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This is GoDaddy’s first acquisition under its new CEO Blake Irving, who joined the company January 7, having previously held roles as chief product officer at Yahoo and a number of senior roles at Microsoft. The news was announced as GoDaddy opened up new offices in Sunnyvale.
The acquisition is squarely aimed at expanding the kinds of products and services that GoDaddy offers to businesses, going beyond basic domain registration and hosting. In an interview with TechCrunch, Irving said that while GoDaddy expects M.dot to bring it “a ton of new customers,” GoDaddy also has some 54 million domains under management, “and a lot of them have asked for mobile help.”
Expanding GoDaddy’s revenue streams is also a key part of what the company needs to impress investors in the event of an IPO (the company is currently privately controlled by KKR, Silverlake Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures).
Irving would not comment on when GoDaddy could or would seek to go public, except to note that “this is definitely one of the logical conclusions when you consider GoDaddy’s double-digit revenue and Ebidta growth. I think that it’s something that we definitely will consider but we have no plan for a specific date. The company is well placed to make a decision like that in the next years — plural.”
Dominik Balogh, who co-founded the company with Pavel Serbajlo, says that M.dot was not looking for an exit this early in the startup’s life. Both Balogh and Serbajlo, as well as three others working on M.dot, will join GoDaddy.
First arriving in Silicon Valley from Europe in hopes of getting into Y Combinator — it didn’t make the cut in an April 2012 interview — M.dot opened for business in June 2012. Between then and October 2012 M.dot found funding from investors including Floodgate, SV Angel, Emergence Capital partner Sean Jacobsohn, San Francisco 49ers football star-turned-investor Harris Barton and Archimedes Labs, where TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare is a partner. M.dot had raised some $700,000 in seed funding.
Mobile is not a new area for GoDaddy: In November 2012, the company launched a website-building product in partnership with DudaMobile, although the primary purpose of that is to help translate a desktop web page into one optimized for mobile. “But we need to go deeper than that,” Irving said. M.dot’s unique selling point has been that, while many businesses have gone online, many have not, and creating a site via M.dot will be the first web experience for many of them.
In the words of Balogh, M.dot is aimed at “the large group of people out there who are hesitant to use a computer but they do have smartphones and use those all day. It’s a very different psychological approach.” So far, some 60,000 businesses have used M.dot’s service.
GoDaddy gives M.dot a chance at much wider distribution, but it gives it something else to target those users with: a customer support system.
“GoDaddy has over 2,000 people in customer support — that’s a big advantage,” notes Balogh. Prior to this, “since we were early stage,” Balogh says M.dot didn’t have any dedicated team to help customers with questions or problems.
M.dot had yet to introduce any kind of charging model for its service. Although there are fairly obvious ways to introduce paid elements into M.dot — say, by adding elements like an e-commerce backend, or giving people the ability to create a native app in addition to a web app — for now the idea is to keep M.dot as a free product. This is part of a new freemium strategy that GoDaddy is looking to explore, according to Irving.
“There are things we will be able to offer based on M.dot — more complete packages that we can make available across a variety of other devices,” said Irving. “What sits in front of the shopping cart that is free and what sits behind the shopping cart is a distinction you will be seeing more from us.” The idea, he says, is to offer users certain services for free and try to entice them to upgrade based on that. It’s a strategy that many other online companies that target the enterprise have taken, from HootSuite to Evernote and Box.
There may not be charging on the cards for M.dot in the coming months, but there will be other developments. There is an Android app in the works to complement the work on iOS. And we may also see enhancements that will let businesses use the M.dot platform to reformat their websites into mobile apps, thereby taking some of the existing DudaMobile work in-house. There is also the question of whether M.dot, a native app itself, will also progress into the area of helping businesses create native apps.
While mobile web has so far been the startup’s first priority, Balogh notes that they have built the business with native apps in mind. “We were thinking about apps at the beginning but we decided that mobile sites make more sense at first,” he says. “In the segment that we are focusing on, when you are a visitor and you are looking for something on Google and you find information it’s not likely that you would download an app. But we have been collecting structurized data so if we decide to turn on a native app function, we can create them with one click. We haven’t closed the door on native apps.”
