Aman Bhutani
Analyst · Wedbush. Please go ahead. Your line is open
Thank you for joining us today and thanks again to those who joined us for our Investor Day in April. While it has only been one month since we spoke to you, we have several important updates to share today. Plus, in Q1, we delivered strong financial results which included the early impact of COVID-19 as expected changes in consumer behavior rippled across the globe along the COVID-19 arc, with the last two weeks in March being the toughest in the U.S. as everyone focused on safety first. Second, there are definitive proof points that we are creating significant value for our customers. We are seeing an uptick in customer demand as new customers are exploring how to build the website and everyday entrepreneurs in fashion, beauty, health, professional services and many other verticals are forging ahead with new ideas. Those with the website are expanding the online scope of existing ventures, adding commerce and payment features, creating digital content and downloads, adding virtual classes, appointment scheduling and much more. Third, I'm excited to share more on OpenWeStand. What started as an idea about a month ago has become a movement with over 50 partners and over 50 million views on YouTube. It is a testament of the extraordinary power of our community and the distinctive powerful and differentiated reach of our brand. The true heroes in this movement are the everyday entrepreneurs who are finding a virtual way to be open even when their physical doors are closed, making OpenWeStand a reality. And fourth, as we look into Q2, our core business continues to be resilient, with renewal rates edging up year-over-year. Predicting the balance of the pressure on small and medium sized businesses on one hand and human creativity driving new digital demand on the other is pretty hard. For example, in Germany and Italy, where the pandemic seems to have been restrained, we have seen growth customer adds accelerate to 80% year-over-year growth, albeit of a relatively smaller base. Additionally, while we have some headwind in care and services and through disciplined execution we have improved them on a weekly basis for some teams being back in the office environment remains a key part of getting back to peak performance. In his comments Ray will go through what all of this means for Q2 guidance. Let's dig into creating value for everyday entrepreneurs. GoDaddy is a customer-led software company, built on the foundational idea that creating value for our customers is the best way to create value for our shareholders. Helping our customers on the journey from green to create and grow remains a key driver of engagement and TAM expansion. As customer needs shifted over the past few weeks, accelerating our pace of experimentation and innovation enabled us to quickly bring offers to support them. Over the last four weeks, we have started an experiment with a freemium model for websites plus marketing. This is now available to all customers in the U.S. and include product integration with GoFundMe, robust gift card functionality, expanded capabilities with PayPal and much more. In the true spirit of experimentation being customer-led, we also launched a basic messaging capability so our customers are able to connect with their customers. Getting these features out quickly allows us to give early customer feedback and improve them rapidly. For example, you will see us upgrade the messaging capability within days, and that is just one of the two ecosystems we are part of. We also have a new offer available to designers and developers, bringing together manage WordPress and WooCommerce at an attractive limited time price point of $1 for three months, everything they need to get their customers selling online fast. In fact, it's not just websites plus marketing or manage WordPress that we're moving on quickly to improve all our products and engineering teams have reset their roadmaps on the WIN model, meaning what's important now. We have active offers for three-month free trial of our digital marketing suite and overthrow and 30-day free trials of celebrates multiplatform e-commerce marketplace solution. And the results install of the over app jumped 24% month-over-month in March and Sellbrite saw a 20% month-over-month increase in connections to online marketplaces. The opportunity to introduce our products to customers when they need them most in a manner that is easy for them create immediate customer value and will lead to shareholder value over time. And we want to extend our ability to experiment to innovate and give customers more choices at competitive price points. One of the key tools in our toolbox is the ability to deploy capital, and in early April, we announced the acquisition of the registry business from Neustar, which will be known as GoDaddy Registry. While the acquisition will have only a small financial impact this year, we believe there is significant strategic importance here. We have demonstrated in our roughly 20 years as a registrar that we can innovate and dramatically increase the value we offer to customers. We plan to bring the same innovative rigor to the registry business. Vertical integration reduces the many complexities of building innovative end-to-end offerings for customers at competitive price points. We have experience creating value for everyone in the industry. Just look at the domain aftermarket. Over the nearly seven years since Afternic became part of GoDaddy, almost every major registrar leverages our Afternic platform for aftermarket domain sales, creating greater choice and value for customers and creating greater value for our partners. We look forward to closing the acquisition in the coming months, and welcoming the team to the GoDaddy family. Equally important is the guidance we provide to our customers which has been part of our ethos at GoDaddy since the beginning. It is our killer app. It is a competitive advantage. In these unprecedented times, entrepreneurs need guidance and we are committed to being there for them. When we took 7,500 Guides home several weeks ago, we focused first on their safety and then moved quickly and creatively to guide customers effectively. And I am happy to share that our average speed answer has been exceptional. Customers are surprised and delighted that we would call them just to offer help, and they have shared positive recognition for our guide across many calls. Anecdotally, I have received a greater number of messages directly from customers, thanking us for being there to help them in this difficult period. This is why we exist. This is what our brand is about. The GoDaddy brand is a remarkable asset, and there has never been a better expression of it than OpenWeStand. Let me take a moment to share its origin. About a month ago, we saw a gap in the way small businesses could find and take advantage of the many offers available to them. The offers were not in a central location that made it easy for entrepreneurs to find them. OpenWeStand solve both these problems and has grown beyond our wildest expectations, in an amazing display of the exponential power of our community what I thought would be 2020 hindsight has become 50/50. I thought 20 partners and 20 million views would have been an amazing achievement. But here we are more than 50 partners and over 50 million views on YouTube and thousands of activations by small business owners. That is a movement and the momentum continues. The movement started with a 60-second film to communicate our desire to help businesses stay open, even when their doors are closed. We invest in media to communicate this message and directed all traffic to OpenWeStand.org. This site now stands as a repository for us and our partners to provide offers, help and advice, where partners can edit their own content and small business owners can find the help they need. As traffic to the site continues to grow, we are posting more offers and content, as well as enhancing filtering capabilities making it easier to navigate. The need for these resources is great. As an example we did our first webinar last week with expectations of 300 attendees. It tremendously exceeded our expectations with 5,000 sign-up and over 1,000 attendees. It has been humbling and inspiring to see the response from the community, and we will continue to put muscle and marketing dollars behind OpenWeStand, providing valuable offers to our community in a central location. Before I wrap up, I want to tell you about Liv, one of our remarkable everyday entrepreneurs. She started Box and Flow in New York of boxing and yoga studio. If you talk to her, she will tell you that she really believes in this idea of balance and combining strength and softness as a way of life. When the pandemic hit, she left her studio in New York and temporarily moved to Florida to be near family. But the entrepreneurial spirit in her didn't stop. She was comfortable taking risks, though she continued to try and experiment. She started teaching classes on Instagram and last week offered all her classes online. She is not only teaching her regulars in New York, she now has regulars from Malaysia to Barcelona. Liv is not just trying to survive. She figured out how to make her dream bigger, and she demonstrates the spirit and drive we are here to serve. And in these times where so many parts of our lives have transitioned to a digital experience, we are seeing the best of human creativity. We believe human creativity will drive many variations of online businesses, and we are fortunate to be a global leader serving this massive market of everyday entrepreneurs like Liv. In the current COVID driven climate, GoDaddy's distinctive financial profile with profitable growth at scale stands out. We have the capability to invest capital aggressively and an experienced management team that can make sure we do that with prudence and as good stewards of both the P&L and the balance sheet. We know that short-term everyday entrepreneurs like Liv may have some setbacks, but we know that their beliefs and spirit will not be deterred. I believe in Liv and millions of other everyday entrepreneurs just like her keeps us confident that we will deliver on our 411 target, $4 billion in revenue and $1.1 billion un-levered free cash flow organically by 2020. With that, here is Ray.