LegalZoom.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:LZ) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dan Wernikoff: Sure, I’ll take the first one and then Noel maybe grab the second one. So books, super excited. So we’ve only been in the market for a couple months here. And we went into market with a great product, but also knowing that we were missing some key features. And you can get a sense of the velocity that we’ve almost closed the gap on all of those features within those couple months. Just to remind everybody, over 90% of the small businesses that formed through us have no accounting solution. Interestingly, they don’t have the highest brand awareness of the category either. I mean, they’re really looking for a solution that’s custom built for them and they are truly micro businesses. The other thing that’s interesting is we’ve talked about this, books for many people precedes the need for tax.

In some cases, our customers come in and they’re not really going to be filing a return for the year that they form, but at the same time, they want to get established properly on the right financial management solution. And so that’s the point of launching this. We are seeing really strong engagement on things like bank connections and invoices sent and paid. We like the trial to pay conversion. And I’d say that we’ve been doing this at a smaller scale. So a lot of our focus when we launch a product is to make sure that the customer metrics are great and the experience metrics are great before we start to scale. You’re now going to see us probably more actively marketing it to our base going forward because we’re seeing that. We’re getting the right signals from it.

Noel Watson: Yes, and on the sales cost question, the impact on Q4 because the transition is happening during the quarter is not that significant. And just the way we’re viewing our sales channel in general is along the same lines as we think about kind of our overall performance marketing spend. So really, as we calibrate on bringing cost back into the organization, it will be on a performance basis. And so we’ll provide more detail around our thoughts for 2024 impact on our next call. But the lens that we’re taking and the approach that we’re taking is looking at it from a performance lens and we’ll scale up as long as we’re seeing the right ROI on the spend. And that will be determined kind of as we grow into it.

Dan Wernikoff: And just adding to that, I think sales for us we touched all of our customers. So that wasn’t the right approach as we went to free. And as you think about a sales team, a lot of what you want them to be doing is really focusing on the highest value stuff post formation. And so this is a big change to the sales organization strategy. And I do believe that we’ll build it up over time as we continue to prove that we can do a better job of monetizing post formation.

John Byun: Thank you.

Dan Wernikoff: Yes, thanks, John.

Noel Watson: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Ron Josey of Citi. Your line is open.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey guys, this is Jay Zhang [ph] for Ron. Thanks for the question. Dan, I just wanted to see if you could elaborate on the Business Licenses product. Could you maybe touch on just like the key problem that we’re solving with the product and then thinking about what the opportunity could be going forward? And then just quickly, you might have touched on it, but any early indications on what the early retention rates look like the going back to like the early cohorts of the freemium formations customers. Thanks.