Sarah Friar
Analyst · Evercore
Thank you, Matt, and hello, everyone. Q3 was another challenging quarter for many neighbors and customers, and more verticals and industry participants are beginning to feel the effect of volatile advertising demand. In this environment, we are focused on the areas we can control, including product development, providing increasing value through utility and community for neighbors and helping advertisers reach their goals. On the neighbor front, our platform remains highly engaged. We grew weekly active users, WAU, by 17% year-over-year and 4% sequentially. This strong growth was driven primarily by U.S. neighbors with over 1 million net new WAU added quarter-over-quarter, and 90% of new neighbors to the platform came organically in Q3. We've successfully held onto and built upon the boost and reach that we generated from the pandemic, seeing a 41% growth in overall WAU and a 32% growth in U.S. WAU since Q3 2020, comparing favorably to peers. We're beginning to see the benefits of this year's investments in machine learning and AI as evidenced by smarter notifications, which are getting more sophisticated and driving greater engagement each quarter. This focus on ML and AI will continue into 2023 and beyond. We are only getting started on harnessing our neighbor data set, which when used appropriately, has the power to transform the neighbor experience through greater personalization. We expect this investment to also benefit customer performance through improved targeting of Nextdoor's high-intent audience. Notably, we had another strong quarter of sessions growth, which both exceeded sequential WAU growth and also accelerated for the third straight quarter. Strong sessions growth indicates increasingly frequent engagement and ultimately leads to more impressions supply. Our efforts are focused directly on WAU and revenue growth. In the third quarter, neighbor initiatives included building out a native Maps feature within the Discover surface, launching Faves, which allows neighbors to connect with businesses and introducing the Election Civility Reminder to encourage civil political discourse during the U.S. midterms. Some of our most visible advertiser partnerships in the quarter including our Halloween Treat Map with Purina Beggin’ Brand Dog Treats, and The Big Neighborhood MeetUp sponsored by Verizon contributed to growth in the number of neighbors on our platform as well as revenue. Revenue grew 2% year-over-year to $54 million. While this was in line with our guidance from last quarter, it does reflect continued headwinds in advertising spend across a range of customers. For us, this is particularly notable in a few key verticals, including financial services and real estate. As you recall, this is a continuation of a trend that we first called out earlier in the year. We did see pockets of strength in the quarter, including from new and existing mid-market advertisers. Shipt, a same-day grocery delivery service was one example of a customer who achieved both brand awareness and conversion goals on Nextdoor. Shipt realized returns well above their industry engagement benchmarks, a result of our ability to connect businesses not just with those who are highest in intent and closest in proximity, but also with those who hold the purchasing power. In fact, 93% of Nextdoor neighbors are the primary or joint decision makers on their household purchases. We also expanded our third-party measurement partnerships in the quarter, including with companies such as Oracle Advertising, Lucid and Neustar to help advertisers understand the efficacy of their spend. We are continuing to make progress on developing our ad platform, a top priority and important step to delivering greater value to all advertisers. In Q3, we further simplified our self-serve campaign management tool and added greater automation to facilitate the ad creation process for customers. We also made progress on our proprietary back-end ad platform. Q3 was our first full quarter with a selection of customer campaigns running on our own ad server, allowing us to utilize our proprietary data sets and the early outcomes are positive. In response to early indications of a slowdown in advertising spend, we evolved our sales strategy to increase focus on recession resilient verticals and customers, such as healthcare and public agencies. One of the global pharmaceutical companies that ran a campaign in the quarter was Moderna. Throughout their campaign, there was consistent correlation between ad engagement and sentiment list, both across Moderna's brand, and for vaccines overall, especially in states with higher vaccine hesitancy. The success of the advertisers we mentioned today illustrates that, even in light of headwinds, Nextdoor continues to perform. In the quarter, we also enabled government agencies to purchase ads on Nextdoor through our self-serve campaign management platform. Government, another recession resilient vertical represents a new total addressable market for Nextdoor and is a natural fit given already high engagement from agencies. In closing, our purpose has never been more important, especially as the global economic backdrop continues to erode. Our platform is a unique resource for neighbors, businesses and public agencies, and we are as excited as ever about the product roadmap ahead. We have a strong team in place, and we are well capitalized with over $600 million on the balance sheet to execute against our strategy. There may be volatility ahead, but we're as committed as ever to cultivating a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood to rely on, and we remain confident in our long-term growth opportunities. I'll now turn it over to Mike for more details on our financials.