Squarespace, Inc. (NYSE:SQSP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Nathan Gooden: Concerning your question on longer term, we’re not talking about 2024 today. But hopefully, Q3 results and Q4 guidance gives you a good indication of how we’re thinking about the business and the progress we’re making. I would say, as Anthony laid out earlier, our platform has never been stronger, and with all the goodness from Squarespace Refresh, we’re very excited about where we can take this both domestic and international.

Operator: Our next question is from Siti Panigrahi from Mizuho.

Siti Panigrahi: I want to dig a little bit into the gross margin impact. Nathan, you talked about impact from domain cost this time. That’s quite a bit sequentially, if you look at almost like 380 bps. So help us understand a little bit, is it for the cost for the new domain that you register? And how does the revenue recognition and the cost usually works for domain? Or is it for the 10 million domain that Google has? And then another quick follow-up on to that is, do you have any sense what percentage of that 10 million domain do you have a customer mix among the overlap with your customer base from that 10 million domain?

Nathan Gooden: Yes. Siti, thanks for the question. So we have historically operated on 80-plus percent margins, very healthy margins. We’ve been in the domains business for over a decade. And so the dip that we see here is not a surprise. We certainly expected it with onboarding new domains, we do recognize the cost of the registry costs Upfront. So that’s fully burdened in our cost of goods sold, whereas revenue is recognized ratably over the 12 months. So because of that discrepancy, you do see a greater impact on gross profit margin. But over the long term, I would say we expect to see the margins normalize. As Anthony talked about earlier on the call as well, the exciting part and transformative part of this deal is that cross-sell opportunity as we bring these customers on opening them up to the ecosystem of Squarespace and attached products. Did you want to say anything more, Anthony?

Anthony Casalena: No. I mean that covers it for me.

Siti Panigrahi: And how about the overlap between that 10 million?

Anthony Casalena: On the overlap, I’m sorry. Yes, I’d say the substantial amount of the 10 million is not overlapped. I mean, if you just looked at the unique subs that we had before and the fact that a lot of the domain attach was from us, a substantial portion or not overlap, even just if you look at just the raw numbers divided our [indiscernible] accepted half and said, okay, well, what’s the max impact it could be? Max overlap.

Operator: Our next question is from Alexei Gogolev from JPMorgan.

Alexei Gogolev: Anthony, you said in your prepared remarks that you have introduced the biggest advancements in commerce products and various other releases during the Refresh earlier this year. Could you elaborate how your customers are choosing higher price point packages post those new releases?

Anthony Casalena: So yes, so to just emphasize that within the quarter, we have payments being introduced to a single-digit percentage U.S. customer. So we’re rolling that out. And then we had improvements to our classes and courses product and our invoicing products as well as multiple improvements to our existing service-based selling products and Acuity. And just all in, it’s the most improvements we’ve ever delivered in a year. I think that we have a lot of ideas about the go-to-market and the packaging and the pricing of those products that have yet to be realized. I think we’re a little bit ahead of ourselves in terms of like — I think we have functionality that’s sort of like undiscovered. And so in 2024, there’s a lot we want to do with the brands around those products and how we package them that I think will influence the planned choices people are making and simplified this whole experience for people.

Just due to how we’ve grown up, there’s a lot of different subscriptions inside Squarespace right now. And I think that if we get smarter about repackaging for essentially people personas, if you will. I’ll be able to more clearly comment on how they’re adopting those specialized, verticalized plans around this functionality.