Welcome back to Cheddar news. Go Daddy is on
a mission to help small businesses. The company launching
its new point of sales hardware for the first time
that will allow customers to sell anything from anywhere.
The news coming as the company also looks to extend
its online platform into brick and mortar businesses. Joining
us now is the ceo of Go Daddy, Amman
Bhutan E uh thank you so much for being here
. Could you just take us through this new product
? You know, how will it help small businesses
? And I guess uh these small businesses, many
of them we don't even have to say but have
been really struggling or crushed at some point during this
pandemic. Thanks Alicia, great to be on the
show. And we're so excited to go Daddy right
now to bring, you know, point of sale
to our existing capabilities as folks probably already know,
Go Daddy offers the easiest way for small businesses to
get online and be able to sell in their online
store or on major platforms, whether it's amazon Etsy
google or social media like facebook or instagram. And
we're so excited that we're bringing the same easy capability
now to physical stores for our customers. And we're
offering all of this at sort of bargain basement low
pricing in the industry. Our customers only have to
pay 2.3% flat for their in store transactions and 2.3%
plus 30 cents online. And yes, you're right
. The pandemic has been difficult. But what we
have seen is that small business owners have been resilient
. They have been creative, they've gone online,
they've opened stores. We have customers that started online
and open stores because they just have to go,
they have to make things happen and that's what they've
done. Yeah, we certainly have seen the resiliency
in the small business space and entrepreneurs. Um I
wonder if you can talk about this. Is it
a win win scenario essentially for small businesses and for
go Daddy, you mentioned that the transaction fee that's
obviously to your point, you know, lower than
um some competitors, but it is a possible opportunity
for extra revenue, certainly growth. Is this a
pivot into kind of, you know, getting more
market share here, especially with volume of transactions and
the adoption of this? Yeah, it's definitely a
win win. We think the low pricing allows more
businesses to come in and start selling because not only
is everything easier to use and integrated that at that
price point, it allows the small business owners to
keep more in their pocket and invest back in their
business. And absolutely, you know, we would
love to have a tremendous amount of volume bringing more
and more customers online and supporting them In store as
well. But the way we actually do this is
that we're looking at the core of the stack.
We've gone out and started at the raw basic and
we said, how much, how low can we
get the pricing and how much of that value can
we get back to customers? And that's what you're
seeing in that 2.3%,, You know, it's easy
to remember. It's 2.3 flat on one side,
2.3 Plus 30 cents online. And the ideas build
that up and give most of the value back to
the small business owners. Your company is an online
giant. I wonder if you can also talk about
the companies that you're looking to challenge with this,
you know, smart terminal and card reader and what
what do you think gives Go Daddy the advantage in
this space? You know, a lot of customers
go Daddy as 20 million customers and millions of folks
started their online journey with Go Daddy. And we
have deep relationships with them. We get calls from
them very, very often our customers instead of when
they want to call their CMO, they're calling Go
Daddy when they want to call their CTO, they're
calling Godaddy, we help them with their website,
we help them with their online store, we help
them with their email and consistently our customers have wanted
service from us, which is easy to use and
is backed up on the human side with folks in
care, which is our operation where Over 6000 folks
pick up the phone or get on to chat and
help our customers grow their business. So, you
know, our approach is very much about working back
from are the needs of our customers. Yes,
there are lots of competitors out there and this is
a big space and everybody's interested in it. But
what we're building is targeted towards our customers. These
are the smaller small businesses And they need to support
and we've been providing it to them for 20 years
. Yeah I think one of the numbers that I
saw is that this allows you to tap fully serve
you know 60% of that 20 million customer base that
you were talking about. Um want to talk about
the commerce hub, the new commerce hub that's an
additional kind of um a feature. What problem does
this helps businesses solve? Let me tell you about
a customer Alicia. We have a customer sarah small
, she has a business called Wicker Goddess. She
started it online up to three years ago and actually
in the pandemic she opened a physical store now she
wants to start selling on Etsy. And you know
what she's dealing with, she's dealing with three different
screens, She's dealing with pulling inventory and seeing her
payment somewhere else. And one worrying about, did
I sell this in this uh on the screen or
not? And the commerce self brings everything together.
It doesn't matter if she's selling it in her online
store or her physical store using her smart terminal or
she's selling on the major platform that in her case
it's etc. Or instagram or others. She can
see it all in one place and that gives her
valuable time back so she can put it towards what
she wants to do is just spend time with our
customers no secret that small business owners often wear many
hats, do five or six jobs. So any
process that could be streamlined and and to the point
you made there, how that was streamlined, certainly
critical and an advantageous um want to talk about what
the future of commerce looks like for small businesses post
pandemic, what do you think that is? You
know, as we look at our customers and they
said they've gone through the pandemic and they're very,
very hopeful of the rest of the year and what
happens next year, you know, a lot of
small businesses were formed this year. In fact we
do a study which is a very broad study over
20 million folks, it's called venture forward. And
the recent update of that study showed that half those
businesses Was started by people 30 or younger. So
we're really starting to see that entrepreneurship wave coming with
the young folks and they start their businesses online and
we think they're going to want to be in the
physical stores, they're going to want to try to
sell everywhere, they can, doesn't matter what platform
or social media it is and we think this is
a huge tailwind for businesses like Godaddy, but also
for our communities because these small businesses or what ended
up being the backbone of local communities and we're just
really happy that we're able to support them, you
know, from the impact to small businesses, I
want to talk about the impact to a major business
obviously like yours. Can you just talk about the
pandemic, what impact it had on your company in
terms of growth and maybe some of the challenges that
go Daddy needed to overcome and how it's overcome that
. Yeah. You know, during the pandemic,
a lot of folks came online, we definitely saw
that if you look at 2020 we had record net
new customers, 1.4 million new and it was a
huge year for us. But as we look at
the future, what it's really about is how do
we offer our services in this state when all our
employees our remote right. When people have to work
online over using video conferencing tools and we still have
to have the culture that serves the customer first.
We still have to innovate and come up with new
ideas. You know, we just delivered the new
omni commerce solution that we just talked about this week
in record time. You know, we, we
started on that project earlier this year and we were
able to bring it live, but it's difficult to
do that when all 7000 of our employees are in
their home offices and we're building that muscle and work
and I think it's a huge experiment for everyone in
the world, but for us, the key things
around culture, around innovation and continuing to maintain them
because without those things, we can't serve our customers
the way we want to really quickly. Before I
let you go here. Any additional initiatives that we
should be on the lookout from for Go Daddy.
Well, you know, we are committed to supporting
small businesses and I'll tell you a lot of small
businesses are served by designers and developers and they use
Wordpress. I don't know if you know that platform
is the largest CMS platform in the world. Still
growing and we've launched a lot of cool stuff in
websites plus marketing this week, I would just say
we're going to bring it all to Wordpress and the
world should look out, we have a lot more
to do and we're just getting started. Well do
me a favor when you have those initiatives come to
light uh and you can kind of flushed out a
little bit more for us, come back what we'd
love to have you any time we can help small
businesses and uh improve that. We would love to
do So thank you so much. Amman Bhutanese ceo
at Go Daddy