GoDaddy Terms Set, IPO scheduled for April 1st

It’s not an April Fool’s joke–GoDaddy will debut on April 1 on the NYSE.

The terms value the company at $2.87 billion if priced at the high end of the range. Private equity firms paid around $2.25b in 2011 for the company and numbers have boosted but a large amount of debt still remains on the balance sheet–$1.4 billion.

GoDaddy, with its racy commercials and high profile, will not have a problem putting itself out there for investors. Performance, on the other hand, may be an issue.

Although $GDDY is the leader in domain registrar, this article says the crowded space and sizable debt is enough of a red-flag to keep investors away.

How GoDaddy will market their business on the roadshow will be a key item to watch as well as what company it will be compared to. The NY Post wrote an article saying GoDaddy may want investors to use an analogy to NetFlix when valuing the company.

GoDaddy, during the road show, is expected to compare itself within the web-hosting space to Netflix’s position in the video streaming game — and not to rivals Web.com Group or Endurance International Group, sources said.

High profile IPOs in recent years have had a mixed bag of results. Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) opened 34% higher than its offering price last year, traded higher for awhile and remains 25% above the IPO price. GoPro (Nasdaq: GPRO) opened 24% higher and traded 310% higher within months. On the other hand, deals like Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), Groupon (Nasdaq: GRPN) & King Digital (NYSE: KING) took their lumps upon when debuting.

For a look at GoDaddy’s financials, refer to a past post on this deal.

“GoDaddy will no doubt receive its fair share of attention,” senior research analyst at IPOBoutique.Com, Jeff Zell, said. “I am interested to hear GoDaddy’s pitch to investors during the road-show. If they want to be valued with a different metric aside from typical domain registrar’s, they will need to ‘wow’ wall street.”