Nextdoor Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:KIND) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mike Doyle: Eric, I’ll add one more thing in addition to what Sarah highlighted. And as we think about the ad stack, really one of our core focuses is advertiser performance. And so we talked last quarter about moving SMB customers to our Nextdoor Ad Server, as we mentioned that’s an area of significant momentum. And even as we double click into the indicators of momentum into future periods, when we look at things like budget utilization rate as an indicator of advertiser value, as we look at how that shows up in terms of revenue retention for that set of customers, we see some really positive signs, so that is an area where we continue to see momentum. We continue to have conviction, and we’re really balancing that against some of the vertical dynamics that Sarah noted.

Eric Sheridan: Thank you.

Sarah Friar: Thanks Eric.

Operator: Our next question comes from Brian Fitzgerald of Wells Fargo. Brian, please go ahead.

Brian Fitzgerald: Thanks, and again congrats, Matt and Mike. Thank you for all the help we’ve had over the years. We really appreciate it. Two quick ones from us; when you think about campaigns like the one with Verizon that you ran this quarter, how effective are those in attracting new neighbors to the platform? Do you see equal benefits across neighborhoods at different levels of penetration? And then second question was on the, can you give us an update on the progress with business-to-business initiatives like Weather.com or Axios or BBC? And how’s that impacting content generation and consumption?

Sarah Friar: Yes. Let me take that. I’ll lift it up a level because it’s really a question about how do we grow new neighbors on the platform? And if you look at our top of funnel efforts, which really became a big focus for us in Q3 because we said in order to grow WAU, we need to go back up to top of funnel because we feel very good about our ratios such as VN [ph] to WAU, about 50%, WAUs to DAUs, also about 50%. So the real growth is going to come from bringing new neighbors in at the top of funnel. We grow that in four ways, invite, brand awareness, content sharing, which is the partnership piece that you just asked about, as well as things like SEO and even just our own content that gets shared out even onto other social channels, and then finally paid and paid is definitely the fourth of four there.

So, I’ll put it to one side because in this period and in the last couple of periods, well over 90% of our Verified Neighbors are coming unpaid or organically. As I have already touched on invites, that’s been in place where we put in the most investment in the quarter and that included really reinvigorating our digital invite strategy. That’s where we’re able to match someone’s location with either an email address or a text message and then invite them to Nextdoor. It’s a place we’re actually able to use generative AI to create an invitation, but it’s even more enticing for them. And that’s where we saw that big acceleration 32% growth quarter-over-quarter. Because of our digital invite strategy, as people join the platform, they are more inclined to invite others as well, and so we’ve really invested into our Neighbor Hub.

Today, we’re seeing almost a million visits per week in our Neighbor Hub and that’s contributing to about a 100% year-over-year growth in digital neighbor-to-neighbor invites. Coming to your question, another way that we can drive growth is through brand awareness. Those can be campaigns we do on our own. So things like, we did a whole list with Blue Star families, Military families are more likely to move, new movers are a category that do very well on Nextdoor, but it’s also a place where we can work with brands like Verizon and almost have a win-win on both sides. They are paid advertisers, but they want to do something unique locally, and in this case they came to Nextdoor in order to do more of their neighbor month and neighbor meet up.