Thanks everybody for joining us. I'm Colin Sebastian. I follow internet and internet services here at Baird, and we're really happy to have with us today BigCommerce and Daniel Lentz, who's CFO and been with the company for a number of years. We're going to have a presentation for those of you who may be less familiar with BigCommerce and their position within the broader e-commerce technology landscape. Then we'll switch over to Q&A. Those of you here in the room can contribute questions to the email address you see in front of you. With that, Daniel, I'll turn it over to you.
Sounds good. I will try, just for fun, to see if I can do this while sitting in a chair. I have a ridiculous amount of nervous energy. If I get up and just start pacing back and forth across the screen, don't judge me. It's kind of how I'm wired.
Me too, by the way.
Yeah, I can't do it. It's like this fireside thing. It's a different format. This is our first time at a conference with Baird, and I recognize that for some of the folks in the room, I don't assume that folks are really well familiar with our company. We've gone through a lot of change over the course of the last year or two years. I thought it would make sense maybe for the first 10 or 15 minutes tops, just to give a really brief overview of who we are as a company, what are we in the midst of doing, and then leave time after that open for Q&A. First, let me just start by just talking through what exactly are the products that we sell. We have three products in our portfolio today: BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift.
BigCommerce is one of the world's largest e-commerce SaaS platforms. Fundamentally, with us, customers use BigCommerce to either run their branded commerce store online, but also to connect that product catalog to a number of channels, whether it is advertising channels, marketplace channels, or more and more, I think in the future, to LLMs and AI-based agentic commerce channels as well. Through BigCommerce, they can manage their tax, shipping, order management. A lot of the backend complexity that it takes to run a business online is delivered through the commerce platform. The second product we offer is called Feedonomics. This is a platform-agnostic, AI-based feed management solution.
If you have a product catalog that you're looking to advertise, again, through Google or social or whatever, the algorithms on the receiving end of that as a channel use a different data schema typically than what the catalog data is in. Feedonomics essentially uses AI to transform and optimize those data feeds so that you get better conversion and return on ad spend, et cetera, et cetera, once it gets to the receiving algorithm. Feedonomics, the vast majority of its revenue is actually not on BigCommerce platform customers. It is a platform-agnostic solution. There are tons of customers with Demandware and Adobe and Shopify and others that are using Feedonomics. We run that portion of our business deliberately to be platform-agnostic because we're not trying to limit the addressable market, obviously, to the market share of the platform product.
The goal there is to continue to be one of the best feed management platforms in the world. You cannot do that by not working with all of the great platforms that are available in the market. Finally, Makeswift is a small acquisition we did a couple of years ago. It is a visual editor and design system. Essentially, it uses Next.js and React frameworks to allow a no-code or low-code way for folks to manage and update their sites. If you are in CPG, brand managers could make changes directly to the website themselves without needing to work with engineering. This is a tool that we are actually building into the core platform, and it is kind of the future of where we think things are going to go in our business for how customers can build and interact with their sites.
OK, snapshot of who we are as a company. We've been going through a lot of changes, as I said, over the course of the last couple of years. We're about $350 million in ARR, about three-fourths of which is with customers that are buying enterprise products from us. That can be kind of our higher-end products with Feedonomics or the platform product. Average customer size in that group is about $45,000 a year in revenue, and we have about 6,000 customers that are buying enterprise products from us today. I would say our sweet spot today is really kind of the upper end of mid-market and the lower end of enterprise. The business has gone, as I said, through a lot of change.
We've had about a $120 million swing in cash flow just over the course of the last two years, nearly a 30 point improvement in profit margin. Our focus at this point, though, is in where we are from a growth perspective. There's a lot of changes that we needed to make coming out of the pandemic to kind of improve the way we were operating, especially on the go-to-market side. In a lot of ways, this year is a transformation year as we metabolize a lot of those changes. I've been here about seven years, and I would say from a company health, balance sheet perspective, quality of booking is definitely the strongest we've been in the seven years that I've been here. We just need to grow faster, to put it simply. OK, how do we make money? What is our revenue model?
Let me walk through for each of the core products. I already spoke to BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift. I also want to address partner and services revenue, which is about a fourth of our revenue as well. To understand our business model, you also need to understand that piece of it. On BigCommerce, it is a software subscription business, and I call it an up-to model. In other words, customers buy blocks of orders that they can process through the platform, and they contract to be able to sell up to a certain number of orders. Once they go above that order allotment, obviously, their price goes up. We have both direct sales motions and self-serve motions on that product. We have self-serve available for small businesses, and obviously, our sales and marketing focus is up-market, mid-market, and enterprise. Feedonomics is very similar. It's a subscription-based business as well.
It has a lot of service elements to this as well. It's also a variable-based up-to type pricing model, except instead of up to a certain number of orders, you get licensed to buy up to a certain number of SKUs that are going through the data transformations. Other than that, it's a very, very similar pricing model. We have direct sellers that are selling Feedonomics. We do not have a self-serve version of Feedonomics today. We're actually building that out so it would be available to our platform customers, of which we have tens of thousands of them. We are looking to have that available late this year before holiday. Makeswift is also very similar. It's a software subscription. It's also variable, but it has much lower revenue today. In a lot of ways, job one is to become kind of an enhancement to the platform.
We're going to be building a self-serve version of Makeswift that's baked into the platform as well early next year, with ambitions after that to make it more of a direct sold product, which is, to him, expanding for us because it's not limited to folks that are doing commerce. Makeswift could be sold to content-only websites and a lot of others. Just job one for us is to augment the platform itself and then grow out from there. Partner and services revenue is essentially a take-rate business. Whenever a customer is joining BigCommerce, that's a perfect time for them to evaluate who they're using in their tech stack. Maybe they're coming to us and they're using a specific banking partner to process payments.
That's the right time when they're implementing the new solution to evaluate who are they using to process payments, who are they using for tax or shipping or others. We will make connections between those prospects and our technology partners. In exchange, we get revenue share from those technology partners as well. In the future, I think PSR is going to grow to be not just this kind of referral rev share business. We're also going to be bundling in technology partner solutions with the platform product itself so we can have kind of a more unified commercial experience for our merchants, which I'll get to in a minute. That will also, I think, help move PSR from not just kind of a take-rate-based business, but also a subscription business in the future for us as well. OK, I pushed the wrong button. Dang it.
OK, so who are we as a company and what's our point of view? We have a new CEO, Travis Hess. He joined us about two quarters ago. He joined about a year ago, but was moved into the CEO position at that time. What's the vision of where he wants to take this and where we're going? Our view is that commerce shouldn't be complex. It should be curated. OK, that's a marketing tagline. What exactly does that mean? If you look at the spectrum of where competitors lie within the commerce space, it kind of goes on one scale from what we would describe as your monolith solutions to extreme componentized and customizable on the other end. We kind of deliberately try to land in the middle of that because we think either extreme can create problems as customers attempt to scale.
If you go on the left, monolith competitors, sometimes they're very, very large platforms where commerce may be one component of many that they sell within their bag. Or if you have all-in-one solutions or competitors that kind of do everything vertically integrated, that can be very successful for merchants, provided they're willing to do things the way that that software provider would like them to. There are a lot of customers where this can make a lot of sense. We think that it can be very rigid for customers. It can make it difficult for them to, on the simple end, be able to customize their tech according to what they need for their business. On the complex end of that, it also makes it to where you sometimes are buying a lot of features that you, frankly, don't need.
It can be very expensive and cumbersome in order to implement. On the other extreme is what we would describe as kind of your extreme open or componentized solution. Commerce Tools would be one example of this, where it is very, very customizable, has a lot of really interesting features and functions, but it can be very expensive to implement. It can take a long time because there really is not an out-of-box experience for a lot of these types of competitors. What we are trying to do in the middle is saying, look, we are going to deliver solutions that are very flexible, where you can swap out best-of-breed and do what you want that is best for your business, for your architecture.
We are not going to do it in a way that is either so componentized that it is difficult to implement or so rigid that you end up having to do things the way we say you should be running your business. Rather, we would say, look, here is the out-of-box recommendation that we would make with all the pre-integrated technology partners that we think are best for your vertical or for your particular business. You can use 80% of what we are suggesting and modify the other 20%, and we make it easy for you to do. We aim for the best of both worlds. What we are looking to do is to also make this commercially as simple as it is technically, which is why we are getting more into bundling our technology partner solutions directly with our product.
OK, so I want to end with this just focusing on where are we focused for this year. Full stop, our number one priority is to accelerate growth in ARR. We've made huge progress on quality of billings, cash flow, profitability. Very notable. We're very excited about that. Our focus is on growth. There's three areas where we're really focusing on that for this year. First is increasing wallet share. What does that mean? Every company would say that they are aiming to do so. I want to talk through what the initiatives are that are behind that. A big area of focus for us is, as I said, in bundling. We announced recently that we're in negotiations finalizing a partnership with Noibu, which would be the first example of this. Noibu is one of our partners that does kind of site error monitoring.
We are going to be reselling and bundling Noibu in with our core product. It is a unified contracting experience, billing experience, support experience. It allows us to take that idea of composability but curated so that we can take to customers and say, look, we think that this is the best solution for you. We think you should also be considering this. Rather than have to refer them over to that third party for a separate sales and contracting experience, we can do all that in-house with us. This gives us a deeper relationship with our customers. It allows us to be, I think, more consultative in the recommendations that we give them on how we think we can help them.
Ultimately, it expands what we can do from a subscription revenue point of view as well so that it's not as much a referral business, but actually we have a better subscription, which is stickier and better revenue for us as a business. The second focus is in expanding our TAM. Part of this is actually we have a captive audience that I would argue is actually not being fully monetized the way that it could be. For example, we bought Feedonomics roughly three years ago, and we had not built out a version of Feedonomics that was native to the BigCommerce control panel so that customers could just opt into using Feedonomics as a platform customer without having to talk to salespeople, and I do not have to pay people a bunch of commissions.
There's a lot of ways that we are looking at Feedonomics and Makeswift and bundles, even a BC payment solution that we are releasing so that we can better monetize our existing base of tens of thousands of customers. That has not been as much of a focus for us in the past. Eventually, we also have other areas that we are excited about, not just through bundling because it allows us to talk to technology partner solutions as well, but also in the future, we think there is an opportunity to make Makeswift more of a viable standalone business as well with content management platforms. Finally, the last thing I would call out is B2B. Big, big focus for us is what is going on in the B2B space. We have over 12,000 B2B accounts that run on our platform, which actually makes us one of the largest B2B platforms in the world.
I remember when some of our new executives that have joined in the last year saw this number. Some of them came from competitors that said, I had no idea that BigCommerce was this big in B2B. We need to talk more about this because people do not appreciate how big of a B2B platform we are. It has delivered over half of our new bookings growth over the course of the last couple of years. There are a lot of areas, I think, where we have competitive advantage in this space. The orders-based model is particularly appealing to B2B rather than a rev share model on GMV.
We also have a lot of features specific to B2B, whether it's custom buyer portals so that if you are a B2B business and you want all the different folks that are coming to your site to see custom pricing according to your specific contract with that customer, you can build all of those customized experiences so that it looks different by buyer. We have a whole lot of other things like CPQ things built in and things like that that make it really compelling in B2B. That is an area where I think we have kind of distinct competitive advantage where we really intend to double down. What I would just say is kind of wrap up on this. In a lot of ways, this is a transition year for us as a business.
Over the course of the last year, we've brought in a lot of new folks into the C-suite in terms of executive team leadership. We can speak to why if necessary. I think that we've made a lot of changes. We've nearly doubled the size of our quota carrying sales team in the course of the last six months. We're making a lot of investments in what we're doing on the product side. There's a lot of growth opportunities specifically in AI and commerce, which are really, really interesting. We're having conversations with all the leading players there, whether it's OpenAI or Google or Microsoft or others, which is really interesting, this notion of agentic commerce and where that's going. Where we are this year is kind of ingesting a lot of the changes that we've made.
The front half of the year, we kind of expected to be kind of tough as we're ramping up new sellers and adjusting to these new motions, but really looking to build momentum as the year progresses, specifically in the back half to capitalize on the changes that we're making.
Great. That's a great overview. Thank you, Daniel. Again, there is an email address in front of you if you'd like to send over a question. I guess the first one that occurs to me is looking at the top priorities and re-accelerating ARR growth. Obviously, I think this is part of it. When you think about new customer acquisition specifically, is that typically someone who's re-platforming from somewhere else? Is it a smaller merchant that's growing and they need more of a mid-market or enterprise scale solution? What is the, I guess, profile of the new customers?
Part of it depends upon the vertical that they're coming from. I was really surprised when I joined specifically in B2B how many B2B businesses still have homegrown commerce platforms that they built 20 years ago that they convinced themselves they were such a unicorn that they needed their own thing. They have yet to adopt SaaS. Kind of decision one is to adopt SaaS. Decision two, I would argue, is then who are you going to adopt if you're going to move into SaaS? B2B, in a lot of cases, actually the competitor is actually in-house development. If they are re-platforming within B2B, a lot of cases they're moving over from whether it's Hybris or a lot of others that tend to be older tech, haven't gotten as much investment, and tend to be more complex and expensive to implement.
On the B2C side, it's a little different. In some cases, it's small businesses that have grown so much online. They're starting to run into some of the complexities and challenges of kind of outgrowing the system that they were on before. If you're going to use one of our competitors that kind of have all-in-one solutions, they can be very, very easy to use. You can get to a point to where you start to look a lot like other businesses that are using those platforms because a lot of them are using exactly the same type of themes. They're using the same types of solutions. As they start to run into more complexity in their business, they start to run into problems where you want to have different sites and different regions and different languages.
For some of our competitors, you have to have a separate back end for every single one of those storefronts. It just becomes really complex to manage. They kind of graduate out of those competitors and look to move over to us. A different use case entirely is sometimes you have customers that have been using some of our larger competitors for whom commerce may be kind of an add-on, but not really an area of focus, where it is really expensive and does not have some of the more modern features that we offer. They may stay with those partners for CRM or ERP or something like that and then switch over to us for the commerce component portion of that.
Got it. Where you are winning RFPs or winning share, what are typically the drivers of it? Is it the vertical? Is it the geography? Is it the product? Maybe within B2B specifically, you can talk about or drill down just in terms of why BigCommerce has an advantage.
Yeah, let me talk to B2B and then B2C because those decisions are actually very different. B2B tends to be driven by cost savings and time savings. If you're going to a B2B site as a buyer, that conversion rate's 99% probably. It's not really about funnel optimization. It's about permissions. It's about security. It's about customization. That's a very, very different use case and buying experience than it is on B2C. B2C is a lot more about, OK, where are the channels where you're having your products be discovered? How do you optimize the conversion funnel? How do you try to get the best payments rates that you can as associated with that? That's a lot more about funnel optimization.
If it is a B2B buyer, we have really, really large ROI advantages that you can run our platform using fewer people and certainly at a lower cost than a lot of the more old monolith competitors. On the B2C side, that is especially where Feedonomics starts to become a really big advantage for us because I would argue as a company, we are as good as anybody else in the industry, if not better, at optimizing product sales conversion in almost any channel that you can imagine through Feedonomics. When we win, it is usually because customers are looking for a little bit of extra configurability, a little bit of additional customization that we can offer at a competitive price without having to move into the really large monolith solutions that tend to be really expensive and bulky to implement.
Got it. Thank you. Maybe with reference to increasing consumer wallet share, maybe you can connect that to doubling the sales force or improving sales productivity.
Yeah.
Specifically what's resonating with accounts?
Yeah. For us as a business, we had a lot of inefficiencies in how we were approaching go-to-market. I may be weird by CFO standards because I tend to talk as much about the areas where we need to get better as I do on the areas where things are going well. From a business operation point of view, I'm really laser-focused on go-to-market efficiency. Pick whatever metric you want to look at, whether it's magic number or I just tend to look at dollars of ARR growth relative to dollars in sales and marketing expense. We have not been where we need to be from an efficiency point of view. There are a lot of reasons for that. Our roots as a business were in small business historically. That's more of a high-velocity, low-average selling price type of motion.
It tends to be very top-of-funnel marketing spend focused. As we have moved up market, we needed to change the way we were approaching go-to-market to have it be more of a sales-led motion and less of a, I would say, heavy marketing spend top-of-funnel motion. We were probably, I would argue, a couple of years slower than we should have been to pivot and move. I would actually say the product moved up market faster than the way we were approaching go-to-market. That is part of why we are getting everybody into one CRM. We have doubled our quota carrying sales team because they are now managing territories. We have bifurcated into dedicated B2B and B2C sales teams because those are fundamentally different selling processes and different audiences. In a lot of ways, this is a transition year as we manage through that. We have seen really encouraging signs.
I've seen really encouraging signs on what we're seeing in terms of pipeline build, where that pipeline is being generated. I'm always going to have a healthy amount of conservatism and skepticism until I start to see that flow through numbers that we can report and talk about on a quarterly basis.
Have you talked about any long-term goals for adjusted EBITDA?
Yeah.
Maybe what level of growth scale is required to hit those?
Yeah. So we talked about this in some detail at our recent investor day in March. I think from a growth perspective, there's no reason why this business can't be sustainably growing in the teens. We haven't been there over the course of the last couple of years because we've had a lot of changes that we needed to make in the business. Making as big of a pivot as we've made from a profit and cash flow perspective certainly came with some cost. That said, I believe we could have and should have done better on revenue growth than where we have. If I look at the underlying drivers and where we have opportunity to increase net revenue retention within the business with the existing customers we already have, I definitely think this is a business capable of sustainable growth in the teens.
What that means then from a profitability perspective, I think similar or higher in terms of profit margins. What I do not want to do is cut our way to a really healthy profit margin at the expense of growth. If you look at where we are from a guidance perspective this year, which we talked about at length on our last earnings call, I do not really want to spend time on that here. I believe the opportunity is there for us to grow. I think that where we have made improvements in billings quality, the flow through we have seen in working capital, and the cash flow improvements we have seen gives us room to invest. There are a lot of areas where we think there are huge opportunities to invest. That is why we doubled the sales team.
There's areas where I want to continue to invest specifically in AI and capitalize on really fast-moving changes that are interesting that are happening in that space where I'd like to maintain where we are and grow a little bit. We talked about already in our guidance on profitability, but my focus is definitely on growth.
Thank you. On the Feedonomics portion of the business, and I guess maybe the bigger trend within e-commerce of marketplaces, social media, TikTok, et cetera, gaining or consolidating market share of transactions and dollar value of e-commerce, how do you strategically go about integrating with those platforms, leveraging Feedonomics then to increase the funnel into the other parts of your business?
What's really interesting about Feedonomics is that I think it really capitalizes on where the trends are moving in commerce. If you look at for a lot of the LLMs in the AI space, I believe a lot of them are moving into Google's ad business as an example. As that happens, it's going to cause some shifts in where volume is coming from to businesses from an order perspective. Today, businesses spend a lot of time thinking through how they're going to optimize SEO. They pay an absolute fortune for SEM. I think that will continue to be true. I just think it's going to be a lesser share.
I think in the future, more volume share will come from maybe not more than the traditional ad search business, but a greater share than today of volume that's also going to come directly through some of the discoverability that you're going to find through AI search models. Feedonomics allows customers to optimize the data feeds to each of those models, whether it's discoverability with Mercado Libre if you're doing sales in Latin America, or whether or not that's through Target or Walmart or Facebook or eventually through OpenAI or a lot of these other tools. Feedonomics allows those conversion results to come through at a better return than where they were before with better conversion. We are always going to invest in Feedonomics for that to be platform agnostic.
I do not ever want to limit the addressable market for that product to just the amount of market share that we can capture on the BigCommerce platform. We have actually really good partners with a lot of the other commerce players in the space where we are really careful that we are not out to necessarily switch volume from those platform competitors through Feedonomics. We are going to continue to market BigCommerce on its own. We are really about cross-selling Feedonomics into the BigCommerce space because we want to continue to make sure that we are making that the best feed management platform as much for a Salesforce customer as it is for a BigCommerce customer.
Thank you. One question from the audience, which is pretty thematic, and then I have one myself. The first is on the SaaS business model. I guess this is just coming up broadly around the transition to AI apps and LLM-driven sort of economy. Do you see any change in the way that you will—I am extrapolating the question. Do you see any change in the way that you monetize customer relationships? Will there be a shift from a SaaS business model to more of a usage-based business model over time?
I think if you look at the different pricing models for competitors within the space, it already, I would argue, in some ways encompasses the spectrum of outcomes that you just articulated. Some of our competitors charge basis points on processed GMV. We charge based on order blocks and kind of up to kind of tiered pricing. Is one better or worse than another? I think it depends upon the customer and what they're looking for. If I look at where things are going with commerce specifically related to AI, it's hard to say because it's moving relatively quickly. If you think about it, merchants still need to run their catalog. They still need to process orders. They need to do so in a way that is tax compliant. They need to make sure that they're paying low payments processing rates.
The fintech world, I think, is going to continue to own the payments rails. It's just going to look like a different channel flowing into those payments rails. In a lot of ways, we would argue the same is true from the order processing side of things. Businesses are still going to need to run their catalogs. They're still going to need to maintain a direct business or a direct site where they're going to get volume through. It is really important that businesses are working with a partner that's forward-thinking about how to optimize that catalog data for all of the channels that volume is going to come from in the future. Maybe it will be more in social commerce. I don't know. Maybe it will be more coming from LLMs. I'm not sure. From our point of view, we're agnostic about that.
We actually have an entire business that's based around optimizing all of the channels where those customers can connect. In my opinion, we win almost no matter where that volume shifts. We just want to make sure that we are really positioning ourselves that we are bigger than just an e-commerce platform. We're really about facilitating commerce online no matter what channel that's coming through.
Yeah, that's a good answer. I think that makes a lot of sense.
Thank you. I'm so glad you didn't say it was a terrible answer. That would have been really embarrassing.
I might not have said that if I thought that.
You could think it.
I just don't say it.
Right. Thank you.
Maybe I'd like to ask you about payments. The one I'd really like to ask you before that, I'm not sure we have time for the other one. Around AI, just of course, all the hype around agentic commerce, as you sort of touched on already. How is BigCommerce using AI today? I'd be curious both internally as well as sort of the external side of it. Then what's the vision that Travis or you and the team have for the next year?
This is a really interesting conversation because I talked to a lot of peer CFOs at other companies about this. We kind of compare notes on where we're using it internally and how we're looking at productizing it and capitalizing on that externally. In a lot of ways, the use cases are very similar. Internally, we are using AI to actually augment what we're doing on the support side. We actually measure what % of inbound call volume is actually being answered through AI versus going to people. That's kind of an obvious early use case.
What is that?
We use Forethought as a solution for that. We have been for over a year, and it's done very, very well. I'm a CFO, so I always want it to be doing better. I've actually been really pleased with that. We're also using it in a lot of really interesting ways in sales enablement. We are already using OpenAI and other tools where the reps actually can use AI now to automatically have it look through their book and give them ideas on which prospects they should be talking to, automatically classifies their notes into whatever framework they need in order to capture the data from their sales calls. There are a lot of really interesting use cases that we are using and looking to build out internally on how AI can just make reps more effective. It doesn't take away the number of reps that you need.
What it does is it enables them to spend more time on the phone and less time documenting, preparing, and getting ready for those calls. It's kind of an unlock in that respect. I've also seen a ton of things out there with companies claiming to be able to optimize marketing spend. Good luck taking out of business with Nielsen. I'll believe that kind of when I see it. There's those use cases. Externally, there is a lot of opportunity for us to be able to optimize that catalog data to the LLMs. Whether or not I don't know that all customers will allow agents to buy on their behalf. I think that remains to be seen. I think some customers will. Some may want to do search there, but still go do the purchase themselves if they don't want to just outsource the buying decision.
There are a lot of interesting things, and it's moving really, really quickly.
Yeah, have your MCP servers up and running from what I gather.
All right. Thanks, everyone.