Tinybeans Group Limited (TNY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Well, let's make a start, and if there's any more people, they can just join in. So hi, everyone. My name is Eddie Geller, Co-Founder, CEO of Tinybeans. Welcome to this exclusive micro cap club event, and thank you for each of you for joining. Special thanks to Dan Rogala for his support in getting it off the ground. Really appreciate everyone taking the time today to attend today's presentation. We'll be covering a little bit about Tinybeans today and more importantly about what the future holds for the company. I will spend about 25 minutes presenting and then offer everyone the chance to ask questions at the end. If you could all turn off your video and mute your devices and telephone that would be great. And then when we get to the Q&A, feel free to obviously, put yourself back on video and unmute yourself, that would be great. So before I begin, let me do some introductions. I'd like to introduce some of the leadership team presenting today. All are based in New York and joined the company in the past 10 months. All have been instrumental in delivering this wonderful last 12 months we've had of laying the foundation for the future. Starting off with Allison Musmand, our CMO, just joined about 2 months ago, over 20 years' experience in building brands, and faster earning consumer subscription businesses like Amazon and People Magazine. Kyle Martin, our Chief Product Officer, very strong category in building consumer products in fast-paced tech companies such as Splice, SnipSnap and big brands like QVC. Nina Lawrence, our Chief Revenue Officer, tremendous pedigree and big media brands for many years to Condé Naste and Time, Inc. to Wall Street Journal. And Mark Wunsch, our CTO, also strong experience with consumer brands, strong engineering mindset, like Gilt, Rent the Runway and Kickstarter to name a few.

So hi, I'm Allison, and thank you all for joining us, and I'm having technical difficulties this morning. So I don't have this amazing background that my colleagues have, but the good news is it is close to my view here in Manhattan. So welcome to Manhattan. Anyway, I have recently joined Tinybeans as CMO, as Eddie said, less than 2 months ago, and this is such an exciting opportunity. I was recently building businesses at companies as Eddie said like Amazon and People, and I'm like really so thrilled to be able to take my consumer and brand experience from those companies and apply them here. I'm also a parent. And nurturing little ones is a lifelong journey that I have been on for 18 years now. It's the most important aspect of my life. So I'm so excited to join and grow this mission-driven company that is so critical to the lives of so many.

I am Kyle Martin, I'm the CPO, and I represent the what at our company and the drive our product strategy. I was thrilled to join the team last year, primarily for 2 key reasons. First, I'm a father of 3 tiny beans and actually one tiny bean on the way, and I need this platform. Memories I've saved on Tinybeans are the most precious to me. So it's a real honor to be a steward of our users' memories. Second, after hearing Eddie's vision and goals for Tinybeans early last year, I was -- I just knew instinctively how we do it. I've spent my entire professional career focusing on building innovative customer-centric mobile platforms. At a founder level, growing an app from 0 to millions of users to building digital shopping tech for e-com. The thing that impresses me the most is the opportunity and value we offer to parents just becomes greater each day. I'm really thrilled to be here with you this morning.

Hi. I'm Nina, Chief Revenue Officer, and I too am a parent, but I don't actually remember the life stage that I was in -- when I was doing Kyle's thing. I have big beans, high school and college-aged kids. So while I wish Tinybeans existed when my kids were little, that was not my draw for joining the team. I like to join companies where there's a clear market opportunity to drive aggressive revenue growth. When I spoke to Eddie about joining, it became very clear very quickly that Tinybeans is that opportunity. So I'm thrilled to be at this amazing company working with this powerful team.

Hi, I'm Mark. So Kyle and the product organization here represent the what. Myself and the engineering organization represent the how, how do we build and operationalize the vision. So when I first spoke to Eddie about joining the company, I was then the first time dad of a 2-month old baby. Now she's 11 months old, which is very hard to believe. I was then a freaked-out parent, and Tinybeans filled a very clear need. And as we made progress on our road map and our ambition has materialized, I am so excited about what we're building and what Tinybeans will offer parents like me. So I'm so excited to bring my experience to Tinybeans to build a platform unlike anything else.

Thanks, everyone. So 2020 has been a critical year for the company in many ways. So before I get into the future, I'd like to share a short video to demonstrate where the company is at. Enjoy. [Presentation]

Hope you enjoyed the video as much as we enjoyed making it. As you can see, we're really proud of what we've achieved and where we're at. We're not going to talk about COVID, what's happened in the last 12 months, what did or didn't do. It's been a tremendous past 12 months for Tinybeans and really a vital one as we build out this long-term strategy. We're here to share with you a little bit more about that strategy and how it really upgraded our ambitions to where we're heading today. Not only is our goal to make parenting easier, but really, we're driving the goal of becoming the #1 digital parenting platform in the world. Today, we'll share with you a little bit more about those ambitions, but the substance behind the strategy and turning it into a reality. 2020 was a record year for us. Not only did we deliver stellar results, we did it with several very intentional strategic decisions to set the company up for success in years to come. We successfully acquired and integrated Red Tricycle, this incredible parenting platform, which significantly enhanced the value prop to our users and brands, proven by the increase in monthly active users to 4.8 million, which is a record, and $6.4 million in revenue for calendar 2020, $2 million or $3 million of that was in the last quarter alone. We also continued to grow brand relationships with Amazon and LEGO and also with new brand partners like Walmart and Apple. Recently, we reviewed things with a LEGO and the partnership is better than ever, evidenced here by their quote. And really, it's very interesting in the last couple of years. I've really seen dramatic growth in their business as it relates to partnering with us, which is really are all about. We're really scaling our ambitions, and let me talk to that a little bit more. So as everyone knows, we have a very successful advertising business. Today, largely about 85% of our revenue is advertising. But -- and a very small subscription consumer business. So we're here today and in recent months talking to the market around really stamping a foot on growing there and accelerating the advertising business, and then also growing the consumer business. And we really feel from a very low base of consumer revenue, it's going to get fast and large very quickly. And if you want to know like, why, I guess there's 4.8 million reasons why? And it just shows you if we have that level of intimacy with our customers using the platform every month, the sky is the limit with what we can deliver. So really, we feel with the acquisition of Red Tricycle, growing our addressable market over the next 5 years, expanding it even more with age and now with product, we really feel confident growing our ambitions to really build a very sustainable revenue streams not only in advertising, but also in very large consumer subscription businesses, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. Now I'd like to hand over to Allison to talk more around the brand and marketing strategy.

Thanks, Eddie. And again, I'm Allison, and I'm thrilled to be here. And one of my goals, as you now know, is to grow consumer-driven revenue as I've done at companies that I mentioned before. And again, the opportunity here is just incredible, and I'm still looking forward to driving such an important business for parents and their families. So I've been in my role for just a short time, but one thing that has stood out to me time and time again since I've been here is Eddie's vision, that we are building a brand to last for generations. So internally, we now use this as a north star, and we build our functional strategies with that goal in mind. So right now, with the reach of 20 million, Tinybeans is the fastest-growing parenting platform. Our growth continues as we become the most trusted brand that makes parents' lives easier. We inspire, we inform service and delight parents and their families. And for us, this is paramount, both with our current products and as we move our products forward, we are here for parents for everything they need, all in one place. We see them because we are them, and we understand their needs. So who are our customers? Our affluent young professional parents are particularly mindful when it comes to investing time into their children. With a household income of over $100,000 and more than 2 kids in the household, it is key that they really plan, they learn and they organize. So for them, saving and sharing their memories is a part of that experience. And we bring this to life for our young families. Our growth will come from this tremendous addressable market of millennials. In addition, we have another group of grandparents, 600,000 of them right now, who are also members of our community, and we look forward to growing and monetizing this member base as well. It's amazing because the time for Tinybeans is right now. And this is the marketer's dream, right? We are perfectly positioned to capture the attention of the largest generations of parents ever, 72 million millennials. They're a generation that require technology just to get out of bed in the morning. They moved -- as they move through their parenting years, they are just driving and will continue to drive the entire U.S. economy. So we are, therefore, building a consumer revenue growth strategy at this very moment where we can drive revenue from this very key customer base. Our plans are now being tested, and in the coming months, they will continue to be tested. And we are excited to grow revenue and users by providing these parents with what they need. As Eddie just mentioned and as I alluded to, we have very ambitious consumer revenue goals. This year, we'll introduce several new products that accelerate our growth around ARPU, which is average revenue per user. And so to grow user subscriptions, we're using the same basic principles that will drive user growth. So first, we'll continue to connect families through our memories product, and we're going to rebrand our premium photo journals brands. It will include the same great, robust features users love today, but it will be an even better experience. And the new structure will enable community development and create room for new products designed for creating memories. Next, we'll launch premium content. So we'll be delivering tailored content to parents based on the children's age. So -- plus new original content that's exclusive to subscribers. And through our pillars of play, feel, eat and shop, we will provide parents with very deep content in each of these areas each week, letting them know they are not alone. We have all been through this before. And this will all be accessible via the app, via the web and also through a member-only newsletter. We'll also be focusing on the Tinybeans community. So Tinybeans is the fastest way for parents to discover relevant advice and inspiration for their family. And in this experience, these parents can act on everything, whether it be saving, sharing or shopping, and just really runs the gamut, anything. Kyle will be talking more to the details of these experiences shortly. But from my end, these experiences will be key to driving user acquisition and revenue strategies. Testing is in place, and we are looking forward to monetizing these products. So now that we've talked about the marketing strategy, I'll hand it over to Mark and Kyle to talk about the product strategy.

Thanks, Allison. So at the heart of the product strategy this year is the transformation from being a popular photo journaling app to the #1 digital parenting platform, which means creating a multichannel experience that delivers on demand and making every parent's life easier.

That's right, Mark. So I'm really excited to give you a glimpse into our product vision. So let's dive in. Like Mark said, our mission is to make parenting easier, and to realize that we're expanding our scope beyond just a family journaling app. By embracing both Tinybeans' and Red Tricycle missions to create memories and to connect memories, we offer more value to users and expand our addressable audience. But how will we grow? From the beginning, we knew that our strategy to accelerating user and revenue growth would revolve around community and content. These are areas that Tinybeans already leads in. And if we're able to establish ourselves as a discovery platform, commerce will also become a key channel. The question's more of how. To find this, we started speaking with parents, existing users, churned users to identify the problems that parents face on a daily basis and the possible ways that Tinybeans can solve them. And through this analysis of our customer, we define our growth channels in the following way. So first, let's go through content. Parents need smarter solutions that adapt to their lifestyles and experience. If you have kids, you've been there, you don't have time to search across the social network, a blog, check an app to figure out what you need to do for the day when you have kids asking you and then -- you to go do something. And parents -- in Tinybeans, parents encounter personalized experiences that introduce them to helpful products or recipes, advice and activities in under 60 seconds. It allows families to go and find new things to do and spend more time with the ones that they love. For instance, my wife spends probably hours every week, planning activities, finding crafts to do with kids and researching products. And with Tinybeans, that's going to take just a minute. That's our goal. This experience is available right now through our Today screen. And we're getting a lot of phenomenal responses from our users. Our content vision goes well beyond just regurgitating content from Red Tricycle as well. We're really focusing on optimizing this experience for mobile users. People who need answers fast in ways that are actionable. Beyond original content that's produced in-house, we're also curating video content from our community. This is going to help Tinybeans leapfrog the competition when it comes to current diverse and hyper-local content. So next up is community. I'm really excited about this. Tinybeans has always had community at its core, connecting families and friends to experience your journey alongside you. When speaking to our users to understand more about their problems, we heard a theme come up over and over again. That's time, just like we mentioned before. Parents of children of all ages are overwhelmed, and they need help from other parents. Time is -- we've identified is a parent's most precious resource. 90% of parents want an easier way to save ideas. 70% of our parents want a special place for them where they can share products, activities and tips with one another. And over 60% of our parents primarily discover ideas and things to do via their social feeds. So this made us realize that while Tinybeans has always been about connecting families, in our effort to be ultra-private, We prevented parents from accessing their most influential resource, other parents. Existing parenting communities, which are out there, leave a lot to be desired. Most have created different iterations of the same tired blogging or forum products. And like we've identified before, time -- parents don't have time for chitchat. They want answers. So we're going in a different and new direction. Our vision is to make Tinybeans the fastest way for parents to discover relevant advice and inspiration for their family. This is going to make Tinybeans the must-have app for any parent or expecting parent. And these parent-powered resourceful communities will be a key driver for our growth. Parents creating content that enrich the community will create this virtuous loop of engagement. It's going to be so exciting. I can't wait for you guys to see it. Mark, can you talk about maybe how we realize this?

Sure thing, Kyle. Yes, connecting community, tailoring content, recommending relevant products. That is a tall order. All of these activities require us to harness and utilize the data that users grant us. And as Nina will discuss further later, this is 0 in first-party data, the data that parents and family members grant to us is critical to our growth. To support transformation from a simple photo app to a parenting platform, we will have to make smart connections within our data set. We will be leveraging the power of machine learning to draw these key connections. So if you are, for example, the first-time parent of an infant daughter in the New York suburbs, the Tinybeans platform connects you to an experience that's unique to you and your family's journey, all while guarding your privacy. Privacy is at the core of the Tinybeans app experience. It's something internally, we consider sacrosanct, the privacy of our users, the parents, their families, their children. So now that you have an appreciation for the product and technology platforms, I'd now like to reintroduce our Chief Revenue Officer, Nina, to talk about our advertising business.

Thank you, Mark. So I wonder if you can relate to that parent in the suburbs of New York with a 13-month old.

Yes, I believe.

I lead the team that puts lots of dollar signs behind all of these exciting initiatives. And our goal simply put is to connect brands and parents. We're perfectly positioned to capture the attention of that largest generation of parents ever, millennials. Millennials are digital natives, and COVID has actually accelerated their move to digital solutions. That's not going away. And where the consumer goes, marketers and their budgets follow. Eddie shared some of the success we've had in ad sales this year. Our goal, of course, is to continue that aggressive growth level in the years to come. So let's take a look at how we'll do that. The expansion of our addressable market opportunity is going to be fueled by delivering our powerful product road map that you just heard. Audience and user growth drives ad revenue growth. We took our first major step toward expanding our market opportunity this year with the acquisition of Red Tricycle, moving from delivering parents of under 6 year olds to adding parents of 6- to 12-year olds, so now we're offering marketers prenatal to preteen audiences. Our next big move is in delivering our product road map. When we successfully make every parent's life easier, we scale to owning the parenting market, and we'll position to continue to introduce new products to grow that flywheel. That growing scale becomes the foundation of our ad revenue growth. While marketers are looking for more accountability, increased attribution and brand-safe environments, the ad markets capabilities are actually going in the other direction. Big social media is becoming more controversial for marketers every day, and Google and Apple are initiating significant changes to the ability to target consumers by advertisers. Most digital media platforms are in high defense mode, while they're planning for the removal of third-party cookies in less than a year. We're in high opportunity mode. We're leaning into our high-trust relationship with our consumers and working toward making our first-party data a market-leading brand differentiator. Our first-party data is our single largest strength as it allows us to deliver what chief marketing officers around the country are looking for: efficient, effective marketing solutions. That's gold in today's advertising and marketing world. Our addressable market will build on itself, opening doors to creating omnichannel partnerships that both serve our product and revenue growth. Today, we work with Amazon Kids division on direct advertising. As we move forward, we're going to expand the divisions we can work with and the products we're selling, including programmatic, e-commerce and affiliate partnerships. We're going to build these relationships. We're super excited about what's ahead. And looking forward to developing these multi-platform revenue streams that drive Tinybeans into a market-leading future. So I'm going to turn it back over to Eddie now to wrap up.

Thanks, Nina. We've clearly covered a lot of ground today. What I really hope you've taken out of the day is we have a smart, passionate and very committed team that's very enthusiastic about our ambitions for growth, not only obviously the people we see today but also across the entire company of the 50-plus people we have. We're very focused on a very clear path to success. The foundation is there. We've got the tenacity and the confidence to succeed. We plan to further accelerate our growth, and we're really well placed to build the multiple revenue streams we've been talking about. In a challenging year, we achieved so much. And we have plans to deliver on the grand ambitions we have. We're into it. We're delivering it. Look at the brands we've won, the many other growth metrics we've accomplished and the partnerships we've garnered. Just as we've delivered success in 2020 through a challenging year, I expect to report even more progress and success in 2021. Look forward to the partnership together and obviously welcome you all on board. So with that, that's a wrap in our presentation and happy to open up Q&A. So if people want to come back and I guess you put yourselves back on video, and we can take a Q&A. Pretty relaxed style here. We don't have a lot of people here. Just unmute yourself and we'll obviously get into it for the next, I guess, 20, 25 minutes whatever you feel comfortable with.

Hey, it's Dan. I guess I'll go first. So this is probably more for Kyle and Mark. Just curious, I'm beta testing the Tinybeans platform, which I guess is the first piece of community. And obviously, it's a little bit raw right now, and it's kind of working through a lot of changes, I'm sure in the next couple of weeks or months. So I'm just curious, ultimately what you guys expect that user interface to look like. Right now, it's kind of just a horizontal row of videos and then you can kind of scroll down by topics. Just curious what you guys kind of envision for that to be in terms of the final product.

Yes. That's a great question, Dan. And like you mentioned, it's -- we're really going and taking an evidence-driven style here to identify what features are being used the most? Where is the most demand? Going up before we even get into like the UI design, one of the things that I think you probably had a chance to participate in was just how we're actually going, the process we're onboarding users. So one of the things that we're doing is taking a pretty high-touch approach, which is to conduct these almost like focus groups where we're bringing in users, having people identify what they like about the platform. And from that, we're learning a lot about what they like and what they are expecting. And from that, we're using that to build and design the UI and our road map for implementing it. It's -- we're looking at 2 things. One is how do we make this really fast. You heard me mention before that this is about speed. Parents don't have a lot of time, they want to go into the app. They want to find things that are really relevant. So we're going to be looking and introducing a lot of new signals that we collect from users to say, hey, here's -- this is a parent of 3 ages 1 through 5. These are their interests as well their location is. These are the videos that are going to be the most relevant for them, the most relevant posts. The interface is going to adapt to that. So we're bringing in those videos as close to you as quickly as possible. The second aspect is to help users continue to identify the areas and needs and discover them in a really interactive way. So being able to get proactively prompt users to say, if you're a New York mom, here's a community of people posting around these things. The first step is to get people to start creating that content. And one of the challenges that we've been dealing with over the last I'll say, 6 months is really focusing on like infrastructure and making sure that we have the ability to support and deliver just an amazing performance. We have a really exciting IA and new UI that not just for community, just for the rest -- for the entire app, that is really embracing this entire vision where we have content -- where content and memories and community all live in 1 environment. And you'll be noticing steps very shortly that start to show the progression of how we plan to bring them all together. Mark, do you want to add anything to that on the platform side, from the...

Yes. Yes. Just to kind of riff on something you mentioned, which is speed, which has been on the engineering team, like our main focus here. So really kind of building and retrofitting our systems to go from this kind of like photo journal and memory system where you're sharing photos with a limited number of users to something where you're sharing video with a much broader set of users. So what we've been really focused on is -- are those platform pieces. So how do we make the throughput of our upload capabilities much faster, how do we get those videos downloaded and sync-ed to your device much faster. That's where our focus has been. And I think as Kyle and the product team continue to think through the IA and the UI, we're really focused on just like how can we make sure that the video itself and the video experience itself of just uploading and browsing videos is as fast as possible.

Okay. Great. Looking forward to seeing it.

Yes. Thanks for beta testing.

I'll hop in the queue.

This is Neil Cataldi. I'm also a beta tester, and I've enjoyed the experience thus far. I'm curious, to kind of follow up with Dan, do you see it moving in a direction where people will have more of a profile? Dan can follow me and see what I post and vice versa. Not that you're looking to copy Instagram or what some of these other platforms have done. But there's something to say about the idea of a feed on a phone. I mean all of these platforms look similar in a way for a reason. I think we're accustomed to just scrolling through and kind of curating the people we like ourselves, who we want to follow. So I'm just -- I just wanted to ask, like is it going to move in that direction?

Absolutely, absolutely. So there's a number of features that we're being -- we're not just -- while I think -- from an industry perspective, they're looked at as kind of table stakes. So we need to have whether it's user profiles or search or being able to follow and connect, those are all things that are on the road map. One of the things that we do want to -- we are reinforcing in product strategy from top to down, is making sure that we are, like I mentioned to Dan, is taking that evidence-driven approach, not just implementing it because we see that Instagram or TikTok or another app is doing it. But understanding like how do users -- how do parents want this to work? If we have a profile, what does the parent actually want to share? For example, we did -- we just did a really interesting survey with some of our beta members as well as our existing users to identify what features would parents be comfortable sharing? And what makes -- what public attributes that are available make the community feel more inclusive? One of the areas that we're really focusing on is not just trying to be this Facebook or some other social network that either feels too intimate. And like I don't know if I trust this -- all these users that much, but also we don't want it to feel too cold either. We want this to be a place where people trust each other, where the advice that each other is giving is recognized that's coming from a real, honest, authentic parent who has been in that same position before. And so we're trying to use those to identify how can we take this digital representation of somebody and make them feel more real. And so that other users understand If I'm looking at your profile, Neil, what kind of interest do you have? What kind of -- how many kids -- what kids ages are? How are you like me so that if I'm following you, I can have a better understanding of what type of content you're going to be sharing because I think those are the small details that if we get right, we'll start to see a lot of loyalty -- will increase our customer loyalty. And that's not an excuse to say we're going to wait really long to get those things out. Those are all coming in, in the road map, and you'll see those being introduced very, very quickly.

Okay. Yes, I'm a parent of twins, identical twins actually. And so I can sort of attest to, when they were younger being able to network with other parents of twins would be something that would have been of value, to just figure out weird quirks and things that were happening. So I guess another question would just be what do you -- how do you look at what the premium content is going to be? Like what drives your ability to charge for this? Is it just that it's specialized, I don't know, in a weird -- it might be a strange analogy, but in the way that like a dating app is specialized, right? So you pay for that, whereas I can -- it's a lot harder to find the community on an Instagram or Facebook or something like that. And then I'll just add one of the features that I think would be interesting that I think you're developing is that this idea that you can find activities and deals, and there's a sort of natural flow to what am I going to do with my child this weekend or what am I going to do -- what things like that can you create that people would want to pay for?

So I'll take that. Thanks, Neil.

Yes.

Why pay for content? So I come from content, and all I've done is help people pay for content. And I think there's a lot, there's a lot of content out there for parents specifically that is free, right? However, it's not tailored. It's not tailored to them specifically for their child, their multiples, whatever the case may be. And it doesn't go as deeply as we will go into these sort of 4 areas, combined with the fact that it will all be in one place. So if a mom is in a Facebook moms group or has her own special spot, she always is looking for different things, right? Here, it'll be in the same spot, all in one place, and we'll go deeply into that. And as far as like sort of activities and deals and things like that, that's going to be part of our like shopping pillar where if you're a New York parent, maybe you'll get 25% off of the Bronx Zoo because you're a member of this sort of content piece that we're going to be delivering.

Okay. I got one more, and then I'll let everybody else jump in. As you move forward with this, do you need to license any technology to build out what you're developing? Like are there going to be any AI pieces? Or just anything that either needs to be developed internally or maybe you need to partner on.

Yes. We're -- I'd say we're exploring like a bunch of different options. So for something like content classification, that's something we're actively researching now, we're looking at both partners and third-party vendors that we can work with, who offer sort of interesting things that are a little bit of plug-and-play, but we're also bringing on board a data scientist. We've invested a ton of energy and effort into a data platform and our data warehousing capabilities so that we can actually start to build a lot of those things in-house as well. So we're kind of just evaluating a bunch of different options to understand where should the bulk of our effort be when it comes to machine learning efforts generally and what makes sense to put out to other partners. So whether that's something like we might do classification using a third party but build the recommender system internally. We're kind of evaluating that as we go.

All right. Thanks.

Hi, I'm Cagla Hirschman, and I've also been testing your app and working with it and getting used to it. I have a question and a follow-up. I've been -- I set up a profile that included a 5-year-old and one of the benefits of the Red Tricycle acquisition was going to be that there was going to be more content for the older kids. So I'm still seeing stuff pop up on the feed for a 5-year-old about teething or sleeping issues, things like that. So The first question is, are you planning the app to be -- to have content also to those older kids? And then I'll have a follow-up.

Yes. I'll take a swing at that one, and Kyle feel free to jump in. But the answer is yes. I was just talking a little bit about content classification. A big part of that is being able to go through our full content library of Red Tricycle and understand to what age range is a particular article suited for. Kyle, in the presentation, mentioned the Today screen, that's an area where, increasingly, we're looking to kind of connect these signals. The signals that we get from Tinybeans with the content that we have from Red Tricycle. So more and more, you'll notice that screen, in particular, is going to become more and more relevant for parents with older kids. And we hope to sort of extend that out through the app. Kyle, anything to add to that?

Just a quick note and then, Allison, if there's anything on the content production side from -- that you'd want to chime in on, is what Mark just said is definitely true. That the industry has been -- what we're looking at is -- and not every user has access to this yet. We're still rolling this out slowly. And as we're really trying to learn more about what's working, what's not working and how to make this better. But someone -- I think Neil mentioned the dating app analogy. And we've used that internally quite a bit just thinking about how -- from a matchmaking perspective, that's a really great model to model what we're doing -- what we're building, whether instead of dates, we're really trying to connect parents with those ideas. We talked about getting people those ideas and answers in a really actionable fast way. So we're going to be continuing to borrow in some cases, UI patterns. In other cases, just the idea around how those signals and those connections work. So you'll start to see more of that. And to do that, you'll start to see more surveys being introduced into the app for us to learn and collect more information about you. We're handling all that in an incredibly private way, so we're not sharing that data or selling that data. We're using it really to make sure that we're able to connect you with that content. And one also -- besides just the user -- besides the original content that we're creating from Red Tricycle, we also do have that community content we're creating, which is going to provide a lot of those answers that people actually want because it is happening in real time or it's happening in really paper-local way. So while we're also classifying existing data, and trying to have better ways of mapping and recommending content we've produced to you, we're also looking to figure out how do we take the content and extract what people are -- the ideas, the products, the places that people are going and structure that so that we can say, okay, your -- this user is at Bronx Zoo, here's a post, and we recommend going to the Bronx Zoo. Here are all different posts from and experiences from parents that went to the Bronx Zoo. Here's what they did. Here's what they liked. And then here is your 20% off your next ticket -- your next family pass. So that's a little bit of the way that we're trying to think about content from a product perspective. But Allison, if you want to chime in and add anything else about like how we're -- how you're thinking about producing content across different age groups.

I don't have that much more to add except just to say that we are there and we always produce content for these age groups. It is our sweet spot across both Tinybeans and Red Tricycle. So feel very comfortable that it's a matter of just getting it into the right people's hands. And that's -- Kyle and Mark, they're on their way. So all good.

That's helpful and informative. I really appreciate that. The second question as community is going to be so important, there have been a number of platforms that have tried to build communities for parents, primarily more kind of like on boards. And a bunch of them have shuttered, not gotten to enough scale or had problems. And even on ones that are kind of linked to major brands, trusted brands like the What to Expect brand, even those folks sometimes have issues with claims that there is bullying or misinformation on those kind of boards. So clearly, that's going to be really important for you guys to find ways to moderate that and make it that trusted safe space. So can you talk to me a little bit more about how you're going to walk that line and create engagement and try to build enough scale and geographies all across the country, while still maintaining some kind of control over the inclusive and positive and accurate information that's presented there.

I'll take a quick stab at 2 aspects of that, and then I'll pass it over to Allison to talk more about just the distribution and scale and reach component. The -- one thing that we've identified from other platforms, whether it's a Facebook Group, a mom group on Facebook or Peanut or What to Expect, some of the products you're referencing. The challenges with those are -- is a lot of them are very similar and that they have -- they were built on discussion platforms. So they -- this idea that parents want to talk with each other. They want to ask -- they want to -- it's threaded. And I think one of -- while that's, in many cases, true, and they provide a lot of value, one of the challenges that comes with that approach is that you get discussions. And you have discussions that typically go into very sensitive areas, whether it's politics or what your neighbors are doing and just a lot of things that most people probably don't want to read every day. The other challenge is that they're not necessarily very searchable. Like if I have a question, it may have been asked 5 times before, but it's buried in threads and it's really hard to find. So from a user experience, it's also -- they're not very navigable and content is buried. So when we went into this area, we didn't want to just be a me too. It was more of what the parents actually want. And again, going back to this idea of dating apps, like we kind of had this recollection like -- or recognition, I can get a date -- I mean I've 3 kids and 1 on the way and very happily married. But if I wanted to, I could probably get a date on Bumble or Tinder in a couple of hours or a minute maybe, depending on -- maybe I'm speaking too highly of myself. But the -- but the idea is that what dating apps used to be 10 years ago or 15 years ago is very akin to where -- what the state of these parenting groups and community platforms are. That they were -- they used to be built in very discussion platform like ways where matchmaking was a component but it wasn't the focus. They -- the UI, the user experience shifted to bring it about what are my signals. And then rather than showing me everybody in the platform, let's just show a stack of the things that are most -- that we think are going to be most relevant for you so that you can move through. And by changing the approach and the user experience to focus on providing what the customer or the user wanted and what they needed and it's focusing on speed, I think they were able to mitigate and avoid a lot of the challenges that had come up with a lot of historical dating apps. They're still there. There's still moderation that needs to go in. There's still whether it's using machine learning to identify hate speech or to identify sensitive photos, whatever it is, that's all needed, and we can do that by putting up better gates. I mentioned before, we have a really -- what I think is a really exciting onboarding practice where we're meeting a lot of our users in person. Part of this is a way for us to learn more about them as it is about learning what their expectations are. That's a hard process to scale, but I think it's more about the idea of us trying to understand who is joining the platform and to have some level of verification that they are a real parent. They are trying to provide helpful content. But I think it's a -- part of the solution is making sure that the product experience is focusing on what users want. In this case, it's answers and feedback and help, and making sure everything the product is doing is to encourage users getting that help, and building tools to then allow them to share help rather than creating tools that kind of open up this open-ended discussions that can kind of veer off in any different areas. But -- so that's from a product perspective. Kind of more of a gated controlled experience that will, we think, allow users to have a really fast and positive experience, even if it's not as open-ended as some other platforms.

That's a great explanation. Thank you.

Awesome. Allison, I'm not sure if you wanted to talk about the marketing component like just on the scaling side.

Well, we plan to scale and we have [indiscernible] place to scale. But just to add to that, the other thing that we're doing about our content creators is we're making sure that they're setting the tone on positive -- positivity and inclusiveness. And we're being really, really tight about monitoring that. So as things come up, we'll deal with it, basically. But right now, we're trying to make sure that in this beta, a tone has been set of positivity and inclusiveness.

This is Neil again. I'll ask one more. I'm hearing today that beta's going to roll forward and you really want to get feedback from the group and you've mentioned -- learned from evidence, I guess, a few times. Can you help us understand maybe how large you see the beta becoming? And what the time line really is? I mean if you're trying to develop it as you get this evidence, is a realistic launch date more like summer-fall than spring? Just trying to understand what that time line looks like.

That's a great question, Neil. So we're constantly -- like I said, we are constantly learning. And we -- launch for us is we're constantly looking to expand this experience. It is in a very small -- very controlled beta right now, so invite-only. And in April, we're going to be expanding that. We're going to be expanding that to bring in more users. And to a much larger group of our community, which we really haven't offered the experience yet to. So we've been bringing in some of our power users. Some people to get feedback from different channels, but we've been much more precise and targeted with who we're asking to join. And the next step is to bring in more and get more of that feedback. And we're going to continue to progress and expand this to more and more users as we feel comfortable. I think I speak for the rest of the whole team when we don't want to just launch this to check off a box. Like we want to make sure that we launch this and get it right. There's a lot of implications to launching a community, and we don't -- we want to make sure that our users understand the value proposition. The -- we want to make sure that we're communicating that value proposition so that there isn't any distrust in the notion of going from a private journal to something that's public. So we want to make sure that we're handling that communication and navigating that as intelligently as we can and building things that will have the most impact. So we're looking to continue to ship, continue to release and to continue to scale. But I don't think there is a hard time line right now where we're saying that we're done. Community is constantly going to be growing and growing and growing. And we'll get to a point where we see everyone have access. Right now, that's -- we're still just looking to get more feedback on the existing experience before we bring it out to -- before it just becomes a tab in the app.

Got it. Well, from the beta perspective, it seems like maybe there's, I don't know, 50 people in it today or less than 100, I'm just guessing. But how do you see that scale? Are you trying to make that 1,000 people? And by doing so, you're sort of testing the ability for the platform to scale without taking the risk that people pay and get turned off?

Great question. So we have a -- I think I mentioned before, very -- it is a smaller group. It's the invite-only right now. Next step is to invite -- to expand and look to increase this by more than tenfold. So you mentioned like 1,000 contributors, 1,000 creators. That's, I think, at the low end of our spectrum, like we would like to see us see -- set a baseline of around 1,000 creators and contributors to start identifying what people are creating. And so yes, the next step is to really start growing this by about 10x. And then we'll probably continue taking 10x approach over the next couple of months. So going from 1,000 to 10,000 to -- and then going from there.

Yes. So Neil, just to speak about it from the kind of platform and engineering perspective, like our guidance to direct it here is to continue to add orders of magnitude. So right now, that's 100x. We're going to just keep adding zeroes to that. That's our goal.

Got it. So if -- say in a month here at 1,000 and hypothetically speaking, July, you're at 10,000 or I don't know, 100,000, will there be -- will you, at some point, say that like the beta's over and everybody that's a part of the beta has to start paying? And will there be this like sort of conversion wave where you've got all these people using it and now it's like engage or don't engage?

Sure. I can take that, Neil. So yes, we do hope to scale the beta group, and we do hope to at some point this calendar year, figure out what that pricing strategy will be and what the strategy is for the sort of customer value prop. And that, as I said, is really -- the testing is in place now. And there will be a point probably, I would say, and again testing this, that we do give our current customers some time but then they will probably need to pay.

Got it. Good.

I'm just going to add to everyone's comments, Neil, is unlike all -- I would say all other platforms that have communities, as you know, most other platforms, there's a very small percentage of creators and most actual users are consumers, like 99.99% of all be consumed content and very few people create the content on all the big platforms in the world, even some of the small platforms in the world. Where there's a very intentional focus here around increasing the amount of people that create content as well as consume content. So it's not just about like opening us for hundreds of thousands of people and they're all just staring and waiting for people to be posting. We're trying to really create a very intentional strategy of a very strong percentage of users are also creating content as well as consuming content. And that is a different mindset and different strategy than nearly all community platforms out there from Next Door to Facebook, right? Very few people create. And that's why it's about like, I guess, conditioning the user to have the trust with the brand to continue to be comfortable with posting lots of content because obviously, the more content, the more engagement. The more engagement, the more value and all those types of things. So it's really unlike most other platforms, that's why it's much more of a methodical approach to the rollout as opposed to just, let's just open up for the wild and see. So I just wanted to add that comment.

This is Dan Rogala again. I just want to pick up kind of where Neil left off and where Allison was kind of finishing her comments around value prop and pricing strategy. So I guess to piggyback off that, how do you guys think about kind of the customer acquisition piece and the strategy and I guess the target platforms or areas that you guys are going to focus on once you have the pricing and value prop kind of refined?

Yes, absolutely. So we are in the process of refining all of that. And our testing so far has been really in the organic front. We have these 5 million customers that already are very engaged with our brands, and we know that are already parents, right? So we know that they're a target. However, we're also right now in the middle of planning a test for paid media really across the board and making sure that we can garner an even larger audience. So that is as well in place for acquisition.

And I guess what are you guys thinking about in terms of channels for the paid media? Are you guys going through social, are you guys going through kind of other, I guess, TV, radio? Like what's the thoughts there?

Yes. I mean I would hold off on the out-of-home for now until we really refine the paid media and understand our attribution. So I would really first go in the social, right, this is a social platform I would first go in the social world, and the paid search world and make sure that we sort cover off on those and really understand, again, like just better all of that will help us figure out our customer value prop and help us refine and refine and refine. So that when we're ready for out-of-home and TV and billboard or whatever it may be, taxi tops, whatever, that we'll know exactly what the customers are coming into us for, and we'll have great attribution.

Okay. Thank you.

It looks like we might have time for one more. If there's anyone with a question, otherwise we'll wrap up.

Hello. This is Chris Manousselis. A little new to the story as opposed to the other questions. But I have 3 teenage daughters, so I'm a little bit past the Tinybeans age, but we do have family members who have quite a few tiny beans. What's the typical process of how some of these people would find out about the platform and actually be able to engage? Then I have one more question after that.

So right now, we have very strong organic channels in place where they find out about it right now. We have a great social media, a lot of followers, things like that. But again, like we'll be testing beyond that and so should have no problem with our reach.

Okay. And then as you scale and things grow -- take an example of the Bronx Zoo discount for instance. So I'm in Chicago land, big city. But let's say, for instance, you start growing and you have users in Richmond, Virginia and Topeka, Kansas and all these little smaller towns, how do they get the same kind of benefit in these medium, small markets as opposed to myself in Chicago or somebody in Manhattan?

Yes. So we're looking at that thoroughly, and we have local markets that we look at all the time and deals in local markets that we have no issue getting to. From the perspective of a smaller town that we might not have those kind of sort of deals or relationships, we would look more to like a national deal. So it's something that would scale across the country.

Got you. Okay. Thank you so much.

Sure.

Okay. Well, we're just on 11 here in New York. So we're going to wrap up. So thank you so, so much for everyone joining today. Really appreciate everyone's time and enthusiasm for learning more about the company. Should you wish to learn more, please feel free to reach out. We're obviously on our website or lots of other channels like LinkedIn where we're available. But thanks so much and look forward to updating everyone on performance and tracking. So all the best, and enjoy the rest of the day. Cheers.

Thank you.

Thanks very much, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.