Tinybeans Group Limited (TNY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So welcome all, Simon Matison here from Bell Potter. I'm very pleased to introduce the team from Tinybeans for their half yearly results presentation, another half that reflects the implementation of the new strategy by the new management team. So I'm very pleased to introduce into the office, Zsofi Paterson, the Managing Director; and James Warburton, the Chairman. So I will pass over to Zsofi. Just a little bit of housekeeping. [Operator Instructions] Zsofi, across to you.

Thank you. Thank you, Simon. Appreciate it. Thank you for hosting us today. So hello, and welcome, everyone, to the Tinybeans FY '25 Half 1 Presentation. I'm delighted to be joined here by the company Chair, James Warburton; and online by our NEDs, Mike Rothman and Andrew Silverberg in the U.S. I'm going to jump offscreen while I present, and then I'll come back on to answer any Q&A. As a company, Tinybeans combines technology with a deep understanding of family needs and digital privacy to make parenting more joyful, simple and meaningful. Our beloved family photo sharing app is loved and trusted by millions of families around the world who use us every day to safely save, preserve and share their precious family moments. Starting with the highlights. It's been a transformative half for Tinybeans marked by decisive action to refine our strategy, strengthen our business model and position the company for long-term sustainable growth. We reaffirmed our conviction that Tinybeans has a unique opportunity to build an enduring global subscription business, serving new families with a trusted private platform. This led to a swift and material restructure of the business to streamline operations, reduce costs and minimize reliance on a volatile and unprofitable advertising revenue source, allowing us to focus on scalable, high-margin subscription revenue. In Q2, we successfully restructured our team, reducing full-time head count by over 50%, while maintaining agility and efficiency. Our engineering team transitioned to a long-term contract with Propel Ventures in Australia, ensuring cost-effective product development, while maintaining ownership of product innovation and strategy. Meanwhile, the sales and content team was rightsized to deliver a high-performing, profitable commercial function aligned with our go-forward strategy. This delivered tangible financial results, including growth in subscription revenue, reduction of OpEx and improvements in EBITDA for the half. We had wins on the subscription side, which I'll cover in a moment, along with some key partnerships, product launches and press wins. Looking at our key metrics. While we had slight declines in total paid subs and monthly active users as we ramp up and scale our marketing efforts, all other metrics were up for the half. Subscription revenue increased by 16% pcp and made up 59% of overall revenue. We have changed our revenue mix in line with our strategy. We saw further increases in the important average revenue per user and lifetime customer value driven by pricing and strong retention and continue to see opportunity to increase both of these, which I'll touch on later in the presentation. We had very strong retention of paid subscribers of 91% in our key renewal Q2, demonstrating the value and the role that Tinybeans plays in families' lives. Tinybeans remains a daily use product with our DAU over MAU at 61%, being up there with some of the leading household subscription businesses. And we can't forget our incredible referral rate from our last survey, where over 93% of Tinybeans' paid subscribers said they had referred Tinybeans to at least one other person. The work during the half translated to improvements in our financial performance. Subscription revenue for the half increased by 16% pcp driven by strong retention and pricing. OpEx was down by 20% pcp, following the restructure and streamlining of the business, while still allowing for disciplined investment in marketing and product development. Our core subscription metrics of retention, ARPU and LTV all improved driven by strong engagement, pricing and retention. And as reported in our Q2 market update, we had the strongest acquisition of new paid subscribers in December since the launch of Tinybeans+ in May '23 driven by seasonal offers and life cycle marketing efforts, and we are gaining confidence in our ability to scale subscribers over 2025. Despite the major restructure, we had a number of operational wins, with our nimble global team remaining engaged, resilient and motivated. We launched the Tinybeans gift cards, enabling parents and friends to gift a Tinybeans subscription, with promising early sales. This also unlocks a range of partnership opportunities. We executed successful marketing partnerships in Australia with major retailer, Harvey Norman; and popular pediatrician, Dr. Golly, to assist with brand awareness, reach and relevance. We grew sales of the Tinybeans photo books, demonstrating potential for expanded complementary physical product range to fuel monetization and grow ARPU and LTV. And we secured press wins in Australia, where there is an enhanced awareness and conversation about privacy, social media and kids' data, securing coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Kidspot and Channel 7, to name a few. Turning to summary financials, noting all references are in U.S. dollars. MRR was up by 16% pcp to $1.61 million. Total revenue decreased slightly by 2% driven largely by a 14% decline in ad sales revenue, in line with our go-forward strategy and focus. Advertising revenue continues to play a role in the business, but we are very pleased to have reduced our reliance on something that has been in decline for years. Operating expenses reduced by 20% due to disciplined expense management and the restructure. Cash balance at the end of H1 was $1.87 million and operational cash burn was $1.37 million, with the restructure and full impact of the cost-out taking place late in the half. And now halfway through Q3, we are on track to have a very good quarter with minimal cash burn, following the cost-out and noting it's our key subscription cash quarter. The P&L and the balance sheet are included in the presentation and are self-explanatory. Strategy overview. While tiny by name and market cap today, we have big aspirational goals that drive our strategy. We are focused on growing our monthly active users, on becoming an enduring global leader in the digital parenting category, seeing 1 in 4 first-time parents in our primary markets of the U.S. and Australia using Tinybeans, and growing our revenue substantially while ensuring it's skewed to valuable subscription revenue. We have the plans and team in place and demonstrated our ability to execute to plan and get things done. Over FY '25, we are laser-focused on three things: growing subscribers; monetizing subscribers; and pursuing our path to profitability. With the business now steady and streamlined, marketing and product are center stage as we focus on subscriber growth and monetization. Growing subscribers. As we've talked about, this includes executing a full-funnel strategic marketing plan focused on cost-effective, long-term brand building while driving short-term sales and acquisition. This includes building and executing a pipeline of strategic and distribution partnerships, optimizing our performance media channels, continuing to invest in PR, micro influencers and content and initiatives to foster loyalty, advocacy and engagement to drive the money-can't-buy referral and word-of-mouth acquisition that we benefit from. Monetizing subscribers. We are confident that there is plenty of room to grow our average revenue per user and customer lifetime value and to do a better job of monetizing the hundreds and thousands of people who use and love Tinybeans. This will include a potential review of product tiers and pricing, ensuring we're offering plans suitable to different life stages and use cases as well an expansion of physical product range. A lot of this hinges on our ability to better use the rich first-party data to offer premium personalized experiences. We're super excited about the opportunity we have ahead of us as it relates to product development. Partnerships. As we've talked about, our partnership-led approach to put Tinybeans into the hands of new and expecting parents cost effectively is at the heart of our growth strategy. Some of these are focused on brand building, while others are focused on lead generation and subscriber acquisition. We have a number of partnerships at various stages in the pipeline, and we're excited to be kicking off the year with key strategic distribution partnerships with Babylist in the U.S., where a Tinybeans offer is going out to 300,000 expecting mothers over the course of this year; and Bounty Bags in Australia, where a Tinybeans offer is going out to 50,000 new moms within days of giving birth over the next 3 months. We are already beginning to see our numbers here grow. Other opportunities we are pursuing include employee benefits and HR platforms for employers wanting to provide a differentiated, cost-effective benefit to their people; retail and baby registries; and loyalty programs and subscription boxes. We continue to consider ambassador, sponsorship and talent-led partnership opportunities as well. To wrap up, this year, we are focused on the following: subscriber acquisition at scale; evolving our product strategy and offering to drive more value from our subscribers; securing major strategic and distribution partnerships; and pursuing a path to profitability. We have strong plans underway across each of our priorities, with key activities commencing and showing promise as we speak. We've done a lot of the hard work to stabilize and rightsize the business for growth and are optimistic and confident as we look forward. Thank you all for your interest in and support of Tinybeans. I'm now happy to answer any questions.

Thanks, Zsofi. So we have a few questions that have come through. The first, just there was a statistic on early in the presentation around 90 memories uploaded per month. There was just some clarification. Is that a per subscriber figure that you provided there?

Yes, it is. We have broken that down historically with total number, but we thought that doing something that shows kind of engagement per paid subscriber over the month was a little more tangible this time.

Great. Second question was just, I guess, goes to size of the market. So just a sense of how many babies are born in Australia and the U.S. on a sort of annual basis that sort of increases your addressable market as they're obviously born.

Yes. So it's about 4 million combined over Australia and the U.S. So it's about 3 million, 3.5 million in the U.S. and about 300,000, 400,000 in Australia each year. So we're playing in a rich and growing kind of regenerating market, I should say. So there's yes, to us, lots of opportunity to really grow our numbers as we capture more market share.

And do you have any sense, Zsofi, of how many you might touch with your marketing today in terms of that big pool?

No, I don't. But it would be a small portion of that.

Small portion, okay, so a big upside in that respect.

Yes.

Next question was around cost base. So the question is, is there any scope to further cut costs given OpEx has already reduced 20% versus the pcp?

Look, we think there is some small bits around the edges that we are evaluating and looking at right now, and we may have more to say on that at the next time we update the market. The big chunk has kind of gone, and we need to be careful as well that we're not now going too far. And we also need to make sure that we are continuing to invest in our growth. So that's something that we are trying to balance, putting as much marketing as we can into our product and our marketing and really trying to preserve anything else that doesn't touch those parts.

And do you want to give us a sense, I mean, partnership is obviously a very efficient way to get out to your market, and you've had some success there clearly. Just is there a lot of engagement with other potential partners? And I guess, what you offer them on top of what they're offering you.

Yes. Look, we're really, really excited about all the opportunities that partnerships present us. And these range in size and scale, in what they look like, in what we're trying to do with them. We do see them as a really cost-effective way to try and put the Tinybeans offer in front of people that we know it's going to resonate with. So we have, yes, a long list, like a very healthy pipeline, a partnership pipeline, both across the Australia and the U.S., which are designed -- some designed for brand awareness, some designed very specifically for customer acquisition, some designed just for brand affinity. So yes, we will continue to keep the market up to date and shareholders up to date as we progress those. But the ones that I'm very excited about, which I alluded to, as of this week in the U.S. and as of 1.5 weeks ago or about a week ago in Australia, a Tinybeans pamphlet, for whether it's 1 month or 2 months or 3 months, has been included in hundreds and thousands of kind of bags and boxes that are being delivered to expecting and/or very new parents. So in the U.S., it's people that have signed up and made purchases from the Babylist registry. They have to do a few things, and then they get sent like a gift box. And in that gift box, there's a number of little kind of like promos and offers and samples of things, and Tinybeans sits as part of that, which is great. And they've just started this week being shipped out, the 2025 batch. And then in Australia, similarly with Bounty Bags, which is delivered to women within hospital at typically 2 days, within mom giving birth to a baby. And there, we're starting to see those numbers. So they've been in market now for about a week, and we're starting every day, seeing a few more of those redemptions. And so that for us is going to build hopefully our free subscribers, and we have a terrific opportunity for them to be engaging with the product and then hopefully converting them into paid subscribers and bringing them into our world in a really cost-effective manner.

Great. And that level of engagement, the sort of 90 memories per month that you mentioned, is that sort of almost start day 1? Or is that something that they build up to over time? What's the sort of time scale of that?

Yes. Look, it really varies. What we see is like we have a very specific acquisition window. And if we get people at the right time and we get them using it really fast, then we've got them for years and years and years. And a lot of our work over the last couple of months and also bleeding into this half, we are implementing a new CRM, which we're really excited about. We've been kind of working with one that's an old, outdated tool, so customer relationship management tool, which looks after our 1.5 million kind of database of people. And it allows us to offer really personalized communications, both through the app and through e-mail and through push notifications, et cetera. And the reason why that's so important is because it does get people engaging really fast and seeing all the benefits of Tinybeans really, really quickly. So yes, like it's a good question, Simon. But typically, like if we're getting people within the first kind of 2 to 3 months of first baby's life, we've got an excellent chance of converting them into engaged free subscribers or, even better, engaged paid subscribers.

Great. Okay. Next question was just around head count. So total head count now, and just give us a sense of the size of the split between Australia and the U.S.

Yes. So I'll talk on a full-time basis. We have under 10 in the U.S. and under 10 in Australia. It's far less than 10 in Australia. It must be about 5 FTEs in Australia and about 9 FTEs in North America. We're then supplemented by an engineering and small product and design team from Propel, although we do have a CPO, like a Head of Product, who sits in our business and is employed directly by us, which is really important to us. So yes, we've taken -- I think the head count this time last year was around 39 people, and the full-time head count now is closer to 13 or 14.

Great. And then are there any initiatives underway to get grandparents and have them use and subscribe onto Tinybeans?

Yes, I love that. It's a great question. Grandparents are so important to us because they essentially help keep our parents engaged. We see, our data shows, that like the thing that makes someone very likely to come on try it and stick around and either become a paid subscriber or use us as a free subscriber for years is having at least one engaged person following their kid's journal. And typically, that is a grandparent. So yes, we are looking at -- I mean, at the moment, we've got limited resources and limited budget. And so we're very focused on reaching moms or expecting moms. And we're kind of working through how we want to think a bit more specifically about grandparents. So yes, I think we'll look at that over the course of this year a little bit more. But what we are going to be doing this year is really fine-tuning the experience that the grandparents have to make sure that it feels like premium, personalized and really like custom-fit for them and their needs as well rather than treating our subscribers kind of in one homogenous group, which, again, the CRM project I referenced will make headway there.

Great. Okay. So you mentioned a goal in your presentation is $25 million in revenue. So can you give us a sense over what duration that might be? And how many subscribers you'd have to get to, to achieve that figure?

No, I can't. Look, that page is very clear. It's aspirational goals, and we think they are realistic, but they are not the basis of a business plan or something that I'm going to give forward-looking statements about.

Great. All right. Well, that's the last of the questions that I have on the call -- oh, sorry, apologies. Apologies. Next question was, are you looking to collaborate with any celebrities or influencers to grow brand awareness?

Yes. We continue to look at opportunities, and we have looked very proactively at 1 or 2, which didn't pan out for various reasons, and they were big-name people with big profiles. So yes, as I mentioned in the presentation, looking at talent partnerships and ambassador opportunities remains something that we consider and we are optimistic about doing. So yes, we'll continue to look at that as part of our marketing strategy and marketing mix. And then the question becomes like how do we want to think about funding something like that if it turns into a really big name that we think makes sense and would drive our business forward.

Great. So next question is more around the market, i.e., the stock market. So you're obviously going through a significant change in strategy here. Do you get the sense that the market is not getting it at the moment in terms of where the share price is? Or is that something that it's taking time to educate?

Yes. I think it is taking time. We've had a lot of work to do. And we've been very heads-down focused on doing that. There was a lot of change last year operationally at a Board level. And I think that's where our focus and efforts have been. Our focus and efforts have not really been so much yet on IR and how we really make sure our story is being told effectively to the market. And I think now is probably the time that we have a bit of bandwidth and we can really invest a bit more time and energy in that. And I know that's something James and I are both really excited to do in Australia. And then there's also some interesting kind of conversations potentially in the U.S. to be had as well. So yes, I mean, we feel very good about where we're at. We feel good about the hard work that's been done. There's a lot more hard work still to go. We need to crack our acquisition model, and we need to find more ways, like better ways, to monetize all the people that sit around our ecosystem. And we have the plans and the people in place to do that now. So yes, I'm very hopeful that we get a chance to be looked at and thought about by the market in a more optimistic way.

Right. Okay. Now that is the last question. Apologies for the last one. But unless there's anything else, I think we will leave it there. Zsofi, James, thank you. Congratulations on the result, and congratulations on the ongoing execution of the strategy. And we look forward, obviously, to keeping abreast of the story and seeing the next results in 6 months' time.

That's great. Thank you. Thank you for hosting us today, really appreciate it and to your support, too, as we look forward.

Great. And thanks all for attending. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone. See you later.