Tinybeans Group Limited (TNY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, all, and thank you for joining the Tinybeans' Investor Update. My name is Will Gormly from Bell Potter Securities, who is acting as a lead manager and underwriter to the recently announced $5 million entitlement offer. I'll now pass over to the CEO, Zsofi Paterson, to provide the update to shareholders this morning. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Zsofi. Thank you for joining today and your interest in Tiny. I'm going to take about 15, 20 minutes to go through some of the key pages of the recently of the Investor Presentation we released to the market last week. I assume most people have had a chance to have a look at it. So I'll do it relatively quickly, and I'll allow some time for some questions at the end. For those of you that I haven't met, I can see a few familiar names. I'm Zsofi. I was appointed as the CEO of Tinybeans last July, and it's been a very productive and busy time in States since then. I have 15 years' experience in media and technology across the U.S. and Australia. And prior to joining Tinybeans, I was the CEO of a small portfolio of digital health and wellness subscription apps and had great success in scaling one of them and selling it to U.S. private equity. The brand was centered by Chris Hemsworth, and it was a very good success story for an Australian business that made a great impression on the global scale and had great returns to shareholders relatively quickly as well. I was delighted to take on this role after having used Tinybeans every day since I became a mom in 2020. And I continue to use it every day since with my second daughter now. And seeing and understanding -- firstly understanding a lot about some consumer subscription businesses and then observing my own behavior, and the behavior of my family and then those other the people that I know that use Tinybeans, I became really curious in the company. And so I was delighted to join in and be given a chance to try and find a way to create great value here, which I think that we have the opportunity to do. So to dive straight on in, very high level, I assume for most people, if you're interested in Tinybeans, you have a sense of what it is. But at our core, we are a private and safe family photo-sharing app that connects generations and turns moments into memories. The business model at the moment is a freemium product. So we have the ability for anyone to use the product without paying a subscription fee. They are monetized by advertising. And then we have a subscription layer on top, which is $75 per year, and you pay for that. You don't see ads, you have up limited -- unlimited uploads and they are the kind of key differences between the free and the paid layer. In addition to the app, we're a multi-channel media platform with multiple touch points for brands to reach highly-engaged new parents and their families. And that's across our app, our website, social channels and our great e-mail database. To touch on Tinybeans, we have been around a little while over 10 years, and we've been loved and trusted by thousands and thousands of families since that time, and this provides a really strong platform to now scale with a clear strategy and focus. Some of the highlights of the company today, we do have great scale. So we reach over 4 million parents and families every month across the platform, being at the app, the web, the e-mail and social channels. And the vast majority of these people do sit in the United States, which is where most Aussie businesses want to get to. We have diversified revenue channels that exist today. They are the high-value recurring subscription revenue, advertising revenue, affiliate revenue and e-commerce revenue and the highest growth segment and the area that we are most focused and interested in growing is the subscription revenue, which grew 36% year-on-year last year. The thing that I commented on in my own personal experience and when we dive into the data, we really see, is very, very prevalent, is we have over 40% of our paid subscribers use Tinybeans every single day, which puts us at the very top of the daily-use metrics or companies that sit in that benchmark. So we sit alongside companies like Instagram and Candy Crush in terms of how frequently people are engaging with the product. So super, super strong. And we have a high [ OT ] base. So we see, on average, our families that join Tinybeans to use the app, they are with us for around about 3 to 4 years, which just provides a really nice opportunity to think about different ways that we might think about servicing them. But even before we get there, we get them and we keep them for a long time, and we make a good amount of subscription revenue for them. To dive a little bit further into some of those points, the paid subscribers who are the people that are primarily starting the journals and inviting their families, we have just over 50,000 paid subscribers, and they are typically the mothers. And the makeup of the -- a good portion of them, they are urban mid-30s, high household income, actually 2.5x the average household income and typically working moms. So a really valuable segment of the market. For everyone and me, I invite on average -- or the active ones of me, we invite on average, 19 family and friends to follow in our family -- follow along in the family journal. And so you can see that there is a really interesting and compelling network effect potential of this product. All those people combined, so paid subscribers, the free subscribers who have not yet converted into paid or are happy using the product to its free limits and the families that sit around them, there's about 900,000 people engaging every month with the app product. I touched on the fact that overall, our audience makeup is in the U.S., which is super valuable. And at the other point, I'll make about the followers and the family that sit around the paid subscribers, is they also continue to engage with the product over the course that the paid subscribers as well. So their LTV and their engagement is also really, really high and persists for a long time. A couple of comments just on kind of growth to date. So the business has spent not a huge amount of money. In fact, a very small amount of money in driving subscriber and brand acquisition over the last couple of years. Last year, I think less than USD 200,000 was spent on brand awareness and subscriber acquisition, which indicates to me that we've got a lot of room to kind of scale that and think about how we can really effectively and efficiently grow the brand and drive subscriber acquisition. And because of that as well, we see that only 80% or less than 20% of people are actually acquired via paid channels, which again indicates that there's like a high word-of-mouth and high referral factor and also opportunity to scale that number once we kind of get the foundations going and we have our marketing mix in place. So that's Tinybeans today. And I think the thing that I think is really, really interesting and compelling here is with the high-trusted engagement that we -- that exists, Tinybeans is positioned to become a leading global consumer subscription platform that reaches parents in the early years of parenting. And there are a number of ways that we can think about expanding our offer, beyond the private photo-sharing and ways that we can add value to the lives of our customers and users, increase the monetization and the revenue that we earn from each of those people. So there's a number of opportunities there. But for me, the things that kind of stand out as really opportunistic, personalized content. So content that gets people at the right time based on their usage and the first -- rich first-party data that we know about our families and their usage patterns. We do a tiny little bit in terms of like the printed products, but we've got a lot of people that have expressed a lot of interest in having a stronger kind of physical photo or printed product capability as well. And gifting and wish-list and registry type solutions, I think also really interesting for us to think about. The app knows I have 2 daughters. It has my family already sitting around them, knows when the birthdays are. So I think finding ways that we can take the friction out of gift giving, and the friction out of everything that you can think about that you may wanted for your children at a certain stage, Tinybeans, I think, has the promise and the potential to be able to meet that need and service us in those very different ways. So lots of product expansion opportunities, once we kind of nail the core and get our acquisition humming and our user base up. And we've got big aspirational goals that kind of sit under our long-term vision and our long-term strategy. Our vision is to make parenting more joyful, simple and meaningful, and we think that by pursuing that vision with a focus on meeting the needs of our parents, we have the great ability to really scale our user base. So scale it up to 10 million monthly active users, become a global leader in the digital parenting category, aim to reach one in 4 first-time new parents in the U.S. At the moment, we have reached less than 1% of those people. So we've got, I think, a lot of room to grow and to really grow our revenue base with a heavy concentration and makeup in the subscription revenue in particular. So we want to be looking at a revenue mix where we have more than 50% of our revenue coming from subscription revenue, and we believe that will put us in the best [ debt ] to then grow the rest of the revenue that sits alongside that and subsequent to that. I won't spend a much a huge amount of time talking about the market opportunity other than to make a couple of quick key points. There are about 5 million births in our [ primary ] markets each year. And I think the thing that's interesting there is we know that for every one of those births, there's actually a lot of people that sit around those babies that are potentially available for us to acquire, whether they are the paid subscriber like me, the free subscriber that may use the product to the free limits and be -- have the advertising sitting around it and then all the family members. We know that parents take a lot of photos of their children. The stat here is a little outdated, but it's over 1,500 photos taken of babies in their first year. I actually think that that's far, far higher, judging from the experience that we understand our users take and how we see that upload patterns over time as well. We know that a lot of parents don't actually discuss their child on all social media or share any photos around 30%. And we know the vast majority, so over 77% of parents are also really concerned about AI and privacy and data in relation to their children. So there are underlying existing thematics that continues to subsist that make Tinybeans as relevant today as it was 10 years ago. And it's a large valuable and regenerating global addressable market that we have the ability to go and reach. I touched on this a little bit in the first couple of minutes, but Tinybeans provides great value to families as it exists today. The #1 reason why people use it and love it and continue to use it and love it and refer it to their friends and families, is because of the privacy and security. That is the #1 reason why that we hear from our users and our subscribers about why they came to it, why they stick with it, why they love it and why they refer it. We also know it does a really nice job of connecting family and bridging gap. So we see a lot of our users have family that is spread geographically, nationally and internationally. But we also see that people who have family that sit in the same city or state, use it as well and really value the way that it helps enrich their bonds together. And how it kind of stacks up and compares against some of the other potential like niche products in the market and all the native solutions, is it's platform-agnostic, which means that whether you and your family are on an Apple device, a Google device, you have family members that don't necessarily want an app, but want to get updates by e-mail, Tinybeans caters to that. So that is something that puts us in a really good stead and makes people willing to kind of invest in a custom-built product when there may be native solutions offered by the larger platforms. We have over 150,000 5-star ratings in the App Store and thousands and thousands of beautiful reviews and testimonials, which one of them is included on the screen here. So we're raising capital, and we're raising capital to help fund the next stage of business growth. So I shared this the kind of very, very high-level 2-year plan, first time at our AGM last year in October, November. And we are underway with this plan. So 2024, the focus here really is a foundational rebuild, so we've kind of moved through a lot of -- some of this already in the left-hand panel in terms of really, clarifying the core customer, clarifying the core company strategy to focus very much on the subscription app and kind of tightened up operationally how we work as well in addition to taking out 22% of costs out of the business in the first half. 2025 is when we then really -- we'll be in the position to start thinking about growth monetization and innovation. So I'll touch on '24 in a little bit more detail. So over this year, we're mostly focused on improving the core subscription product and driving subscriber activation, implementing new acquisition channels and driving brand awareness, building a growth-obsessed global team and developing a stronger audience monetization strategy. To touch on each of these, we're a product-led business, and we need to work like a product-led business. So we are most focused on improving the core product experience to drive -- and driving subscriber activation to grow our monthly active users and our paid subscribers. So that involves, at baseline, improving the core photo-sharing functionality and then add to performance to lift it above the competitor set and continue to make sure that it works really, really nicely, 99% of time for our subscribers and their families. The second thing is increasing subscriber activation. So we know once people come in, join and have their families join, they begin to use the product, they stick around. But we do have quite a big drop-off point between those that come in and then those that start to really take those first actions and steps. So this is a very, very nuanced, very focused piece of product development work. that we will -- we need to improve by rapid experimentation and being very, very laser-focused on that funnel and the onboarding and that activation. And the third one I'll touch on here is driving a stronger referral loop. So enabling subscribers to be incentivized to refer their friends and family members, so this is doing something that organically this behavior is happening, and our app needs to do a better job and incentivizing and encouraging people to do it and then rewarding them when they do, do that. Second part is marketing, which I touched on a little bit as well. Business has not spent significant resources or investment on driving subscriber acquisition over the last few years. They had a very small investment in it last year. And you see from our subscriber graphs that our numbers have actually stayed more or less flat for the last couple of years. We think there is great opportunity to really scale our user base by turning on and engaging a sophisticated kind of multi-platform, multi-channel marketing strategy. And we're going to be really focused on global partnerships, so working with targeted, integrated and highly aligned U.S. and Australian brands in the first instance to help drive brand awareness and subscriber acquisition. We're in discussions. We'll be looking at some influencer, creator and ambassador type programs. And then if we think it could make sense, we find the right celebrity. We are very open to thinking about celebrity endorsements, assuming we can do it in a way that is cost-effective and very much authentic and aligned with the brand that we're building here. PR, thought leadership and affiliates, is also another area that we think there's great opportunity in. There's virtually not a week that goes by, at least in Australia, where there's not some discussion around kids' social media, privacy, data, et cetera. We think we can be a voice in that space, and so we're going to work on implementing a strategy there as well. So needless to say, a lot of room to really double down on the company's efforts in terms of driving acquisition and brand awareness to drive the top of the funnel growth. Number three is people and culture and being focused on developing a highly -- higher-performing global team to build on some of the improvements we've seen over the first half in terms of operating rhythm and efficiencies. So we are now in market with a fully underwritten raise to bring on a couple of key missing capabilities in the company across primarily data and analytics, engineering and marketing, and we've got some great candidates in the pipeline in both Australia and the U.S. We will be building out a very small Australian team to access great talent cost effectively and supplement the great work that's going on with the core operating team in the U.S. We think Australia is a market that there's opportunity to grow our subscriber base and having a small presence here and a small team here will help with that, plus also just with the delta with the $1, it gives us good ability to hire at a level above where we may be able to in the U.S. And obviously, continuing to work on building improved team engagement momentum and shifting the mindset into one that is obsessed with growth, with everyone in the business obsessed with growth because our performance and our business is only as good as our people and our team at operating. Number four is monetization. So this is developing an overall audience monetization strategy to improve our average revenue per user and build a more sustainable ad sales model. So historically, there had been a bit of a disconnect between where the advertising revenue was being generated on the dotcom and then the product in the subscription product, yes. And we're doing the work needed to make sure that we have 1 cohesive advertising experience that commands stronger CPMs and has stronger ad units across the entire platform. And we've made some good progress in that regard as well. And the other point here is really developing a strategy and an ad strategy that ties much more and leverages much more the rich, an incredible first-party data that we are in a fortunate opportunity to have. And that will enable stronger personalization and more targeted advertising experience for premium brands as well. So that's 2024. Fair bit to do, but we're underway. 2025 is when the product -- when the focus really shifts to product innovation, market expansion and growth acceleration, so these things will include major strategic business-to-business and product integration partnerships to really supercharge that growth, thinking about the expansion potentially of the digital product beyond photo-sharing, to deliver more value and take more market share, thinking about the opportunity that may exist in the physical product space, leveraging the journals that people already spent so much time and energy and effort creating digitally, and then utilizing AI and Machine Learning models to create a really personalized experience for people and be able to deliver on some of the opportunity and the promise of the product. So that's it in a wrap. I'd end by saying we have a great foundation. We've done a fantastic amount of work, very productive work over the last half. And we're in a really good position to be raising this money now. The raise is fully underwritten. And we are very pleased by the uptake in the interest from our institutionals both in terms of existing and new, though we've had some new institutionals and high net worths joining the cap table. They should be great additions and happy to open up for any questions now.

[Operator Instructions] In the absence of any questions from those on the call, I would just like to reiterate the time frame of the retail entitlement offer. It opens today and closes on Friday, the 13th of May, with settlements due on Friday, the -- sorry, that's, Monday, the 13th of May. It closes with settlement on Friday, the 17th, so there'll be a couple of weeks of it being open in between before the end of the month, we can be expecting a quarterly update from Tinybeans, which will be released prior to the end of the month, and we would no doubt be keeping all shareholders updated. If you have any questions, please feel free to pass it through to Bell Potter and we'd be happy to assist. Alternatively, there is an offer information hotline that's detailed in the prospectus, which has been circulated to all shareholders or eligible shareholders this morning. Thank you, Zsofi, and thank you, Chantale, for providing the update.

Thanks, Will.

See you soon.

Thanks, everyone. Appreciate your time.