Avishai Abrahami
Analyst · Citigroup
Thanks, Emily, and good morning, everyone. We had a fantastic start to 2024 as we built upon the strong momentum and milestones over the last year. We exceeded our expectations across many areas of our business in the first quarter by executing on our product strategy, growth initiatives and commitment to balanced profitable growth. As a result we continue to differentiate ourselves and grow market share as users increasingly choose Wix the go-to platform to achieve their goals online.
We kicked off the year with a strong growth booking in Q1 grew to more than $457 million, exceeding expectations. Revenue grew to $420 million, above our guidance. This outperformance drove free cash flow, which grew to more than $111 million. This new high volume mark in our profitability journey, is a milestone that we all will go into more details shortly.
The strong growth we saw this quarter was driven by improving business fundamentals, which I'll let Nir discuss in a few minutes. An incredible product innovation. In particular, we are seeing remarkable results from the product milestone achieved last year, a leading portfolio of AI technology and Wix studio.
First, AI -- first, our suite of AI part product is performing extremely well. Notably, this quarter, we released the highly anticipated AI website builder. This is our cornerstone AI product. It leverages our 10-plus years of web creation expertise and unparalleled knowledge base off users' behavior, functional and conversational AI chat experience users describe their intent and growth AI technology then creates a professional, unique and fully built out website that meets the user needs entrant.
Importantly, the AI-generated site includes all relevant pages with personalized layout themes, text, images and business solutions such as scheduling, e-commerce and more. Best of all, this website are fully optimized with Wix-reliable infrastructure, including security and performance as well as built in marketing, SEO, CRM and analytics tools. There is truly nothing like this on the market.
Excitingly, feedback on the AI website building has been incredible. In just a few short months since its launch, hundreds of thousands of sites have been already been created using this tool by both [indiscernible] and partner. This strong response and utilization is a testament to the depth of our AI expertise and strength of our product. We did not step up the gas after this milestone release and recently added more products to our AI portfolio in order to make the site building experience easier and more enjoyable.
In April, we released a suite of AI-powered image enhancement tools that provide users with the capability to create professional images on their own, high-quality images are an essential part of a professional website but often hard to achieve without the help of professional photographer. New users will be able to easily erase objects, generate images edit them to add or replace object with a simple prompt all without ever leaving the Wix product studio. A few weeks ago, we also released the AI portfolio creator, which uses in-house AI image clustering technology and the latest AI model to enable users to easily and professionally showcase an online portfolio.
This creates a smooth intuitive portfolio building experience that generates unique and professional options in moments. This new capabilities are just the start of a robust pipeline of AI-enabled products still to come this year, including a variety of vertical AI business assistance that will be released for the year. A couple of these assistants are currently in beta testing and seeing great results and feedback. I can't wait to share this and more.
We are seeing a tangible benefit from our entire AI offering particularly a better conversions among users into premium subscription. I strongly believe that our AI capability will be significant -- a significant driver of [indiscernible] creators growth in 2024 and beyond. I'd like to finish with an update on Wix Studio, which continues to perform ahead of plan. Since its launch in August, over 1 million studio accounts have been created by agencies and designers.
The majority of the studio accounts are created by larger agency completely new to Wix. This is an encouraging sign that we continue to win market share. Existing professionals are also increasingly using Studio to complement their classic editor project with most of our top partners having built at least 1 project on Studio.
Moreover, fast conversion of these accounts has resulted in more studio premium subscriptions than anticipated. This high conversion demonstrated powerful design, creation and workflow management capabilities a professional cannot get anywhere else. As a result, we expect the lifetime value of our partners' user base to continue to improve as partners build more projects on studio over time.
As a reminder, the lifetime value of our partner is already multiple times higher than that of our safe creators. We continue to add new innovative capabilities and improve the Studio platform and a [indiscernible] the ability for partners to sell student templates in the marketplace. This feature enables partners to market and sell Studio templates they've created, those increasing the earning potential while organically fostering the Studio ecosystem with more new features on the horizon, we remain confident that Studio will be a significant driver of partner growth in the years to come.
With the momentum we started this year, I'm confident that we will successfully -- we are successfully executing on our strategic initiative and growth filers. These and many exciting things are still to come in 2024 an impossible and incredible team here at Wix. So thank you to the entire team for your hard work and dedication to our users. With that, Nir, over to you.