Addictive Learning Technology Limited (ADDICTIVE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So good evening, all of you. Welcome to the FY '24 Post Earnings Conference Call of Addictive Learning Technologies Limited, popularly known as LawSikho. Today on the call from the management side, we have with us Ramanuj Mukherjee, who is the Co-Founder and CEO. Abhyudaya Agarwal who would be joining us shortly, he is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer. Siddhant Singh Baid, who is the co-Founder and CFO, is already on the call. And we also have Pratul Kumar Singh, who is our Associate Director on the company side. As a disclaimer, I would like to inform all of you that this call may contain certain forward-looking statements, which may involve risks and uncertainties. Also to inform you all that this call is being recorded. I would now request Ramanuj to update on the financial and business highlights, which we [ went by ] for the year and also the growth plans going forward. After the management commentary, we will open for the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]. So over to you, Ramanuj.

Thank you, [ Abhijeet ]. Thank you, all the esteemed investors who have joined us. I see there are 35 people here right now. Thank you very much for your interest in our very small nascent early-stage company. Yes, so I mean quite a few of you. I have interacted in person as well. So thank you very much. So I am going to -- I have written down some notes. I will not use new slides as such. I mean I find this easier to share my flow of thoughts this way. But whatever I'm saying, I have written some notes, I will share it. After this, I was advised to not post it before, but after this, I will post it on twitter also so just in case somebody wants to refer to them later, you can do so. So basically, good news is that we have doubled our revenue this past financial year. And we -- this is something that we have been doing every year. Like this is a target we [ hear ] from the beginning of every year that we have to double our revenue, right? So we don't take a larger target also. The double is good enough. And so you may ask why not -- why double, why not triple, why not four, quadruple? The thing is that in our business, if we double, it is already quite challenging for us to scale our systems and actually deliver for every student who comes in, we have to also deliver high-quality experience. And so we plan to stay restricted to double our plans. Everything is done in such a way that we double not more than that. So we have met our expectation more or less. And you will see that we have maintained our directory over the years of doubling every year. So while I will explain to you why I think what are the things we got right? So there will be two sections here. I will talk about what we thought that we got right. And I will also share what I think have been the misses, like what we tried to do, but did not manage to do. So obviously, those are opportunities this year to do them well. So I will tell you both those areas. And in terms of profits, we have more than doubled. Honestly speaking, for most of the year, we were not very focused on our profits. We have been focused on several other key objectives, but still profit has grown, which is great. And so basically, I'm very grateful, actually, we are very busy for almost 3, 4 months during the year doing our IPO, lots of meetings, lots of traveling, lots of paper work. Literally I'll be there, I was everyday signing mountain of paper work, and we were like [Foreign Language] right? We took Siddhant out of sales to manage the IPO for our side and so on. So obviously, that we have made our target despite that is something kudos to the team for that, right? So this despite so many distraction we meet our target. So outlook is fantastic. We have done really well in many ways. So let me talk about what are the things we did really well. First thing, we have scaled up SkillArbitrage to a point where it is equally important as LawSikho and more like it is -- in fact, we are seeing the cost of sales, cost of acquiring customer, everything is much lower in SkillArbitrage tracks. Please do not be surprised if going forward, you see faster growth in SkillArbitrage. There is also one more thing that has happened. SkillArbitrage has a much bigger total addressable market LawSikho. That also is kind of working like a tailwind for us that we can go much faster. And the other thing we have done last year, which I am again very happy about, positive -- feeling positive about that is that we have launched a lot of new categories and made most of them very successful. So we have launched, which is one thing to launch and have a state in onetime but to being able to sell those courses again and again, multiple batches with those batches being successfully placed and getting opportunities, getting the right kind of reviews, right kind of NPS, all of that is being tracked. And so -- and creating the right material, creating the teams in case who can take care of those specific areas. So we have done really well in a variety of areas. And the result is that our total addressable market is very big. So next few years, we don't have to worry that or do we have enough market to grow, right? Do we have any -- so this is one thing. The other thing, which is really amazing thing that has happened last year. Is that not only new categories we have launched we have also been able to sell courses in North American market, U.S.A., Canada, U.K. Now that is another fantastic thing, right? It is a very nascent phenomenon for us. It's not like a lot of our revenue but it could be a very weak part of our revenue. Being able to sell those courses in U.K., U.S. is a very good signal. And in future, we see this being a very large part of our revenue as we keep scaling different courses in those markets. Now it was very difficult to create so many high-quality courses, teams of mentors, placement system, but we have tracked and that would serve us very well in this coming financial year, even the years to come. One thing we did marketing-wise very well is that we have been able to fine-tune our marketing, our organic lead generation across different courses have grown, we have been able to reduce our ad spend. Although our revenue, for example, this month has grown significantly. But our cost of customer acquisition and our ad costs have gone down despite growing revenue. So it is a very good sign for us. Also, I was personally worried. Many people told me also many of you investors also told me that after IPO, there's a period in a company where you will see that people start spending like crazy. And because we are a Bootstrapped company, suddenly, there is so much money. So are we going to be imprudent about it. I think that we have managed really, really well, it hasn't happened yet. I actually saw a few signs of it for like maybe 15 days or a month. And then immediately, we cut it down and rather than growing costs in the next few months, we had lower costs. So you have done well in that front, I believe. Then more than -- so another good thing, we have more than doubled our engineering team. Our tech team has -- we have alway struggled to scale our sales -- sorry, our engineering team. So -- but it's a very critical team because many of our forward plans in more technology and even currently. So we have more than doubled our technology team in the last 1 year. So this would also help us really because they are working on increasing our revenue, basically, they are creating new features and products, which either increase our revenue or reduce costs or create a [ moot ]. So this is what they will continue to work on. I can talk more about engineering projects later in our discussion. Another thing I'm very glad about, I think, for it take globally and especially in India. So last financial year was the worst year for every EdTech. There are very few EdTech which have -- it's called the EdTech winter. It was really bad trained, nobody got not VCP funding, IPO also, I don't think, apart from us, anybody did or any other upcoming EdTech, [ IPO ] was also there. I don't believe that. Now -- but -- and there has been a lot of backlash, right? So even our sales callers would say that or even we will hear that, okay, so this is happening to Byju. This is happening to even be it [Foreign Language] business, right? And how will this impact us? Will this impact us? We were worried, but fingers crossed and thank God, we have not been affected at all. We have rather done well, plus because we have raised funding while others have not been able to raise funding. This is actually helping us a lot because we are in a strong position. So this is something that I think we should be happy about. And it also some -- quite a few of you have told me personally also that it shows that we have a significant competitive advantage in the market that we are -- that quality of execution, hopefully, also you'll be able to appreciate from that. I have our test prep team had a breakthrough success here like this. We have not seen this kind of success before. So many states, i think there are seven states where we have produced -- produced Judges, we have produced civil offices, we have produced a lot of people who have cracked UGC, [ met ] law, some many bank law officers. So suddenly, we had put in a lot of effort over the years because test preparation is such a business that success sells. If you don't have previous history of success, people do not want to buy your courses. Also, in the same way, not only Indian test prep courses, we also had huge success with NCA Canada Solicitor Qualification examine in London. In that when we will soon also have success in California Bar Exam, we are regularly waiting our first batch of students have written the exam. And in May or June, the resuts are awaited, once the results come out, hopefully, I can give you more good news. But for SQE people sitting in India, knows, there's no training program from India, which trains for Canadian Bar Exams, Canadian NCA exam as well as this California Bar Exam or Solicitor Qualification Exam. So for us, it has been traditionally difficult to tell people that come join us. Although we have no success before, we have produced no judges before, when do you come to us. But now that we are getting this kind of success, we would have I believe that it will significantly impact. We are still figuring out our marketing strategies, how to market this success very effectively. But we believe that this would be a game changer for us going forward in this financial year. So this is one thing. Then we have managed to start selling our courses in U.S., U.K. and Canada. And for the first time, we have a nascent sales team sitting in India, sitting in Noida and working right shift, but calling in those countries, and we are getting great results from that. Obviously, it is a very small project right now. But still, we have done last month. I mean, this is not a part of the audited financials. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say it but let's assume that we are doing something like INR 1 crore last month from our international sales team which is focusing on these markets. Then we have managed to scale and operate efficiency -- efficiently while working remotely. So this is a huge competitive advantage for us that we are able to operate remotely. And this really helps us when it comes to hiring top talent at a lower cost. And also the fact that our team can actually function remotely and double like this is a testament to the quality of the robust systems we have built. Because if you are sitting next to each other, you can even throw paper planes at each other and get the work done, but when we are not there, you really need very high-quality IT systems so that you can track the productivity effectively, you can track the results, you can predict what is going to happen, you avoid disasters, all of that, we are able to do very well working remotely. We have also started to successfully deploy a lot of AI technology and AI tools across our business. This has already helped us but to keep our costs manageable, and to keep our delivery costs low, and there is a lot more we can do, and we are currently working on that. We have recreated our entire suite of courses. Almost everything except test prep course to be AI friendly. So we are teaching people how to draft contracts using AI, how to -- I mean, we are not even teaching them anymore how to draft things on a Word document or how to work on a Word document or Excel sheet. We are across board, we are teaching them how to use AI in everything they do. And that is also going to be a huge differentiator because to y knowledge, I don't know too many other people who are actually bringing AI education into everything they teach, but we are doing that very effectively. And we already did it, like we already built our course curriculum around AI tools. That is really helping us. We have launched a new platform called LawSikho Opportunities. It was there at the time of the IPO, but it was very small. It was hardly there. Now we have already scaled it up a lot. We are getting almost 3,000 visitors and more than 300 applicants, hour an average per day. And we are very fast becoming the top job platform in the legal space, and we believe that we can scale it up another 10 times from here. And also, we'll be able to launch similar job boards in skill arbitrage as well as data is good. Why are we doing this? Because this is helping us to get qualified leads. If somebody is applying for jobs, repeatedly and not getting a job that means there's a skill gap so we can analyze the data, understand that and run them through a marketing funnel, which results in higher revenue. These are also organically leads. We don't have to run ads, we are in the process of building an app which app they can download and it will be sharing notifications of job opportunities, et cetera. So we can bypass the entire e-mail, Whatsapp, any other communication channel and directly serve our ads on their notifications directly. So if there are 20 jobs or if you are job searching and you can get your jobs on your phone app specifically to your events. And I can also serve ads in between. And also I have very useful data related to every job applicate. So this gives us a great opportunity. I am evry bullish about this particular platform that we have created. Also, I think we have improved a lot on our course quality, service delivery and the cost that is actually involved in delivering the courses a lot in the last 1 year, this financial year has been really wonderful from that perspective. In the last quarter, we rapidly scaled up our content creation because once we did the IPO, we had a little more budget. So in the last quarter, especially we rapidly scaled up our content creation. We created a lot of new courses which have put us in a wonderful position that we can rapidly increase our revenue also in this financial year. We have more courses to sell. So -- and also the existing courses we have upgraded in a big way. So this is a very good thing. Now this was the part where we have done well, now the part which we wanted to do, but we did not manage to do so well. So what are those things? I will come to that. Okay. Should I pause and take some questions or something at this point Amit, or -- I mean if it is very boring, we can take some questions and then move to the next part? Or would you like me to just run through the next part as well?

I suggest you continue, Ramanuj, just finish the entire thing from your side and then we'll open to the Q&A.

Okay. We can also have some questions. I mean, as I'm speaking, if you share your questions in chat or something or if you see any relevant questions you can point out to me. Contextually, I can give better answers maybe, right?

Since are around mostly financials. So I would suggest [Foreign Language]. Yes, sure.

Okay. So what we have failed to do is, but that represents an opportunity this year that we can do these things well. We could not meaningfully scale our sales team. I wanted to scale our sales team even more but it proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. We have had many learnings, which are currently being deployed. Some things are giving results already in this financial year. We will aim -- so currently, we have about -- if we leave aside data is good, which is a very different sales process. Our skill arbitral loss has a homogeneous sales process. So we have -- and that is where most of our revenue is, right? So currently, 80, we have 80 productive salespeople, including the team leaders and their coaches. And we are looking to scale it to 300 over the next 1 year. So this is the plan that we have for the next 1 year. I wish I could have done this faster, but there we have faced a lot of challenges in doing that. It is not as simple as just hire 300 people and ask them to make calls because we have to train them about every product. Our product is not a very [ regular ] product, it has complexities. You have to understand. So for example, if you're trying to sell a course on corporate law, or you're trying to sell a course on California Bar Exam, or you're trying to sell a course on U.S. accounting or corporate finance. It's not like just you can tell people, "It's a nice course, buy, buy." And they will buy. You will actually explain to them why they should learn U.S. accounting, how will it help their career. The person actually who's selling needs to have the right kind of knowledge before they can go and effectively counsel. So that has proven to be hurdle for us but we will be able to pull it off this year. This year a lot is riding on this. Then we have -- this is basically sales-led growth then there is another method of growth, which is marketing-led growth. So we are in marketing led growth, we are focusing on auto finance. So if you might know about this in the U.S. nothing below $10,000 is sold by callers, sales callers or physical meeting is out of the question. So how do they sell? So they have something called auto funnels and it could be something from $10 to $100 to $1,000, $2,000 products sold using different kind of auto funnels. So we are also building auto funnels currently because we and auto funnels I mean in this financial year. Last year, we tied -- I mean, we are not able to build auto funnel. We should have built earlier. This financially year our auto funnels have started producing results. Really, I mean, it's still very early to say too much about it. But yes, our strategy will majorly involve. This year, we have to double. So that involves the auto funnel as we believe. Also one more thing that is happening because of auto funnels is that we can sell abroad with much more ease in any country because right now, there are a lot of if you have to call people timing matters, the shift matters, the phone number matters, the accent matters, the language matters, but when you are selling using auto funnels, all of that is absolutely not mattering you. I mean, I don't want to explain great detail, but it's working very well for us currently in this financial year. Then there is another major thing. We have been developing a referral portal where our existing students can refer others and we can even have affiliate programs. Now this is something that we should be having already. Our -- but our technology team has been developing this, and it is very close to get deployed, hopefully, in the next 1 or 2 months, we'll have it. And it will also create a new revenue stream for us. So that's another major strategy we have going forward, but we wish we could do it last year, would have been really awesome. We have -- we have also hired a team for product-led sales growth. So there are three kind of growth programs for companies like us. One is sales led marketing, one is marketing -- sorry, sales-led growth, marketing-led growth and then product-led growth. We haven't had -- we never worked on any product-led growth until now. But product-led growth, especially with -- is becoming more and more possible for us. We are even building different systems or product-led growth and like a micro learning format, a mock test platform, even our opportunity section, which is basically a job board. These things are actually product-led growth opportunities for us. And we have hired a team for the first time in the last 2 months. We couldn't do this also because product-led growth talent is very expensive, but we are able to start working on this very recently because we had the budget also to work on this. Our operations have actually further opportunity to be optimized, especially by using more AI tools. We have made great progress on that front in the last 3 months, but lot more can be done, and we look forward to that. Our micro learning app for law has been delayed, although the first level of development is already complete, but we didn't like the -- like the courses that we had created initially on it, so we're redoing it. So it's taking a bit of time. When it is launched and we expect -- I mean, once it has some adoption, we expect more organic leads, reduced [ CAC ], twitter, engagement with our community, and we have not succeeded with community-led marketing last year. Commonly can be a very powerful, a lot of very successful ed tech company today are using community-driven marketing. Again, we have hired a very effective team in this space, and we are working very hard on this as we speak. And that also has a huge opportunity to improve our CAC and it is already improving our lead to conversion rate. So to sum up, what would be our obsessive focus in the current financial year. One, we will scale our sales academy so that we can produce -- we are running a sales academy, the last 6 months, there have been problems, we have fixed them. We are going to put a lot of at least 500 people through our sales academy, which we believe will help us to scale to 300 salespeople and massive -- massive jump in our revenue. Auto funnels are working beautifully. We have cracked our first two auto funnels, which are already producing results. Now we are scaling them up slowly, but we'll be launching our auto funnels. We are launching, now there is one course we are currently selling in the U.S., U.K. and Canada market, but we look forward to selling more. And that is also very exciting for us, especially because the average revenue per user can significantly grow there. We are also already building and nurturing a lot of communities for community-driven cells. We are also focusing a lot on building auto funnels, but not for course sales, but to onboard clients in the U.S. for increased workflow for our learners. So how do we get more work for our learners from U.S.? Of course, you also get up share of that. But how do we get more work because that is a very critical part of our business. We are going to use auto funnels even there. And initial results are very good so far. So and important long-term projects, which are -- we are working on it. But these projects are not long term. Do not expect them to produce immediate results maybe in the next -- not this financial year, which is going on, with the next financial year we'll start seeing results but we are still investing in them because you have to place long-term bets. So we are -- number one, we are identifying high-quality acquisition targets. And we have identified some very good acquisition targets. We are having discussions with them. We already like them, but the problem is usually around pricing. So we are trying to see how to make it work. We will only make a deal provided we like the price. So even if it is a great company, the price is very high. We are not going to close those deals. So there are quite a few discussions that are going on. We are building an app for the U.S. market. So far, we are like at a very, very early stage, which is like we have got the [ wear ] frames done. And we are identifying the team that we'll start working on this. but we are trying to create AI tools for lawyers in the U.S., which would be like -- it's like kind of [ Credit Next ], lexisnexis and Westlaw type of platforms for them. And they will also -- the whole idea is to also use that, why are we building that? Because that is our hook, that is our entry into the U.S. legal market. It's a very expensive market, adds are very expensive. We need some organic channel that people will use which will spread virally so that we can have a cost-effective entry and interface with our target market. So that's why we're building such tools. We have been building an AI-based legal assistant. Again, I mean, we are not ready to go public with it. We are not ready to launch it. We are expecting another 3 months before we can launch it. But the capability it is going to have is that it will be able to draft certain contracts using AI and they'll will be able to draft very fast, rapidly initial versions of it. Why is it relevant to us? This is basically integrated into a marketplace where you can get it reviewed by a actual lawyer. That's what we are creating. You get a draft using AI and then in the next 24 hours, get it reviewed by a human lawyer who can -- if it is important enough, you will get a human -- reviewed by a human lawyer, that's the idea. So we are working on this. Also, we're looking to turn IPleaders blog into our services marketplace going forward. So overall, our outlook, we would be aiming at doubling at our revenue in the current financial year while improving our PAT margins so that's the idea. And we believe that our cost of acquisition of customers as well as delivery costs will have significant improvements in the coming year. Okay. So that's the end of my long monologue. I hope I didn't bore anybody to death. And I'll share all of that I said, I'll share it on twitter so that if anybody is interested, can study this later. Okay. So [ Amit ji ], please.

Yes, Ramanuj. Thank you so much for sharing the highlights, the future outlook and the challenges. So very well, very well articulated Ramanuj and the entire team. I would now open -- I will be sharing the questions posted by the participants, and there are a couple of one, two more questions on the chat boxes as well. So one by one, I'll be starting the questions. So there is a question from [ Mr. Supnil Kabra ]. Our H2 revenue is almost at par with H1 revenue. Is there any seasonality element here or there is some other reason for the slow growth sequentially?

So see, first of all, the second half is the half where we started doing our IPO. Now instead of driving our sales team we are traveling to Singapore, Dubai, London and Bombay and, Ahmedabad, and Rajkot, and where not, right? And there were so many investors -- I mean, now we are doing one, but we are doing like hundreds of those. And so obviously, we are a small team, small company, excuse me. So -- What I was saying was that there was obviously an impact of that. And also, priorities were also different, right? So basically, we were launching so many categories in SkillArbitrage, and that has been our focus that -- I mean, anyway, if our goal for the year was being met. We had to do our double revenue was focused on that. We did an acquisition that also -- if you acquire a company, not matter how good an acquisition, it goes a lot of time goes in to make it work. You have to work with them, you have to -- where I understand. So all of that has been there. We were on our target, which is good enough for us.

So second question is from [ Mr. Divyam Gupta ]. He's asking how long can you sustain the 100% growth rates? And can we expect a steady rate EBITDA margins of 20% going ahead?

So I believe that our profit before tax, EBITDA should be 25% in the long run very easily, if not more. Well, 25% is our target. Let's see, I mean, when you are growing very fast, sometimes our first priority is growth, profitable growth but growth. So we are not trying to -- so I can either optimize growth or I can optimize for profit. So if I optimize too much for profit, then it can impact my growth numbers, right? So I have to balance. But yes, long-term PAT target would be [ 25-odd ] not PAT, EBT would be 25%, okay, EBITDA, EBT, whatever you say. So our -- we don't have a debt-free company anywhere. So that's one thing. Second thing is that we have got -- there was one more question about can we -- how long can we double our business, right?

Yes.

So that's the thing. We have successfully opened up a very large market last year. This was our question also, that can we keep doubling every year within just law, within just India and we had our doubts, which is why we launch SkillArbitrage and grew it. And now we have proven SkillArbitrage business. Now SkillArbitrage is not a small market, it's a huge TAM, right? So finance is bigger than law. Marketing is even bigger than finance. HR is itself huge as bigger as Law. So we have so many other courses now. We have social media, I mean I used to think that social media marketing is a very crowded space, we will not succeed there, but now we are succeeding there also. So then AI tool for senior professionals, a huge market, competitive but huge market, then remote work for women home, empty market, how can you enable women in India to do remote work abroad, right? As virtual assisstant, as content creator. As content creator we succeeded. I said, there are something we didn't succeed also. Video editing, graphic design, we did not succeed. We tried repeatedly but failed in that market. But that doesn't mean we will forever fail. We will try again, we have faith in that market. We crack maybe different pricing, different strategy, different marketing, different content is needed, we crack it. But my point is that now our TAM is very big. Now how long can we double? I think very, very long. I mean there's no problem in doubling for the next 2, 3 years, at least the total addressable market is not a problem. Then we can also double because we are able to sell our product in other countries. So we are not -- you can be convinced that we are not limited by one geography. We can sell in other countries, right? If we have done INR 1 crore of revenue in U.K., U.S., then we can do it clearly, right? So that also gives you that confidence that TAM will not be an issue, geography will not be an issue, category will not be an issue. So I think for foreseeable future, at least till we hit INR 100 crores revenue per month kind of -- I mean I would start worrying there? Can I probably -- how do I double now? That would be difficult. Also at current -- I think next couple -- I mean, INR 65 crores to INR 130 crores wouldn't be a challenge. Sure, INR 130 crores to INR 260 crores will be harder than INR 65 crores to INR 130 crores, but the market is there. And we have got the markets right. So now it is about scaling sales and marketing. Hopefully, we'll solve that problem.

Okay. One question is from [ Mr. Sahil Sharma ]. What are your plans for medium term, next 3, 4 years in terms of revenue and profit growth?

You want to know about next 3, 4 months? Then next 3 to 4 years? 3 to 4 years, not medium term. So I will talk about 3 to 4 years. First of all, we are not -- see, our ambition is that we believe that we are sitting on INR 100 crores per month opportunity for ourselves, not the huge entire market. I'm talking about just our revenue per month is INR 100 crores. That's our ambition, INR 100 crores per month. So I don't know if I -- I mean, I haven't done a realistic calculation if I can get there in 3 years or 5 years. I mean it's possible, especially if we keep doubling it is possible. But I mean my plans are for the next year, like this financial year, next financial year. So any intelligible real plans I have are for this year and next year only. This financial -- current financial year and the next financial year. After that, I haven't made any plans. So it's very hard for me to predict. I mean, if we can reach that INR 100 crores per month in next 3 to 5 years or not. My medium-term goal in like, let's say, I don't know how you define medium term, but let's say, over the next 2 financial years, my goal is to hit INR 20 crore revenue per month. This I believe is possible, and this is what I'm aiming at.

So next question, Ramanuj...

That level is 25% is what I believe. If there are any follow-up question on, right, this question, you can write in chat, I will respond.

Sure, sure. So one question again from [ Mr. Sahil Sharma ]. What are we doing to minimize the CAC, Customer Acquisition Cost, which is one of our largest costs in the line item of P&L.

Sure. So see, basically, there is a reason -- so you have to understand how the global tech business functions, if you want to understand CAC. So you have companies like Google, Facebook, primarily, Google and Facebook, then you also have Apple, Amazon and others, right? So Twitter, for example, they are like gatekeeper of your audience. So even if there are people who want to buy from me, you want to know about me. For example, you may want to buy a [indiscernible], you want to buy a course from us or you want to receive my e-mail every day or some kind of communication from me every day. There are gatekeepers, they to share my message with you or -- even if I want to e-mail you, they will charge me, right? So they control all communications, all communication channel between us and our customers, right? So most of the CAC is what we pay to them to reach our customers. Even if I have e-mail ID, and phone number of my customers in my system, who have already said I want to know more about your product. Google does not want me to reach very easily through Gmail to them. They want us to run ads Facebook does not want us to be able to very cheaply reach out to them on WhatsApp. They want us to run ads on Facebook and Instagram. Now this is the problem. Now if I want to use CAC, my long-term plan would be to like reduce the interference by these big companies somehow? How can I do that? I need to build teams that my users will use every day or every week or every month. They will use it anyway, whether I send them an e-mail or a message or a WhatsApp or not. Now how is that possible? So it is possible, for example, this is why we are building a job platform because people who want job, they will come to my platform. They will subscribe to my platform. People who -- there are people who read my blog every week, every day, every month. So they are coming to my blog every month, and they are seeing my ads. For this, I don't have to pay anyone. So the best way to reduce CAC is to create products which will be used by my audience. So if I want to sell to -- let's say, I want to sell my courses or product or anything to mid-level lawyers, can I give them a software they will use every day? What software do they use every day. Can I give it to them, then if they use it every day, I can show them ads every day, I can send them notifications. I can reach out to them without Google and Facebook's interference. Now this is something that will reduce CAC. Other than that, usual methods of reducing CAC is like the more deeply you understand an audience, you can come up with better marketing messaging. You can create auto funnels. For example, slowly, you warm up somebody over a period of time so that they trust you, community marketing, if people are on a telegram group, WhatsApp group, and they are regularly engaging with some content or they're following on -- following you on YouTube and they love your content, they watch, they wait for your content every day, right? Then those kind of things if you are able to successfully build, then you can reduce CAC. I can give you a very good example that we plan to emulate. There's a company called Testbook. Now what TestBook does is that it has mock tests of different government jobs. And they are selling this for very low price. The price is almost nothing. They make money from that also a few crores from that also. But it is actually a marketing funnel for a different thing. But if there are free mock tests, people are talking to by word of mouth, it's trading that you can go and give free mock test on Testbook. So their customer acquisition is almost free. And everybody wants to get a government job, will come, and keep practicing tests over there. Now this is an example of reducing CAC. Now if -- let's say, if I own Testbook, I don't and no plans to, but let's say, I had a product like Testbook, which every government job seeker is practicing their things on that. So then I will have I don't have to pay for this lead. I can get it for free. So this is -- this intermediation of big tech is the solution for CAC and, of course, improving marketing messages, et cetera. I hope that answered the question.

Perfect, Ramanuj. Next question I'll take is, can you give the breakup of the segments we operate in percentage terms?

So this is a futile exercise as of now because the numbers change very fast month-to-month. And we have a lot of CAC -- you should look at it annually, then it would be better month-on-month -- you should not look, we should look at it annually. But I don't have that breakdown right now, sorry.

Perfect. Then one interesting question is from [ Diviam Gupta ]. What can disrupt our business according to you? Is it competition? Is it AI or a general slowdown in the economy?

So a slowdown in the economy is not at all a problem for us. When there is a slowdown economy, we benefit because when people don't get jobs, they want to try new things, they want to learn new skills. This has been historically the case around the world. So we have not suffered from that. But AI is not a risk, AI is a risk in this way that if we fail to teach AI, we have to keep up with the AI. We have keep teaching those advanced AI tools to our students. So one risk is that because of AI, our cost of course building can go up because you are not able to stabilize your course. So for example, I used to teach people, how to draft contracts using templates. Now I have to teach them how to drop using AI. So I had to change my course curriculum, I needed new teachers. So my cost went up, okay? Temporary onetime cost, now is it onetime costs really? Or is it -- I have to do again if there is a completely new generation of GPT and everything is -- I mean that is an issue. The nature of work is also changing. So that is an issue. So there is some risk around those things, but we don't believe that short of like what would, short of like age AI, like basically, if you know Artificial -- generally intelligence where AI is able to actually think like a human being. Right now, the produced quality of AI work is very pathetic. It is not -- you need a human being plus AI to do a good job, right? So a skillful human being plus powerful AI really good results. But if you only leave the AI, it does not work. Now when there are Artificial General Intelligence, then I don't know what we have, right? But I don't think in the next 10 years, any such thing will happen. So that is number over. Number two, what you said is about some -- what can disrupt our business competitors? Can competitors disrupt our business? Yes, they can. So for example, if tomorrow, there is some competitors who have a ton of money and start spending on ads like crazy, right, it can increase our ad cost and our CAC. It has happened in the past. But it is not happening now. We have advantage because those people are not able to raise money. Some of them have gone bankrupt also. Now it is good for us because we never had those kind of marketing practices. So that has -- but that is a threat that if some competitor raised a ton of money, sitting on a work chair, spending money like crazy, don't care about CAC at all, whereas we are covering our CAC, that can impact us. But honestly, that did not happen. We thought that can happen, but we had very large unicorn comapany, which tried to enter our market. I will not take names, but that happened, and they were not able to disrupt us. So I mean, I'm not saying it is never possible. It's possible if they have a different execution plan, somebody maybe able to do it. What is disrupt us? I mean, I think -- I think we can disrupt ourselves that is the biggest danger that we get distracted, go down the wrong track. All of that is always a big danger. Otherwise, I really don't see any imminent or medium-term threat of anything as such. AGI for sure. AGI then that can impact us.

Okay. So the next question I'll take now, is it difficult for you to hire quality talent as we are a relatively small company?

So yes, so this used to be a problem, this used to be a huge problem. But because we started hiring remotely, this did not remain at all. If you look at the quality of people we're able to hire, imagine you that you are able to hire judges, who have been judges and now they have, for some reason, taken voluntary retirement, but they want to live with their husband in some cantonment city where there is no job. So now we can hire them. We have more than one person like that. And this is not just in one -- I think we have very phenomenal people, you would never be able to hire them, but we are able to hire them because we hire remotely. So because that is why we are remote. We are able to hire wonderful people because we hire remotely. I can tell you, our Facebook marketer lives in a small town in Turkey. Our U.S. accounting course anchor leaves in Italy. Her husband works in Porsche, She lives in a small town in Italy. Now imagine in Italy, your option is either to be a waiter at a local restaurant, or work in a shop, or you can work remotely with companies like us, which one will you choose, right? Because there are no local jobs of her skill set, right? So there are such talented people we have specialized in finding such people around the world and hiring.

Okay. One question is looking at the revenue from operations, can you share more granular details like courses, referral fees, other fees, et cetera. Margins will also be helpful if you can share. Thanks for the time and allowing us to share your efforts. We want some general details, yes.

I don't know how to answer this question.

All our -- basically, all our fee is course fees. The revenue is entirely course fee.

This financial year, there was no revenue from anything other than course sales. It does not recognize any revenue that is [indiscernible].

Perfect. What is the team size? An unanimous attendee is asking?

What is our team size?

What is our team size?

600 plus. I mean it keeps going up and down. Just now I saw some three people joined, but let's say last I check was around 632.

Perfect.

And this is an addition of long-term consultants plus employees.

Consultants as well as employees. Consultants working full time. No part time. This does not include part-time consultants.

Okay. So there is a participant called [ Sachet Singh ], he is, first of all, congratulating for the progress. And then he's asking when and how do we plan to monetize the Opportunities platform?

So no immediate plans to monetize Opportunities platform because what is our advantage there is that we want everybody to use it free of cost -- we want. We are even building an application tracking system for the employers, so that they can come post and actually track their applications and all of that. So all of that we want to give it for free -- until everybody -- we become the go-to place, everybody use it a lot, then we think of some premium model. But it is not in our plans right now. Eventually, you'll see. I mean we have enough [indiscernible] to double our revenue next year, we don't have to look at all these.

Perfect. Then another question is, do we have any plans to have an off-line or an omnichannel strategy in the near term?

Okay. That's a great question. We want to do it. We want to do offline, okay? When there is a problem with that -- problem is that we have no expertise in running offline centers. So we are looking at acquiring partners, acquiring businesses, which have expertise in running offline businesses of education nature, right? So in some of the acquisitions we are talking to right now, there are such people who are right -- who have spent 15 years building offline education. So it's something like that -- I mean, that's what would be our method. I mean, otherwise, we are not going offline, rather, we will sell in the U.S., in U.K., launch more courses there, that's a build more sales team. So that will be our strategy to grow. Offline is great but it's cost -- it is, number one, it is very cost intensive, and we'll probably have to raise more money. If you do that, we don't mind but at least initial experiments, you would like to do it along with some experienced partners who have offline space experience. So before that, we are not doing. So if we find some right partner, we will.

Perfect. Another question from Mr. Rajesh Swaminathan. He's asking any insights on the traffic on our website? And second question by him, is there is a jump in the depreciation and amortization. Any information on that?

So traffic -- I mean I don't know what to say about traffic. I don't think there is any intelligible data. I keep looking at the traffic out of habit every day, but it's not something that tells an interesting story about the business to be honest. We have a lot of blogs on our -- on our platforms, right? So those blogs get a lot of traffic because people are searching for those topics, I end up on a blog. Some are ending up on our course pages. We need to hire an SEO team, which will dedicatedly work on SEO. We haven't -- we don't have it yet, which is a miss. We'll work on it. We try to have a good team to do SEO. But we have done some SEO on our own end. We are also not very bad at it, but like we need to have a dedicated team working on it going forward.

I'll answer the second question.

Yes, Siddhant. nPlease.

For the second question. You see, like we had built a lot of intangible assets, like what Ramanuj said, on content development, on community engagement, community development and a lot of tech place. So that is the value which is getting amortized which we have told that we will do over a period of 16 months. So that amortized value, which has a treatment this year is what is being reflected in that. So I think during the presentation, Ramanuj said [ excellent].

There is a question from [ Mr. Jhitendra Agarwal ], he is asking what competition does differently than you and why you can do that?

We have no competition. We have like monopoly in our markets. And if you found competition, please tell me.

Well answered. Then one question is from Mr. Lavkesh Thakur. What is the nature of competitive intensity as far as Ed tech for law is concerned. So you have already answered this. Are we a dominant player in this market? Again, you have answered this. And how hard it will become for others...

The average playerplayer is not even like what -- like not even 1/20 of the size.

So the last part, Ramanuj, of his question, how hard it will be for others to do what we are doing in law?

Apparently very hard because we had unicorns who tried to get into our main stay legal ed tech market, right? So upskilling market. And none of them succeeded, even not one, multiple ones, like you think of any big unicorn today, they all try to get into law. And they -- none of them succeeded -- some of them spend crores of rupees. There was one competitor which raised INR 50 crores, they were existing before we did, right? And they also lost to us. So we have survived and they didn't. One of that INR 50 crore company went bankrupt. I don't want to take names, but you can easily Google and find out. If you are a smart investor, you'll find out which companies try to get into law, just when asked any law student or lawyer, which companies lean a lot of ads on your platform, right? And they have stopped now. They're not running ads anymore. They'll tell you. But the point is that a lot of people have tried. It's not like we are a monopoly because nobody realized oh, law is such an amazing market and left it alone for us, right? It's not even that.

Perfect. Yes.

We had a -- called Reuters. This I am happy to say. Thomson Reuters entered this market, left in 2 years. Completely shutdown. Yes, please.

Yes. Yes, Ramanuj. So I mean in the interest of time, we are on 5:57, and this call was supposed to be at 6. So I'll just take 2 more questions, one from the Q&A and one from the chat section as well. So one question from Sahil Sharma, he is asking, we had a clarification in our financial result on the amortization of content costs over 5 years. Can you please explain what is this change in accounting and why we did it? And it's impact on the P&L.

I was expecting this question earlier to be honest.

That's why I took this, it came in last, but I took this for the benefit of everybody.

So see, I will tell you what is the accounting policy change and why it was necessary. So 12 months in a year, now out of that, first three quarters, 9 up to 9 months, we had spent INR 10 crore on our -- plus INR 5 crores, INR 5 crores in two quarters we spent on our new course development. Then after the IPO in the last one quarter, not even like 2.5 months, 3 months, you can say for benefit of doubt we spent INR 10 crore. So our auditor was uncomfortable that if you follow basically what is happening that according to the accounting standards, you have to amortize any kind of such expenditure from the time you actually put it to use, not before you put it to use. So if I -- this INR 10 crores, if I start -- apportion it over the whole year. So what do we change? We changed that 5 years from 5 years, we said, no, it's not 5 years, 16 months. So month-on-month, we calculate it, right? See, I had one simple choice. I could either say that let's not start all these extensive cost development in the last quarter, led the profit, we booked and then next year, you start all this course development. Now that I started those coal development, it was unfair, if we apportioned for the whole year, the last 2 months cost. So this is a better accounting practice, which reflects the reality more closely. That is the only purpose.

Perfect, Ramanuj. So I'll take the last question now from the chat window.

For example, I'll tell you like I just wanted to say it. So the principal intangible asset is like this. So if I spend all the money, let's say, on the last day of the year, okay? And then I claim it for the whole year, it is not appropriate. That's the reason this required this change. I hope that answers that question clearly.

Yes, you have been very candid on this, Ramanuj. One last question, I will take now from the chat window. What has been our key hires post IPO? Any prospective hires in the senior team, which we'll see joining the company and which areas you have been looking to hire?

Somebody saying they are selling normal course, you are selling legal. First of all, you have complete misconception about our company. Number one, they are also trying to sell legal courses, we succeeded, they failed and they left our market, number one. Number two, we are not selling only legal courses. This year what like 40% of our revenue or 50% of our revenue will be law. The rest 50%, 60% is non law, okay. So yes, your question was about good hiring, right? So we have had somebody join us in our product-led team that I'm very excited about a product-led growth team. We had somebody who joined us in our auto funnel team. I don't want to take names because they are still -- they have really recently joined, and I don't want them to get into trouble with their previous people because they still are supposed to get some shares and all those resorts and all of that. So but yes, really excited about the recent hires. We have [ Pratul ] with us. Pratul just joined from Physics Wallah, about a month back. And he is handling our Investor Relations. So you guys will have a chance to probably interact with him. Used to do M&A and Investor Relations at Physics Wallah.

Hello everyone.

So Ramanuj, I will thank everybody now on the call for being so patient. And for the final comments, I would request again, Ramanuj for a minute to give a final. But before that, Pratul, if you can please share your e-mail ID, any email ID of the company on the chat window so that many questions were unanswered. So [indiscernible] let them and try to reach out to them and answer them right. So that please share that over the chat. And Ramanuj, would request you to give your closing comments, and then we will wind it up.

Yes. So my closing comment will be this that I really thank all of you that you have chosen to support a very young and new company, newcomer in the market like us. We are still learning. So if we make any mistakes, do forgive us. I honestly don't understand why our share price rapidly goes up and down every week. But I -- we will do our best to keep it up, and we can't control the price or at least our performance will be up right, as a company. It's really going up. We are very, very positive about the way things are shaping up. Honestly, doing the IPO has been a very good decision. The kind of strength we have got after we raised the money and the kind of difference we are seeing in our business is really truly fantastic. And the team is also very charged up. A lot of great things ahead of us, stay with us for the journey and look forward to interacting with you soon again.

Thank you, Ramanuj and the team. And once again, very, very sorry for not being able to take all the questions. But you please share us on the email ID shared by Pratul. We'll be very happy to answer all the questions in a day or 2. Thank you once again, all of you.

Thank you, everyone. Take care.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.