GoDaddy, the internet domain registrar and web-hosting company for small businesses, is open to acquiring any company that is “building phenomenal experiences for small businesses,” a top executive of the company told BusinessLine .

“A part of our investment strategy is broadening our product portfolio with products that are purpose-built for small businesses. We generally build our own products, partner with people on products and acquire companies. We have a history of being quite acquisitive,” said Andrew Low Ah Kee, Executive Vice-President, International, GoDaddy.

Asked if the company is looking to acquire Indian firms, he said: “We are looking around the world for people who are building phenomenal experiences for small businesses; so if we see companies that are doing that, we are open to acquiring them.”

Pointing out that India is GoDaddy’s largest market outside the US in terms of new customer additions, Ah Kee said: “India is the first international market outside the US where GoDaddy established an on-ground presence, in 2012, with corporate headquarters in Gurgaon and a customer-care centre in Hyderabad, which has 400 people today. We have 4 million domain names under management in India, which is home to 51 million of the 500 small and medium businesses in the world, giving us tremendous headroom to continue to grow.”

The company is taking its learning in India to build a playbook to launch in other international markets.

App for entrepreneurs

GoDaddy on Monday launched Flare, a free, community-based app aimed at bringing business ideas to life.

Available on both Android and iOS, Flare helps entrepreneurs define their business idea on the app, validate the idea and receive feedback from a global community of friends, investors, mentors and fellow entrepreneurs.

“Most entrepreneurs struggle to determine whether their idea is viable or not, because they have no access to expensive market-research insights. With Flare, they can post their idea with some details on it, and have 24 hours to get 10 or more likes; and convert their idea into an active idea. An active idea allows the entrepreneur access to those who liked the idea and ask them questions on pricing, features, go-to-market, whether the idea has merit or not; and use the answers to go ahead with the idea or dump it and start again,” Rajiv Sodhi, Vice-President and Managing Director, GoDaddy India and Australia, told BusinessLine . Besides providing feedback, Flare users can become advisors or mentors by sharing their failure/success stories with others.

GoDaddy also expanded its affordable cloud-hosting services in India with the launch of Cloud Servers and Cloud Applications for small businesses, offering Cloud servers at the starting price of 0.50 paisa per hour that can be provisioned in 54 seconds.

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