All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Chris Kuntarich. I'm with the UBS Internet team. I have Chris Zhang up here as well from UBS Payments team. We co-cover the web builder space, and we're really excited to have the GoDaddy team here and Mark McCaffrey. So thank you very much for joining us here today.
Great to be here. Thank you for having me, Chris and Chris.
Too easy to remember. Well, yeah, let's, let's jump right in. Mark, you've been in this seat for 2.5 years now. I guess, what, what has changed the most? Kinda what's changed the least here, and really, what are you most excited about over the next year?
Yeah. So it's been, I would say, a very active 2.5 years when you look at the macroeconomic environment that we've been in. I always say, you always have to remember, these are cycles, right? And you're gonna go through cycles no matter what. And I think, looking back in two years, even coming into the role, one of the things that attracted me about GoDaddy was just the strength of the balance sheet, the cash flow, the free cash flow, and some of the, you know, advantages that created. Little did I know, those advantages would be placed in a recessionary environment. I don't know if we're in a recession or not, but that type of environment.
And, you know, it really came into play, allowing us to maneuver and make decisions, and really look at the business as things were unfolding in front of us. There was a lot that was within our control, but a lot that was outside of our control, and we took advantage of it. We took some time to, you know, look at our infrastructure, look at where we were going, look at what made sense. We've talked about the transformation we did on our technology stack. I know, you both were at dinner last night, and we launched Airo, which is launching today, live, which we're really excited about.
But that really is the accumulation of the work that has been done over the last year, even probably a little longer, around, you know, that transformation. And what I'm excited about today is we're at that inflection point. Airo launched, Payments is now fully in market. We have a consolidated technology stack, and with that consolidated technology stack, we own the data all the way from the domain to payments now.
And with that data, feeding that into a machine learning model, we're able to create an experience, a seamless experience, for our customers that really takes the friction out of discovery, you know, engagement, and then ultimately monetization for us. So we demoed it last night for people live. The websites actually went up live. I knew all of you would be checking it as soon as we were talking about it. And you got to see just how the friction has been removed from it. So really, really excited about it.
Got it. Yeah, maybe just a little bit more on Airo before we jump into some of the other topics. It was a great demo last night. The way we're kind of looking at it is this is kind of the GenAI, the new GenAI-based onboarding flow. But I guess just as far as... Yeah, just for investors that may not have had the chance to tune in last night, what should be the key takeaway from it on Airo?
You know, I'll talk about it in the financial aspects of it. We've often talked about, you know, our model and our ability to generate LTV and, you know, really going from one product to two products with our customers, to three products. And, you know, what that does is, you know, our retention rates are great, at 85% on average. When we get to that second product, it goes up even further. Get to a third product, we almost have a customer for life. When you think about Airo and generative AI, and taking the friction out of the choices around products, that gets those decisions faster in the funnel for us. And if we can have it faster in the funnel with a greater experience, using generative AI, then we can, you know, get to those equations.
Now, you know, I would also point out, you know, this is really new, right? We're so excited about it, but it's only... You know, we've had it out for about 10% of our customers right now. We'll launch it full today. You know, the engagement we're seeing around it, it's pretty positive. When we launched Payments, we saw positive engagement around Websites + M arketing, attaching to our payment processor to it. It made us really excited, and now we're seeing that roll out into, you know, what we're seeing in our commerce. We're seeing those similar statistics now, right? When you put it in front of it, you take out the friction, they're going to those choices.
So, so again, brand new, but, you know, it really has us now evolved, and we've always said it, we were a domain company, and as a domain company, you come to us for the domain, that was yours. You'd go somewhere else to get other, you know, services you needed for your web presence. Today, it's all in one platform, and literally, when we dem- what did it take, 5- minutes to get it up and running on the web last night?
Yeah.
That's how quick it is to get a online presence out with email, with a logo, with social media posts. And those social media posts are generated by the AI machine that allow... You know, remember, we're the micro businesses, and allows them to get online in social media almost instantaneously, and then schedule things out based on things happening. And we're even seeing engagement along the lines that says, the generative AI social media posts our customers are using are actually more or getting more reception or click-throughs on our customer's customer, right?
Right.
Which, again, those are just all positive signs out there, but it's the evolution, I would say, of, you know, us now taking the domain business and taking it all the way through payments, and combining that into that frictionless experience.
A lot to be excited about.
Yeah, it is, right? And, you know, as you heard last night, you heard Aman talk about it, and you heard some of our products people talk about it. And, you know, we're really excited just how well this is working right now and the initial engagement we're seeing in the market.
And how should we think about the cost side of that? How much was kind of built, how much is upfront investment that you've already made, versus how much this is gonna be kind of ongoing recurring?
Yeah. So the great thing about this is the product itself, called Airo, the—we'll call it the engagement or front of funnel now, has become so efficient, it actually helps us on a profitability standpoint. Now, this is early stage, so the numbers I've talked about coming out of Q3, we haven't really put it into any, you know, model at this point in time, 'cause we're really still seeing how people are engaging. But the idea of, you know, the care organization, the marketing organization, you know, which used to really facilitate that second and third product for us, now that's happening much faster, which allows us to get better leverage out of our PNL.
On the tech investment, you know, we—this is the transformation we have talked about earlier, of combining the tech stacks to put all the data on one platform. We're, you know, well into that. We completed a lot of it first half of the year. We still have some going on, so I don't wanna say we're done done, but I think we're, you know, past the heavy lift.
Okay.
And that's why when I talk about, you know, tech and dev going into next year, I phrase it as, you know, we're coming off a cycle where we've made all this happen. We knew we had to transform, but we're at that inflection point now, where things should start to, you know, level out and get back to normal. I would say, a normal basis, and allows us, again, to get better leverage in our operating model going forward.
Got it. Well, yeah, good, good transition here to really talking about the margin targets that you've laid out. You laid out the 31%, normalized EBITDA margin exiting for Q4 2024, so two points of leverage versus where you guys have guided for for Q4 of 2023. I guess, just maybe philosophically first, should we be thinking about there being kind of, like, a shift in focus from you guys from growth to profitability?
I don't. I wouldn't call it a shift. When I came in 2.5 years ago, we were at about... I think we exited then at 23% margins. Last year, we exited at 26%. This year, we're exiting at 29%. You know, we've put the target out there for 31%, right? So I would say, the philosophical view of profitability has always been there.
We continue to look for efficiencies in the way we do things. Now, we also knew we had to do a couple things. I've said often, innovation in the technology space is necessary. You have to innovate, or ultimately, someone else will for you. And we knew we had to make those investments at the same time. So again, looking at how we went forward with the transformation, we were very, very purposeful on how we positioned everything, so that we could get to this inflection point, knowing that it would create, you know, the tailwinds we have going into the future.
Got it. And I guess, just as we're, as we're thinking about where that leverage is gonna be showing up at the segment level here, I guess, yeah, do both segments, or should we be thinking about both segments showing leverage in 2024 here, and, or should most of that be really kind of flowing through the Apps and Commerce business?
The Apps and Commerce definitely has the most leverage for us. And think about it from, you know, the second product that I talked about and going into the third product. We still see the domain as the primary top of funnel, which is our Core Platform. So once they get into the domain, when we start talking about, you know, 2+ products, 3+ products, most of the benefit of that is happening in A&C. So A&C comes at a more efficient revenue, because it is more of an attach to the primary. And the domain still remains, for the most part, the primary within our, I'll call it, one-stop shop.
Now, as we've moved to Business in a Box, you know, so, you know, we've always talked about the, the one-stop shop as, as our goal. I would say, now you're gonna hear Business in a Box, which is what we're offering our customers today. As, as the A&C becomes a larger part of the portfolio, obviously, it has a natural, you know, I would say, tailwind again, to our overall margin position. So we're really excited about that. Now, on Core Platform, we're, we're still working on a few things. Like I've been open about hosting and, and what we're doing around some of the non-strategic brands and hosting, and, and, we've disposed of a few, we've integrated a few, we've end- of- lifed a few. That journey continues for us.
Aftermarket continues to be a great business, but it is subject to macroeconomic, you know, reactions. We don't set the price there, so it's depending on the buyer and the seller, and depending on the, you know, average transaction that can you know sway that stream. But taking it down to the core domain business, we're still seeing, you know, we talked about it, that strong demand, 4% growth, 8% bookings growth in domains in and of itself. Again, that's what's really now driving that, I would say, model of the attach that's coming over into A&C. So I would say A&C is, you know, the growth.
All right? And that's where we're gonna see the growth show up. We'll see domains continue to be a strong funnel for us. We'll get leverage more on the operating basis as we complete some of this transformation work that we've talked about within Core Platform, but both of them should start to see the benefit of that as we move forward.
Got it. Got it. And you touched on it a bit through a couple of these questions here, but maybe just kind of bringing it down to the cost line item, Tech and Dev, that's obviously you've talked about for next year. Thinking about that falling in absolute dollars and a percentage of revenue in 2024, just as we think about it, I think infrastructure costs, those account for a little over half of the line items. Like, should we be thinking about that Tech and Dev, what you're guiding to for 2024, is that more the infrastructure side slowing down on a year-over-year basis, or is this more? Should we be thinking about this as far as kinda like the product development, more related to Airo, kind of some of those costs coming out or a combination?
So it'll be a combination of both, right? I would say in the infrastructure, we are moving off of data centers. We're moving into the cloud. We're using AWS. That does add a cost that offsets the data center cost, so the benefit we see there is limited as more and more volume goes into AWS. We see a significant benefit in our cash flow because we don't have to support the CapEx around the data centers, so we see a benefit to our cash flow per share. But that line item will continue to get efficiencies now, on the development side, which is the other half of the pie. You know, like we talked about, we're coming off an investment cycle.
You know, we still wanna invest in innovation, but you know, we're coming off the heavy lift around Airo, around commerce. All that now should be... is in market. It should be leveraging out. I don't wanna get too far ahead into exact numbers and all that fun stuff, but we definitely are looking at it from a, "Hey, we can optimize both these for a more efficient operation going forward, and we have a lot of opportunities." And you know, we have more to do on it, but that is part of it. You saw the jump from Q2- Q3, right? And a little bit of that is, okay, that is the pattern we will start to see.
Got it. And as we think about those kind of two points of leverage here, maybe just moving on to the marketing side of things, is it kinda the right way to be thinking about that we'll be seeing leverage on marketing? And then maybe just kind of to uplevel the question here, just the web builder, the web builder space as a whole, we've seen a lot of efficiency on the marketing side. Just curious, if we were to think about where the web builder space is on kind of a growth versus a profitability spectrum right now, kinda how you see that, and whether some of these cost savings that we've seen in marketing as a space here are more structural going forward in your view.
Yeah, so marketing for us, we you know, several years ago came to a conclusion that the marketing dollars were not as efficient as they needed to be in the market. We were in an interesting time coming out of the pandemic, going into the economic environment we were in. We made a switch back then, two years ago, to use our own technology to figure out how to spend our marketing dollars and get the best return. We stopped relying on third-party data. We you know... I always say we have 21 million customers, we have 13 million you know, interactions with our customers every year. We have a lot of. We've been around for a while. We have a lot of data, right?
Using that data and creating that engine that allows us to get that efficiency on the marketing was a big deal for us over the last couple years. So from a marketing leverage perspective, we don't look at it as, you know, "Hey, we're cutting back," or, "This is the new norm." We look at it as we can now really see where we get the return on our marketing dollars and where to put that dollar in order to get that return, and we feel much better about our ability to do that. Now, there are always decisions we'll have to make, what markets we are going into, what that takes to get to a market. An example I give is we've now launched commerce in Canada. We had only launched it in the U.S.
So, you know, there is an area where we will look to, you know, launch the commerce and start to get the returns. But, you know, spending marketing in markets that we haven't launched commerce maybe isn't the answer right now, 'cause we won't get that full benefit of that return related to not having the commerce, you know, part of the equation yet in that. So it becomes very tactical for us, and we feel really good about our ability now to measure that and see the returns on it.
Aman always says, "As a CFO, I always have to cringe." He always gives the, "I wanna spend marketing dollars, I just want the return on it. I'd spend $1 billion in marketing if I got $2 billion back." I don't wanna do that. Having said that, though, we will continue to look. If there's an opportunity to get market share at a profitable basis, we'll do it. No doubt.
Makes sense. Maybe just kind of wrapping up on OpEx before I turn it over to Chris here. Just third-year OpEx is G&A and customer service, customer care. Just kind of how should we be thinking about the puts and takes, and, again, we saw last night the presentation, really blowing it out to the broader theme of GenAI. How does that kind of fit into the customer care organization and efficiencies you're gonna be gaining here over the next 12-24 months?
No, no doubt, without, you know, going into exact dollars or percentages, we do expect efficiencies in care. Part of it is already starting to happen. You know, when you don't have to maintain separate technology stacks, you don't have to maintain care around those technology stacks, you don't have to have expertise in those areas anymore around those technology stacks. So there's an efficiency just from the transformation we've done already. Now, you start to put in, you know, data, Machine Learning, AI, within the care organization itself, so they can use that tool. And we had Demetria on stage yesterday.
You know, their ability to use that to get customers' needs met quicker, whether it's in a chat or whether it's live, or also to target where we think a customer is coming in, that is prime for maybe conversion on the commerce platform. We have that ability to do that much more efficiently right now. We also, you know, have, I think, you know, as we've come out of the pandemic, our care organization has just gotten better in and of itself. Our footprint now doesn't have to be around having care in one location.
We can actually, you know, spread it out because-- Yeah, you learn through crisis sometimes. Our care organization works just as well remotely as it did in our Tempe office. And that was something, you know, we would have never realized had we not put everybody remote. And we continue to take advantage of that, 'cause that gives us more opportunities to hire people that are more effective, but not having to worry about what location they're in.
Makes sense.
All right. I'm gonna switch a little bit. I'll face this way here.
All right. Awesome. Yeah, great answers so far, and really appreciate all the details.
Oh.
So I guess maybe if we jump back up to the top line, and you've mentioned that you didn't need double-digit growth next year, assuming somewhere in the single-digit range, it could be a high single-digit range. So maybe can you just walk us through how people can potentially build to the high single-digit growth next year, and how does this align with your growth initiatives?
Yeah. So I'll give a few breadcrumbs. I don't wanna-- We're gonna have an Investor Day next quarter. You know, we'll announce the date here shortly. I'm looking at Christie over here in the audience, and it will be in Arizona, just so everybody knows that. The way we look at it, and I just wanna be clear, you know, when we talk about the percentages and the operating profitability and the normalized EBITDA targets, my basis for wanting to give people an idea that it's not dependent on double-digit growth, was to give comfort that we don't need to chase growth in order to obtain profitability. We have the plan on profitability, and we have the momentum.
We feel really good about these headwinds becoming tailwinds going into next year, and that gives us the confidence of, "Hey, we will accelerate growth." Now, I haven't gotten into, you know, what that means exactly, other than to say, I'm not chasing double-digit growth to make this whole model work. I feel really good that our ability to make it work within the parameters that are in front of us today. Now, I will say, where we are really excited and has started to show up, is within our A&C segment, which is that second product attach that we've talked about. We've talked about the demand coming in to our Core Platform, but they're moving to that second product. Now, this is not an error at this juncture.
This is just a pattern we've seen all year around, that we're accelerating to that second product faster, and we're seeing that acceleration start to show up in our A&C platform right now, which really gives us the excitement around the momentum. You also look at some of the areas that haven't. You know, we've talked about hosting. We will have some headwinds around hosting going into next year, as we've disposed of some of the entities that we've also end-of-life'd the integrated. That comes with a natural. You know, we will tail off on some customers there that weren't transferred over the core GoDaddy stack. So we'll keep everybody informed of what those pressures are within our hosting business.
I think that's some of the feedback we got from investors over the last, you know, few weeks as we've done our investor reach out to, "Please give us more details of what that means." But eventually, as we start to lap those events, you know, that creates a better environment for us. And then in the aftermarket as well, you know, we're coming off of, I would say, a 2021 that was extremely strong in the aftermarket. You know, valuations were very high. We saw that a little bit in 2022, saw it tail off into 2022. We're entering a more normalized, I think, market for the aftermarket now. So again, those headwinds start to become the tailwinds that we've talked about.
Without getting into exact numbers, you're starting to see our bookings, you know, exceed our revenue. Some of the FX hangover that we've always talked about coming out of last year now is starting to abate itself, so we're seeing some strength there. We'll get into more detail, you know, when I get to Investor Day, on what that'll look like exactly within 2024. But we feel really good that this isn't about chasing a specific number to get to our profitability, to get to the free cash flow we talk about, to get to the unlevered free cash flow.
We really feel good about our increasing ability to do that, and ultimately, you know, it starts to show up in our free cash flow per share, which, you know, as I said at the end of Q3, we're on target to deliver that for this year. And obviously, we'll start to give the what that'll look like for 2024, but we feel really good about the momentum going in.
All right. Sounds great. I appreciate all the color on the building blocks. I'm sure we're all gonna get more concrete answers in a couple of months or.
Yes. If I told everything now, no one would show up to Investor Day, right?
All right. Awesome. So I guess before moving on to the segments, can you just just comment on the pricing environment and what do you think about the opportunities that for potential pricing increases in 2024 versus the pricing actions you've taken in 2023? And then maybe just layer on top of that, how do you feel about the health of SMB strengths at this point in time?
Yeah. So, I'll start with the last part and then move it into the front part. You know, when we do our survey, Venture Forward, we look out into small businesses, and we kinda get the reaction. There's a clear, you know, statistic out there. Over 70%, 70% of entrepreneurs right now feel really good about their opportunities out there to grow their business. They-- That same group also doesn't feel rather good about the economic environment they're in today, so you have to balance the two of them. But we feel really good about the fact that people are engaging at the micro-business entrepreneur level in a manner that, you know, we haven't seen this demand for a long time, this consistent, right?
So there is a strength out there that we are seeing, we feel good about, and we believe that is starting to transform itself into people doing what I would call the side hustle or the side business. And that's an environment that we thrive in. Again, we're the micro businesses. When other people talk about small businesses, they're talking about a level up from our micro business, right? And that is a very, I would say, durable, resilient group that does things because they love it, and therefore tries to keep doing it.
Maybe they slow down a little bit, but generally, when you look at the value they're getting out of GoDaddy, you know, our ARPU, you know, when you look at it overall, is at a level that the value they can achieve versus, you know, what they're paying for it, there's, you know, we believe there's surplus there. So, it's not something they generally will give up. We haven't seen it in our retention, we haven't seen it in any aspect of our business, even when we've talked about the strength of the front-of-the-funnel and demands. What that does from a pricing, we continue to use pricing as a lever, no doubt about it.
I never want anybody to walk away saying, you know, where we think we're getting our customers more value, we're not going to try to achieve, you know, more pricing on it. We do balance that very, very much with retention. You know, our 85% retention rates, we think are just fantastic. And we never want to put pressure on that number because that hurts LTV ultimately. And so we balance where we think we can take price versus our retention rates and make sure that what we're doing keeps that, you know, I would say, leverage in place in the model. Having said that, we're in an environment where, one, you know, depending on what products we talk about, you know, there's ability to take price.
We also think in things like commerce, we're very aggressively priced, but it's allowing us to take market share. We'll make those decisions as we go forward, right? As to what is our ability to do that? What are our successes around it? How do we continue to generate those, I would say, value points within our model? Going into next year, you know, one of the things, again, now that we're on a common technology stack. I haven't even put Airo into the model at this juncture. It's early stage, and we think it's going to be a great tailwind.
But when you just take the technology stack in and of itself, the customer now has the ability to bundle more, again, getting to that second and third product, which gives us pricing elasticity. Once we see the data around what bundles are creating more value, that gives us the ability to go in and say, "Okay, you're getting more value out of this bundle." That gives us a pricing opportunity. And again, we're at such a level, we're not the ones that are going to sit there and double their price overnight, but we'll take advantage of it, right? And as long as our retention rates stay strong, we feel really good about it.
And again, it's a balance between once you get to that second product, the retention goes up, which gives us pricing elasticity to maybe get more value because our customers are getting more value out of the bundle. And, you know, that is, I would say, something that is evolving more strongly for us versus in the past, where you just, you know, you passed on the price increase in domain names, and you just passed it on, right? But I would say those were more of a, you know, blunt instrument type pricing events, where versus now we're getting more into that, you know, value-based pricing that we can do within our customer base.
All right, awesome. I guess, with two minutes left, I just want to see if there's questions from the audience, and I do have some more-
This is a great audience, by the way. Thank you. At 8:15 A.M., I do appreciate you all being here.
All right, so I guess maybe just a rapid fire on one topic definitely we want to get to. Recent highlight, 50% of subscribers now have 2+ products, and this is where you're seeing growth and potential more leverage. So I guess, first one, does this include a Managed WordPress account?
Yes, so it includes all our products-
Great
... right across the board. And just to give you a little color, I all of a sudden came up with a new metric and threw it out there in Q3 earnings. You know, the plan for that is to show that and talk about that more going forward, so we wanted to give a baseline this quarter. You know, it's been improving, but now that Airo is launched, you know, to me, you know, I... We've been talking about leading indicators and lagging indicators within metrics. We realize that with our business model, while things like ARPU and ARR, you know, we give out, they're more lagging indicators, and we have to give a few more leading indicators of where we think the business is going.
So things like the attach, you know, and the 2+ products, we're trying to get more into it in Investor Day, but those are... We're trying to give more leading indicators so people can see the progress.
Right. Maybe just a quick one: What are the most common two products? Payments, shipping, or something else comes to mind?
I would say, we haven't gotten into, you know, what are the most common two products, right? I will say-
Yeah
... on an overall basis, where we see strength, when you think about domain, website, email, and now payments, you know, those four pillars for us are probably at the core of everything else. There are other things out there that do well, whether it's logos, whether it's partners, like, you know, forming an LLC. There are other aspects that do very well as we're seeing within that environment. But when I always come back to it, the four things that you think about when you're creating a business is: Okay, what are-- I got to get a domain name, all right? You know, I need a website. How do I do that efficiently?
Having a professional email, you know, versus a generic email makes people feel like they are, they are, you know, really doing something, gives them more credibility in the market. And my ability to take payments as fast as possible. Those are the four pillars that I would say have hung together mostly within our strategy right now.
All right, awesome. I guess,
This is great. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. I could be up here for another hour.
Yeah.
I did admit, I looked down. I'm like, "Wow, we're at zero here," but thank you both. That was great.
All right. Thank you so much.