we refine this new playbook we expect to be able to export it to other maturing international markets as a core strategy to drive ongoing growth. The punch line is that we continue to see many vectors of growth in domestic and international markets, supported by a diverse set of product and operational initiatives in each market and for you our shareholders this creates a clear line of sight to continued double-digit top line growth. Before I wrap, I want to emphasize our focus on building a business that's aimed at customer success and that could deliver for years to come. We're proud of the consistency of our execution and more importantly how we've evolved as a company. We've got a good business, a great customer and market to serve and a fantastic team all of which underpinned what we deliver to our shareholders. With that here's Ray to cover the financials.