Text S.A. (TXT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. So good morning, and we welcome you very much on the LiveChat Software Investor Presentation. It's our first chance to present the company to Finnish investors and to interested community. We are very happy for that. Today, it will be us presenting, Marcin Droba and me, Lucja Kaseja. Just for your information, the presentation will be recorded, and we will upload the recording later on our website. And we will be giving a presentation first. And later on, there will be enough time for a Q&A session. So just please ask the questions that you have. And now, Marcin, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Thank you, Lucja. It's great to be here. It's very interesting for us. We try to go very fast for the presentation. For us, it's a very interesting meeting. Some part of this presentation is completely new. So maybe it's not new, but we share some kind -- some part of presentation for the first time with the public, so it's world premiere, but nevertheless, we are very excited to be here. So as you know, we are a company based in Poland. We are LiveChat Software. Our vision is customer communication without barriers. Our mission is help people and businesses to communicate better and fully express themselves. And as you can see, as some of you know, we have a history. We were found at almost 20 years ago by 3 guys, Mariusz, Maciej and Jakub. They are still with us. Mariusz is CEO. All of them are shareholders. Maciej and Jakub are member of Supervisory Board. So founders are with us. They -- with some partners, they control company. However, our idea behind LiveChat was -- 20 years ago was quite innovative. But the most important part of our history really was completely changing business model. So 10 years ago, we became a Software-as-a-Service company. Now we are 100% Software-as-a-Service company. So what that means for us, among others, is that we became global company, like overnight really. Before that, we were completely...

Dependent on Polish markets.

Yes, absolutely. We offered our services and our product only in Poland. And now Poland accounts for some 2% of our revenue, so that's the change that you can see, that what big change for us that was. So the main business, the main market for us today is definitely U.S. and then [ we speak in world ]. And as you can see, since we changed that business model, since we adopt Software-as-a-Service model, we -- our history is history of the constant -- very constant growth. The constant pace of that growth is changing, but here, you can see that since that, the growth always was here. And also, you can see that we have some well-known customers, that our products are very popular. We have now more than 32,000 customers of LiveChat, our flagship, and the first solution, we have almost 2,000 clients of -- to -- of ChatBot, and we have also 2 more products. We are almost -- we definitely worldwide company. We are present in more than 150 countries. You can see that we have some famous brands amongst our customers. For your information, so big brands not only -- not always means that's big customer, which is generating huge ARPU. Some of them can use LiveChat in one country, in one division for very specific purpose like, for example, recruiting. But nevertheless, we -- our solution is present, our company is present worldwide. And of course, the main asset of technology-based companies the people, we have now more than 200 people. Most of them works in Poland in our Wroclaw HQ. And here, you can see some of us. And as I said, we have now 4 main products. The first one is LiveChat. The idea for LiveChat was to give our customer possibility to chat online, the real time with visitors on the website. Now LiveChat is not only about website. Now LiveChat can be integrated with other channels of communication like Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat and many others. The second one is the ChatBot. The ChatBot is, of course, a tool which gives possibility to create bot, to create scenarios and to really chat without need of having human consultants onboard. And the third solutions is KnowledgeBase. It's solution which lets companies create their own knowledge bases, which can be accessed by customers but also within the team. And the HelpDesk, our newest child, it's ticketing systems dedicated mostly to e-mail communication, but also it can also be integrated with other channels communication. And we're very excited to have HelpDesk -- to add HelpDesk to our suite. And the very important part of our strategy, of our growth is the marketplace and the platform for developers. Our tools are very flexible. Our API is open. So marketplace for us is not only source of revenue in the future but also source of innovation. And as for today, we have the first solution, very interesting integrations created by third party. So for us, it's a very important part of our strategy. And that's the part of presentation as mentioned. We shared this part of presentation for the first time in the public. It's the presentation -- well, very small part of the presentation, from onboarding presentation, which is part of onboarding process of new people into LiveChat. And so as I already said, we have 4 main products: LiveChat, ChatBot, HelpDesk and KnowledgeBase. We focus on the U.S. market. Also, we have customers worldwide. We really try to focus on the biggest market, biggest also in the terms of opportunity. What that means in business terms, means that we -- for example, seasonality in the United States is important for our business. Of course, our business is based on subscriptions. So if you look at revenues, if you look at MRR, it's very stable. But if you think on both new businesses about adding new customers to LiveChat, there is seasonality, and some part of the year are just better than others. This is brief look at how customer life cycle looks like. So of course, the customer's life cycle starts with trial. So anyone can try our solution for free for some times, usually 2 weeks. Historically speaking, it was 30 days some times ago. And of course, you can see that's after successful trial. After we were able to monetize some customers, there's a lot of things, a lot of processes, which can happens. So some new customers are coming to us. Some are -- some of them churning, some of them returning, some of them upsell. And of course, we are very focused on supporting these processes. So we -- of course, we still -- all the time, we try to prevent customers from churning, and we try to upsell existing customers. And of course, you can see that some customers are more or less profitable and which is a very important fact. If you think about business model, that is very important role. If customers is staying for us, is -- customers is really using LiveChat, he tends to upsell with time. And of course, this brief look at trial process, we try to observe trials very closely. Maybe if you have some questions, we can go deeper into that area. But for your information, not all leads are equal. We try to monitor very closely the trial. We try to help customers. We try to communicate with prospective customers during that period. And definitely, it's not -- is a process. So we try to improve the process of customers onboarding all the time. It's data-driven process. It's not something easy. It's not something anyone can learn over time. And of course, we try to design products in that process in order to be more successful. And as I said, a lot of things is happening. After successful trial, the very important fact is that we have a lot of -- we have some churn, but also, we have some returning customers. All the time, some customers are upselling. All the time, we saw some contraction. Fortunately for us, the upselling is a much more important trend. For us, it means that a very important fact is that we are data-driven company. So all decision or process is made based on the data. And we can see -- we can monitor this process when we can see, for example, that some particular kind of customers are -- well, for example, when we see some contraction from some region from some kind of customers, we can look into that. We can check what is happening. We can interact with customers. And different teams can work on different areas to improve different metrics or the same metrics from different perspectives. So that's very interesting that it's something we can discuss all the days really, so let's go further. As I mentioned -- I mentioned trial periods. There is sales or trial funnel. And of course, very important is how we get this trial, how possible, prospective customers is learning about our products, about our company. And that's something which really distinct us from a lot of other companies because we really successful when it comes to customer acquisition process. For us, it's very effective. It's very cheap really. For us, customers acquisition is not something which is really expensive. It took years to establish, to improve that process, but also, there is a lot of channels of customer acquisition for us. To date, one of the most important is Partner Program. The Partner Program is very important, and we'll say some more things about this program. Google Search is still very important. So it's definitely got to have the good position in the Google as a lot of people look for -- not only for, let's say, LiveChat solutions, sometimes also knowledge in the area of customer support on this online sales, and we create a lot of expertise, a lot of expert knowledge in that area. So we can attract people who works in that area and to educate them that we can help them and offer them a good product. We are integrated with a lot of solution like solution which are used to create website at very important -- very -- well, I think our favorite channels of customer acquisition is chat widget. If you start to chat using our solution, you can see that there is almost always our logo and thing called powered by LiveChat, and it looks that a lot of companies are observed by peers, the competitors, leaders and check which are solution are used by them. So that's great thoughts, which works well for us. We are present in marketplaces. That's Shopify, BigCommerce, others. Social media, our social media, recently YouTube, we start to produce a lot of video content, software comparison services like G2 Crowd, like Capterra. Also paid marketing, also paid marketing, but that's something we -- which today is not really important for us. We are -- try to learn how to use paid marketing. We got our experience. For us, paid marketing still is not work so well. It's not so effective like these other channels of customer acquisition. And at the end of the month when we check reports on customer acquisition channels, generally, it is more than 100 different sources of customer acquisition, of the leads. So that's really good working machine. And as you can see, this is our pricing. This is actual life tag price. And as we have mentioned, we have other products, but at end of the day, the ARPU, the MRR generated by each customer depends on the price, on the plan and on the number of agents they going to use. And that's illustration of what I said, really, that in terms of -- in a situation of LiveChat, in LiveChat scenarios, there is, of course, price of the plan, the number of agents in ChatBot. Customers is able to choose different plans and is charged on the base of that plan. In HelpDesk, it's again number of agents, which is the important factor. And in case of KnowledgeBase, there is flat fee. And as I said, plans offer different features. So for the customers, it's important to learn which features are most useful for them, if they need higher plans. But we can see a very strong trend that, as I said, with time, customer learn that LiveChat is good tool and they can do upsells and help -- upsells include not only adding more people, more agents to the service but also to migrate to more expensive plans. I mentioned Partner Program. Partner Program is now huge engine behind the number of customer growth. It's very -- I think really when we compare with some other plans on the market, it's very profitable for partners. We share revenue with them. This commission is 20% of our revenue during our customers' life cycle. So it's very beneficial. It works great for us as there is no upfront payment, as we -- really, we were happy to share the revenues, the money we have. We -- and thanks to these partners and stay motivated to work with us and choose LiveChat instead of different solution. We also work on some tools. We share some tools, which led our partners to monitor how they are doing, how the customers are doing. So I think that this program is really one of the best on the market. And recently, some 2 years ago, we created sales team. Before that, our sales process was fully automatized. And we learned that although we have a very good technology, although we have really great premium customer support, we are not so successful as some competitors when it comes to acquisition of enterprise customers. And we realize that we have to create some sales team, some -- we have to have some people, which are dedicated to this process, which have -- be able to present our products as well as we need a legal team, in-house legal team, which will be able to discuss some legal clauses with prospective customers because, of course, for some enterprise customers, now the more important enterprise is to be compliant with all the rules. And I think that's the moment when I can stop for the while and Lucja, please continue.

Yes. So now that you know the basics of our business model, I'll briefly tell you the latest things that took place in our company. So actually, the very important thing took place almost a year ago in June 2020 when we published new mission and vision of the company, and we published a document called Constitution of LiveChat. That came also with the rebranding of all our products in April last year. And also other things took place meanwhile. We secure our knowledge, and we were actually granted the first patent in the U.S. at the end of December 2020. And what is also important, we are continuing to strengthen the team. So we ended 2020 with 191 people, and from -- since then, the team grew to more than 220 people. And also part of the transformation of the company, we also -- from May last year, we have a new Chief Officers level on the company. So we have a total of 7 Chief Officers who report directly to the Management Board, and those people are people from within the company. In terms of the product side and the recent developments, with LiveChat, we increased the base of our customers. We add new features and integrations. And actually, what we sell is that there is an increased need to use our services because in single -- October 2020, there were over 50 million chats in a single month. And in whole 2020, there were more than 500 million chats performed by -- through LiveChat. Also, in terms of other products, with ChatBots, the very important thing that we launched in December last year was a new visual builder of ChatBot that requires no prior coding knowledge. And in that way, it's much easier for our customers to build their own scenarios. And in terms of HelpDesk, we still focus on automatization. And having said all that, it's very important to say that we are working on those new integrations. And for example, within the last month, we had voice integration. We have integration with Zoom. We have integration with SnapCall, 2 way and also invest in new reports and many other things. We are a remote first company, and it is very important to still be creative in those times. So although we -- for a long time, we used Slack, an online communication methods, we keep on doing innovative things still with this remote work. So for example, we have Side Project Day or even now, we will be having separate 2 weeks dedicated to innovation in our company. As Marcin said in the -- in his part of the presentation, we have a sales team. It's important to know that in this business model that we have, for many years, there were no -- there was no sales team at all. We came back to this idea of having sales team in 2019, and this allows us to be able to attract and still negotiate with enterprise clients. And we see the results of that. So for example, in Q3 of the financial year, so that's the last quarter of 2020, we were able to sign the contracts with, for example, #1 sport betting site in Asia Pacific or [ global ] IT company and also global services firm with huge assets under management. And actually, the sales team, in our case, is currently 17 people, but it's not that they are sales representatives. We have 7 of those based in London, Spain, Boston and also in Poland, and the rest of the team are actually account managers taking care of our biggest clients. It's also important to say a few things about our shareholders. So as Marcin said already, we have the CEO of the company and 2 people on the Supervisory Board who are the founders of the company. And together with some other key managers, they held 41.9% of the shares. We also have 2 other important shareholders. Those are the Polish -- 2 Polish pension funds. And the rest of the investors are both the Polish individual investors, Polish financial investors and of course, investors from abroad. Also, although we are a growth company, we also have -- we pay out dividends. We have a dividend policy to pay out the highest possible part of the profit for a specific fiscal year provided that there are no other investment opportunities. And as you can see, with our net profit increasing year-on-year, also the dividend per share [ increased ]. We pay -- an important thing here is we pay advanced dividends and one for -- the last one was paid out in January 2021, and it was PLN 0.89 per share. Also, I'd like to very briefly to say a few things about the latest financial results. And actually, those are the preliminary revenues because at the end -- when the quarter ends, we publish preliminary results. We used to publish it within 2 weeks at the end of -- 2 weeks after the end of the quarter. And now we try to publish it as soon as possible. So this year, we published it on the first of April. And you can see that the revenues for Q4 2021 financial year, so that is from January to March, they were at USD 12.660 million and those were the revenues of all our products with LiveChat being the major source of the revenues and ChatBot, the second largest. In order to be -- we do not provide forecasts. And that's because -- mainly because we base on this trial period and in order for investors to see how our business is going and how to look for -- into the future, from the last quarter, we published also monthly recurring revenue in U.S. dollars. And that for March 2021 was USD 4 million. That was the first month when we exceeded this $4 million for a single month. I think, because we are 35 minutes into the presentation, that will be my last slide, and I'll be -- we'll be happy to take any questions that you have. We might refer to other slides on the presentation later.

So feel free to ask questions. You can ask your question via chat or you can just switch your voice on. It's what will work for you best. We really like to have also some discussion. As I said, we are really [ afraid ] to be here. It was a nice surprise to learn that we have -- no, some community here in Finland. So we're very happy to be here. So [ Jonas ], I think you can...

Can you hear me?

Yes, yes. Okay.

I was just -- I'm going to ask about the analyst following. Do you have analysts following and do you have reports that are really available for...

We have 8 analysts covering. They are -- the names of the analysts are on the website. I'll soon provide it, the link on chat. Those are mainly the -- well, they are the Polish analysts, but they all publish in English. So if you'd like to get specific reports, we will contact you with particular analysts.

So of course, these analysts are Poland-based really. We now work with some analysts from outside Poland, and maybe some good things will happen. But of course, they work for some international institution like Banco Santander, like Haitong Bank, Wood & Company. So of course, they also are publishing their report in English. Okay. So we have some questions with -- in chat, which is great. So the first question, how many customers you have in the HelpDesk? What is behind ARPU growth of ChatBot? So we are not -- we start to publish number of customers of each product when this number is crossing 1,000. So it's below -- so still below 1,000, so still small. But maybe I can share this slide. Of course, the full presentation will be available. So here, you can split of revenue between products and you can see that at HelpDesk is, of course, still very small, but some good things are happening with HelpDesk today. And we're really excited about this product, and we believe in that product. And I think it's on the beginning of the -- is on the good path now. ARPU growth of ChatBot, that's very easy to explain. Of course, we can see that this ARPU is -- really looks good in the ChatBot. And that is very simple. I think January 2020, we add new plans with new features, new more important plans. So before that, there was only one plan. ChatBot started at $50, $50 per month. New plans with new features came into life in January, and new customers are really willing to pay for these new things. Can you share the profitability level slide? Yes, of course, with pleasure. Yes, these are margins. So you can see that we have very good margins, and one of the secret is definitely customer acquisition model. But -- and customer acquisition is very cheap for us. So that's definitely a huge thing when you -- very important for our profitability. As you can see, the link from Lucja, the list of analysts, of course, that -- if you look for the Polish perspective, that looks good. The coverage is very good, but definitely, we are aware of the fact that we should work on that. We should add some analysts from outside of Poland. We definitely work on that. Fifth product, what a great question. We definitely want to have more product, so we will work on that. What is certainly holding us back at the moment? It's the people. It's the people. We need more people. We look for more people. We need for more developers as we want to improve existing products all the time and start to work on the new products. We have some ideas that they are the very early stage, but we definitely want to have more products. The thing which is now more important is really to integrate our existing products and build where -- maybe it's bold to say, but really to build a new product based on the existing spot to create a very good integrated suite, which will be -- which should be helpful when it comes to dealing with enterprise customers.

So I think I'll take the next question. So the question is IP Box the same amount tax relief than last year, 2019/'20. It seemed to be at Q4 2020 to 2021 divided every quarter. Exactly, IP Box tax relief was for the first time used with the financial results of 2019/2020 financial year. And on that year, together with our auditor, we decided to put the whole tax relief effect into Q4. However, this year, so -- well, already the past year, 2020/2021 financial year, we -- our auditor allowed us to show this tax relief already in semi-annual results in the statement and later on, also to show it for Q3 2021. So from now on, we will be publishing this tax relief -- we will be using it and showing it in the financial statement for every quarter.

Of course, the reason why we used that IP Box for the first time last year was just simple fact that it was introduced in Poland. That kind of tax relief is present, is used in many EU countries. It's not something which is, well, Polish specific, but it was introduced in Poland. It was just introduced in Poland. So next question is about sales teams, so I think this goes also to Lucja.

So maybe a little bit about history. So we -- the sales team was established in our company in 2019. And the history of the sales team is that when we were back in the on-premise model, so until 2010, we had sales team. And on the day when we changed the model to SaaS model, we got rid of the sales team. And until 2019, we didn't have one. So actually, in 2019, there was -- the best people from the support were promoted to the sales department. And later on, we recruited Alex Wilson, sales -- Head of Sales from Boston. And since 2019, the team is more structured and working on bringing the enterprise customers.

What is the main reason customers choose your product instead of competitors? So of course, we'd like to believe that it's because that the best product, and we're really convinced that's a very good product. So of course, the features, the available features, the integration, the fact that it's very easy, that's the tools, which is also not only complex but at the same time, it's very easy to adopt, is the third driver between this decision; that also we are aware of the fact -- Lucja mentioned LiveChat constitution. That's a very important document for us. And we admitted the constitution that sometimes that the product offered by premium providers, because in our market, there is a lot of -- a lot of technologies, a lot of providers, some of them are offering quite simple solution but in free or freemium model. So definitely, you can't compete with price when you have a lot of free solution on the market. You have to add something more. So of course, that's the features. That's the integration with different channels of communication but also premium support. So we are really convinced that we have the best customer support on the market. And in terms of bigger customers, of course, the KPIs, some -- the fact that we are compliant, that we have guaranteed that they will be compliant with a lot of regulation and environment is very regulated. And of course, we have very demanding, very high standards when it comes -- came to SLA, standard level agreement. So of course, we offer a lot of guarantees that this service will be available all the time, and in case of any troubles, we will respond to this trouble in like no time. So that should be the main drivers of the growth. And I lost the chat.

[indiscernible] listing, is that on more liquid markets? At least it's hard to buy in Finland. Well, we're listed only -- in Warsaw only. In fact, for our foreign investors, especially the individual ones, we know that the easiest way to buy the shares is through the services like DEGIRO or Interactive Brokers. But we are also looking into other markets as in analyzing what are the options for making our stocks more liquid.

Yes. So we are aware of the fact that we are subject of interest, of the investors from different countries. Some of them have possibility to invest in Warsaw. Some of them don't have that possibility. Some other choose not to invest to Warsaw because they think that's not the best place to be. For us, it's maybe -- I will add a very small story from our history. So we didn't raise capital during IPO. At this stage, we didn't need capital. But after NPO, we had financial investors onboard. So for us, really, IPO was extremely important because it was possibility to exit of the financial investors. And at the same time, we were -- it was possible for us to keep control over the company and to become independent, and we want to be independent. That's very important for us. So for us at this moment, to become public company, to have this opportunity, to keep control with the company was the key. And we were a small company and the Warsaw was very natural and cheap alternative to other markets. Our ambition as we are -- as U.S. is our main market by far. Our competitors are there, and our customers are there. And we -- our leaders also, are also very, very interested in U.S. culture, in the U.S. as a country. So it was very natural to think about NASDAQ, about U.S. market. So that's our ambition. That always was the ambition to be 1 day to be listed in the U.S. But also honestly, the business is the most important, and we are focused on business. And of course, the process of dual listing or delisting and listing to another market is very complicated. It's something which really require a lot of attention. So for us, now the business in the first place and maybe tomorrow some situation will change, and we will think -- so we are thinking on that. In fact, we have gathered information. We're learning. We got an information from me and Lucja. We now gathered information for management team. So maybe it's something, which will happen 1 day, but not today and not tomorrow.

The next question is, I noticed that you said that you have now 220 people. Was that correct? Is this behind the hike in sales expenses? How many of the recruits are in sales? So the number is correct, and actually, we are hiring across the whole team. So we have many people in the developers departments that we are looking for, and it's also increasing our legal team. It's also actually the human resources. The peoples team is also expanding. So the hiring is really across the whole company. And in terms of the sales team itself, it's 17 people currently, and it should be 6 more by the end of the year. So just to give you the perspective. And if I understand that correctly, you point out to the fact that the sales expenses are high. And in our P&L, we have 2 -- the cost of sales reflected in 2 places. So one is the cost of goods sold, and those are the cost of developers, the cost of administration and the cost of service. And then the cost of sales will be, for example, those Partner Programs. And so it's not directly linked to the presence of the sales team. And talking about that, I'll skip one question, and I'll come back to it later. But there is a question, does the reintroduction of sales team mean that LiveChat will have stronger sales focus in bigger customers? Marcin, do you want to take that?

Yes, yes, yes, let me take -- so yes, yes, that's the idea. That's something we want to do. That's the change, but we don't change our business model. So what -- this part of our business model, which works very well, it stays here. And we don't want to be different. We don't want to become a different company. So if you think about LiveChat was company created by product guy. We have -- we've had a lot of code. A lot of LiveChat was written by our CEO. So we are very concentrated on product. We don't want to be company run by salesmen, by sales team. We really want to work on the product. We really want to invent new ways of communication. We really want to change a landscape in our business. That's our ambition. And -- but yes, we can see that's huge opportunity for us. So we can see that we have a good technology. We have a capability. We -- that's something, which can be done -- which can be just done. So yes, we will be concentrated on more on bigger customers. At the same time, the sales process, the customer acquisition process still should be very effective and not so expensive. So huge sales events, some conferences for -- in Las Vegas for the hundreds of visitors, it's not something for us. It's not something we're going to do.

Also maybe to give you a bit of color on that. Our -- if you want to look at the size of the customer, you can look at the ARPU of LiveChat, which is on the level of USD 117. So that's the monthly payment an average -- our average customer pays each month. So whereas this is the average, we also have clients that pay hundreds or tens of hundreds in terms of dollars, and those will be this enterprise customers. But the fact that we started the sales team is actually those kind of clients were coming to us through our channels. But we -- previously, we were not able to serve them properly. So with the customer enterprise deals, many more issues come in place like especially the legal ones. And with the sales team, we are actually able to discuss and to negotiate those larger deals that come through our current channels to us.

So [ Heikki ] wrote us about RedEye. So definitely noted. Definitely noted. We will see. We will check RedEye, very interesting thing.

The next question is what is the approximate total cumulative share of customers that has discontinued using your paid product, discontinued customers to total customers, current and discontinued? So an important thing here to say is about churn. That's a part of our business and part of this business model that, on average, every month, around 3 -- in terms of LiveChat, so our main product, on average, 3% of our customers' churn. And also another thing to note here is that this is in terms of the number of customers. And when you look at the churn in terms of MRR, so monthly recurring revenue, this level is about 1%. So actually many small clients discontinue our services, but that doesn't translate to exactly the same levels in terms of MRR churn.

Yes. So important thing is that churn is the highest among the smallest customers. Why? Because, really, these stalls for some of them are not so sticky and also the main -- absolutely reason one for the churn is the fact that some of the customers were surprised not chatting. Why? Because, for example, they have a small website with small traffic. So LiveChat is a great tool. We are absolutely convinced that we have great tool, but to use LiveChat, you have someone to chat with. So if you don't have visitors on your website, you really shouldn't pay for LiveChat. It's not going to work for you. So that's the reasons on why, and we would try to observe what that churned customers are doing that they usually are not choosing different provider, so usually are not choose another, even free providers. So they just learned that the chat, that they don't have visitors. They're not chatting, so they're not going to use LiveChat. The other case, completely other case is with returning customers. So for a lot of businesses, the need for LiveChat is seasonal. So they're adding -- for example, they're adding LiveChat for sales season into a business. And we have a lot of returning customers. So yes, that's also the case.

Okay. Do you see the market environment staying strong? Do you think that you can keep up the current growth?

So let me start and maybe, Lucja, maybe you add something. Yes, so the market is strong. The market is strong. The best thing about market is that still new companies from around the world are adding LiveChat. They try to add LiveChat. They try LiveChat. They adding a new channels of communication, a lot of that all the time. So really, it's great not to be forced to think how to get existing customers from your competitors. But we really can focus on newcomers on being the first choice company, the first providers of the LiveChat because, as I said, a lot of companies from around the world are adding new channels of communication, like including LiveChat to take businesses. And of course, online communication is more and more important, but it's not something which is new because of pandemics. This trend was here before; and pandemics, of course, make this trend much stronger. And if you look at our growth, of course, while it's a terrible thing to say, but of course, COVID helped us. But we're still growing. The market is still strong, and I really don't think that this trend towards online communication will not last. It will last after pandemics. Hopefully, it happens soon. But of course, if you look at our growth comparative, if you look at the next quarter, the comparative base is very demanding. And it would be extremely difficult to maintain this pace of the growth. So be aware of the fact that we don't have official forecast. We don't have official guidance. But of course, it would be -- from one hand, it would be very difficult to maintain this level of annual growth. I think the quarterly growth can be better. We will work very hard on that, but annual growth were in coming quarters. That would be definitely. I don't think it's possible. But nevertheless, the growth is here. We can see MRR growing. We show you the chart with MRR quarterly, but if -- it's great. It's absolutely fantastic. If we show you this slide month by month in terms of MRR, there is no single month of contraction. So the growth will be there. We are very much convinced, although, of course, that the situation from the year ago, it's not return. At least, it's not something we really think happen -- will happen.

There was a note that the question was relating to quarter-to-quarter growth and not...

Sorry. So quarter-to-quarter, so the last quarter, as Lucja said before, this customer acquisition model, which we have, is great because it's so effective and cheap, and it's really not easy to duplicate. It's not so easy at all. But it's very hard to steer that process. So we -- all the time, we work on the sales funnel, the sales funnel, which was showed on one of the slides. We work on improving all the process all the time, but it's very hard to forecast. We can see how many trials we have at this point.

Yes. If we were to divide the last quarter in 2 months, we would say that January, February were not so good months. We were actually slightly worried at the time. However, March, for example, was one of the best months in the last 12 months with increases similar to the ones we've seen in the pandemic -- in the first months of the pandemic. So...

So yes, March was fantastic and that give us some reason to be optimistic at this moment. But unfortunately, we don't have official guidance to share. But that's -- yes, March was great. March alone was great. And to say that January and February were not so good is delicate. That is definitely below expectation. But also, as I said, there is some seasonability. If you look at our business model, it's based on subscription fees. So it's very stable. It's not like we have to build new contract, to work on new contracts every month. We have these subscription fees. But of course, new business, new base is the different models. And of course, there is seasonability, and the beginning of the year is usually very weak, the weakest in fact. So end of December, beginning of the January is absolutely the worst part of the year if you think about new business.

Of course, these are the best months for the use of our products because these are the months when we see the record use -- record number of chats actually. So this is the months when our customers use them the most.

But there is also part of this question about ChatBot. So yes, so we really believe that the ChatBot is best as a supplement to LiveChat. But the ChatBot can be stand-alone. ChatBot can be used as stand-alone. And from the perspective of ChatBot, where I would say that some 60% of ChatBot customers are using ChatBot integrated with our LiveChat and the other stand-alone or in integration with other solution. And of course, a lot of chatbot, competitors' chatbot are used and integrated with LiveChat. So it's okay with us. So of course, the best scenarios is when we are able to upsell and cross-sell. But we really -- also really believe that customers, a lot of customers want to have freedom. We have partners. We have resellers, which are selling LiveChat and they own bots. So they are partners that work with us. So it's -- we are fine with that. So ChatBot can be stand-alone, can be used with LiveChat at the best-case scenarios, but also can be used with competitor solution and different channels of communication.

So the next question is have we considered to come to Inderes forum. There are many great Finnish companies that have CEO or IR present. Well, we started cooperation quite recently, and it's actually our first experience with the Finnish investors. We'll be definitely looking into new opportunities and that might include the forum.

That's possible. Of course, we really -- we like to -- I think even in IR, we have the DNA on the LiveChat when it comes to customer support. And we try to -- for example, when we have some questions, we try to answer really fast. And sometimes, it may be difficult to be on different forums and to -- because it's possible that maybe we will be engaged otherwise, and we will be able to answer very soon according to our standards. So that would be a challenge. But it's really interesting. So really, we -- for us, it's very interesting to be here. It's great experience. So perhaps, yes. Just note the fact that it's not something we are doing in Poland. We had some investor communities, and we are at not to -- not present. We don't have rather official profiles on these services. But maybe I really -- I think the Inderes forum is great. So it's very -- so meritoric that the level of discussion is impressive when we compare that to some other forums. So who knows? Maybe we have to think about it.

Coming back to quarterly results. Did you do something different in March? New sales hires starting to contribute. According to my knowledge, we didn't change that many things. In January and February, we had some issues with integrations. So maybe that kicked back in March. Also, we haven't talked yet with the sales department on the most recent additions in terms of the enterprise clients. But it might be just a seasonal effect, kind of the one we saw last year.

So definitely, if you look at LiveChat, any person, not only in the sales team, but any person, the product, the marketing is contributor of growth, is supposed to be part of the growth. But sometimes this investment comes in time. For example, marketing team, when you based on inbound marketing and content marketing, it took sometimes a lot of time as content begin to convert. But we have content, like articles, which helps us to acquire -- which help us in customer acquisition, which just created [ a years ] ago. So -- and it's still a big piece of knowledge, which brings people to our website and learning about LiveChat. So definitely, we are having a lot of new people. And of course, there will be cost because of that, and there will be some pressure on margins because, yes, that's a spike in increment costs. But for us, it's also investment. That's definitely something we did because we want to grow, because we want to create new things. It will take time, but if you need -- that's the investment.

And the last question on the chat, what's the size of our market and what's the growth rate of the market. So actually, there's no one market for our services because each of the product has kind of a separate market. In terms of LiveChat, we were looking at the statistics done for -- showing the forecasts for the market obtaining USD 1 billion until 2025. However, the whole forecast was done before pandemic, so the things might have changed. In terms of ChatBot, the market itself for those kind of services, for bots is much larger and it's almost ten-folds larger. However, the players in the market are also different. So that would be also the chatbots -- much -- the bots directed, for example, a single sector, like the financial sector. And also HelpDesk, which is relatively -- well, a small part of our business today, this market is even larger. But here comes the players like Salesforce and other market players. And so the growth statistics will be actually different for different products in different markets. With the...

As I said, the market is growing definitely, yes. So...

Exactly.

Sorry. You wanted to say something.

No, I was just going to say that the forecasts are much higher for HelpDesk and ChatBot rather than for LiveChat. So we definitely will see higher growth in those products in terms of our company. However, because they have a very small base, their addition to our revenues will be still relatively small.

But also, we saw some studies, some of them made by our competitors like Zendesk, but also some recent report by Twilio, I think by Twilio, which shows that some of -- that there is a huge interest. So a lot of companies plans to add new channels of communication, and LiveChat is one of the most wanted, really. How we -- it materialize, we don't know, of course, of that. But definitely, on [ high ] communication is getting more and more important not only because of the pandemics. Of course, there's a lot of -- that's very competitive market, a lot of players but also a good thing. This market is growing. And as I said, a lot of companies try new things, new channels of communication and they...

They become much crucial.

Yes. Yes, absolutely. So I think that's all the questions.

Exactly. It looks like we have no more questions. Thank you very much for your attention. I hope you found our presentation informative and that we managed to answer your questions fully. If you have any other questions, we'll be happy to answer them later on. Just contact us. We'll send you also the presentation; and as we said, the recording of this presentation will be uploaded.

At least we hope so. I think worked as planned. But also, we are in touch with guys from Inderes. We are very happy with this opportunity. I think they're great and we really get along. And it was a great experience. We are very happy to be here. So definitely, we will be in touch. Maybe we will join the forum. Who knows? So thank you. Thank you. Have a great day.

Have a good day.

Have a great day, and thank you once again. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye.