GoDaddy has reached an agreement to acquire Over, the startup behind an app that helps businesses create the photos and videos they need for social media.
Justin Tsai, GoDaddy’s vice president of growth and product, said this acquisition is about acknowledging “a world of entrepreneurs who may never have a website.”
He told me, “Over’s capabilities really target those set of people, who may have an Instagram profile where they need to post visually engaging content but have never gone to GoDaddy.”
This follows GoDaddy’s relaunch of its website-building tools last fall under the new name Websites+Marketing, with additional features around email marketing, search engine optimization and maintaining a presence beyond your website, whether that’s on Facebook or Yelp.
Tsai said Websites+Marketing now has 1 million paying customers, but as more business started using it, “We started noticing users really had trouble creating great content as they go to those platforms. They didn’t know what to post or how to make that post really sing.”
That’s where Over comes in, offering a variety of customizable templates and layouts that should make it faster and easier to create eye-catching visual content. The goal, according to co-founder and CEO Matt Winn, is to “build guitars, not violins” — in the same way that someone can pick up a guitar and “strum a few cords,” they should be able to download Over and quickly “start creating really great content.”
In fact, the startup says it has more than 1 million active users of its own, who are using it to create more than 220,000 projects every day.
Tsai said GoDaddy and Over were initially discussing a partnership, but as it became clear that there was an opportunity to integrate the products more deeply, those discussions led to acquisition talks.
Over will continue to operate as a standalone app, and he said the team will continue to develop new features for the app. At the same time, they’ll be building integrations with Websites+Marketing, for example by taking Over and connecting it “into our insights tool to understand how different elements of [online] presence layer in together, to look at templates and how those actually help different types of small business owners.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Winn said Over had previously raised funding from True Ventures and angel investors, and that the entire 76-person team will be joining GoDaddy. Over will continue to operate out of its Cape Town, South Africa headquarters.
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