GoDaddy is acquiring Main Street Hub, an Austin-based social media marketing platform.
The deal is for $125M in cash plus up to $50M in potential future earn outs, and is expected to close late in Q2 2018.
Founded in 2010 Main Street Hub has raised a total of $93M in debt and equity financing from Silicon Valley Bank, Vista Equity Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and other investors.
For a monthly fee Main Street Hub handles all aspects of a small business’ online presence including marketing automation, CRM, social media, reputation management and mobile, web and email marketing.
But of course these days the most important part of a business’ online presence is their social media activity, which is where Main Street Hub shines. The company has a team of photographers, writers, designers and marketers to create and manage content on all of a business’ social pages.
If you’ve ever seen a small businesses’ social media page you know that they generally come in two shapes and sizes. The first, and much more common, is when pages were created years ago but lack any significant activity or posts because most business owners either don’t have the bandwidth or don’t know how to actively manage a social media profile.
The second and more rare is an actively managed page that posts updates very frequently and regularly engages with customers. The result is usually tons of additional traffic, attention, and customer interaction – all the benefits that come along with having an active profile.
So that’s where Main Street Hub comes in. It’s essentially a turn key solution for business owners and operators that don’t have the time to manage their social media profile but want the benefits that come with an active page. The company has around 10,000 customers ranging from restaurants to auto repair shop and everything in between.
Of course GoDaddy also serves small businesses – they have over 17M small business customers who use one or more of GoDaddy’s products. But while GoDaddy has a professional web services division that helps with building websites and managing SEO for small businesses, they’ve never had an offering related to managing social media activity for small businesses – which makes this deal a perfect match.
Plus there is also already significant overlap between the two companies’ customer bases, explained Lauren Antonoff, Senior Vice President of Presence and Commerce at GoDaddy. After the deal closes GoDaddy will offer Main Street Hub’s services directly to GoDaddy customers, meaning a GoDaddy customer will soon be able to pay for someone to handle their business’ website creation, email marketing and now social media platforms.
For now Main Street Hub will continue to run just like it did before the acquisition, and remain based in Austin, with Main Street Hub co-CEOs and co-founders Matt Stuart and Andrew Allison joining GoDaddy in leadership positions.