Super League Enterprise, Inc. (SLE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to H.C. Wainwright's Fireside Chat with Ann Hand, the Chief Executive Officer of Super League Enterprise. Ann, welcome.

Thank you for having me, Scott.

So I think a good place to start here might be helping investors understand the revenue components of Super League's business, and why brands and advertisers want to partner with you?

So right now, we did about $25 million in revenue last year, a nice sizable jump from prior years and continue to see that top line growth. About $10 million or $11 million of that is brands paying us to create immersive experiences inside game platforms like Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft. And so that's specifically kind of our focus are these immersive game platform that feel 3D like and very personalized because you're entering them with your own avatar and it's kind of like product placement on steroids, I always jokingly say because we're building for Chipotle an immersive virtual restaurant, where you can go in and make your own burrito. So we're building these immersive experiences, about another $8 million, $9 million is brands paying us then to buy our on-platform media products. So those are media or ad units that we can deploy in other many games inside these platforms and drive traffic to that experience we've built for them. So right now, in Roblox alone, we reach about 130 million monthly unique players, and we have RSDK distributed across thousands of many games. So that's how we get that sizable reach, and then we're able to get to those players with those proprietary media products and other games and drive them to the place where we've built the immersive experience world. And that's a powerful tool because typically, a brand is spending media dollars off platform, doing advertising on Instagram or YouTube, there's a lot of friction in that. You have to hope you're getting a Roblox user. They have to get off that platform, get on to Roblox, find the experience. So the power of that on-platform media by as you get a direct bull's eye. And then the remaining is we have a little bit of direct-to-consumer revenue. We are excited about seeing if that's something we can grow over time. We also often get paid to produce broadcasting content. So not just what's happening in the game, but content that we can then distribute live stream or click the content on to other platforms. And so we see there's emerging other revenue streams that could be interesting for the company over time. Another couple of revenue streams increasingly brands are paying us for, we used to kind of give it for free is, we've been working in these immersive 3D feeling game platforms. So keep in mind, nobody's playing Roblox or Fortnite necessarily with the VR headset, right? They're playing on a flat 2D screen, their phone, or their TV screen or laptop, but it still has that immersive feel to it. But increasingly because we've been in this space for close to a decade, we really understand this Gen Z, Alpha user and brands are starting to pay us for that strategic consulting as they start to understand this new marketing channel. Just like they had to get their heads around 20 years ago, social media marketing channels, this is just a new generation of that where kids increasingly hang out and socialize. And so strategic consulting. And also, we have a really powerful set of measurement tools and analytics suite that adds value to the advertiser. And so we increasingly are starting to bake that into some of the costs.

Can you talk a little bit about the demographics that Super League can help brands reach? You mentioned Gen Z, but who...

Yes.

Wasn't baked into that, I guess?

I mean, really, we're talking about the under 25 gamer. Platforms like Roblox are starting to age up a bit. It used to be mostly an under 13 audience, but now it's about 50-50 between under 13 and over 13, because too, it really is much more for a hyper casual player, somebody who's much more social in many ways, it really is an interesting diverse reach. And it's about 50-50 split between boys and girls or men and women playing these games.

Sure.

Right now, the average Roblox user is on platform for 156 minutes a day. The next close is social media channels TikTok mins a day. And they're mostly -- it's not that there aren't competitive genres inside it. But a lot of people really are there just to socialize, co-create. It's kind of like a -- I always say digital cul-de-sac or park [indiscernible] playing out. Yes.

It's the mall for Gen Z, right?

And that's really the important point, Scott, is that they're hanging out and socializing, but they're learning, they're shopping. They're truly digitally native to these platforms. And so this is just an extension of their physical cells. And this is where they expect to meet brands and start that brand journey or relationship with them. And so it's really an imperative that the CMO of today gets their heads around this new great marketing channel that's really -- I'd hate to say it's just emerging because what often CMOs and heads of media will say to me is they already can see the numbers of ship. There's a 0.5 billion players globally on these open world platforms, where we can bake brands in very natively into the game experience. And so it's a powerful way for a brand to have a real intimate conversation with these players, but the audience is there and we're kind of poised with our capability and tech suite to be the enterprise solution to take a brand there and frankly, start to see the ad dollars catch-up with the audience shift.

And are there certain precautions you need to take when dealing with consumers that are in their teens or any risks associated with that you need to navigate at Super League?

Well, certainly, we have always had a brand that stood for kind of positive inclusive gameplay, COPPA compliance, we're not collecting any personal data or information on our players, nor is Roblox or Minecraft, they're compliant that way too. And so I think we're seeing as kind of a safe, trusted brand that can bring a brand in a positive way. And our experiences are positive. We do we've done countless things with nonprofits like the American Heart Association programs we did with Visa last year were around teaching kids about data privacy. So all of -- a lot of the things that we do, they're gamified and they're fun, but there's often a bit of a, like I said, a learning or being very positive as an outcome.

That's great.

And maybe not making a Chipotle burrito virtually and eating it for 14 minutes. I don't know what -- I mean there are no calories in it.

I guess. Right. That's true. So the company shifted its strategy a bit over the last year or so, focusing on working with brands or more partnering with brands on longer-term assignments. Can you speak to investors a little bit about the rationale behind this shift? And any kind of early returns you're seeing from that decision?

Yes, absolutely because it's probably -- it's the most exciting part because it is kind of the ultimate vision of the company and where we can go, but it really changes the business model and takes out some of the things that are challenging with an ad model. Right now, we still continue as most ad-based businesses would have to have a very lumpy seasonality effect, sure. So as you know all too well covering us, a lot of our revenues are in the back half of the year tied to back-to-school and holiday spend. But what's happening over time is as brands are dipping their toe in, they're seeing this unbelievable top-of-the-funnel engagement they're getting. On top of it, we're driving real conversion for them. And we can talk about that a bit more later, but that's an important hallmark is we don't want to just give you a lot of flashy engagement, we want to drive real results to your P&L. We want that digital to physical crossover. So with Chipotle, it was all about digital app downloads, and how do they get somebody to come into their real stores and get a real burrito. But the important thing is it's kind of like -- if you think about a parallel to social media, and then I'll tell you a little bit about how we already are seeing brands start to get it. Today, it would be unthinkable for a brand like a Chipotle to for 30 days, do a lot of great exciting content in Instagram and spin up all this fan engagement. And then for the next 11 months, do nothing, right? You can practically just deactivate the channel, right? To be unthinkable. It wouldn't be smart marketing spend. And why did you bother creating all that fandom to then just go quiet on those fans. But that's exactly what brands do when they pay us to do a pop-up experience, we delivered 60 million visits to Barbie's Dreamhouse in 30 days. On day 31, Barbie Dreamhouse was gone. And the smarter thing to do would have been to left Barbie's Dreamhouse up or that Chipotle restaurant, which we do leave up, and just think of it almost like a virtual billboard, right? It just happens to be 3D and interactive, but it's still a virtual billboard, but then you can then spread that marketing investment, keep that up all year and just rotate campaigns through it. No differently than Netflix changes out every 2 weeks, their billboards down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles or Times Square or what have you. And so you want to have a persistent conversation. And so we -- I'm so excited that we have now -- we have 6 brands today, that we're working with that are asking us to build something for them and keep it up. And the importance of that is that, that also changes the smoothing out of our revenues, right? And we start to collect a recurring operating or maintenance fee for that world because we have to keep it active and exciting. We need to rotate those new campaign objectives through it. Last year, we did -- Universal Studio's alone spent $1 million with us, but it was broken across 10 different new movie releases.

Right.

We could just build 1 time a Universal Studio theater and have achieved all those same goals. And so I really like it right now, brands like Visa, Dave & Buster's or just a couple of those brands that are paying us to build something and paying us that recurring fee than to keep it as a persistent channel, no differently than they have a persistent strategy for Instagram and Facebook, and others. And you don't just have one social media channel or strategy, you have an omnichannel strategy.

Right.

No differently once we get a brand persistently building out a Roblox experience, we can then turn to them and say, what about Fortnite, and we can start to have it be the omnichannel solution for them in those other open world platforms as well.

As you build out some of these longer-term products how much leverage can you use when working with Visa versus working -- sign a new customer? I mean, I imagine the cost to you guys to develop is incrementally less each new customer add.

It's the perfect question because it's actually at the heart of what makes us different, right? Because some people will say, "Well, are you guys just an ad agency? Or are you just a game studio." And we see no, we're a product and tech company because once we build an experience once, we then productize components of that 3D experience so that we can reuse them. So right now, we're super excited. We've just launched a ton of what we call pop-up products. You could also call them drag and drop on those products, but it's things like kitchen, the QSR kitchen, a concert stage, fashion runway, makeup counter. We did a lot of fashion and cosmetics business last year with L'Oreal, Urban Decay and H&M and others. Well, we just are about to do a really big program with a competitive cosmetics company, about a $1 million program this year that we just recently won, but we can take cosmetics counter and we can reskin it. And what that does is it lessens the development time. It lowers the barrier of entry cost wise for the brand, but also it gives us more product like margins. And so that's just really what we do so differently. Most of the people that we beat, we know who we're up against, right when we're winning these big RFPs, and it is either just independent game studios who can build, they can build a Chipotle restaurant too, right, and Gamify that it might be a great game, it might not. But they'll build it once, and then it will be in the trash can and they'll start from scratch all over again or it is just a good old fashion ad agency, who's a service agency, they're a middleman. They don't have products. They don't have -- and in many ways, they might know certain things about gamers or youth marketing, but they don't have the deep kind of strategic insight that we have. A good example is -- and by the way, it's very friendly with these parties as well because often, we'll turn to some of these games' studios, if our studio team has -- 0is at capacity, and then we'll use them in a friendly way to outsource, and the agencies are a big source of opportunities into our pipeline. Our $4 million deal we won last year with kraft Lunchables back in kind of September, October, which was 3x the largest deal we've ever won, came to us through Google -- through their ad agency. And who basically said we've taken on this giant program, and it's all built around Roblox and ties to QR codes and on packages in stores. So it was a true digital to physical kind of crossover 360 experience, and they said, "We think you're the only people who know how to run it."

Right. Right. Can you talk a little bit about the way you generate revenue and monetization on some of these assignments. Are there -- is there a onetime fee that's accounted for over the course of the partnership, are there KPIs that if you reach or even kind of in-game metrics that could drive monetization to you? How does that all work? And what are the longer-term opportunities there?

Yes. Today, for the most part, think of it as just a big menu and a brand or an agency has come to us with an RFP that says, "Hey, we're -- it's this specific campaign, here are the types of objectives we have. Here's the ROI we're looking for, whether it's impression-based or what have you." And then we're pulling from a menu inside that budget what we think is the right program that can guarantee that type of results, right? And the nice thing is, we keep resetting in a good way the minimum floor on margin and size of programs we go after, right? Because we serve about 100 brands last year, that's a lot of brands. That's a wonderful thing to have that kind of diversity. But we did 10 Lunchables deals a year, we'd have $40 million of revenue baked, right? So there's something about leveraging that utilization better. But with that, typically then we're getting paid based on performance of work and different milestone achievements. But I think where you're going is an opportunity for the company over time. That Chipotle program still to this day, average person spent 14 minutes eating a virtual burrito. We have 24 million visits to the build-a-burrito experience. It still stays the highest digital app download day ever for Chipotle in their history, and the second highest digital food sales day, because when you -- in the game experience, you could unlock a secret word. And when you unlock the word, burrito and you put it in the Chipotle app, you've got a free in-real-life burrito. So we gave away 130,000 free burritos in 30 minutes. What's important about that, though, is that, that compelled people then to add on to that order and buy other things before they drive to their local Chipotle to get their food. We believe there's an opportunity over time with enough evidence about how we really do have this leading position on digital to physical conversion and measurement of that and proof that we can start to get paid that way. Because what would a brand pay for -- so they made it to download in their phone, a digital app, they pay a lot that's kind of the ultimate and stickiness, right? And so if that program, Chipotle paid us $400,000 for it, what if we had been paid for performance and what kind of opportunity could have that been to really change the model of it, how we get compensated on the back end for that conversion value.

No, that's interesting. Given the shift in strategy, can you talk a little bit about, I don't know, average assignment pricing and what you're seeing there maybe versus a year ago? And also along those lines, what you're seeing in terms of repeat customers? Do you have customers that typically have a successful campaign and come back to you the following year with something, hey, maybe even larger?

Yes, for sure. I mean we were just on a weekly revenue call last Thursday and heard that we just won 3 more chunks of sizable business with Chipotle. So certainly, we have very high repeat percent. The challenge -- I used to always report on repeat percent, and I still do. It's always kind of north of 70%. But then people will say, well, so why don't -- some of them come back. And it's not really -- it's more that the denominator of how many total brands are coming in, keeps getting bigger, right? So the more important metric is our brand spending more and more aggregate dollars annually with us, and they are, right? So we had 7 brands last year that spent north of $1 million with us when you aggregate what they spend. And it is those Universal Studios, the Sony's and others who keep coming back. We're running a few programs for Visa right now and that we just recreated the loop in Paris for them and they had a real concert at the loop with Post Malone, and we created a broadcast speed of the Post Malone concert on May 28 inside our Roblox loop world we built for them. But again, that all came on the back of doing the data privacy one-off program for them last year. And so average deal size continues to get bigger, but I really think the important thing is the aggregate dollars of brand has to work. And obviously, what we want is, like the Universal Studios example I mentioned earlier, we can chop it up into individual campaigns or we can take again one of these pop-up products like a movie theater, we can have a feel very customized to Universal, and we can spread those revenues out more evenly through the year.

No, that makes a ton of sense. You touched on it a minute ago, but where are most of these -- your customers or these assignments or campaigns sourced from? Would this kind of internally driven versus brought to by advertising agencies?

Yes. It's still to this day, I kind of call it roughly 80-20, 80% is coming through the agency.

Okay.

The more that we stopped doing small campaigns and do larger programs, the brand is involved. And so it might start as a source from the media agency. But just to give you an example, like when we did that program for Mattel, that was about a $700,000 program. The media products -- the media buy came through the agency. They're the ones who sit on that tells media dollars.

Right.

[indiscernible] to build Barbie Stream house and Polly Pocket's, tea party experience, come from inside the brand. So inevitably, when the program gets bigger, when it has an experiential component and does it just like a look an ad deal, inevitably, the brand gets engaged, and that's good for us, right? Because they've got budgets that are dispersed in different places, and we want to be able to get our reach into those different programs. But we also want to be able to have that direct brand conversation about how we ship them to a persistent strategy because the agencies, again, are wonderful partners for us, and they're the ones who are trying to advocate for this channel to these brands. But equally, they traditionally sit on kind of short-term media by budgets. And so that's kind of their motivation is to disperse those dollars in a real programmatic way, where we're trying to build you a new immersive marketing channel.

So -- and where are these advertiser dollars coming from? I mean what wallet share is going to gaming and the metaverse these days versus more traditional social media or even print or television, what does that look like?

It's a great question because it tended to be historically that we would always be kind of talking to the agencies or brands and they would tend to think "well, how many dollars do we have allocated for gaming?" Like it was this small little niche segment.

Right.

And really, and I say this all the time to investors and to CMOs, you really have to stop thinking of these as gaming -- video gaming because it's really just a next generation of a social media channel. It just happens to be way more personalized and interactive than tech is for you. But it's still a co-creation platform, just like anybody can be spin up an Instagram video. Anybody can make a mini game. That's what we do for brands.

Yes.

And it's really, again, much more about social interaction than it is about traditional video gaming. So when it comes to budgets, if we can do the right job of educating the brand, what they really should be looking out is their total digital advertising strategy. And what do these platforms play no differently than what's the role of other social media platforms. I had a Global Head of Media for a big kind of blue chip company, say to me over a year ago. He's like, look, I get it that the audience has shifted. The numbers don't lie. We engage men in the audience, and my go-to ad unit for the last several years has been the 30 second YouTube video. The thing that now all of us can't skip faster, right. Just like we don't even really see ads when we're scrolling through social media feeds. And that's another thing is this real kind of concern that social media advertising has plateaued as well. It's not performing as well as it did. So people are grappling with what is my next generation of what the YouTube video spot was for me. And in our opinion, it is this immersive marketing channels where you get to speak this new language of 3D engagement, which, again, is how this younger generation has grown up. They've grown up with the personalized digital avatar, and they want that digital version of themselves to interact just like their real-life person does. I heard something crazy the other day that by 2030, they expect that this young generation today, 30% of their wardrobe will be digital. But again, it's a blended life. It's not -- they don't define a line between this digital self that's out there exploring swimming in Barbies's pool and making a virtual burrito no differently than the same person who wants to go get that real burrito.

Let's jump into the financials a little bit. The company reported a revenue increase of more than 25% in the first quarter versus a year ago. How much of that can you attribute to your unique capabilities at Super League versus kind of underlying secular or industry trends?

Yes. I think that the thing that makes us unique is that we have the capability to take down full end-to-end programs. And so while there's generally more dollars being put into these immersive platforms, this kind of new generation of social media, I think what's unique about us relative to the competitive set is that we're a one-stop shop. And I think what you're seeing in our top line growth is it's not just that the law of advertising with scale, you can take a greater share of advertiser wallet. It's that we really -- you can come and you can get your experience, your immersive experience built we can do your media buying for you, both on platform with our media products. But often by the time we've taken down that much of a program, brands will then say to us or the agency. I've got 50,000 in my budget for off-platform media. Why don't you guys just do that for me? So we'll go and we'll sprinkle some of those extra dollars on social media or what have you. And then they'll say, "Oh, the Barbie team really loves this one influencer and would like them to do some posts about the experience. Can you manage them as well. And we say, yes, absolutely, we will because, again, we want -- we really think we separate ourselves, and I think the 26% year-on-year growth that you're seeing in Q1 versus same quarter prior year is that capability to take full programs and really give them one point to measure and optimize their full campaign.

Now that makes a lot of sense. Can you talk a little bit about the visibility in the business? I mean, here we are in mid-June. Are you booking fourth quarter deals at this point? Or what is your kind of sight line look like as you think about the business?

It kind of goes back to what we've talked about earlier, but tend historically in these types of businesses that are very ad dependent, you're usually just seeing 1 quarter out. We're tending to see more 2 quarters out and even a little further because if we're doing annual programs for brands with that recurring revenue we're able to fully mark that out. So what we're seeing is even if we're just turning that corner. Like I said, it's 6 brands right now that are paying us for those persistent programs. But that does allow us to start to see things in Q4 and Q1 even in Q2 of next year, and even if it's relatively a small-ish percent relative to the whole of the revenue pie. So that's powerful that we can start to see that visibility. And as I've said, smooth out those revenues, but also get some better kind of predictability and have for revenues that we can forecast better, which, again, I think investors will like because that's always the challenge with an ad model. Is that lack of line of sight.

Absolutely. You guys have also done a really nice job reducing the operating costs over the past year. Can you talk a little bit about the progress in -- how much revenue growth the current operating infrastructure can really support before you'll have to start making some meaningful investment there again?

Yes. Those are -- those were tough decisions over the last 18 months, right? The couple of primary ways we got those reductions was obviously through layoffs of personnel, our biggest line item and also reduction in infrastructure costs. We did a lot of cloud hosting. And those costs can really be challenging for a small company, the recent divestment of our Minehut business, which is a Minecraft owned and operated server farm that we ran was kind of the last big sizable reduction in infrastructure costs. So our infrastructure costs, we pulled $2.5 million, $3 million of cost out of the company on a full year run rate basis. The way that we got to a lot of the people reductions was frankly just really looking at our product roadmap and being pretty hard about saying we -- even if a product line is technically profitable or breakeven, if it's not going to support the majority of the trajectory of top line growth, we just put it on the back burner. And then what we've been doing to your heart of your question is really trying to test the capacity levels, the utilization levels, right? And so we've made a decision to really lean out the [ org ] in aggressive way and test those limits. So in 2022, our top couple selling salespeople did about $2.5 million each in revenue sales. Last year, the same couple of people did about $4.5 million. And now keep in mind, some of that is those bigger programs, too, right? So they're not chasing every [ 10,000, 20,000 ] deal with the same fervor, but we started to push the limits on that and then there is a production side of the house. There's people who have to build these products and run these programs and projects. And frankly, we've had to be pretty ruthless about on a performance management side about just kind of resaying the bar of what does an above-average performance look like in those roles, and just really churn staff more aggressively to push people up to that limit. There is still a learning curve as a salesperson. If you come in from the digital media side and you are now selling this kind of more expensive kind of investment. It's more like a biz dev sale. It's a strategic sale. You've gotten if you've got $500,000 Chipotle last year, and you've already figured out how to get another $700,000 out of them this year, you are building long-term relationships, right? And those are big dollars. So I think in that case, I think it's about a 6-month learning curve to see if a salesperson can really get into a strike zone there with the products and understand how to sell them. So that's one of the challenges is how do we give enough time for a salesperson to come up that curve. But again, we've got to weed out kind of weak performance as fast as we can.

That makes sense. So with revenue ramping and a strong kind of disciplined eye on costs, there seemingly should be a fair amount of operating leverage in the business. Can you speak to path to profitability or how you're kind of -- give us something that will allow us to kind of extrapolate what an appropriate time line is?

Yes. And that's where the productization theme is so important, right? Because once I build that fashion runway once, I can reskin it much faster. I can get more out of the products and the studio team to be focused on new additional growth. So that is a big way that you get more capacity existing resources and be able to sell a lot more through the same. But we've always talked about the fact that at the end of this year, kind of that Q4 time frame is where we turn that an important corner and see breakeven. And that's why smoothing out the revenues is so important because, obviously, Q1 is always traditionally in advertising, the lowest performing or seasonality-wise, but Q4 is when we have a profitable quarter. And there's nothing that's happened this year that has made us believe that, that still won't be the case. We still have a little bit of a working capital challenge as we go into Q1, but we feel like the company is in a really important position that, frankly, investors have been beating it over us for 18 months, which is -- the thing is, in microcap, it used to be okay to just be fast growing and in a top line. Everyone lost their patience for that over the last couple of years. And if it has to be profitability. So I think I was really happy to see not just like your feedback from the Q1 results, but also other investors who reached out and said 26% top line growth versus same quarter prior year, but 22% cost reduction, and a 27% improvement on net loss. I think it was -- those power of those 3 metrics working in tandem, I think, gave investors the confidence to say, okay, they are on their path to profitability, and it's going to be an exciting Q4 to see more cash coming in than going out.

Makes a ton of sense. You've previously talked about a kind of path to $100 million of annual revenue. Help us understand what gets you from kind of mid-20s in 2023 to $100 million in whatever it happens to be, right? What needs to occur? Is there some additional M&A in that? I mean just help bridge us there, I guess?

Yes. I mean, look, I've always been very open about the fact that we will continue to remain acquisitive as long as it's accretive, right? We can't afford to take on more losses. That said, this is a very fragmented kind of world that we're in. And again, we bump up against a lot of friendlies who do pieces of what we do. And often, a lot of them will say things like, can you guys buy us? We want to be a part of Super League because our top line is public, they see we're doing $25 million to their $5 million or $10 million, and they see us as the natural hub. And so we do think there's going to continue to be very selective ways to aggregate more tech or capacity or pipeline into the company and do it in a way that doesn't in any way postpone the profitability stage. So while when I talk about the path to $100 million, there's really a couple of drivers. It's the continued organic growth that comes from these larger programs. Again, it goes back to how many Kraft Lunchables can you do in a year, right? Or how many people like our 6 current brands, can you get to agree to persistent programs, persistent programs inevitably turn into 7-figure programs because you're doing the build and you're getting the continued operating costs. So for organic growth, it's about larger and larger persistent deals and programs and then coupled with opportunistic M&A. If we grabbed a couple of small companies quickly, we could be at $50 million, $60 million top line like that. And now you've got all that additional operating leverage. So kind of once you get north of 50, I think the past from 50 to 75 to 100 is a lot easier. The hardest part of -- I don't want to say it's easy, but the hardest revenue to generate or 0 to 5, 10 20, those are the hard yards.

That makes sense. On the organic side, you're fishing in a pretty big pond, right? I mean you mentioned you have 6 customers that you're working with currently on these kind of longer-term engagements. But there must be tens, if not hundreds of additional opportunities out there, right? I mean you're not bumping up against any kind of wall there, right?

No. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, look, when I talk about how we serve close to 100 brands last year, I mean that shows you that there were tons of brands who were like, I'll just buy 10,000 of your media products. Let me understand this. They're kind of testing the waters. But even if you look at Roblox alone as a platform, they've only brought a few hundred brands globally into their massive platform. So you're just scratching the surface. And one thing that's happening, and I say this respectfully because I'm saying it about myself as well, is you've got a C-suite out there that they're in their 50s and 60s. And they're kind of not really understanding this platform. And having run all the brands for BP globally, I was in that chair when we were trying to understand social media, right? So I do think that inevitably, as you get this kind of next generation that millennial into some of those rules who really understand these platforms differently. You're going to see a huge wave of brands gaining. It's really no different than in 2000, everybody had to have a website. And then in 2008, everybody had to have a Facebook strategy, and we're just right at the tipping point of people saying, how can our brand not have a presence on these open gaming platforms.

Now on the inorganic side, I mean we talked about M&A a bit, but what is the criteria you look at when approaching a potential M&A transaction. And I want to give you guys credit, you guys have done a handful of transactions in the past and integrated those successfully. So just kind of curious how you look at the opportunities and what you're looking for. And it sounds like accretion is towards the top of that list.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, again, a lot of this is inbound. It's people reaching out to us or they already know and work with. But typically, it's going to be -- there are games studios out there. They either will lift our capacity to build more experiences, and they would come with a pipeline right of wins in revenue. That would be a requirement and they'd have to be operating at breakeven or profitability. There's also some small shops that are kind of 2, 3, 4 person shops that are just a little bit of tech, something that can plug into our ad tech and creator tool tech stack, but can give us a new additional revenue stream. And again, that's very similar to when we acquired Bloxbiz. That was 2 guys who had built some specific ad tech specific to Roblox and some creator tools, and we were able to bring them into the company a couple of years ago and then really put resources around them to really drive and build out more of those proprietary media products I talk about. And so it's usually in those two camps. And again, these typically are going to be companies that are sub kind of 25 in headcount. And that's why it's not just that they bring revenue and maybe a bit of product or tech, but it's also that they're digestible. I think that that's one thing that people -- I, for better or for worse, was in energy when all those big mega mergers were happening. And all of the dreams of the synergies that modeled out excel spreadsheet. But I ran a business at BP that I had 13 different ERP systems just in Europe alone. So like there's all -- people always, I think, underestimate how hard it is to ingest something. So that's a really big -- that and a culture fit. How will this work as a leadership team, those are a lot of the things that we screen for. But out of the gate, we're looking for revenues and/or tech. And obviously, that breakeven or probably more [indiscernible].

And I would imagine being able to work with some of these game studios in an outsourcing capacity today helps derisk some of those cultural issues or maybe some other issues that may come up and put you in a more advantageous position to actually do a deal?

Well, it's certainly a good way to test the partnership, right? And I should say some of these studios, some of them -- no one really thinks about product the way we do, but some of them have built their own games. And so they do have a little bit of like a direct-to-consumer revenue stream to them. And that's a really unique talent in itself to kind of -- that's kind of like drilling for oil, trying to -- there's millions of games in Roblox, so to make a winner and without a big brand or a piece of IP is quite a feat in itself. But yes, it's a good way for us to test those relationships out. When we outsource the challenge is only that we're going to get a lower margin on that program, right? And so when investors say, okay, how do we get margins even higher. The answer to that is, I mean, in one hand, if we're building the experience ourselves, it's a 30% to 35% margin profile. If we outsource what's going to be lower, it's going to be about 20%, 25%. So doing in-house is good. But then the key goes back to productization because once I build again that QSR kitchen or concert Stage 1, now when I turned it into a product, I can get 50%, 55%, 60% margins on it through that productization component.

Yes, you were able to take each one of those development features off the shelf and build your -- that makes a ton of sense. Now I save this towards the end, but it always comes up and with the first few questions for small-cap investors. You finished the quarter with just over $3 million of available cash. How are you thinking about your cash balance and needs to raise capital on a go-forward basis to get you to that Q4 were hopefully we breakeven and then 2025 when maybe you're positive on a full year basis?

Yes. I mean, look, what we've been really trying hard to do is to not do kind of deals that just crush the stock. The stock takes enough pressure just from the share back of being in microcap, right? And so we've tried to really be thoughtful with that. We do have a $4 million AR facility which has helped us get through some of those working capital challenges than last year not having it would have put us in a tighter spot with $3.5 million on the books. Obviously, we're eating away at those losses as well each quarter. And so all that's kind of moving in the right direction. And really, my hope is that if we do -- would it be nice to have a little bit more on the balance sheet, yes, it would just to be opportunistic at a minimum if the right opportunity came forward. But our goal is to ensure that if we bring in that kind of money that it would be strategic investment, that it would be coming from a party that could really bring more leverage through their own brand relationships or platform relationships. And so that's kind of our rally cries to ensure that if we do bring in more capital, it's always going to be dilutive, but can we do it in a way that adds some kind of strategic upside or leverage point.

I think that makes a ton of sense. As we start to wrap things up here and any catalyst investors should be looking for, for the remainder of 2024?

Well, I mean, certainly continue to look for more and more announcements with big brands and that notion of programs that are clearly recurring in nature, like the loop frankly. You can go into the loop and you can interact with Mona Lisa and learn about it, but you can go outside and watch a concert and do all kinds of things. And I think keeping an eye on some of those big brand partner relationships and also that notion of physical conversion. We just did a program for Skechers where we, over 5 weeks had 4 million try-ons of digital Skechers products and there was a game where you could win digital Skechers shoes for your Avatar. Your likelihood to now want mom to go buy you those real-life Skechers is much higher if you're putting around your virtual life with that. So I'd encourage folks to continue to look for those big positive persistent brand announcements.

Fantastic. Well, Ann, I greatly appreciate the time today. I'm sure our investors do as well. With that, thank you for joining us. And any questions, please reach out to me directly, Scott Buck at H.C. Wainwright.

Thank you, Scott.

Thank you, Ann.