Squarespace, Inc. (NYSE:SQSP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

We have not yet completed the migration, which we expect to complete over the summer of the existing domains. And we’ve made at this point, zero efforts to try and market to those customers or anything else. In fact, we’re in kind of a, I call it like a do no harm mode, make sure that this migration completes successfully for everybody, that the price is what they, everyone’s expecting, we’re not increasing the price on the first renewal for a lot of people. And it’s just making sure that that’s just super, super, super smooth. But that all being said, that new domains funnel is greatly elevated because one of the most trusted brands in the industry left. And we are the partner that they selected to register domains from there. So that’s a massive ecosystem change.

As people move over to Squarespace, they want another domain. If the domain’s already with us, they’ll get it with us. The domain’s experience is greatly improved. The upsells and cross-sells are easy, but not invasive. And it’s just kind of like a whole different world. And so — and we have yet to even lean into marketing there after all the things that we can do in that world. So we’ll continue to lean into the domain’s world over the next couple of years. But even today in an unauthorized form, it is really encouraging.

Nathan Gooden: Which I will say as a reminder, we talked about this last quarter, we have not included any material contribution from cross-sell upsell of these domains in our guide. We do view that as a future year benefit. And we will talk more about that next week at our Investor Day.

Josh Beck: Okay, that’s super helpful. And then, just on Squarespace payments, obviously it’s available to the customer base. When we think about the adoption curve with existing customers, it certainly seems like a renewal is always a natural insertion point, right? For new customers, it seems like the door is kind of always open. So what are you doing? Or, strategically, how are you thinking about promoting the existing base to kind of move on to the Squarespace payments platform? And over what timeframe? Is that a multi-year journey? Is it something that could start to happen fairly quickly as some of these tier-based pricing, plans are rolled out? Just how should we frame that up?

Anthony Casalena: Sure. So it’s going to be a multi-year journey, of course. But that being said, right now, you can go into Squarespace and in three clicks, without re-entering your customer information, port from Stripe into Squarespace payments, retaining your entire order and transaction history. And we actually have people doing that with absolutely no pushing and no incentive to do that, other than the fact that it’s a better product experience. Everything’s in one place. You’re dealing with one vendor. And that’s what people were telling us before we launched this. So it’s nice to see that with, again, absolutely no financial incentive to do that. People are organically doing that. And then we’ve made that process so easy, is frankly incredible.

To something else you said, the real driver of moving people over to payments will be when we have this integrated into our SaaS tiers, because you will have a financial benefit from moving over to Squarespace payments in addition to the integration. So that’s going to be the real transition point. And then we can, of course, market that and say, hey, you’re above X amount of sales, click here once and move over to Squarespace payments. And here’s your new SaaS fee. And that’s it. It’s a win for all of us. So we’re really, really looking forward to being able to do that.

Josh Beck: Very helpful. Thanks, Anthony and Nathan.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Trevor Young with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Trevor Young: Great. Thanks. First one, just back to international. Could you just expand on what countries are driving that strength and what in particular is enabling you to win? I understand localizing the platform site languages and even the currency offerings certainly help, but that also feels a little bit like table stakes needs to be competitor. So it would seem to me that something else is helping you in?

Anthony Casalena: Well, the combination is those table stakes things and just different payment methods. I think we are just to test out with PayPal internationally right now. Yes. So we just launched PayPal as a way to check out on Squarespace in certain markets. We had stuff introduced last year. We’re continuing to refine the localization. Frankly, Google was a great kickstart for us with respect to our language and currency coverage because we support 98% or so, maybe even more of the languages and currencies supported in Google Domains, which is as worldwide as you could imagine. I think there’s — we’re just stepping through the markets. English speaking non-U.S. were very strong. The conversion rates there approached that of the U.S. And then mostly it’s the European markets that are kind of next to our, let’s we call it like EN12.

And then later this year, we’re going to be dabbling in certain select Asian markets as well. Look, I know it’s sort of like maybe a generic sounding answer, but it really is a process. We can’t just arrive in a market and then ban everything’s just the way we want. So you start with using our circle community, local meetups, just really like guerrilla tactical, more local type marketing initially. And then you can move to bigger and bigger things, direct response, we can always do worldwide at any time. But it’s just a combination of hundreds of things and hundreds of languages and you know, not hundreds of languages, but like a lot of languages and like many, many currencies to really be successful in these markets. So it’s a time and effort thing along with a feature and functionality thing.

But again, it’s like, we say, oh, it’s a table thing. Well, it’s a little long time to even get PayPal to check on, but we’re testing that now in certain markets. So it’s not like we have complete coverage even today, so, yes, but decade-long effort for us and we’ll continue to be.

Trevor Young: That’s helpful Anthony. And Nathan, just a quick follow-up on the Google Domains, appreciate you’re not disclosing what it’s going to be in 2Q, but is that $85 million to $88 million from last quarter for the full year still kind of a good number to model in here?

Nathan Gooden: I mean, I will say, Trevor, we do maintain the strong renewal rates that we forecasted at the beginning of the year. So that’s continuing to flow to the model. But again, like the full year guide was raised for all three of those. So we are seeing goodness from websites, domains, and the email side of the business.

Trevor Young: Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Siti Panigrahi with Mizuho. Your line is now open.