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spk06: Everyone, and welcome to the SEMrush Holdings first quarter 2024 results conference call. My name is Drew, and I'll be the operator for today's call. After today's presentation, we will begin the Q&A session. To register a question, please press Start, followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press Start, followed by 2. With that, I'll hand over to Brynlee Johnson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk07: Good morning, and welcome to SEMrush Holdings first quarter 2024 conference call. We'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after market close on Monday, May 6th. With me on the call is our CEO, Oleg Shlegelov, our President, Eugene Levin, and our CFO, Brian Mulroy. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning our expected future business and financial performance and financial conditions, expected growth, adoption, and demand for existing and any products and features, our expected growth of the customer base and specific customer segments, the expansion of our content-shaped tool, industry market trends, our competitive position, market opportunities, sales and marketing activities, future spending and incremental investment, our guidance for the second quarter of 2024 and the full year 2024, and statements about future pricing and operating results, including margin improvements, revenue growth, and profitability. Forward-looking statements are statements other than statements of fact and can be identified by words such as expect, can, anticipate, intend, plan, believe, seek, or will. These statements reflect our views as of today only and should not be relied upon as representing our views at any subsequent state. We do not undertake any duty to update these statements. Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risk and uncertainty that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. For discussion of the risks and important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as our other filings with the SEC. During the course of today's call, we referred to certain non-GAAP financial measures. There is a reconciliation schedule showing the GAAP versus non-GAAP results currently available in our press release issued yesterday after market closed, which can be found at investors.semrush.com. As noted last quarter, our results for the first quarter and our forward-looking guidance uses our new non-GAAP definition. We are no longer providing guidance for non-GAAP net income and instead guiding to both non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow margin. Definitions for these are presented in our earnings release. We've also updated our definition of non-GAAP income from operations on which non-GAAP operating margin is calculated to exclude amortization of acquired intangible assets, acquisition-related costs, restructuring costs, and other one-time expenses outside the ordinary course of business. For example, our exit costs incurred primarily in 2022, in addition to the current exclusion of stock-based compensation. The updated definitions are reflected in our first quarter 2024 financial results. All future financial statements will reflect the new definition for the current and prior periods. We are also providing a reconciliation of the old definition to the new definition for the periods presented. We believe this update allows investors to better understand our financial performance better align with measures used internally by management and operating our business, and permit a better evaluation of the efficacy of the methodology and information used by management to evaluate and measure our performance. Now, let me turn the call over to Oleg.
spk01: Thank you, and good morning to everyone on the call. In the first quarter, we delivered revenue of $85.8 million of 21% year-over-year and IRR growth of 21% year-over-year. We reported income from operations of 1.5 million and non-GAAP income from operations of 9.7 million in the first quarter. Importantly, we generated free cash flow of 12 million and a free cash flow margin of 14%. We exceeded our prior guidance, and I am pleased to say we are raising our full year 2024 guidance. Our business is focused on driving strong, sustainable growth while also expanding profitability and generating free cash flow. Before handing it over to Eugene and Brian, I would like to touch on a few highlights about our strategy to continue to scale the business and capture the significant market opportunity we see ahead. We have strong competitive positioning as the platform of choice for businesses to improve their online visibility. There is a growing trend of businesses of all sizes investing more time, effort, and resources into enhancing their online visibility. We are leveraging our unique datasets to differentiate ourselves in the market. We continue to make progress on each of our growth pillars. In the first quarter, we reported nearly 112,000 paying customers and now have over 1,125,000 free active users. We believe there are millions of marketers and business owners who will benefit from our platform and we plan to grow both our paying customers and our free active user base. We have an extensive loyal install base that spans over 160 countries across all industries and market segments, from solopreneurs to Fortune 500 companies. We continue to deliver higher value to our customers by cross-selling and upselling within our base. And as we increase our focus on moving up markets, we expect to drive an increase in average or pool, which, as reported today, is nearing 3,200. Our strong profitability, deep competitive mode, and authentic loyal base allows us to continue to invest in the business. We continue to build on our technology and customer foundation with investments designed to further our business objectives. Our reinvestment privileges include launching new AI-based tools like ContentShake and expanding the enterprise. As we highlighted last quarter, we officially soft-launched an enterprise SEO product into the market in late October 2023. And we are pleased to announce that it is now generally available. It is already being used by a select number of large-scale business customers, including one of the largest apparel companies and one of the largest market research companies. While we are still in the early stages, The initial signs we are seeing are very encouraging. Importantly, our enterprise offering has the opportunity to create a meaningful inflection in our pool. And this product carries our pools that tends to be 10 to 15 times our company average. We believe our early adopter customers are experiencing significant returns on their investments after migrating to the platform. Features like automated workflows, corporate level access controls, customized dashboards, and a built-in professional service network are helping our customers drive meaningful improvements in efficiency while also delivering significant time and cost savings. In 2024, we remain focused on continuing to grow our core business, upselling and cross-selling our offerings, and expanding our platform. In conclusion, I am very pleased with our start to 2020 block, and I am optimistic about our ability to capitalize on future growth opportunities throughout the year. I will now turn the call over to Eugene and Brian to discuss the results of the quarter and our outlook in Monitail.
spk02: Thank you, Oleg. We delivered another solid quarter, and I'm increasingly optimistic about our ability to deliver durable growth over the long term. I want to start with the migration SEMrush is making up market. Last quarter, I discussed a segment of our customer base, sophisticated accounts, that we believe represents a significant growth engine for us. Companies that fall into this broad segment are businesses that tend to have multiple marketing team members that are each SEMrush user and they generally have significantly higher ARPU or average revenue per user than our average and meaningfully stronger net revenue retention than our average. The relative strength of this customer set uses increased confidence that our new enterprise product will be met with strong adoption, further supporting our goal of driving strong, durable growth on both our top and bottom line. To service this upmarket customers most effectively, we have been making several important adjustments to our go-to-market model to optimize EPS-CV to CAC ratio over the past several quarters. We are leveraging our product-led low touch sales strategy and shifted more of our investment focus to the high value enterprise area. First, we have been realigning some of our sales investment from the SMB sector into this upmarket category to focus on converting our existing enterprise customers to use our new enterprise SEO product. Second, we have been making investments in our quote to cash process to properly handle the complexities that often surround enterprise clients. These are things like establishing a deal desk and building out proper discipline around large deal sales funds. We have been making this investment for some time and the significant presence we already have in this segment gives us confidence in our ability to successfully handle the ramp that we perceive from our enterprise product. In addition to enterprise product initiatives, we continue to leverage AI in our platform. We continue to see excellent adoption of some of our AI products and features, including our recently released AI-powered content creation tool called Content Shake. Content Shake is a smart pricing tool that combines AI with real-life competitor insights. It guides you from ideation to publishing directly to the blog, generates SEO-friendly articles, creates personalized content ideas, composes copy with AI, and helps you optimize for organic traffic, engagement, and rankings. We're a monetizing content shake on its own, but it's important to understand that we are also monetizing AI in several different ways. First, we have AI features built into all of our tools And the inclusion of those features helps drive new clients' acquisition and also aids in retention as they improve the customer experience. Second, we have structured some of our product tiers to only include the AI features in the higher-priced tiers. This attracts clients to the higher-priced tiers and contributes to overall ARPA growth. And the third way we monetize AI is through separately sold subscriptions, like the Content Shake product I just mentioned. We're also using AI to help drive efficiency in our own R&D departments. And we have recently seen success using our AI tools for our own marketing efforts, where we are not only producing more content, but we are also making higher quality content that ranks well and drives improved engagement. In summary, I'm confident in SEMrush's positioning in search market and our extensive product portfolio. We're seeing increased adoption of our AI products and continue to innovate and bring new offerings to the market. Our sophisticated accounts are growing and helping to fuel ARPU and strong net retention. And I'm very excited about our ability to service upmarket customers and continue to expand our portfolio of offerings. I will now turn the call over to Brian, who will provide a more detailed discussion of our financial performance and guidance. Go ahead, Brian.
spk10: Thank you, Eugene. As Oleg and Eugene mentioned, we had a strong first quarter across the board. Our revenue was 85.8 million, growing 21% year over year. Growth was driven by new customer additions and expansion of our average revenue per customer as we continue to execute on our cross-sell and up-sell strategy. Annual recurring revenue for the quarter grew 21% year-over-year to $354.2 million. There are several factors that can cause our net new ARR to fluctuate from quarter to quarter, and as a result, we believe ARR trends are best observed on an annual rather than quarterly basis. Our calculated ARR per paying user grew 9.8% year-over-year and our dollar-based net revenue retention for the first quarter was 107%. We believe our dollar-based net revenue retention has troughed and over time should begin to trend back up, particularly as our more sophisticated accounts increase as a percentage of our mix, since these customers have higher net retention than our company average. We recognize the importance of having strong retention metrics and accordingly have recently made some changes to our sales team's incentives that we expect could exert some gentle upward pressure on these figures. Moving down the income statement, during the first quarter we had positive non-GAAP operating income of $9.7 million. We reported another significant improvement to our non-GAAP operating margin of 11.3%, which is up 2,000 basis points year-over-year and surpassed our guidance for the first quarter. This improvement is a result of a number of factors. First, Our gross margin improved nearly 80 basis points year over year to 82.9%. Gross margin benefited from higher revenue and our continued ability to gain scale and leverage from our efficiently engineered platform. We continue to expect strong gross margins above 80% in the near term and view the way in which our stack is engineered as a key competitive differentiator. Our healthy gross margins also provides us the flexibility to invest below the gross profit line which gives us a structural advantage in the market. Second, we continue to execute on our commitment to drive efficiencies while also pursuing growth. It is important to note that we have been able to increase our operating margins while making go-to-market investments for our enterprise products. We expect that we will continue to be able to make incremental investments to strengthen our position here while also driving further operating leverage in the business. And we don't expect to see any headwinds to our more traditional SMB business as we realign these resources. This is because we pursue a product-led growth strategy that leverages a self-service signup process and drives meaningful leverage that we're able to reinvest. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments of $243.1 million, up $4.6 million from the previous quarter. Our cash flow from operations in the first quarter was $14.8 million. Turning to guidance, I'm confident in the underlying trends in the business and capabilities of our team to continue to deliver strong growth and profitability. Our business is off to a strong start this year, and we are encouraged not only by what we have accomplished so far, but we are optimistic about what we see as the opportunities in front of us. For the second quarter of 2024, we expect revenue in the range of $89.1 to $90.1 million. which at the midpoint would represent growth of approximately 20% year over year. We expect second quarter non-GAAP operating margin to be approximately 11%. For the full year 2024, we are raising our guidance and expect revenue in a range of $366 to $369 million, up from our prior range of $364 to $368 million, which translates to growth of 19% to 20%, and represents a 1.5 million increase at the midpoint. We expect full-year 2024 non-GAAP operating margins to be between 10.5 and 11.5 percent, up 50 basis points from our prior guidance range, and full-year free cash flow margins to be approximately 8 percent. To help you with your modeling, the difference between our non-GAAP operating margin and our free cash flow margin is the result of interest income offset by capital expenditures and cash taxes. Finally, our guidance assumes a euro exchange rate of 1.08. As a reminder, approximately 30% of our expenses are denominated in euros. In closing, we are confident in our ability to grow and scale our business and remain committed to a disciplined and balanced approach to spending. We are focused on driving improved efficiency and profitability, even while we invest in future growth opportunities that we expect will deliver long-term value to our shareholders. With that, we are happy to take your questions. Operator, please open the line for questions.
spk06: Thank you. We will now start today's Q&A session. If you would like to register a question, please press Start followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press Start followed by 2. Our first question today comes from Scott Berg from Needham. Your line is now open. Please proceed with your question.
spk09: Hi, everyone. Nice quarter here, and thanks for taking my questions. I have two. I wanted to start with a macro question, a little bit more high level. Your ARR additions the last three quarters have been very good, especially on a year-over-year basis, yet we're seeing demand for software that's predominantly sold to SMB-type companies be a little bit inconsistent or softer over the last several quarters. You know, can you help us understand maybe something in the product or maybe something in your go-to-market strategy that's helping you kind of buck this trend to, you know, throw off some really good results the last couple quarters? Thank you.
spk00: Thank you. Let's start with market question. I would say we don't see any kind of significant changes with macro for all businesses in all segments. We believe it's still challenging. At the same time, we deliver, I believe, strong results in current environment.
spk10: Yeah, I mean, Scott, the key for us is macro is impacting us just like every other company, but we're faring really well. We have a really strong market position, really good market, secular market shifts that are happening. We're spending in companies is shifting from one area to an area where we actually provide good technology and service. And we have a really strong competitive mode. And then more recently, we've been able to launch a lot of new AI products that we're monetizing in the three ways that Eugene mentioned earlier. And of course, we have our up market play into enterprise. So we think there's a lot of factors that are allowing us to navigate through this macro environment and still deliver a really strong, durable growth.
spk09: Got it. Helpful. And then the Last question for me is, Brian, you mentioned you expect NRR to drop in this most recent quarter here. Sounds like you're making some changes on the sales side to maybe incent cross-sell expansions a little bit more. But how do we think about the impact of your new enterprise sales motion on NRR over time? Is that a sale that's still very much a land and expand opportunity, maybe by modules or seats? Or are your enterprise customers having the opportunity to maybe land much larger that might not? offer some expansion opportunities there. Thank you.
spk10: Sure, yeah. So two things. NRR, we're really pleased with the performance, pleased with the performance over many quarters. We've been able to maintain very strong, durable retention on a gross and a net basis. And in the most recent quarter, we've seen a trough at 107%. We have talked about that over the past couple of quarters, that it is somewhat of a lagging metric that measures performance over a 24-month period. So it's doing exactly what we expected in troughing, and we expect it will tick up over time, especially as we move up market and start to take advantage of the enterprise SEO product. The key for us is For sure, there are land and expand components to our enterprise play, but our early potential there is more of an expand. We've been talking about the fact that we do already have more than 5,000 enterprise accounts. They've been very loyal and have adopted a majority of our platform and are asking for more features to do their best work. We've delivered that with the launch of our new enterprise SEO products. And as you know, that commands ARPU of about 10 to 15 times what our average ARR per paying customer is. So we do expect that to be, in the early days, an expand of our existing enterprise accounts, and therefore having good upward pressure on the NRR metric.
spk05: Understood. Thank you for taking my question.
spk04: Our next question comes from Surinder Bind from Jefferies.
spk06: Your line is now open. Please proceed.
spk11: Thank you. As a follow-on to kind of the enterprise customers and as you look up markets, can you maybe talk about behavior or potential between the U.S. enterprise-based customers and maybe international opportunities?
spk02: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the question. So, of course, United States is the number one market for us. It's almost half of the opportunity from our point of view. At the same time, if you actually look at list of, you know, early customers that we acquired since soft launch in the end of October, at least half of them are international companies. We have very strong traction in Germany and France and other markets. And as you probably know, in general, we always had a philosophy in mind to build products for global use because even our US customers, a lot of them are also multinational companies who sell overseas and across the globe. So from that point of view, product is definitely built for global use. And in terms of go-to-market, again, SEMrush also has presence in over 103 different countries. For enterprise, the list is probably going to be a little bit smaller, but still we're going to ramp our teams based on geographic presence of our customer base proportionally. And another thing, world is actually not as big as it might seem because From go-to-market point of view, what matters the most is what languages people speak. And, you know, you probably know there are only several really popular languages. And we all need to scale Salesforce, you know, with native speakers who can help us with go-to-market in those markets. But that's really pretty much all the work that needs to be done in terms of international expansion.
spk11: Thank you. And then there's a follow-up on just the the sales structure for the enterprise opportunity here. How would you describe the changes that you've made? I mean, you've kind of talked about it on the call, but how disruptive are the changes or how significant are the changes? Because obviously SMB sales are very different than enterprise sales. And then how much more change should we expect before we kind of get to what I would call full productivity levels?
spk10: Yeah, so great question. Just two questions there. One is what changes are we making to SMB and how does that impact it? And then what investments in enterprise? So on the SMB side, we've been very fortunate that we have a very low cost frictionless selling process. We've been able to enhance that over the last couple of years with AI and automation that has allowed us to really maintain good success and efficiency with a product led selling motion. And because of that, we've been able to efficiently grow and manage the transactions for our SMB and even mid-market customers. That's given us a structural advantage. It's allowed us to reinvest that efficiency into an enterprise upmarket play. And we have been doing that over the past couple of years. And there's three fundamental things that we're focused on. One is there's systems and infrastructure that we need. So there's a demand generation engine. a CRM engine that manages the lead to opportunity process, and an ERP system that manages quote to cash. So we've been investing that and preparing for these types of transactions. From a human resources perspective, we're investing in a deal desk to help facilitate the transactions and the negotiations with procurements. And of course, scaling up the enterprise sellers that have that skill set and experience to be able to develop relationships and strong partnerships with companies to be able to evolve from just a transaction to a value-based sale that will allow us to be successful. So we're making those investments. We're not expecting that this will be disruptive because the SMB dynamics have been things, efficiencies that have been building in a business over time, and we're able to see the impact and then adjust the investments accordingly. And for enterprise, it's new for us. So while we do have more than 5,000 enterprise accounts, This upmarket selling motion and the enterprise SEO product is new, and we're taking into account the risks and the opportunity and setting expectations accordingly.
spk05: Thank you.
spk06: Our next question today comes from Scott Ader from KeyBank. Your line is now open. Please proceed.
spk12: Hey, guys. It's Jackson Ader from KeyBank Capital Markets. Hope you're doing well. So first question is, you know, Brian, I know you guys have talked about the balance of growth and profit, but, you know, just given the results of late have shown more, you know, more upside kind of being heavily skewed toward margin. Is there, like, could you in fact deliver a little bit faster ARR growth if you were to make some additional investments? And I'm curious if the answer is yes, like where would you, make those investments?
spk10: Yeah, this is a really, really good question. It's something that we think about every single day. We're always challenging ourselves and the leaders throughout the organization to make sure they're focusing on investments that will drive long-term growth and value for us and our shareholders. And our goal here, we've talked about this, our goal at SEMrush is to achieve an efficient frontier. So we want to be investing in the business so long as that investment drives incremental results. But we don't want to be overspending and getting past that efficient frontier where the incremental return doesn't justify the investment. For SEMrush in 2024, we are investing quite a bit. So we're investing on this enterprise upmarket play, as evidenced by the most recent general availability of enterprise SEO. We've been doing a lot of product investments in AI. Eugene talked about one new product, ContentShake AI, and a number of others earlier this morning that we've monetized in a few different ways. And we're constantly focused on what that next close adjacency is for our customers that will allow us to expand our platform beyond our core competency. So we're continuing to invest. We do believe in 2024 and a foreseeable future that there is a lot of opportunity. We have a strong foundation with 112,000 paying customers. over a million free users, and we have quite a bit of cash on the balance sheet to put to work, and we'll be doing that over time.
spk12: Okay. All right, great. And then just a quick follow-up, kind of a practical question. Those 5,000 enterprise customers that you talk about, what is – can we get a sense for, like, for what their current ARPU looks like? Do they have the propensity or the, you know, the –
spk02: willingness i guess to spend 10 to 15 x more than your typical customer yeah definitely they already pay more uh and uh their you know expansion their ltv is much higher than average as well so they're not just uh you know buying more expensive subscriptions they're more active they're more likely to have multiple people using the product uh so they they have all the signs that that correlate with pie willingness to pay.
spk05: Got it. All right. Great. Thank you.
spk04: Our next question comes from Adam Hutchkiss from Goldman Sachs.
spk06: Your line is now open. Please proceed.
spk08: Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess to start, I just wanted to touch a little bit more on the enterprise product. When we look at the early access page, we see stats like 10x faster SEO productivity and generating a 360-degree view of customer data, which seems like a pretty ambitious message to send to prospective enterprises. So could you just take a step back and give us a sense for what enterprise customers are asking for that the tiered offerings aren't giving them today? And then when you think about how much of that is just a function of customers wanting to run more volume through your system versus actively looking to you to co-innovate on incremental products, you know, how would you describe the balance of that customer relationship?
spk02: Great question. So, yeah, I mean, of course, you know, to sell, you have to sell. So, of course, 10X is definitely achievable, but people need to put work and, you know, fine-tune the product to their needs, which we've helped them with. But to give you just a couple examples of why I think 10X is maybe even conservative we have for example customers who use our internal linking module and when you do internal linking for a small website it's not hard you can do it using whiteboard you just put 20 pages and figure out how to connect them now our enterprise customers they have millions of pages so there is no whiteboard in the world that is big enough to put all those pages and figure out how to connect them so that's why we crawl their websites we understand what other websites link to them so we can figure out external link profile, internal link profile, the map of the website and figure out what pages should be connected to other pages and sort of share the authority of the page with other pages using AI and machine learning and if you if you think about the you know incremental value it's not just being 10x more productive it's actually finally being able to do the work that you would not be able to do without this technology and the difference between tiered offerings like that we sell to smbs and enterprise that smbs don't have websites with millions of pages so they don't need those features while large enterprises have millions of pages so they need additional products and That's technically a philosophy that we have with enterprise products. Things that we build in enterprise platforms, they're purely incremental. They're not things that are just fancy versions of things you can buy with our SMB offering. They're incremental. They use the same technology and data, but they solve totally different scope of problems that only big companies have.
spk08: Okay, thanks, Eugene. That's incredibly helpful. And then could you just talk a little bit more about your professional services strategy here as you move up market? It seemed through what we've seen that you're opting to vet and collaborate with enterprise freelancers to help enterprises. Is it fair to say that this will exist in the place of building out more meaningful services in-house? And then maybe, Brian, if you could just touch on what the monetization arrangements look like with those freelancers, that would be useful.
spk02: Yeah, great question. And I probably should have answered this in the first part as well, because of course, services is another area where enterprise product is differentiated from SMB product. And as you mentioned, big companies, they need extra services. They need someone to hold their hand. They need someone to provide second opinion and guide them. And there are two options that software companies have when they tackle this problem. Sometimes they decide to build service arm inside the company, which has some benefits. But from our point of view, it's actually margin dilutive. And, you know, we're a software company. We want to run very high margin business. And the other approach is actually what we are doing to partner with industry leading experts in different areas and connect them with a pool of customers that we have. And we are starting with freelancers. and experts over time we think we could expand this to our agency clients as well and generate additional leads and demand for them by allowing them to work with our brand customers and in terms of financial arrangement what we do is we productize their services and we provide for billing and handle transactions and then take our a small commission for facilitation and then pass their main revenue to freelancers so we recognize as revenue only our commission so it's a clean high margin revenue for us.
spk08: Okay really useful thanks so much Eugene.
spk06: Our next question today comes from Elizabeth Porter from Morgan Stanley your line is now open please go ahead.
spk03: Great. Thank you so much. Just given the focus on the cross-sell and up-sell plus addressing larger enterprise customers, it sounds like it can be a material upside to ARPU. So how should we think about the growth algo between new customers and ARPU shifting between these two factors? I think historically it's been a little bit more balanced, maybe skewed a bit more towards customers. So just wanted to level set on the growth algo and the forward outlook as we go down these new initiatives. Thank you.
spk10: Hey Elizabeth, this is Brian. Yeah, so we expect, as we've experienced in the past, that both will be significant growth drivers for us. So we're still very pleased to see the amount of net ads that we experience every single quarter. The S&P and mid-market, which tends to be the bulk of the incremental net ads for us, has been very strong and healthy, and we expect that will continue to be a growth driver for us. At the same time, as we've been talking about, we do see much healthier metrics as we're moving up market. We've talked about things like the retention, the average ARR per paying customer, and even growth for that particular segment. So I think going forward, you might see a slight shift where the number of accounts sorry, the growth would actually shift a little bit more towards upsell and higher valued accounts. But we still expect that we'll see healthy growth from net ads as well.
spk03: Great. And then a follow-up actually on the net ad side. Net ads of 4,000 was just a bit below the 5,000 you've consistently added in prior Q1s. So just curious if there were any factors to call out And then also touch on the seasonal trend of customers leaving in Q4, but coming back in Q1. You know, how did that play out relative to prior years?
spk10: Sure. So you're just building on what we were just talking about. You know, like any metric, they can fluctuate from quarter to quarter. There's always seasonal dynamics within one quarter or even year over year that could affect that number. But I think what you're seeing is just because we're putting more focus on higher valued upmarket enterprise accounts that you could see that as we're putting more focus on that, that you could see that net ad metric be impacted going forward.
spk04: Great. Thank you.
spk06: Our final question comes from Mark Murphy from J.P. Morgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
spk14: Hey, this is already moving on from Mark Murphy. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the quarter. I spoke to some of these investments you guys are expecting to make, particularly on the upper end of the market. Can you get any sense of how you expect hiring to trend through this year? Thank you.
spk10: It's tough to hear you. It was a little bit choppy. Can you just ask it again?
spk05: Sorry, it was tough to hear you.
spk13: Yeah, is this better?
spk10: It's breaking up a little bit, but try again.
spk13: My question was just around hiring and how we should expect Pet Town Growth, particularly in sales and marketing, to trend through this year. maybe compared to last year and the year before? Thanks.
spk10: I see. Yeah, good question. We're not expecting a significant change. So we've been talking about our investments in enterprise are being funded by the efficiencies we're seeing in SMB and mid-market. And, of course, the quantity of SMB and mid-market sellers was higher. So now that we've been able to take advantage of leveraging AI and automation and really push a lot of the SMB sales through our e-commerce platform, and take advantage of the product-led growth strategy, we're able to reinvest back into the enterprise. So while we're investing significantly and making a strong push into the enterprise, you shouldn't expect to see sales expense from an E2R perspective or even sales headcount change materially.
spk05: Great. Thank you.
spk06: There are no further questions in the queue at this time. That concludes today's Q&A session. I'll now hand back over to the management team for closing remarks.
spk00: Thank you all for joining us today. I want to say again, we are very pleased with our execution in the first quarter and strong start to 2024. And we look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. Thank you.
spk04: That concludes today's call. You may now disconnect your lines.
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