Wishpond Technologies Ltd. (WISH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. My name is Pardeep Sangha, Head of Investor Relations for Wishpond Technologies. And I'd like to thank you all for joining us today and welcome you to Wishpond's Inaugural Investor Day for 2023. We truly appreciate everyone for joining us today. Please note, portions of today's event other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors, many of which are outside of Wishpond's control, that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance or achievements [ implied ] by forward-looking statements provided in our management discussion and analysis. We'll provide further forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. We don't undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except if it's required by law. Next slide, please. We have an amazing line of the speakers here for you today. We'll begin today's event with a presentation from industry veteran and Wishpond Director, Mr. Lloyed Lobo, who will be taking us through 6 trends that will shape the future of marketing. We will then hand over the event to Ali Tajskandar, CEO Wishpond, who will be providing an overview of Wishpond as well as the company's newly released platform Propel IQ. Viewers will then be able to watch a part demo of Propel IQ from Wishpond's Sales Account Manager, Trina Links, followed by an update on 2 business units directly from the General Managers, Nick Steeves for PersistIQ and Kevin Ho for Brax. Ali Tajskandar will then showcase Wishpond's latest artificial intelligence innovation, known as Wishpond's new website builder. Finally, CFO, David Pais will provide us with some financial highlights and then we will close out the event with the CEO, Ali Tajskandar sharing Wishpond outlook for 2023 as well as an investment summary for the company. There will be multiple opportunities for question-and-answer sessions throughout the presentation today. However, we will only be taking questions from analysts. On the call today, I'm pleased to note the following analysts will be participating: Gabriel Leung of Beacon Securities, Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital, Christian Sgro of Eight Capital; Neil Bakshi of Canaccord Genuity; Neehal Upadhyaya of Industrial Alliance; and Jason Zandberg of PI Financial. And with that, allow me to introduce Wishpond's Board of Director, Mr. Lloyed Lobo, who will be kicking off our event with a presentation on 6 trends impacting the future of marketing.

Thank you, everyone, for joining. I'm Lloyed Lobo. I am the co-founder of a company, a fintech company called Boast.AI and also large entrepreneurial community called Traction, and I'm here to talk about 6 trends that will shape the future of marketing. Let's roll to the next slide. Awesome. So one of the biggest reasons I joined Wishpond's Board is as an entrepreneur -- multiple-time entrepreneur and execute multiple start-ups, I was always challenged by finding great tools that would help me manage the customer journey from first touch point to vowing them to long-term relationships with them. Now there are tools out there, but they were all very, very expensive, especially the smaller the business you are, these tools are out of reach or they're not integrated or they're very fragmented. And it becomes very difficult for small businesses. And so one of the reasons I was wowed by Wishpond, I knew Ali from a very long time in what they were working on, and I had used this tool myself, and I realized that Wishpond is really designed for the small business and its democratizing access to marketing for the small businesses that matter across the United States, Canada, world over, right? Awesome. So the trend one -- everyone is talking about it. If you're on LinkedIn, you probably can't scroll 5 minutes without seeing something about ChatGPT or Generative AI. So the biggest trend we're going to see shaping the future of marketing is going to be Generative AI, as we know, right? Generative AI tools like Midjourney, DALL·E, ChatGPT, Jasper and 160 platforms were launched in 2022. Now you've got ChatGPT doing the GPT-4, which is adding more data points to make the experience more personalized. And so now AI can be used to make incredible auditory, visual and written creations that can be personalized to target audiences or individuals with just very simple directive prompts, right? What 2022 did was lay the groundwork. And as we look into the future, these things become table stakes, right? It's going to shape the way not only how we generate big ideas, like marketing all starts with big ideas, then the communication, the scripts, the headlines, the storyboards, 3D renders, website copy code. We've seen Generative AI touch all of this. Awesome. I'd touch very briefly on this. As you've seen any market, right, you come up with something new and it's a set of early adopters or innovators using it, and how AI is starting to get mainstream -- Generative AI is starting to get mainstream. And the number of investment deals that happen in 2022 is humongous, and this is only growing a number of AI companies that are being funded. The volume of investor interest is going up and up. I sit on a number of boards, I sit on number of -- I've been on a number of venture capital funds, and I keep getting updates that the deal flow and the investment action in Generative AI companies are only soaring, and it's going to literally shape the future of all business. Let's move on to the next slide. Awesome. This is just showing some of the investment activity that happened in the last year, and this is only going to drive more and more interest in Generative AI companies. So this is the one top trend looking in the future because it impacts your entire communication stack with your customer across every channel. Let's move over to the next slide. The other thing is we're getting into a cookie-less world, let's turn over to the next slide here. And what that means is Google has said repeatedly that it's going to end or phase out third-party cookies, where you're on a website, you're on a browser, and they are tracking you. And Google plans to phase out third-party cookies in 2023. So this loss of granular data means that it's going to be a huge challenge for businesses. If you can't track user behavior, understand user intent and personalize your marketing efforts, then you're lost. And you -- for brands, especially that have spent years and years running ads, this is a huge challenge. And so one of the biggest ways to overcome this is first-party data, and brands are now focusing on building their own first-party data by gathering user information directly from websites or apps or collecting e-mail addresses and building that relationship with them. And instead of targeting [Audio Gap] users based on their -- targeting users based on the context of the content they are viewing. And this is huge because it's going to create a massive shift in the industry where people are just relying on spending money, lots and lots of money on advertising, are going to be left in the lurch because, "Hey, do we have that e-mail address? What is our relationship with the customer? What are our touch points?" Because if you don't, then you're in a bad position. And now this is where Wishpond comes into play because it helps you manage the customer journey end-to-end. You're collecting that e-mail address, that SMS and through e-mail and SMS and different messaging mechanisms to message the customer from your website to pop-ups, end-to-end, Wishpond helps you manage that customer journey, right? And that is the epitome of first-party data, a one-stop shop to manage your first-party data. Next slide, please. Awesome. The third trend is community, and this is a big one. A lot of people don't talk about this. But if you see 2023, marketing is taking a blood bath. It costs twice as much to generate results from the same marketing tactics, right? Businesses are spending less and less on marketing because consumers are tired. Like every marketing channel eventually gets saturated. They are tired of getting spammed by ads, they're tired of giving out their personal data to access crappy white paper. So they're saying no to the old marketing, right? If you look at it, some of the best and the biggest, the most iconic brands have built communities. Harley-Davidson almost went bankrupt in the '80s and rebuilt the company around the ethos of community. Today, the company is worth more than $7 billion, right? And you can recognize a Harley community member anywhere just by what they're wearing. Nike. They want to help people become better athletes. They have running clubs. No matter where you are in the world, you can start a running club -- start running with a Nike running club for free. And so the theme errors like brands of yesterday were built on what they told the world about themselves, by spam messaging, I guess, if you want to call it that, but adds just messaging to advertising. And brands of the future will be built on what the community says about them, right? Yesterday's innovation always becomes today's option and tomorrow's commodity. But if you build a community, you will not become a commodity because you cannot have a community without personalized communications. And so Wishpond helps you personalize the communications. It helps you host events. It helps you create landing pages and connect with the audiences across all touch points. And without that personalized communication at scale, it's hard to build a community. And coming from someone who's built a community of over 100,000 people, I know firsthand how difficult that can be. So that third trend is community. I can dive into a few more trends, but I think we'll pause here for some questions.

So we have a question from Gabriel Leung from Beacon Securities.

Yes. I got two questions. The first question is relative to some of the trends that you talked about thus far, relative to Wishpond's current marketing tech stack, how does that technology stack rank in your opinion? Are there any weaknesses that you feel the company needs to address to be able to capitalize on, I guess, the first 3 trends you talked about, maybe the next 3 you plan to talk about?

The exciting thing is Wishpond's working a lot of technology, especially in the AI space, right? They just launched an AI website builder, for example. All of these add efficiencies. So I wouldn't say weaknesses. I would say, a lot of the trends I talked about are in the roadmap. And I'm not talking about those trends because of the roadmap. I'm talking about the trends as a marketer. But the good and the positive thing is they're either in action or they're in the roadmap, right?

So if you look at it, what do you need to build a community? First, you need to build an audience at the very onset, right? If you look at community being the epitome of any business relationship with the customer, at the beginning, you have an audience. When the audience comes together, they become a community. When the community comes together to create impact, it becomes a movement. And ultimately, if the community comes together to make an impact and they have unwavering faith in that mission, then it becomes a cult. But if you look at it, communication is at the heart of everything, right? So Wishpond, through promotions, through landing pages, through marketing funnels, appointments, website, it helps you build that audience. Then through e-mail marketing, marketing automation and SMS, it helps you nurture those relationships, right, through content marketing and e-mail communications. You can host events, you can host meet-ups. You can automate that messaging and nurture your e-mails and -- nurture your contacts or community and make sure you have understanding of where they are in the journey relative to your product or your community. And then you help them convert through like whether it's purchasing, whether it's signing up for things so you convert them, move them from like, hey, capturing, creating that audience to nurturing them to converting them. So I think they're covering the full stack here, and things like they're working on like AI tools to improve the messaging or build better websites will only help further that. Yes. So the fourth trend I have is micro influencers. So if you're seeing right now on LinkedIn or Insta, right, influencers with 10,000 to 100,000 people have a lot of reach, and they have a lot of influence. And brands that can't penetrate their audiences are leveraging micro influencer, some of the biggest brands. And these micro influencers, they have great audiences because they produce content that engage people, right? And this is what I was talking. It starts -- you can't build a community if you don't have an audience. It starts with the audience. If you can engage an audience, then you'll grow your following. But then, how do you take that one step further? You got to bring them together. And the only way to bring them together is to have a two-way communication, and that's something Wishpond enables to their personalized e-mail messaging, SMS messaging and all the marketing nurturing tools, which they democratize to everyone, not just large businesses, right? So there's millions of micro influencers between 10,000 and 100,000 people. We can't go and sign up for these expensive tools like Salesforce and whatnot. But we can sign up for tools like Wishpond to then take our audience, nurture them and turn into a community for long-time sales, for long-term connectivity and turning them into community to sell them to monetize any number of things, right? But most of these audiences -- most of these micro influencers have very large audiences, anywhere from 10,000 to in the millions, but they don't have a way to turn then to the community. And this is the thing that Nas Daily talked about. He's an influencer with [ 16 ] million people. His Facebook page literally died one day, and his engagement dropped because of some algorithm changes. And you realize, "Hey, this is not a community. This is an audience that relies on third-party social platforms, and they can make an algorithmic change and kill the engagement anytime. If I don't turn this into a community, it's going to be an incredible waste." He essentially felt like he lost 7 years. So how do you build that community then? Well, you engage with them in a two-way communication through e-mail, SMS messaging, those kinds of things. Next slide. This trend is very interesting, and this is a big part of building audiences, I feel, right? So people's attention spans are limited, extremely, extremely limited, right? And we're not [ reading ] and looking as much as we should, right? Like back in the day, they would say content marketing or generate SEO. To generate SEO, write a lot of content. But what happens, now people are not reading 4,000 or 5,000 page essays on first interaction. They're not watching 30-, 40-, 50-minute videos. Short-form videos are the present. It's the future is happening right now. It was revolutionized by TikTok and then Insta reels, YouTube Shorts. Video under 60 seconds, in some cases, 30 seconds are hugely popular, right? And they keep the viewers' attention. I don't know how many of you have hopped on a YouTube Short or an Insta reel and 2 hours later, 3 hours later, you are still scrolling, right? And users are so hooked that almost 50% of TikTokers agreed that they found videos longer than a minute stressful. And as of July 2022, videos under 60 seconds made up 57% of YouTube views compared to just 11% 2 years ago. And like I've read a bunch of surveys where it said, 70% of consumers prefer to watch short-form video to learn about a product or service. So attention spans are going down. And so the best way to start building an audience is through micro content, micro videos, photos, micro texts, right, byte-sized content designed to educate consumers, and you can leverage that through user-generated content, viral videos, product teasers, ads, whatever it is, but serving micro content to hook the user to then just keep scrolling. And then once they are engaged with you, then you can serve them larger form of content. And then you can serve them additional content to facilitate bidirectional communication like asking questions, subscribing to newsletters, coming to events. AR/VR, there's a lot of action. There's a lot of talk. There are some applications, like Red Bull created a VR experience where users could ride along with the Red Bull airways pilot, right? Or Sephora launched an [ app ] powered feature in its app, so users can try on makeup virtually. So these things will happen. But these things are wow, I guess, features, right? Without the community, without the micro influencers, without a way to communicate this, you can't have this scale. And that's why I'm super excited about Wishpond because at the center of all of this is helping people manage personalized relationships, manage personalized communication at scale. Yes, definitely. Yes. So just a summary, Generative AI, first-party data, community, micro influencers and short-form content. The last 3 there -- or the 3, 4 or 5 are just things people will need to do in order to scale first-party data, right? I mean a lot of companies that were just spending money on ads that don't have relationships with their customers, what are they going to do? Go and buy e-mails all of a sudden? You can't do that. You've got to build relationships. How do you build relationships if you're starting from scratch? You start with an audience. How do you engage that audience? Through short-form content, through leveraging micro influencers. Then you bring them together and build a community. Well, how do you make this all happen? How do you orchestrate it? You need a platform where you can manage this data and communicate with them in a personalized way at scale.

Now I'd like to introduce Ali Tajskandar, CEO, Founder and Chairman of Wishpond Technologies, who will be taking us through an overview of the company. Ali?

Thank you, everyone, for being here. Very excited to be speaking to you about Wishpond today. So going to the next slide. So I'm going to give a little bit of a brief introduction about Wishpond for those of you who might not be as familiar, a lot of you might be. But basically, Wishpond is an all-in-one marketing platform that is built primarily to help all businesses, specifically small businesses, be able to market themselves and run marketing and promotional campaigns and generate leads and sales online. We are currently serving more than 4,000 customers worldwide. We've been growing quite solid for a number of years. And our organic growth has been about 30% to 40% yearly. We enjoy a healthy gross margin of more than 65%. This year's -- 2022 revenue is estimated to be around $20.7 million, adjusted EBITDA positive, and we are running with a healthy balance sheet and positive cash flow. We -- in addition to our own cash flow, we also have access to $6 million line of credit from National Bank of Canada. That is fully undrawn. We don't have any long-term debt right now. And our cash position is solid, $2.7 million, and we're fortunate not to need to raise money to continue operations. And we can continue to invest in our growth with our own cash flow. And since going public in December of 2020, we've made 5 acquisitions and grown the company quite a bit, and we'll go into some of those details in future slides. Next slide, please. Okay. So now zooming out, thinking about what is the problem space that we operate on, what is the gap in the market that we see. If you think about large businesses, large enterprise businesses, for most part, they have armies of marketing professionals, so they might have a Chief Marketing Officer and social media specialists and ad specialists and content writers and developers and designers and all of those things and also easy-to-access marketing agencies and the budget to be able to go to them and spend a proper amount of time and money. And they have the knowledge to make it work. But when you think about small businesses, which is the majority of the market, millions of small businesses in North America alone, tens of millions of small businesses around the world, they don't have those, so they don't have the necessary financial resources or the human power to make that happen or really, honestly, the time to make it work. And they also cannot subscribe to 6, 7 different point solutions and [ gel ] them together, and they don't have their own developers to [ gel ] them together properly to be able to get the same return on investment and the same success as the large companies enjoy when it comes to digital marketing and online customer acquisition. So that is a huge problem. And a lot of the innovations, a lot of the solutions that have come out have been targeted at the enterprise and the marketing-savvy individuals. And that's something that we've been focused on solving. If we go to the next slide. And with the introduction of Propel IQ -- if you can move to the next slide, please. Okay. So -- and now with the introduction of Propel IQ, actually, all of those pieces come together in a more seamless way. So Propel IQ is our next-generation marketing platform. So when we talked about the challenges of the small businesses, in answer to that, what Propel IQ does is that it's all-in-one, full-suite marketing and sales platform, so you don't have to subscribe to 5, 6, 7 different tools. It's all together. The cost of ownership is quite low. It's made for a small business audience. There are elements within which that just for that element, if you wanted to use a point solution out there, it could be the same price or more expensive. Everything is tightly integrated, you have one log-in information. There's single sign-on capability, all the data, all the customer journey data is in one place, you can take actions across all the touch points that you have with your customers from one place. And really Propel IQ combines Wishpond's legacy platform with the 5 acquisitions that we've made to make it as easy as possible for our clients to be able to enjoy SMS marketing that we got from Winback or referral marketing from Viral Loops or sales engagement software that we got from PersistIQ, ad management from Brax, appointment booking from Invigo, a Virginia software, in one unified suite. And Propel IQ and through acquisitions allowed us to be at a different level of competitiveness against even some of the all-in-one platforms that are targeting larger businesses. The other element that is also key [ but for ] Propel IQ is that because of the audience that we're serving, we realize that when even if we've given them the best technology and we make it as easy as possible and have templates and all of those things, they will still find it overwhelming and they will still wonder, well, what are the best practices? What is the right copy on this landing page that we convert? What would be the e-mail copy that would get people to reply to me? And many things like that. And because of that, we made the onboarding very easy. So when someone joins us the first month, we come up with a customer marketing plan for them that is suitable for them, and take care of everything for them. So we use our designers and copywriters and all of those experts that are best in class. And when we are done with the onboarding and we pass the platform to them, it is set up so that they have best chance of success and they can continue on their own and make edits and so forth, and we give them some training materials as well. Now if at any time they say, "Well, actually, can I still use some design services or something that is outside of the self-serve platform?" We've also built a marketing -- marketplace of services that they can go and buy credits and use against those services to take care of all of the needs of this audience. Yes. So we're basically showing some of the elements of the platform that work really seamlessly into one place. I'm not going to spend too much time here because Trina is going to give us a demo of Propel IQ, and we're going to see them in action. So if we move on to the next slide. Now let's zoom back again and think about small businesses and the large businesses. So the large businesses, the ones that have nailed this, they understand that there's no silver bullet, right? There are only 1,000 lead bullets, and they need a system. They need a coherent framework for growth and marketing. And in contrast to that, a lot of times small business, because of the lack of resources, they're looking for individual silver bullets, maybe SEOs will help and get me to a different level, they try that and maybe they don't get the success. Maybe social media post is going to be the way. Everyone says Instagram is very hard, and this and that. But in reality, you need the system, you need the foundation, you need a framework that works well. And that's exactly what we've seen work for large businesses that we worked with, and that's what we provide to our small business audience as well, a framework for growth. And this framework for growth has a few elements to it. On one end, it's all about attracting new prospects and leads. And we have marketing software such as websites, pop-ups, different marketing campaigns that are built to help our clients attract new leads in the ad management software. And once they've attracted and generated some leads and they have their contact information, oftentimes, that's not enough. These leads are very fresh. They don't trust the business that much. They don't know the business that much. And a lot of times, they need a lot of touch points to be able to be convinced of the [ that ] and become a paying customer. And that's where the nurture part comes in. And we have also necessary marketing software, e-mail marketing, group campaigns, SMS marketing, shopping cart abandonment, different pieces to help nurture this audience and [ won ] them up to the business and get them to become paying customers. Now once you've got some of these leads to become your customers or a very engaged audience of yours, you want to be able to use the power of word of mouth just as you would do with any traditional business to spread the news about how great of a business it is and get more people in. It is obviously easier to convert a referral than completely new lead. And that's where our referral marketing software comes into play and they can -- let's say, if you're a gym, you can say anyone that you refer and they sign up for a membership, they get 1 month free membership, you get 1 month free membership or those kind of things. So this is a virtuous cycle that allows the businesses to attract, nurture and refer and keep growing as a result of that. Next slide, please. So the benefits of Propel IQ for Wishpond, we've talked about the benefits for our clients. The benefits for Wishpond also are numerous. So one, if you think about it, if your website is running on Wishpond's website [ build ] there, let's say, you're booking appointments, and that's using Wishpond's appointment booking software, the forms and pop-ups, everything on your website is using Wishpond. The e-mails that you sent to them as part of the newsletter are using Wishpond, any text messages through that, your CRM is using Wishpond. If you're using all of those components that we're setting up for you as part of the onboarding, the likelihood of living would be decreased quite a bit. So this bundled offering that has all the elements that they need, increase customer retention and stickiness. And as a result of that, it also increases long-term value of customer for us. Propel IQ also improves margins for us because it takes a software-first approach, which is something that we expect to further improve our margins. Also, we've already introduced -- and we'll talk about that in a future slide. We've already introduced some AI functionality, but we plan to continue to innovate with AI and position Propel IQ as a result of what we're doing with AI as well as all the elements that already exist in this platform to really revolutionize the way small businesses approach marketing and the success that they get from that, that may come up for a lack of resources in some of the areas that can lend a helping hand. And it really seamlessly integrate all the products that we required into one place and can be experienced as one unit as opposed to [ disparate ] products. So that's it for the overview. I would be happy to answer any questions now.

Yes. A few questions here. With Propel IQ, can you talk about how the go-to-market strategy has changed, if at all? And then what is process looking like for legacy customers who are only using a few tools? And how are those conversations going, especially because those customers might be paying a price that is lower than the Propel IQ pricing?

Yes. Neehal, thank you very much for asking that question. It's actually an important question. So one of the big deals about Propel IQ is the way we sell actually, right? So in the past, we sold sometimes bundled, but it was still kind of disjointed. And a lot of times, we sold, let's say, Wishpond's packages fully managed or [ sell separate ] from PersistIQ, separate from Brax, separate from all of those. And now we're selling -- increasingly, we're selling them as a bundle. In terms of go-to-market, what it means is that any new salesperson that we're adding, now we're training them and putting them on the floor for selling the bundled offering. And we have some salespeople still from before that are selling individual components. And some of them, we're migrating some of them. Some of them are going to continue selling it as is, and it might take a little bit longer to transition. So that's kind of what we're doing that so far seems to have worked quite well. It took us a few months to really nail exactly what would be the right way for people to talk about the bundled offering and position it. There are elements or there are certain circumstances where it makes sense for us to go to an existing customer and say, do you want to migrate to Propel IQ? But a lot of times, we might not do that if their thinking is, "Oh, I signed up for this specific need and this specific way of doing things, and I don't necessarily want to touch it." So not everyone is going to be migrated, but it's going to be more of customers we add from now on, increasingly more and more of them will be on Propel IQ.

Perfect. Thanks, Ali.

No problem. Jason?

AI has definitely captured the imagination of the market. I think it's still fairly misunderstood. Can you give some examples of how your AI tools would integrate and sort of how a customer can use that?

Well, fortunately, we're going to have a demo of one of our AI tools today. And I'm very excited to show you that. But in terms of background, if you think about it, your average small business owner doesn't have, let's say, designer or copywriter. They're not writers either, okay? So let's say if they want to build a new website, they typically have to go find someone and pay them, on the cheap side, $3,000, $4,000, sometime more, and wait 2, 3 months for that website to be prepared and a lot of back and forth. And then at the end of all of that, they still would be kind of at the mercy of that web developer for changes a lot of times or if they're using some self-serve interface [ algorithm ], for example, they're built for developers. So you're still very much stuck in certain rows and columns that they define, and it doesn't give you the predominant capabilities that you want. Now if only they had a designer that whenever they want it, they could actually say, "Just create these images for me." If only they had a copywriter that they could say, "Just write this content" or when the content is written, they could give feedback and say "Actually, change it like this." If only they have those things, except now with AI, you can. So it actually makes up for lack of resources in a lot of different areas. So one example of it that we're going to talk about today is AI-powered website builder. I won't talk more about it, not to spoil the element of surprise. But when we get to it, I'll talk about some other use cases as well.

Outstanding. Thank you.

No problem. Yes. So the next section of today's presentation, I'm very excited about, is going to be a demo of Propel IQ. Some of you might have seen elements of Wishpond in the past. Some of you might have heard descriptions of it, but never seen it in action. I'm very excited for you to have an opportunity to look at it and see it firsthand and think about it in terms of what it means to a specific customer and their use cases. And Trina has a ton of experience in the digital marketing space. In fact, actually she had experience with WordPress and some of the competitors and some of that. And Trina, maybe you can speak a word or two about the differences that you see between what you've seen in the past and Propel IQ and show us as everything else that you have that you want to cover today.

Myself off mute. Okay. thank you so much. Yes, one of the biggest differences that I see, just in terms of working with clients over the past and working with our system, is really what Ali was mentioning, is just having everything in one place. It is really a challenge for a lot of small business owners, who are trying to do so much themselves, to be trying to navigate all of these different systems and have them actually speak to each other. So I would say, the ease of use of our software, combined with it all being in one place is one of the biggest advantages that we are offering right now. So when we are working with a client on a demo, what we usually typically will go through is we want to, first of all, lay the foundation for the business. And so with laying the foundation, that's what Ali was speaking about, that we do take that first month just to set everything up for the client. Because a lot of times, it they do lack some of that knowledge in terms of what is the best copy for my e-mails, what is the best way to connect these programs, so we lay the foundation with the use of our graphic designers, our copywriting team and an onboarding specialist. After that, we do have ongoing tools for the client to use. They also have training materials, really easy-to-use videos that they can watch to understand the software and how to use it. And then if they do want those services that we talked about, they can go into the marketplace, where they can get services like SEO, like ads management, newsletter design and the like. So I'll just go through the different software now. So two of the main things that we focus on is making a better, optimized website that's going to be integrated with the rest of the marketing. So website isn't just some static brochure site like it would have been in the '90s. That website is actually an integral part of the marketing, has its own tracking, has its automation and is connected to everything. And then the other thing that we want to look at is growing a database full of prospective leads for your client. That is partly because of what Ali was speaking about that most people do take about 6 to 10 different touch points before they actually know and trust your business and are actually prepared to make that business decision to book an appointment with you or to make a purchase. And so we want to fill that database full of prospective clients that we can nurture and then convert. So talking about the website first, where we can find that -- Ali is going to go into the exciting new AI website builder. But first of all, what I'm going to go into is just Wishpond Central here. This is the all-in-one platform, where we can actually get to all of the different platforms under Propel IQ. And this is actually where the client can find their website. So during our onboarding process, we are actually designing the website for the client, so it isn't even something that they have to go in and try to navigate themselves, but it's going to be really easy to use when they do want to go in and make any kind of change on their website. So Wishpond Central here is where they're going to find their website, any of their campaigns such as landing pages, e-mail campaigns, those kind of things. We have several different industries here where they can actually find hundreds of different templates that they can use. They're easy to edit, and they can create other different types of campaigns to drive more leads into their business. We're going to go into the Spa & Massage because we're actually going to use the model of Jason's wife as an [ RMT ] for the sake of this demo. So we're going to go into the back end here, and this is where we're going to be able to edit the website. We're going to be able to find various different types of campaigns, landing pages from giveaways to consultation bookings, to photo contest. All of your e-mail automation, e-mail newsletters, pop-ups for your website, all of those are contained within this platform. And so I just want to show you just how simple it is to navigate the website builder. Once our team has designed the website -- it's incredibly simple. It's actually out of all of the website builders that I've ever used, Wishpond's-built website builder is the very easiest to navigate. So if you can move your mouse around the screen, you can point and click, you can actually edit your own website. So what's really nice is everything is what you see is what you get. These guidelines are going to show me sort of the safe places within what is going to be viewable on my screen above and below the fold, et cetera. If I want to make this logo bigger, for example, all I need to do is drag it. I can move it around the screen, I can fill the entire screen, if I want, move my text around. And if any of you have any experience at all of going into the back end of the website, it's usually quite complicated. And normally to move a logo around, it's something you need to go into the coding for. You've got to change the pixels in another editing program. So it's really, really simple for anyone to go in and edit their website. Let's just say, for example, someone wanted to add a video to the home page of their website. We can simply -- let's delete this image here, and we have various components that can be added to a website. So I'm actually going to scroll through these elements until I find video. I'll simply put in the URL of a YouTube video, and now I have a video on my screen. I can move the text around. And then one thing that Wishpond has kept in mind is that about 80% of people actually view a website on their mobile device. So we want to make sure that no matter what device you're viewing the websites on, you don't need to have prior coding knowledge to make sure that it is viewable on those devices. We can simply, with the click of one button, see what it's going to look like on various devices. And then what you notice is that the layout has changed a little bit because I was editing for desktop. So I'm simply going to click one button to optimize that page layout. So now it is optimized for a mobile device. We can do A/B testing so that we can see if we're going to get better conversions on this page, if we have a video or without the video, for example. If I go back here, we can actually just click the preview button to see what exactly it's going to look like once that website is live. So a really nice, simple, easy-to-use interface there. Now the nice thing about the website, as I was mentioning, it's not just a static brochure site. It's actually integrated with the rest of the marketing. And so what I mean here is that we can actually view the entire customer journey on the websites we build throughout the different platforms. So let's just say, for example, this lead has come to the website at some point. We don't know who they are. And then at another point in time, they actually come and they fill out a web form. Now when they come and fill out that web form, all of their information is going to be synced with their prior visits on the page so that now we can view that entire customer journey through the website, so we can see which pages they viewed on the website, have they watched the video, have they placed an order, have they made an appointment to book for message, for example. So we can see their appointments in here. We can see their entire profile, anything that they filled out on the web form. And let's just say, for example, as an [ RMT ], you have a new service that you're offering. It's a brand-new service that you really want to educate your clients on. And so you've built a new page on your website on that service, and there's a video on there. We could even create some automation on the website that if someone has gone to that page, they watched the video, we could have a pop-up that asked them if they would like more information. They could be sent into what we call one of our smart lists, and then they could receive automation that gives them additional information on that video that they just watched on service. And then from there, that automation can encourage them to then book an appointment. So it really becomes an integral part of that marketing, that customer journey. So now when people are going to the website, one thing that we do want to keep in mind as well is if they're performing, say, a Google search, and they've gotten to your website. 98 out of 100 people who visit a website, will stay on the website no longer than 6 seconds. So if we have even paid to have our search at the top of Google or we've paid Facebook to have that customer go over to the website, and they have landed on the website only to leave, if we have no way to capture their information, chances are next time they perform a Google search, they could land on the competition. So we want to make sure that we're actually capturing their information, and we're starting to go through that nurturing process until they are comfortable booking that appointment with you. So let's just say they have landed on this page of the website. They're looking at the different services, massage therapy here, the tissue relaxation. But now something has distracted them, and they go to leave. Right now, as I go to leave, you see my mouse is leaving the page, and there's nothing to stop me to ask for my contact and information. So now you could have very well lost me as a customer after putting in the effort to SEO or into Google ads or however it is that you got the customer on that page. So let's just say, for an example, if we can all just use our imagination that this is the same website that we're on. And instead, they're looking through all of those different message services, but this time, as their mouse goes to leave the page, now we have some sort of incentive to actually capture their information. So this could be book your free consultation or perhaps it's get 10% off your first massage, some sort of exchange of value for their customer information. And then once we have that customer information, we're now able to actually start that nurturing process to turn them into a customer. So we could follow that up with e-mail. We can follow that up with SMS to make sure that our name becomes top of mind when they are thinking of booking a massage. Likewise, Jason had mentioned that his wife is looking at putting some different wellness products on our website. So let's say, there are some massage oils on the website, a customer goes to the website, they put the massage oil in their shopping cart, they leave their shopping cart. In fact, this happens out of every 10 shopping carts that are -- have an item placed in them, 7 people will abandon those shopping carts. So how are we recovering those customers? We can set up abandoned shopping cart campaigns through e-mail and through SMS so that when someone goes to put something in their cart, they leave, now you get that text message, you get that e-mail to follow you up, bring you back to the website. And for part of those, we will use our Wishpond Central, and we will create our e-mail automation so that we can combine the powerful use of e-mail as well as text messaging to ensure that, that customer comes back to you. The other tool we use is our Winback software. And so with our Winback software, I'll just go into, first of all, our cart abandons, there are several different things we can do in Winback. But if the customer were to abandon their shopping cart, then the next day, we can have a message going out to them, do you still want your product? Click here to get it. And now instead of having to perform a Google search, navigate through your website, they're simply taken right to the shopping cart where they can check out. If they didn't act on that very first message, then the next day, they can get a second message and we can send out a third message and so on. This actually just worked on me the other day with a product that I purchased and it was the second message that got me. So in addition to the cart abandons, we can do browser abandons. So if someone goes to the website, they go to leave without even putting something in their shopping cart and now we can send out a series of text messages to them. We can create upsells. So if they purchase, say, a certain massage oil, maybe there is a warming cream that goes really nicely with it, and we can send them a text message later, would you like the warming cream to go with your massage oil? And say that massage oil is out of stock. We can now send out an alert when that item is back in stock. We can check all of our different messages in our inbox from our different clients and various other campaigns that we could put on here. We could have a Massage Monday where they can book their massage and they get an extra 15 minutes to that message. Here, I'm in the dashboard actually of 1 of our current clients, and this is showing the last 30 days, and this is the additional revenue here that they have just recuperated on their website that otherwise would have been lost had this not been installed on their website. So you can see this is a really valuable tool in order to recuperate the revenue that could have been lost, had the person just left the website and not completed their purchase. And so going back to the diagram, the other important piece that we had talked about was referral marketing. And this is essentially just word of mouth on steroids. And so for that, in Propel IQ, we include our Viral Loops software, where we can create a number of different types of referral campaigns. One of the ones that we could use, in particular for an RMT would be a refer-a-friend campaign. And so I'm just going to go into here. So with the refer-a-friend campaign, what we can do is someone can sign up to become a referrer. They put in their name and their e-mail and they get a unique referral link that they can now share to their friends. And let's just say whenever their friend books a massage, their friend gets $10 off and then they also get $10 off their next massage. So now you can really take that word of mouth and start to encourage people to be telling their friends, their family about it and bring more customers to you. And then we are going to talk about just building up that database. So one of the things that we like to do to help to fill that database with prospective clients is to create landing pages again within Wishpond Central. And so with a landing page, the reason why we would use a landing page is they tend to have a better conversion rate than going straight over to the website. The reason for that is a landing page is very specific in its call to action, where a website, there's a menu bar, there's distractions. With a landing page, we're just going to go into Wishpond Central again, a landing page is very specific in terms of what we want a client to do. So for instance, here, I'm going to create a landing page for booking a deep tissue message. And again, all of the different landing pages, e-mail campaigns, all of those are the same easy-to-use software. And so here, if we wanted to create a landing page to encourage people to book a deep tissue massage, you can see there's just 1 call to action. We want them to contact us for that massage. So we're going to get a much higher conversion rate on this landing page. Now on this one, we actually have a phone number that they can call to book. If they were to call, we can actually have that phone number tracked, and we can do that in our EverGenius software. This is the CRM portion of PROPEL IQ. And in the CRM, we can actually see who is currently a prospect, who we've had a consult with, who's booked their massage, et cetera, and we can go into the call records, and we can actually see who has clicked that number, who's called and we can begin to track how effective that landing page actually is. Now let's say that they booked that consultation, and we want to make sure that they're going to actually arrive and show up for that massage, so now we can actually create funnels where we send out SMS records to remind them about the massage, maybe we want to remind them 2 days ahead of time, maybe the day before or 2 hours before their massage, the customer can actually reply, and we can now -- if we were to actually click on 1 of these messages, we can view the client who's actually booked. We can look at the entire conversation, maybe send an SMS back if they made an inquiry, maybe they texted back and said I have to change that, the time of the booking, and we can send an SMS back to them, we can create some customer notes, et cetera. Now in this CRM, we can also see opportunities. So we can see when someone has perhaps filled out a form for a consultation, have they actually become a client. We could book their appointment in here. We could also see the analytics of the website. So lots of different things that we can do in the CRM software. And then with the landing page, we can also do other things besides booking a consultation, we could have enter to win 1 free massage just to fill up that database full of prospects. And perhaps those are really cold leads who aren't quite sure they want to convert yet, they're not sure if a massage is right for them. We could then use Wishpond Central's e-mail marketing to send an e-mail drip campaign to make sure that we are nurturing them. And each of those campaigns could then have a booking link into that CRM to book that appointment, to which, of course, if they book that appointment, now we're going to send out those reminders to them again to just make sure that they do show up for that appointment. So it really is an all-in-one system where all of those different components are pulled together, set up for the client. And then just like Ali mentioned in the beginning, it's going to create that self-sustaining growth wheel to attract, collect customer data, to nurture them and then, of course, to use them as a referral base to attract others.

I was curious how you find users, take advantage of all these tools. And at what point does the self-managed marketing become a white-glove service that Wishpond is helping people. Maybe it's different for every customer, but I'm just curious how advanced people take this on their own because it seems like the analytics can get pretty deep into the marketing know-how.

Yes. That's really going to depend a lot on each of the clients, and we really do see a range. So we do see some entrepreneurs that are just in the early stages of their business. This is really great because they may not even understand all of the different components that they need. But by building that out for them, providing the training videos, and often those early businesses are going to use those additional services that we offer just to really get them started. But we also do see some larger businesses who perhaps might have a marketing team but do need all of the systems put in place for them. And then they do want to dive deeper into those things. Maybe they've had some of these different pieces set up in different platforms, but they do want it all in one, so everything is integrated. And then they really do want those additional automations and they want to drive a lot deeper. So yes, it really is a range that we see here.

And I think Trina already touched on this, but the important part is that everything you saw is how large businesses already set up their marketing. And it would be kind of difficult even with easy-to-use software that we have for someone to pick it all up and make it successful on their own, that's why onboarding is there, right? In the onboarding, we set all of this up. And after that, a lot of it, even if they just leave it and let it run passively we'll be much, much better place than they started with us.

And maybe just a follow-up to that, Ali, from the current customer base as it stands with an all-in-one platform, is there a lot of opportunity to get people using different aspects of the pipeline that they may not know how to use or just may not be familiar with at this stage because they may have been an older customer that started with 1 product. If you could just expand on that a little bit?

Yes. There's definitely a lot of opportunities there. I think we're still in the early stages. We haven't really taken advantage of those necessarily upsell opportunities or cross-sell opportunities and moving them. So it will be something that in the coming months, we would actually more actively look at. Thank you, Daniel. Jason.

And thanks for giving the example of RMT. I've been by my wife's side for a long time going through all these issues with trying to market online. What I wanted to know, more of a sales question is if I've got a brand-new business and I see this presentation I'm like I'm in, how do you convince somebody that already has maybe 60% of this through various different other software. I mean, to actually go from what you're using to something brand new, it seems like a big lift for a lot of small businesses. How do you make that transition easier for these small to medium-sized businesses?

I'd say a large part of that is our onboarding process. So for example, the other day, I actually got on a call with a woman who did take a bunch of online classes herself. So she tried to set up her own landing page, she did set up some e-mail marketing, she set up all of these different things. So as I was going through discovery, I'm making these mental notes. Okay, she actually already has all of these different things. So where do we touch on these? Those things that she had set up weren't working for her. And so I had to look at, well, what wasn't working. Maybe it was -- part of it was the copywriting. Part of it was the systems weren't actually speaking to each other. The systems weren't connected. So she couldn't actually watch where that customer journey was maybe breaking or maybe it wasn't unfolding the way it should have. Maybe there was kind of a hole in it. And so by bringing someone through our onboarding process -- we do have a team of experts who they've done enough testing over the years. They understand what should those welcome e-mails look like? What's going to get the most click-throughs, the most actions? What is more compelling on a landing page? And they can connect all of the systems for you and then provide the training on how to use those as well. So where that may seem like, "oh, this is a lost sale before I even get there." I actually just closed the deal the other day. So it really does make sense even to someone who's already using all of these things.

And the other thing I would also add to that is I think, Jason, not only would we help with that migration, so the person doesn't have to worry about it. But also if someone says, "listen, I love my website. I just paid a whole bunch of money to redesign and I don't want to touch that." It's no problem. We're not rigid in the offering. So we can say, "all right, we'll work with what you have. You want to continue using Mailchimp for sending e-mails and keep your existing website. We'll do everything else Wishpond has, around that. It's not a problem." And then over time, they might say, "all right. Maybe I'll move this over as well. Maybe it's just easier that way." And with a lot of those things, we have integrations to those external systems anyway. So it's not going to be a problem.

Yes. So I especially like your -- the page that actually showed the extra revenue that you get from using your tools because that's -- it almost speaks to it will pay for itself regardless of how much it takes to change over. It's going to -- the payback is going to be quick.

Okay. Any other questions? Neehal?

Yes, just a quick question. I want to understand how customers engage with their tools once the onboarding process is completed, are you seeing more customers tweak with their landing pages, website design, et cetera, as they get comfortable and see more success on platform? Or is it pretty much plug and play? Because I'd imagine that those that are more in tune with all the tools they have and all that optionality that Wishpond provides the retention rates for those customers will be vastly higher, right?

Yes, Trina you want to take that?

Yes. Again, it's a range of customers. So there are some customers who -- they're -- they've got a little Shopify store as a side hustle and they just need some automation to make sure that, "hey, when I put up that video on TikTok and now I have a Linktree page the company made for me and is driving people to my landing page, now I'm actually starting to get conversions." Shopping carts that are abandoned are actually all automated so that it's bringing customers back and completing those purchases that I would have lost otherwise. So some just leave it on autopilot and it's still going to increase the number of conversions they have. But then I've also worked with a man who does contract work for several different clients, and he actively goes in, and he'll change out a landing page. Sometimes he'll say, "hey, I need you guys to just do some of the work for me." So again, there is a real range and that is what's nice about the program is that it is very versatile.

Perfect. And then I guess for larger customers, do you try and actively promote the fact that the platform has all these different tools. So maybe keep in touch with them a little bit more in terms of frequency than some of the smaller guys who may not need all the complexities that Wishpond provides?

It's really a wide range. It depends on what they are using us for. We try to -- even after the onboarding, we try to keep in touch with them at least on a monthly basis. A lot of times also because that onboarding specialist, someone from that team would want to make sure, "okay, now that you're on your own, are you okay, do you need any help? And also I looked around, and these are some of the opportunities that you can take advantage of." So we try to do that as well. And then the sales team also has their own frequency of checking up on clients to see they're doing well. And, in all honesty, it's also win-win is, sometimes there are extra services that would help them and it also is an upsell opportunity for us. And because of that, definitely, there's that extra hand that is given when it's necessary.

Perfect.

No problem. Okay. I think we're good for here. Trina really appreciated. I think it's wonderful to be able to imagine and see all the words that maybe people have heard about Wishpond in the past and what exactly actually is intangible way. Thank you very much for that.

You're welcome.

Okay. So now let's talk about our acquisition strategy briefly. If you go to the next slide, over the past 2 years and 3 months or so, since we went public, we've made 5 acquisitions. And a lot of them you saw Trina actually touch on. So EverGenius was the software that we got through invigoMEDIA that was a CRM capability and the call-tracking and appointment booking. PersistIQ, we're going to actually talk about more, it's for outbound sales and is targeted towards B2B businesses mostly. Brax for ad management, Winback for SMS marketing, Viral Loops for referral marketing. So the elements that have been key in our acquisition strategy have been -- these are all products that add tremendous amount of new functionality to the platform and make it a lot more competitive and allow us to win these businesses that maybe in the past was more difficult. And now with Propel IQ you have a more sticky offering program. These acquisitions also have increased our revenues in a number of customers. We've also looked at them to make sure that the companies we acquire are high-margin businesses with at least 60% gross margin. All of them EBITDA positive and cash flow positive, in the previous slide, for example, you saw 15% to 20% EBITDA margin over all the 5 acquisitions. And we didn't overpay for any of these acquisitions anywhere from 1.1x multiple [indiscernible] 2.9 on the higher end of it. And we couldn't be happier with the acquisitions we've made. They've helped quite a bit strategically as well as financially. And PersistIQ and Brax have been the most impactful acquisitions that we've made and really helped elevate the company and broaden the customer base that we can go after, increase our revenue and the prospect for the business. So with that, I'd like to welcome Nick Steeves to speak to us about PersistIQ. A little bit about Nick. Nick is one of the original founding members of the team. We've worked together since the early days when Wishpond was significantly smaller than it is right now. And Nick was our Chief Product Officer in charge of a lot of the great things from Wishpond product that you see. And later after we made the PersistIQ acquisition, we thought he would be the perfect guy to -- the General Manager of PersistIQ, and he's done a fantastic job with PersistIQ. So with that, I'll pass it to Nick.

Thanks a lot, Ali. Hi, everyone. Jump to the next slide, please. Awesome. Yes. So to give an overview on Persist. So PersistIQ is an all-in-one sales automation platform, really designed for B2B companies to run multichannel sales outreach campaigns using e-mail, phone and LinkedIn primarily. And it enables them to target prospects that really match their ideal customer profile, with the goal of starting conversations, booking sales meetings with them and building a repeatable sales pipeline. And this strategy is commonly known as outbound sales, in which you're going out and you're reaching out to your target customers instead of trying to pull them in through inbound marketing. And the PersistIQ platform, it enables you to execute every aspect of your outbound sales strategy from building prospect lists with verified contact information, running personalized outreach at scale. So basically being able to create campaigns where you're reaching out to thousands of prospects where each of the e-mails are personalized and look like they're really just sent from my e-mail inbox to you, one-on-one instead of one to thousands. It allows you to automate all those follow-ups so you can create multistep, multitouch campaigns without having to manually e-mail at every single one. The process is actually just done for you by the software. And one of the really big things is that it will sync with your CRM. So if you use something like Salesforce or Copper or Pipedrive or HubSpot, the integration with PersistIQ is going to basically sync all the activities that are happening in there. So everything is going to be added to your system of record throughout the rest of the sales cycle. Next slide. And yes, PersistIQ and Wishpond, they really work hand in hand to provide a complete sales and marketing solution. So on the one hand of Wishpond is primarily built for inbound marketing, which is really kind of like pulling customers in with ads, SEO, forms on your website to download ebooks and all that kind of thing, as well as being able to do more mass marketing using the market [ automation ] platform, which allows us to do things like trigger e-mails with different types of content to nurture many leads into customers. Whereas on the PersistIQ side, again, as I mentioned before, it's primarily for outbound marketing or outbound sales, in which really you're going out to reach out to our target customers and try and pull them in through inbound marketing. And the sales automation platform, again, it really allows you to personalize auto sales outreach to look one to one instead of like one to many through the type of traditional promotional e-mail that many of you I'm sure are used to getting. And together, they enable our customers to grow using some really powerful synergies. So 1 example is that if you're doing inbound marketing with Wishpond, and you're driving customers to your website to downloading ebooks, maybe on your blog, what you can do with Wishpond is you can actually identify really high-value leads. So doing things like lead scoring to understand, "okay, these people are at companies or they're prospects with budgets that are really in line with the product that I'm selling." And then I can actually say, "okay, I want to take that person. And I want to use a more personal approach. " So you can take it from Wishpond, pass it to PersistIQ, and have a personalized outreach campaign directly from a sales rep that gives that person the attention that they need because they're such high value. And then it also allows you to really reach all buyer personas. So like on the one hand, with inbound marketing, you can be reaching buyers who are already searching for your solution. They know they have a pain point they're really looking for something like you on, let's say, Google or through an influencer on social media, and they have an idea in mind and that allows you to be in front of those people. However, there's lots of other tech of buyers who they may have a pain point, but they might not be so educated on the solution or even realize that it is such a problem for their business. And so with outbound sales, you can actually reach out to those people that you know have this issue or you know are fit to your product, but are not actively looking at it at this moment. And finally, it really allows you to compete in all markets. So as we talked a lot about in this presentation, our focus is really around SMBs and a lot of markets are dominated by these big players in such a way that SMBs, they're really not able to compete with their budget and resources, especially in terms of like online ads, SEO and content marketing. And for those businesses who aren't able to compete in that arena, they can go directly to the target customers using sales outreach and hit them up directly inside their e-mail inbox or on their phone and bypass all the clutter that's in the marketing space. And then on the other hand -- oh, sorry, I've got one more point on that one. But on the other hand, there are a lot of markets made up of buyers that are really averse to the direct outreach style that PersistIQ enables, one such is technical engineers. And those folks, they do want to be able to search and find their own solutions and pain points, which is really ideal for inbound marketing and where Wishpond is the right solution. Next slide. Awesome. Yes. So I want to share with you a case study of 1 of PersistIQ's clients MakeMine. So MakeMine, they work with consumer goods brands and where they come in is where they really build and manage their entire supply chain to allow them to provide 3PL services and fulfillment for any brands that are doing sales inside of the United States. MakeMine, they came to PersistIQ, and they've been utilizing our fully managed outbound sales solution, where we're using our software platform and then our copyrighting team and our account management team are actually running the sales outreach campaigns on their behalf to book meetings, also using our sales development rep service. And they've gotten really fantastic results. So in the time they've been with us, we've been able to generate more than $1 million in sales pipeline in book them more than 200 meetings with their targeted prospects. Next slide, awesome. And since the acquisition in March '21, we've been contributing to Wishpond's revenue growth. We've developed a really scalable outbound sales model for ourselves, piggybacking off of the original outbound model, pioneered by Wishpond. We've done a really vast integration with the Propel IQ platform that [ trained demo ], so you can be able to utilize Wishpond and PersistIQ and all the other tools all in one, without having to log in or search between different platforms. We've built a really great cross-selling integration with the Wishpond sales team. So any time that a Wishpond prospect comes in, our sales team identifies that they're B2B or they have a need for sales outreach. They're really easily able to come in with our sales enablement side to sell PersistIQ to those folks as well. And in terms of our most recent product releases, we released our phone dialer to enable more power dialing for a much more expansive campaign directly inside of the platform as opposed to having to dial on your phone, which is very time consuming. We've released semantic reply analytics. And basically, what this means is being able to look at the types of replies that you're getting from the campaigns and not just say, "Oh, I'm getting lots of replies," but what is actually the intent for the response type that these people are replying with, whether that be positive, neutral or negative, which really helps you to understand how well each of the variations or the different types of copy in your campaign are performing the best. And then also on the analytics side, we've introduced multi-thread analytics, which allow us to do really a lot of advanced A/B testing and multivariate testing through like a multistep campaign where you have different variations and different steps to see which kind of thread or which journey is really performing the best. And we've also recently introduced multi-mailbox campaigns where if you really are a power user and you want to be sending out a lot of e-mails to a lot of folks. You can be able to kind of line up and sequence maybe a few dozen e-mail inboxes that are going to allow you to kind of power through that campaign more quickly. And in terms of the future, I think 2023 is going to be a watershed year for PersistIQ. We're going to continue to invest in our sales and marketing efforts, and I expect to significantly grow revenue in '23. We've already had a great Q1 so far. And as we've kind of talked about already throughout this presentation, AI is going to play a big part in terms of our new product releases in terms of building out, for one thing, email AI copywriter, which PersistIQ is going to be really uniquely positioned to do in the market. There -- if you quickly do a quick search on the market, there's lots of tools out there that purport to be full e-mail copywriting tools, but with PersistIQ's vast source of data in terms of the types of copy that really works for different audiences, we have a huge advantage there. And then also the next one is our e-mail AI assistant and sales productivity tools. So being able to take a lot of the grunt work that sales reps do day in, day out and really automate that with AI, for example, being able to see, okay, an e-mail comes into a sales rep's inbox from a prospect, the AI can read the e-mail thread, understand exactly what that prospect is interested in, be able to have read all of the e-mails from that sales rep in the past to understand exactly what they want to say in different types of situations, what kind of tone they like to use and then be able to give them an automatic response that the sales rep can just say, "yes, I want to send this response." They don't have to type it out. They don't have to think about it. The AI does at all for them. And now I can open up for questions.

I ask one question. Maybe on PersistIQ, but about the platform as well. Do you think your customers separately between the customers who are B2C or those who are B2B? Are you building parts of the platform to cater to those different customers? Or are you trying to build one platform that can serve both types of customers equally?

Sure. So I think the really powerful thing about this is that our platform is very modular, so it can serve different segments of the marketplace. So the PersistIQ platform, it is really geared to B2B. So if you're a B2C, you have a Shopify store, it might not be for you, but that's okay. The platform is really so feature-rich that it will still be able to support you with the different modules that are more specific for your business.

Yes, I would have the same answer as well. Not everyone necessary needs to use exactly the same functionalities. Maybe out of 6 different tools that we have, they would use 5 of them, or maybe they don't -- in the case of the B2B, maybe Winback that is SMS for e-commerce doesn't work for them, but Persist really works for them. And then someone else that is e-commerce, unless they also do wholesale, they might not need to use Persist, but they might need to use other things.

It's more of a broad business question on [ cross-sell ]. And PersistIQ came in with the base of near 1,000 customers before becoming part of the Wishpond platform. But are there ways you identify some of PersistIQ's customers and think the Wishpond full suite would be a perfect fit for them and that -- to have some of the cross-sell and upsell efforts is there waiting segments and targets of existing customers or is most visible path forward?

I would say it's a combination of both. I mean we're able to look at a lot of our customers and identify different needs because even if you are B2B and you're doing sales outreach, you're going to still need a best-in-class website. You're going to still need e-mail marketing, pop-ups, ads, SEO and that kind of thing. So we do have quite a sophisticated inside sales team that's able to identify different types of customers and their segments to be able to say, "okay, these might be different types of solutions that we can offer them." We'll maybe try and start them up to 1 that we think is going to be the strongest, build on that success, and then once they're kind of running, then start to offer them the different solutions in our suite.

Thank you very much, Nick. Really appreciate it. Okay. I think we can move on to the next part. So here, now I'm going to invite Kevin to join us and talk about Brax. Brax is another 1 of our really impactful acquisitions that we made in the ad management space. And Kevin has been one of the greats that I've had the pleasure of working with within Wishpond before we acquired Brax. He served many roles and most recently before moving on to Brax, he was our VP Marketing and Sales and really did a fantastic job. And since moving to Brax he's also continued to do really impactful and solid job with Brax. With that, I'll pass it on to Kevin to walk us through Brax.

Awesome. Thanks Ali. All right. Awesome. So yes, my name is Kevin. I'm the General Manager of Brax. If you go to the next slide there. Brax is essentially -- our goal is helping businesses get better return on investment from their ads. Our ethos is that when you spend $1 online, you should make that dollar back and more, which sounds simple, but with a lot of different advertising these days, boosted posts, things for engagement, that's actually not always the case. And a lot of times we talk to customers, and that just isn't the case. So at Brax, we really focus on how do we get better return on investment and that super key, especially these days as people are scaling back and looking at what are the most impactful channels that they can spend their marketing dollars on. So the first thing that we basically have as part of the Brax platform is our all-in-one, I guess, platform focus. So what that means is that all the different ad networks that you would be showing up on, you can integrate with Brax and see them all in one place, right? So that's important so that you can see which platforms are you getting the best conversions from, which sites, which ads, you can compare them one to one, and that really helps analyze the data, so you can figure out which campaigns you should spend more money on, which ones you should spend less money on all that kind of stuff. Another important part of this is that we're able to pull in revenue from external sources as well. So for instance, if you are a -- we work with a lot of hearing -- for instance, a hearing aid clinic and maybe they want to track people that actually go in and get an appointment to get fitted for a hearing aid. It's important for us to be able to attribute the click from the ad to the landing page to their actual in person in clinic. With Brax, we're able to upload data via our API or you can basically import whenever you'd like, data and be able to see a full scope of when I spent this money on this advertising, I was able to see a return on investment later down in the funnel at this clinic that the person went to. Other products that we have are our universal ads builders. So that's piggybacking off the kind of all-in-one concept. One thing about online advertising, you might launch an ad and it works really well on 1 network, and then you want to scale that across a different network, well, in order to do that, you would need to recreate that ad, you need to recreate that copy and launch it again. With Brax, when you're creating an ad, you're going to create it essentially once and you can size it for 4, 5, 6, 7 different networks all at once and essentially publish it across different networks. If you see that there's a winner and there's something that's working, we're able to duplicate it and scale it so it just really allows for really quick workflows, fast testing and all that kind of stuff. Another one of our products, and this is actually probably the core of our products in terms of why people actually use us day-to-day is our ad automation and Rule engine. So there's a lot of intricacies and nuances when it comes to actually running large-scale ad campaigns, things, including like if an ad is not performing well, obviously, I don't want to keep running it. Maybe your ad performance is better on certain times of the week. So maybe Monday to Friday works better. I'll give you an example, for instance, we see people -- desktop, if who're running a campaign that's targeting people on their desktop computers, Monday to Friday that actually might perform better, but maybe on the weekends, less people are by their computers. So that might not do as well. So with Brax, you can set rules to say I want to pause that desktop campaign on Saturdays and Sundays. So that would be 1 of the examples of that. We have a power editor, which essentially allows customers to make changes across thousands of campaigns all at once to update bids, to do a number of different things and really just helps to get a lot more efficiency out of the things that they're doing. And the most recent release, which we're really excited about is called Braxy, which essentially takes a lot of the power that I'm talking about in terms of automation and pausing campaigns that are not working and automatically setting up new ads and brings that power to Google ads. So we've essentially created an all-in-one solution called Braxy, which allows people to create an ad once. So we sit down with them, we'll basically let them choose their targeting, like what city do you want to show up at? What are the key words you want to show up for? Who are your competitors? It sets it up once Braxy will automatically create new ad variations, will block the areas that aren't working well, will start targeting different competitors in a way that's cost efficient. And essentially, what happens is that people are able to log in, update the budget themselves. It's a DIY tool, but super easy. They don't really need to do anything outside of the setup, which is great to see. Next slide. Our business model, the majority of our revenue is subscription based. So we have different pricing tiers depending on how much you're spending. So if you see on the right there, starts at $199 a month, and that gives you up to a certain amount of ad spend. So the great thing about that is that, when people are starting out, they can get in and start to use Brax very affordably. But as they get more value from the platform, the price increases as well. So it's really value-based, and we see a lot of people moving through these tiers as they start spending more, which is great to see as the Rule and as some of the different ad publishing tools start to help them in their efficiencies. We've also rolled out a fully managed program. So we've been getting people saying things like "I don't want to launch this at, I want to set up these types of campaigns, but I don't necessarily have in-house expertise or I don't have the time to do it or the know-how." So we've essentially been able to take a lot of that on for them to say "we'll actually set up an account with the ad networks for you. We will help set up the landing page, to set up the tracking, do the copy, set up campaigns that convert and essentially help you with the whole process." And people have been very happy about that. Because again, there's, in certain cases, a big knowledge gap or they don't have the time. So those packages start at $500, but obviously scale up depending on what the scope of work that they're looking for is. Next slide. In terms of the different companies that use us, so here's a couple of different examples. Tommy Chong CBD, these guys spend hundreds of thousands of dollars across different ad networks a month. They've been using Brax for years and have had great success in terms of saving them a ton of time and making sure that their campaigns are profitable. So at any given time, they might be showing up on 1,000 different websites that are showing their different ads, and they need to be able to update bids in real time to say if a site isn't giving me good performance, if ads aren't getting enough clicks, I want to automatically pause and want to automatically block sites. So they've been using us. We have a great relationship with their team, and they look at Brax as 1 of the core foundations of their advertising strategy, which is essentially a core part of their entire brand when it comes to their go-to-market strategy. Another example is Professional Drone Services. So this is a drone service that's based in Texas. One interesting thing about them. So on the Tommy Chong side, we have a company that's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on advertising. And on the right side, Professional Drone Services, we have a company spending $1,000 a month on advertising. So this is a company that really couldn't afford to pay the fees for a managed service or an agency that just wouldn't be feasible based on the type of ad spend that they have. Using Braxy, which is $250 a month, they're able to leverage the power of AI to create new ads, to make sure that they're showing up at times throughout the day that are working, to target the specific locations that their clients are at and they've seen a huge increase in website traffic. Their costs have gone down and they're super happy with the results because of the fact that it's probably, in my opinion, the most cost-effective solution they would be able to find anywhere. Next slide, please. So some of the milestones since the acquisition, so we've been contributing to Wishpond's revenue growth continually, and we'll continue to do so. We released the universal ads builder. So again, just being able to launch and build ads in one place and scale them across different networks. We've had great feedback from our clients who have really been able to save a ton of time doing that and been able to scale a lot more, which in turn increases their ad spend and can move them in the higher -- in the tiers of our pricing model, which is great to see. We have released a few different integrations, our MGID integration, which is another ad network. We've also released our integration with Yahoo! DSP last quarter. We released Braxy, again, that's just really simplifying the whole Google Ads process and making it super affordable for small to medium-sized businesses, especially people that maybe wouldn't be able to afford agencies or that do need a little bit more management. We are seeing a really good opportunity as well for cross-sell, so people that would be using Propel IQ, and the Wishpond base that make necessary -- maybe they're getting set up with a landing page, and maybe they want a plug-and-play solution that can help them find more customers locally or online, Braxy is a naturally good upsell and cross-sell in that case. And we're working with our account executives on bringing that to more of the people within the Wishpond base, which is probably one of the main actions that we're working on at least moving into the next quarter. Anyone have any questions?

Yes. It's funny, I'm from the era when advertising spend was you spend money and you have no idea whether it's working or not. So it's amazing how much it's come along over the last number of years. But my question is, just in terms of the various packages, just wondering what's the most popular? Where is your sweet spot? Are you dealing more with larger corporations or this -- you've got this SME focus at Wishpond? How -- where is enough scale where do you find the most traction?

Yes. Great question. I would say in terms of the actual platform itself. People that are coming in are probably in between the $499 to $1499 plans. So they're spending up to $50,000 or up to $250,000 a month on advertising. So it's definitely a little bit on the larger side. I would say the smaller customers, the customers that are kind of just getting their feet wet with advertising tend to steer towards a fully managed program, in which case we can then help them get ramped up and then get them to the point when they would be on a higher tier subscription plan. But I would say that, yes, it's definitely larger advertisers that we're working with at least on the Brax side.

Yes. No, that's great that it works on all levels.

Daniel?

My question was around product. It sounds like you added a lot since the acquisition and you kind of reaping the benefits, but the space is moving so fast. So I'm curious if there's any ambition to -- we've seen this around retail, around connected TV, where do those areas fit in with your longer-term product strategy for social, for example? Just how broad does the offering go?

Yes, great question. So there's opportunity, as you mentioned, all around. One of the nice things is that the different ad networks that we integrate with, they are constantly adding new ad placements. So for instance, video might be one, right, that they'll add and we can actually add that into Brax and then have exposure to a number of different placements across the networks that basically we integrate with. But yes, there's tons of opportunity. I would say we tend to look at where our majority of our customers are actually spending online and what the activities that they're doing, and we basically drive our product strategy based on that just in terms of would have the most value, what's immediately going to add spend through their accounts, and we talk to our clients constantly and we're able to get a good sense of that.

All right. Moving on. Thank you very much, Kevin. Really appreciate it. So now we're going to talk about the AI. Some of the questions were related to that, and I'm excited that we're going to also see a demo of our AI builder shortly. Coming to the next slide. So a high level of it, as I alluded to it earlier, when you think about small businesses and large businesses, everyone is going to be trying their hardest to see what is the impact of AI in their customer acquisition, all aspects of business really, but as it applies to us, customer acquisition. And larger businesses can do that more effectively, what we do right now is democratizing AI for SMBs. And do the innovation on their behalf and make it really accessible and easy to use for them. And also the places that they have not enough resources or not enough financial help, we innovate with AI to bring those costs down and give them more capability. So AI for ad delivery Brax.io, Kevin just talked about that, that was launched in December. And that has been very valuable. It's just helpful for them. It's something that they don't have to hire agencies for, and they can manage on their own and it optimizes over time. The other one that I'm going to show you shortly is going to be our AI-powered website builder, and it's very exciting, helps SMB clients and all clients really tremendously, and other ones we're going to also work on. And in Q2, we're going to release this AI-powered e-mail responder that Nick talked about that I receive e-mails or a salesperson who receives e-mails. And AI can actually draft a response based on everything is learnt from your Inbox. And you look at that, 9 out of 10 times, you say it's good percent. And if you want to make a change, you edit it a present -- is a huge productivity tool for everyone, especially, again, small businesses that don't have their SDRs. And as they start doing outbound outreach, they don't want to be inundated with all of these responses that counter their way and takes a lot of their time. Other areas, potential areas for future development. There might be other things we do with AI. Some of these things we might do on AI, but I think it's to give some ideas are imagine you want to send a marketing newsletter. And again, you're not a copyrighter. You don't know what the best copy is going to be. Maybe you're even more of a English as a second language business owner or whatever the case may be or you're having a bit of a creative log, you can then tell AI, "Hey, I want a newsletter with these parameters." It asks you 2, 3 questions and then generates the content for you. You're not happy with that, you say, give me another one, and then you make some edits and off you go. So something that a lot of business owners find quite onerous and difficult, and they don't do enough of it is file communication through those newsletters. Now with AI, they have more of that capability, generate new leads, doing background research on them and summary of this -- everything we know about Jason, who's a lead here. We know all the text massages he sent us. We know the e-mails that we've sent, and he has opened. We know his history of browsing the website. We know the products he purchased. And before the salesperson wants to talk to Jason, here is a summary you need to know. And that summary can come from AI, that research can come from AI, pulling from all the data that we have across Propel IQ. Website or e-mail or SMS personalization could be another one. So imagine I go to the website and knowing a little bit about me, the website is going to look different from when Kevin comes to the website. And some of those are also opportunities that can come in the future that make things a lot more powerful and improve retention and conversion of the traffic that you get. Promotional videos generated by AI is another potential opportunity for us as well. There's a lot of different ones. But our whole idea here is there are some really smart AI use cases that we can bring to market now and for clients to get value from right now as some of them we've already done in the back office for our own business, and we know the impact of them to our business and then we can productize. So I think next slide is the demo. All right. So I'm very excited to show you our AI-powered website builder. So earlier, you saw the demo by Trina from our website builder without AI that you can very easily make changes. But still, when you start, you have to pick one of the templates that we have. And let's say, you have a business that is not a restaurant, or it might be, but this is a template that you really like. So normally, when you start with this, then you have to spend a bunch of time to go and change that to make it your own. And if you're not a designer, some of those images are going to be difficult for you to source. And -- in all honesty, by the time you're done with it, the template might not look really the same because the images that me as a non-designer, I'm going to put in are not going to look the best. That's with an easy website builder like Wishpond, but historically, also you have to think about what is the norm in the market. The norm is someone when they want to launch a new website, you have to pay $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, $6,000, wait a couple of months, do a lot of backing up for it, and that's what happens. And then once you have the website, it's not easy for you to maintain. And if you have a new offering and you want to optic your website, now you have through web developers or all of that, and you might not do that if you're launching a new product suite, if you're launching a new vertical, and you want to have a version of your website is -- that is specifically for that audience. You might say, no, I'm not going to actually build a new website. It was just too much of a hassle. Now with AI, you don't have those considerations. So I'm going to actually show you now. So let's say this is the template that I like, overall, and when I say choose. And then it just ask me a couple of simple questions. So I'll ask our analysts here. Any thoughts on what would be a good business type for us to try here? Okay. I'm going to say, Nehal, may be.

Yes, maybe in time restaurant. Trend there.

Is there any restaurant. Well, I mean, that's another example. So that feels like cheating. Why don't I change it to France restaurant? Would that be good?

Yes.

Okay. So let's say, you want to make this for French restaurant. And the name of the French restaurant is, I don't know, French Delight, let's say, okay? And I say generate. All right. Now it's generating for me, and it might take 15, 20 seconds to build a website for me, something that we normally have taken, not longer than that. So I'll just wait for that to complete. All right. So done. Let's say, my French Restaurant website, lunch the editor. Now, all of this is about that French Restaurant that you said. This content is completely unique. Everything here is generated by AI. This background image, you see it's not a stock photo. It actually is generated by AI. There's no corporate issues. There's no royalty, none of that, completely yours. This headline that you see Delicious French Cuisine, AI generated that. You see a little image, about us. It even decided for your line of business, probably you want to have many reservations, catering and delivery as the different sessions. Meet the team, it talks about that. It even has a little testimonial. Absolutely delicious and must try for any fresh-food lover. Even if I look at about us, Fresh Delight is here to treat your palette with a unique French experience. Our menu combination past experience, delinquencies with modern cooking techniques to create amazing flavors. Come in and discover for yourself why we are the go-to French Restaurant. And that's awesome. If you don't like it, you can click here and say, "Actually, give me another version." All right. There you are. There's a new version now. So that's one of the things that we do with the website that I'm going to show you some other functionalities of it. But before I do that, why don't we try a completely new business. Anyone else wants to give us an example to try to?

Let's do equipment rentals.

Equipment rentals. What kind of equipments?

Like construction equipment rental.

All right. Equipment rentals. I've never tried it in the past. We'll see. What is it called, Jason?

It's called, I don't know, A&B Rentals, let's just be really boring.

A&B Rentals. All right. Generate. So notice how it chose the exact same template again. I could have chosen anyone, but I just wanted show even the same template can look vastly different depending on your inputs. And every time it's also going to be different. So no 2 people are going to get the same website. Okay. So A&B Rentals. All right. Rents, Build, Win. So it even comes with the tagline for you. Here's a background image. If you don't like it, change it, regenerate image. There you go. About us, I think it assumes this heavy machinery. So if that's not really what you were hoping for, we can review it. Let's say, no tools.

No, it's incredible. It's incredible.

Yes. Earthmoving equipment, heavy machinery tools, access equipment, meet the team, what people are saying, A&B Rentals was a great choice for my construction project, affordable rates, both equipment and friendly staff. So that's incredible, right? Now look at this also, let's say, I look at this description, about us, A&B Rentals is go-to-source for construction equipment rentals. Okay. Now I say that's good, but I actually want to change it. So first of all, as you saw in Trina's demos, I can just click around, do whatever I want, right? So I'm not stuck with anything. I can delete this and add my own image. But actually, I want to give feedback to AI. And I want to say refine it for me. This text is good, but you know what, I want to -- Jason, you tell me what feedback you want to give, like, let's say, something extra that your business covers that wasn't included in this. You want to say also make sure to include this, what would be an example of that?

Like just another product maybe that we rental.

Sure. Yes. Yes, what would be another product that you would say? Make sure to also -- I mentioned.

Heating equipment, I don't know.

Heating equipments. Okay. All right. Refine. Okay. All right. A&B Rentals is go-to-source for construction and heating equipment rentals and the rest, right? And then I say, elaborate. This is kind of short form. All right. Now it elaborated. Now it's getting longer. You want to -- let's say, you want this for a French website, you can actually give it feedback and say, translate to French. All right. Now it's in French. I mean I don't speak French, but I assume it's fine. So it does all of that for you with a click of a button. You do the same things for images. And if you're also building a landing page or pop-up or something else like that, the same functionality. It can just save you a ton of time. In 20 seconds, 30 seconds, you have a website. And you might say, well, those are not really the images of my business. Fair enough, you can remove them, you can replace them. But it saves you at least 80% of the effort. And then from then on, because Wishpond editor is so versatile and easy, then you make those changes and go from there as well.

Okay. So any questions on the AI-powered website builder? Yes, Daniel?

How you expect them to use this? Are people going to be just testing out a variety of landing pages? Or is this for people who may not have a site presence that you're just saying, this is a simple way to build it. How do you see it getting traction with customers?

Yes, there are 2 different ways. One is our existing customers. This makes it easier for them, let's say they want to make a change to the website, and they can more easily do it. They want to add a new section to the website. They want to launch a second website, all of that becomes easier. Or let's say we're having a conversation with Propel IQ prospect. And sure, as part of the onboarding, we build your website. First of all, it saves us time also. But also for them, we can say afterwards, if you want to do ads and you want to have a new landing page or a promotion, you don't have to worry about the content and the imagery. You just answer a couple of questions and generate it for you. So that's one side. The other side is, this is something that is very powerful as there are a few AI-powered websites builders I've seen, but nothing that comes close to the power and versatility of this, to be honest with you. And we want to get this in as many hands as possible. So the way we're going to actually roll it out is going to be -- there's going to be a waitlist and all that. And we're going to allow pretty much anyone to kick the can and try it. So there's going to be a very minimal version of it available for free, as you can build your own website and play around with it and share with other people, you won't be able to put it on your own domain, so it would be a sub-domain on wishpondpages.com, and it will have Wishpond branding. So that also helps spread the message to everyone. And then when you say, okay, I'm serious what is actually cool. I want to upgrade, then you would talk to a salesperson, and you would be onboarded into Propel IQ.

And then I think of the content creation, in general. And so applying the AI into e-mail marketing and advertising, as you mentioned. How do you see that going to market? And how does that change kind of the economics of your overall business?

To some extent it's similar. So for example, the AI that we mentioned for e-mail responder, we have a Chrome Extension for PersistIQ already that people can use if they're within their G-mail and they're writing e-mails and all that. Persist can bring details about the leads and you can launch certain automation and all that. Now with the AI innovation that we're going to do that Chrome Extension is going to also have the capability of responding to e-mails. And then we'll have the version of that also that is going to be free, maybe for up to 50 messages per month, that anyone can play around with. And then for more serious users, then they would have to upgrade. So we're going to use these for innovation and getting more value to our customers, but we're also using them as different ways of generating leads and bringing people awareness to the Wishpond product use as well.

Really fascinating stuff.

Thank you, Daniel. Nehal?

Yes. The AI for the website is obviously very, very useful and the value proposition is extremely apparent. So following impress guys. However, I was wondering, is there a way to feed data before using the AI to make the website even more specific and unique? And if not, is that something you're considering to add in later iterations?

There are a lot of things that I think -- this is going to be a work in progress. So there's going to be a lot of different innovations and refinements that we're going to bring in as more and more people use the platform. No question about it. I think the challenge is how exactly you want to get it, and how many questions you want to ask to get there versus how much of the initial heavy lift you want to be done by AI. So for example, internally, when we were playing around with different ways of building the website template, the first iteration, actually, we were asking like 15 questions. Who's the founder? When were you founded? There's so many different things. I'm sure, when you generate it, it was closer to what you thought. But then again, like, well, now you're asking me to do all the work, right? Like can you just do something and then I go and give feedback and change it. So that's kind of where we went. But I think there's a middle ground that over time, we're going to also add to. For example, one of the things that would be cool is, yes, you asked those simple questions. And then maybe another question is, what is the tone that you want? You want it to be formal, informal, humorous, drive, luxurious. And maybe some of the extra questions that we can ask and materials to request, that would be optional. So I think over time, we'll probably go into those as well. But the fact that the editor is so easy to change things even after it's produced makes it less of a problem for them. Even if it's not exactly what you want, you either ask for refinement or just you want edited. Editing is a lot easier than generating from scratch.

No, absolutely. That's very helpful. And then I guess, I was wondering, if you think this will take some of the load off of your onboarding team when it comes to making the websites for initial customers? And if so, do you think these benefits will then be reflected on the margin profile?

I think so. I think so. We'll definitely start using these, and there will be more variety of templates for those clients. But at the end of the day, what someone gets through the onboarding is going to be something that looks really good and if necessary, we'll use our design team, but it will save the time of the design team. It will save time from the onboarding team. And yes, I do expect that it will show in the margin profile as well. I would say, to some extent, more important than the margin profile up front on that is the stickiness it creates, knowing that all right, this is the kind of platform that I want to continue using and I want to continue engaging with. And the margin after the onboarding is higher anyway. So the longer you stay, the more it will contribute to a margin profile. No problem. Any other questions?

Okay. This part of the presentation, we're going to talk about our financials and outlook for the business. And David Pais, our CFO, will help us present that, and we'll go through that and there will be some question and answer after that as well. So moving on to the next slide. Passing on to David. David, please.

Thanks, Ali. That's a hard eye to follow. I've never come on after an AI demo, but...

Sorry about that.

Yes. Fortunately, I have some good material here to follow up with. So try and keep everybody interested. So usually, most of my companies are recent projected hockey stick. But in this case, I'm actually happy to talk about the hockey stick that we've already executed. So when you look at our annual revenue over the last several years, 2017, 2018, 2019, all the way into 2021 when we went public, there was consistent revenue growth. I would actually draw your attention to the numbers between 2020 and '21, but there was significant growth, and a lot of that happened because we started implementing acquisitions. And Ali's and everybody that's past performing have talked and demoed all those different products that we've acquired. But obviously, that revenue growth from $7.9 million to $14.8 million. Half of that was organic and another half of that came from acquisitions. Now in '22, the -- this is actually based on the estimates because we haven't come out with our Q4 numbers. So '22 and '23, I'm going to talk about the analyst estimates. And you see consistent growth here as well. The analysts are estimating 40% growth, going from 14.8 to 20.7. In '22, we only did one acquisition, and that was a fairly small one. So I'm happy to report, that most of this growth is essentially organic growth, and the business is running on all cylinders. In terms of the EBITDA, if you look at the earlier years, '17, '18, obviously, that was negative. Because we started from a really low revenue base, and obviously, the emphasis was growth. But as you get into '20 and '21, you start seeing the business turning positive. 2020 was the pre-IPO year and Ali has obviously been extremely fiscally conservative and has eye on the bottom line and manage cash extremely well. So the EBITDA was at $0.5 million there before the IPO. There was a little bit of a dip in '21, but that's only because after we've been public, there was a lot of public company expenditures, audit fees went up, legal fees went up, filing fees and so on and so forth. So that was expected, but we see a rebound in '22, again, based on the estimates and further improvement in '23. In terms of the next slide, so this talks about our customer base. And I'm happy to note that we've got 4,000 paying customers. And the customers are not concentrated in any one sector, which gives us extremely stable revenue growth. So if you look at a little pie chart there, you look at the largest slice that red piece of the pie is e-commerce revenue. But generally, a lot of our business is B2B. So the blue and the purple slices of -- 18%, 19%, 20% approximately is services and B2B revenue. There's a lot of revenue coming in from food and beverage. We've actually carved those out. Those kind of be B2B as well, health and wellness and there's a mixture there B2B and B2C. But we've carved those out only because they tend to be significant in terms of quite a few companies coming in or help in those areas. But again, it's very widely diverse. And what that really means is, we're talking about recessionary trends and so on and the economy, but we really haven't seen a lot of that impacting us so far. In terms of the geographic mix, the U.S. contributes to almost 70% of our revenue with the balance equally divided between Canada and the Rest of the World. Rest of World, I think the larger countries there are the U.K. and Brazil, some from Australia. But we actually literally see dozens of countries represented there, even though they're very small slices. In terms of the next slide. Next slide, please. Maybe I'll turn this over to Ali, and then I'll come back.

Yes, for sure. Thank you very much. So one thing that we talked about in the past, and I think it's key as well, and I'll add some extra commentary about it is, our scalable growth engines. So similar to what we are discussing with our clients about having a way of growing their businesses, we also have our own scalable growth engine and a lot of it is geared towards our outbound sales engine. And the LTV to CAC ratio for that for the first year is $1 and $3, almost $3.5 out, which gives us a lot of flexibility and ammunition to grow the company as we add more account executives and SDRs. And we've set up this engine for growth in a way that is quite predictable and quite easy to measure and monitor and manage for. So we have lead generation people who are -- people and processes and systems that are focused around generating the content information of those who would benefit from our products and services, then they are passed to our SDR team, the SDR team when someone responds positively then they get engaged. They do the backup both over e-mail or call. And then finally when the person says, "Yes, I want to receive a demo." Then they book it with an account executive to give them the demo, discover their news, given the demo, and hopefully close that. And this has worked really well, and this is how our organic growth, for the most part, has been achieved so far. We've grown the number of account executives quite a bit. We ended 2020. I think from 24 account executives the year before to ending at around 40 in 2022. And now we're ramping up our account executives this year as well aggressively. Now with Propel IQ, increasingly more and more of these account executives that we're hiring are selling Propel IQ, the bundled offering, which is helpful for our customers. We have higher margins for them. There's higher LTV and stickiness for them as well. So very excited about that. Moving on to the next slide. Also, Wishpond is a company that I would say is recession-resilient for a number of reasons. First of all, I think proof is the pudding, not that there's a recession necessarily right now. But given everything you see in the news, a lot of times and a lot of businesses impacted, you fear the worst. In the case of Wishpond, we haven't seen a slowdown in demand. I would say a lot of times, the limiting factor has been how many salespeople we have available to provide those demos. But there's a lot of demand for our products and services. We're always busy with that. A lot of people maybe even looking for cost saving. Opportunities or expanding their business are attractive to us. So our customers rely on Wishpond, and we are a low-cost alternative for them, much cheaper than having an in-house person hiring an agency or using fragmented solutions. So those also are elements that help in any environment, and it's not a nice to have. You actually need a system like Wishpond. We also have a diverse customer base, as David just went through. So oftentimes, when there are top times economically, not all businesses or not all sectors are hit the same way. And having a diversified customer base allows us to handle the impact potentially if it comes up in a more consistent way and not allow the business to suffer or move our weight as the case may be. And we're increasingly getting people on annual terms as well, including with Propel IQ that helps with predictability and we know what the next year is going to look like. We've also done a lot of expense reduction and optimization efforts. We continue to invest in those all the time. We have a very close eye on cash flow, cash balance, all of those things. And so we feel at the end of the day, if you're cash flow positive, we don't have debt, inflation rate increases because of that haven't impacted us. We don't have to raise money right now until things are maybe more solid than the market. And those all give us stability and allow us to focus on growing the business for many, many years to come. And overall, we also have a low-cost structure with virtual head office and remote delivery teams that really help us. Next slide, please. As I mentioned, our outlook is very positive. Wishpond is well positioned for continued growth and profitability. We're innovating in a lot of different areas. We're having record MRR months. We're not seeing a slowdown in growth. We haven't got any material impact due to recession or inflation or supply chain or any of that, fortunately, knock on wood. And we expect to achieve record revenue and cash flows in Q4 that is going to be announced shortly and continue to see that coming into 2023 as well. And we expect cash flow from -- generated by the business to grow. And as the cash flow generation of the business further improves, we plan to reinvest that into the business either is growing the sales team or the debt team or it might be also building future acquisitions or buybacks, share repurchases. So far actually recently in the past few months, we've been paying for earn-outs through cash, even though we had the option of issuing stock for cash. And those earn-outs actually are going to end soon. I think there's maybe one more, David can correct me on that. And then there's even more money to reinvest in the company or share repurchases or acquisitions. And we haven't also slowed down investment in our sales team that is going to continue. We are very comforting in our growth with the cash flow that we're generating ourselves. Our objective for '23 is to continue growing the business organically and inorganically, and to continue to be disciplined capital allocators and maintain profitability and cash flow positive, while increasing sales and continuing the historic organic rate of growth that we've seen.

So in terms of our share price and performance over the last couple of years since we went public. So we went public at $0.75 back in December 11, 2020. And the stock roughly took off. So obviously, those were the heady days, the COVID stimulus and so on and so forth. But obviously, a lot of companies were doing extremely well, including Wishpond. We produced extremely good results from quarter-to-quarter. I think the market rewarded us a little bit with higher revenue multiples, as they were a lot of SaaS companies in those days. But then, I guess, in the last year or so the stock price has dropped a little bit. Again, in tandem with the market. So I think we -- as a cohort Wishpond is doing a little bit better than a lot of our peers. But if you look, perhaps the months from last 6 months, September through March, it's been somewhat stable. It looks like my ECG actually, which is stable, but not very exciting. So we're hoping that the next couple of months as we start reporting and hopefully the different product launches and so on, there may be a little bit of uptick in the stock, and hopefully the stock market as well will improve. In terms of valuation, I do have a couple of comments, but I'll cover that on the next chart. In terms of capitalization, actually, if you can go back for just a sec. Yes. So in terms of market cap, we have $31 million. EV market cap is $33 million. Capitalization, there's not much change here. As Ali mentioned, we haven't raised money because we've managed the company through internally generated cash flows the last couple of years. So the number of shares outstanding has remained constant. Inside ownership is extremely strong. So the inside and senior managers, Ali and several Board members have a large percentage of ownership and are committed to running the company responsibly and for the best interest of the shareholding as a whole.

So in terms of valuation, this is my favorite slide. We started looking at Wishpond and its peers in terms of revenue -- EBITDA revenue multiples. And then we wondered how we compare in terms of financial performance with a bunch of our peers. So if you look at the Y-axis, we've got a proxy for financial performance being revenue growth plus EBITDA margin, ranged from 0 to 60. If you look at the bottom -- I mean, basically, the bottom would be weak performing companies, the top are strong performing companies. And then the X-axis is ranked in terms of the most expensive companies to the cheapest companies. And so if you look at the left-hand side, these are more expensive companies. The right-hand side are the cheaper companies, cheap evaluation companies. And if you want to be investing in companies with a strong performance and cheap evaluation, then you can at that green quadrant on the top right hand. And essentially, you're looking at that bright red star for Wishpond, trading at a little bit more than 1 times EV to revenue multiple for our estimated calendar year 2023. So with that, I'll stop and take any questions.

And my question was around the long-term value of customers versus that cost of acquisition. So how does that equation or how do you think about that equation changing given what we discussed today, the one platform and the other value-added solutions that you're offering? How much of an impact do you think you could have as we think about where Wishpond will go through 2023?

David, will you take that first.

Sure, Ali. So in terms of, Daniel, that's a good question. In terms of the LTV to CAC ratio 3.4:1. I think if you look historically, Wishpond has generally improved in that CAC ratio. If I recall it is to be 3.1:1 right before we updated the last time. But generally, I think with Propel IQ and so on and some of the new product launches, where we expect the customers to be a little bit more sticky and maybe there's a little bit more upside in terms of growing. They come in at a certain price point, as Ali mentioned, in the demos and they may start adding stuff and they start buying credits, maybe they add some services on the top and so on. So a lot of that upsell is not going to -- it's not going to impact our customer acquisition cost, but it's going to be higher revenue. So obviously, I think where we're going is an improved LTV to CAC ratio. That answers your question.

And then, I guess, related to that, as you think about the customer base today versus a year ago or even 2 years ago, we've gone through some extreme cycles with the economy in COVID, and then more recently in the slowdown or however you want to label it. Is there anything to say about the quality of customers that you have now? Or is the size generally going upmarket? Is the duration getting long as the diversity getting greater, just could you help with the frame?

I think the main thing that we've been experiencing is increased diversity. I think especially from 2020 -- 2020, the year where COVID was the most rampant. We focused on e-commerce quite a bit. And now we have more of a variety of businesses, more B2B businesses and all that, and that is continuing. And in fact, not just through Persist, even Propel IQ, now increasingly, we're going after not just Shopify and e-commerce customers, but a lot of different service businesses that we talked about, for example, in the case of Brax.io, the example that Kevin was giving B2B businesses, local businesses, service businesses, those kind of things. So I think there's going to be more variety. And I would also say probably a little bit bigger businesses and not necessarily that the new businesses that we're going after and we're diversifying into our huge enterprises. But in the e-commerce space, oftentimes, we have a lot of -- a lot of clients that might be try to make something more after hours as a site hustle and there might not be a business that has been fully established yet. And the other types that we're diversifying more into are more established, more tenure, more stable on their own rights regardless of our offering, if that helps answer the question.

Jason?

Yes, Ali and David. Just wanted to -- you mentioned hiring new sales executives sort of to feel that to continue to bill momentum on growth. How -- we read a lot about tight labor markets and train -- how easy/difficult is it to hire in this environment?

It hasn't necessarily been too difficult and especially because I think a lot of the tight labor market that we read about are low-cost service providers. And I expect if we were like a couple of years ago, 3 years ago, if we were hiring salespeople to work out of our Downtown head office in Vancouver, we might have had difficulties. It might have been difficult to find really skilled workers in Downtown, Vancouver. The fact that we are hiring, for example, for sales anywhere within Canada, finding all the solid salespeople in Canada for the full year is not a tough job. We still obviously have to go through all the screening and all of that. But we haven't seen a major problem with that. And also the other part is that certain other companies have been in the tech sector, have been letting people go. So there's also an increased supply of skilled workers that we can draw from as well and absorb into Wishpond as well. So I think that has offset it. I think tech layoffs and what we read in the news in terms of the low-cost service providers are 2 different sectors. And I would say the sales white collar workers are more of the ones that would affect us. And so far, at least based on the number that we need to absorb, it hasn't been a problem. Neil?

Yes. Just a question regarding the margin profile, considering your 4 to 5 months in now on Propel IQ. Just wondering, if we should still be looking at that kind of 65% to 70% gross margin range as being instructive? Or should we be seeing potentially some upside there now?

I think still it's good to look at that 65% to 70% because the Propel IQ clients are going to become an increasingly large part of it, but still most of the revenue is the historic MRRs that we've acquired. So it will take some time for it to manifest itself in the numbers. I don't know what the time frame is. I think in the coming quarters, we'll see it play a bigger role.

Okay. Great. And yes, thank you for your overview of the financial section now.

Okay. Moving on to the next slide. So I think as a summary, what is very important to note about Wishpond is that, since we went public slightly more than 2 years ago, December of 2020, we have grown the business quite a bit. We've gone from $7.9 million in 2020 to now revenue run rate of $22 million to $25 million, which is more than 2.5x growth, approaching 3x growth in the short period. We also regained our adjusted EBITDA profitability and cash flow positive from operations. We've grown the business from 1,700 customers to more than 4,000. Made 5 acquisitions, successfully integrated them, both in terms of business as well as technology into the all-in-one platform. And we've had a good fortune of having research launched by Wishpond by 6 analysts, Beacon Securities, Canaccord, Eight Capital, Industrial Alliance, Paradigm and PI Financial. And we've launched a new flagship platform, Propel IQ. And a lot of other features and functionalities and new packages that you got to expose to today. And now increasingly incorporating AI into several of our products, helping our customers as well as helping our customer acquisition strategy.

So going to the next slide, highlight of it really is that, again, let's zoom out for a second. I remember there are tens of millions of small businesses that are underserved. They right now, are overlooked by our large competitors, agencies and so forth. And we have a successful, profitable way of onboarding them. We have a robust and deep product suite that can really help them in a fundamental way, give the foundation for growth. We have a recurring revenue model and strong gross margins, healthy cash balance and generating cash flow from operations and self-sufficient. And now being a leading all-in-one digital marketing platform for small businesses. And I think we have a prudent track record of several years of showing that we are executing the right way. We've been disciplined capital allocators and now continuing to have strong organic growth of more than 30% per year, fueled by our own cash flow to increase our sales and marketing and new product functionalities and bundling of the acquisitions that we made. And finally, I think given everything that you see, it is also important to note that we're still quite undervalued in comparison to our peers, which creates very interesting opportunities for those to be responding the right light and want to take advantage of that misalignment on pricing. So again, I want to thank everyone for being here. The analysts, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your support and the coverage and insightful questions that you asked. And everyone here, all of our shareholders, employees, customers, who believed in Wishpond and are part of this journey and have allowed us to help them with their growth. I want to thank you all, and we'll keep you posted on further progress in the coming quarters. Thank you very much.