WM Technology, Inc. (MAPS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and thank you for participating in the UBS Global TMT Virtual Conference. We are joined today by WM Technology, Inc. with a mission to power a transparent and inclusive global cannabis economy. WM Technology is a leading technology and software infrastructure provider to the cannabis industry, comprising its B2C platform, weedmaps.com and a B2B suite of software through WM business. Weedmaps has more than 14 million monthly active users and more than 18,000 business listings and provide consumers with the latest information about cannabis retailers, brands, products and ordering functionality. WM business offers 1 of the most comprehensive cloud-based software solutions available to the cannabis market today, providing a true end-to-end operating system for cannabis retailers and the necessary tools to support compliance with the complex, disparate and constantly evolving regulations applicable to the cannabis industry. The company has over 4,500 monthly paying clients and is expected to generate approximately $190 million in revenue and $32 million in adjusted EBITDA in fiscal '21 at the midpoint of its guidance. The company listed on the NASDAQ in June of this year. With us today CEO and CFO of Weedmaps, Chris Beals and Arden Lee. Prior to being appointed CEO in 2019, Chris served as Weedmaps President and General Counsel. Before that, Chris specialized in technology and health care work with the private equity fund and prior to that, a transactional attorney with the law firms, Covington & Burling and Davis Polk. Arden Lee has been the CFO since 2019. Prior to joining Arden was the Vice President of Global Business Planning at Nike and spent 18 years in investment banking, most recently at Goldman Sachs as a Managing Director in the Consumer Retail Group. With that, I'd like to thank them both for being here today, and we'll turn it over to them for the presentation.

This is Chris Beals. Thanks for having us. So just to orient you a little bit on the company, WM Technology is an incredibly unique story. So on 1 half, you have the leading marketplace for cannabis goods anywhere out there. This is what the company was founded on at this point, almost 14 years ago. And then the other half is a comprehensive suite of what we call a business in a box solution. So a suite of SaaS offerings, that enables cannabis retailers and now with new offerings that we're providing brands to effectively operate their business and then engage with the marketplace or reactivate consumers. And so starting with the marketplace side, this is, as I mentioned, the leading consumer marketplace for cannabis goods. Cannabis is an incredibly complex consumer good, wide ranges of clinical effects, inventory availability changes rapidly. And what we do within this marketplace is harness over 13 million monthly active users to come in and provide the tools for them to discover, explore, learn about products or be recommended products based on their purchase history to then sort of check out with the retailers and brands that are listed on the platform. We'll get into this a little bit later, but I think the really interesting thing about the users we have is active cannabis consumer those who consume once a month or more represent about 13% of the U.S. population. Yet when we look at the monthly active users across Weedmaps, well over 90% fall into that bucket and report consuming cannabis monthly. And that is a huge part of the power is our sort of ownership or sort of ability to harness the eyeballs of actual active cannabis consumers with intent to come into a marketplace in shop. The flip side of that is WM business. And so this is the industry's first suite of SaaS software that's intended to work harmoniously sort of hand in glove with either providing inputs or interacting with the outputs coming off of the marketplace. And so what we do is we leveraged our relationship with retailers to provide an expanding suite of solutions and software offerings that help them run their business or interact with consumers or manage demand in e-commerce. And so today, we have about half of all U.S. cannabis licensees or cannabis retailers is paying clients spending on average about $3,800 per month. For a combination of SaaS subscription fees and then things like our upsell offerings for future listings, deal promotions, that sort of thing. And then the 1 thing that underpins both sides of this is data, and I'll get into this a little bit later, but to put it succinctly, there is nobody who has more first-party data, I believe, than we do. And there's separately, nobody who has a broader suite of brand and SKU and menu and inventory data than what we collect across the marketplace and then the suite of SaaS software. And that's really important for both powering these offerings, but then also as we look towards the future with offering truly comprehensive analytics and data suites. Moving on to the next slide. We'll touch on a lot of these points as we move through the presentation. But I think the thing to really emphasize here is looking outside of cannabis, when you think about other consumer goods spaces or other sort of complex complicated regulatory good spaces, there's really nothing else like that where you're seeing a combination of both marketplace and then SaaS solutions that work with the marketplace to power the inputs and outputs. And so it really is sort of, I think, a key differentiator when you sort of take the lens out and look outside of cannabis even. The other thing that is interesting about this is we have multiple levers for growth. When you look across the different elements of the marketplace, then things like our CRM solutions, our e-commerce embeds, our delivery and logistics and compliance software around that. There are multiple prongs where we have sort of inroads to both retailers and brands, and these provide avenues, not just for growth within that product vertical, but also it lowers our cost of driving cross-product adoption to drive these businesses and then use other parts of the ecosystem. Moving on to the next slide. I think just snapping back to a high level. I think the thing that's really critical to understand is cannabis is in the infancy of its growth. And there are very few other industries where you have future growth that's a function not just of converting existing demands, but also generating net new demand. And so for instance, if we look at something like cloud or EV. In the case of cloud, a lot of that growth is shifting from on-prem storage to off-prem storage. And in EV, you're looking to shift from people using traditional gas-powered vehicles to electric-powered vehicles. Cannabis is no different in some regards, but also as other differentiators. So in terms of converting existing when we think about total cannabis demand in the U.S. the vast majority of cannabis demand even in states that have legalized is still met on the illicit market. So people, if we look at states like Illinois, California, that sort of thing, generally accepted estimate is that somewhere around 70%, 80%, maybe even up to 85% or 90% of all cannabis demand within jurisdictions like that are still met on the illicit market. And so as we see retail density increases, we see the awareness of brands and sort of affinity towards the branded products start to grow a lot of the demand and sort of the growth of cannabis is actually taking existing cannabis consumers and getting them to buy through licensed channels. And that's a really unique element to this. But then the other part is, I alluded earlier to that 12% to 13% number of the U.S. population that's estimated to consume cannabis once a month or more. These are who we would kind of bucket as high-value cannabis consumers or people who consume them good regularly. And we see this trend line that has continued to go up into the right as a factor of time of people falling into that bucket. So we're seeing growing affinity and comfort with cannabis. And a lot of this is shaking off, I think, the hangover of 50 years of sort of the war on drugs and just say no rhetoric and people getting more comfortable with it as a good, but also starting to understand that a lot of the supposed adverse health impacts of cannabis were often just propaganda. So we're seeing trends of consumers switching from alcohol or tobacco consumption to looking at cannabis as a healthier alternative. And so there's a lot of sort of macro growth, which is grabbing net new cannabis consumers as they sort of become comfortable with the product can come in. But flipping on to the next slide. I think 1 of the things that's really interesting is the cannabis sector faces a really complex set of problems and consumers face a very complicated consumer good and then pathways through which they need to shop that really are much different than what we see in other industries. So at a broad level, it's important to understand that essentially every single state, most Canadian provinces regulate cannabis in very disparate ways within the U.S. almost every single state regulates cannabis in such a different way with respect to lab testing, product dosing requirements of product types that can be sold. The list goes on. The best way to think about it is each state is sort of an individual country. And increasingly, we're seeing as sort of the prospect of federal legalization rooms, these states starting to react and increase the complexity of their regs to intentionally for interstate commerce. The impact of that is a consumer moving from state to state is faced with very disparate sets of goods and types of products and businesses that are hoping to operate across different state lines have widely different frameworks in which they need to operate. On the business side, this underpins a huge part of the value of the SaaS platform is that it's much easier to have your operations, compliance and systems handled via a SaaS stack that is uniform across your business as opposed to relying on manual SOPs and that sort of thing. And on the consumer side, we know that we're really in the first or second inning of cannabis consumers or sorry, pardon cannabis brands increasing the breadth of their offerings. We're seeing new compounds, Delta 8, Delta 10 CBD. And these compounds are incredibly beneficial from a medical impact, but essentially incredibly misunderstood or just not understood at all from the consumer side. And so one of the big important aspects of having a marketplace and where we come in is how do we educate consumers on the different product types and help them go through the discovery flow to figure out what products they want to buy. And then when they come back again, how can we tailor those recommendations based on the reviews and feedback that they get. So how can we take an effectively pharmaceutical good and break it down such that a consumer can go through a self-service flow to figure out what they want to buy and shop. And on the business side, how do you cleanse and present the data for all of these disparate products and then handle things like GPS tracking of your drivers and the requirements that come with this highly regulated space. I'd also be remiss if I didn't note that with the advent of -- or sort of with federal legalization, people often confuse federal legalization with state deregulation. And one really has nothing to do with the other. If the federal government or when the federal government legalizes and that's something that we believe is rapidly approaching, the states will still continue to regulate cannabis in a very disparate fashion in terms of how they require the product to be handled. And so that's a problem that will continue even past federal legalization. Moving on to the next slide. This gets to the left side of the equation I was talking to earlier, which is when you think about the marketplace and what we offer so much of the value. So much of what we're doing is helping consumers within this highly regulated consumer goods space makes sense of the differences in pricing, the difference in clinical effects, the differences in what stores carry or specialize and what types of products we're seeing not just sort of an increase in the complexity of the compounds that are sort of understood to be within cannabis and people shopping based on those, we're also seeing an increase in the complexity of the types of products, new types of vaporizers, new types of concentrates, new types of beverages, edibles, that sort of thing. And it's very difficult for consumers to understand whether you're a brand-new consumer or whether you're a long-standing consumer, a legacy consumer, but who is used to sort of the more limited selection of the illicit market. When we go out and survey cannabis consumers, what are you looking for? What's going to guide you down through this journey the top things they mentioned have to do with things like clinical effect, CBD, THC, personalization based on what I've purchased before, what would be a good bang for the buck or sort of a good way to buy the same products cheaper. That bleeds into price comparison, deals, discounts. We know the average cannabis consumer is more price conscious for their income level with respect to cannabis than they are with respect to other goods. And so what we do in the marketplace is we're constantly taking the data inputs we have to cleanse them, to enable normalized search to make retailer menus or brand SKU menus, more information, dynamic based on the individual who's browsing trying to surface more information around what stores may carry certain products at what time. And then we're doing push notifications to let people know when there are changes, deals, discounts, promotion pathways, that sort of thing. And so really, one of the differentiators between marketplace and nonmarketplace surfaces is in a marketplace surface, you're really focused on conversion, focused on getting the consumer down through the purchase part of the transaction, what the retailers and brands care about. And on the Weedmaps marketplace, we're incredibly good at doing that. And we're continuously improving that flow, augmenting the information and discovery pathways we provide drive people down through purchase. And then with things like our CRM and life cycle marketing offerings, we're then reactivating those consumers to bring them back into the ecosystem. With that, flipping on to the next slide, I think what you can pick up and some of the things I've mentioned is while with Weedmaps marketplace offers a lot of elements that basically appear similar to what we see outside of cannabis, the requirements of the complexity of the product, that sort of thing make it sort of highly differentiated and make it almost impossible for non-cannabis specific product offerings to effectively compete or to provide services within the cannabis space. So if we think about something like the food delivery side, the DoorDashes, the Grubhubs, that sort of thing of the world. They don't have to deal with the fact that cannabis inventory levels due to the fact that this is a non-shelf stable farm market good essentially are constantly switching. And so having to deal with POS integration is the way that we do to keep menus real-time, live menus, dealing with constituent compounds how is this product going to affect me. Most people have a common understanding of what types of spaghetti are or pizza are or that sort of thing. There's also the fact that even if a consumer were to order through this most states require that the delivery driver is an employee of the retailer or a social equity licensing. But again, when we go out and survey consumers, what they're really interested in is things like THC level price for milligram or gram of THC. Ways to understand how the product is going to affect them before they ingest the product. And then the #1 complaint we hear from consumers is when menus and inventory isn't real time because that's how fast inventory levels change. It also underscores the fact that the average retailer in the U.S. carries well over 400 SKUs. So even letting consumers make sense of the overwhelming amount of product choice is a task in and of itself. Looking to something like an Amazon, we've consistently seen that specialty consumer good marketplaces are able to more effectively service consumers than generalized marketplaces. And so one example of that is we look at something like the product detail page, PDP. A lot of the information that we're providing on the PDP is information that's derived from brand catalogs, brand information, but then we're also pulling in consumer feedback and consumer reviews based on the clinical effect based on how this product will impact them and we're beginning work to do personalization where we're trying to match homogenize groups of people who have similar reported clinical effect from similar types of products. So we're actually going deeper on how we can recommend products to folks. But keeping up to date with the changing product SKU catalogs, the fact that the same skew from state to state is a different product because the supply chains are vertically integrated with each of those states is a very complex task. And when you look at the discovery pathways to even get down to a product consumers are shopping on things like THC, CBD levels, what products are -- will be delivered the most quickly to them, what the cannabinoid contents are, different form factors or types of concentrate, that sort of thing. And then last but not least, when you look at something like Google, when we talk to consumers, they're really not that focused on the phone number and sort of the address of the business. What they want to know is how they can shop from that business. This is the difference between a marketplace and an ad network. And what Google lacks is the ability to show real-time menus to show information to a consumer has decided, yes, I want to shop from this business, but they've now need to know where they're going to shop or how they're going to shop. And that's where having orders directly in a marketplace comes in. Moving on, on the business side. As you can see, as I said earlier, this is an end-to-end suite for cannabis retailers and brands. So really, there's nothing else like this out there and the way that we price this at effectively $500 per month is far cheaper than if the business were to go out and buy these products individually. It's a sort of classic kind of land-and-expand type strategy. And as we look towards the future, we look at value-add upsells to these various products. It's worth noting that several of the products on this page, Sprout, Kanban and Current were recent acquisitions, which we completed in Q3. And each of these will have incremental pricing over that $500 a month price level. But what you see here is that from the beginning to the end of the consumer life cycle, we have product offerings to help these retailers not just survive but thrive given the sort of tightening margins, the increase in the number of retailers but the need to sort of service consumers compliantly or else risk losing their licensure or serious fines and other penalties. And this is really a critical piece of where the WM Business SaaS suite comes into the equation. Looking on to the next slide. In terms of what we offer in our business in a box solution, as you can see, there's really nothing, and I mentioned this on the last slide that covers the breadth of what we do. But then when you think about the scale in terms of our revenue, our size, our headcount, we're over 700 employees at this time with over 40% of those people being in our engineering product and design group. It's not just sort of the static state of what we offer right now and how much broader it is than anything else out there. It's the fact that we have a much larger scale in terms of the revenue we make. We are profitable and that this is a platform where we can continue to expand our offerings as well as drive adoption of them, increasingly with increased economies of scale and that we can build one software service and have to consume it across the suite. We can go to one consumer using 1 part of the suite and more cost effectively encourage them to use other parts of the suite. Moving on to the next slide. The thing I would note here is there is nobody, I believe, who has more first-party cannabis consumer data than the Weedmaps. And you pair that with just an absolutely incredible amount of product brand SKU menu data. And when you take those 2 pieces, I think the really exciting part of it is, is the work that we can do and are starting to do around personalization, not just sort of saying, here are the products that are available, but based on you as a consumer based on your past purchase behavior based on the purchase behavior of people who are similar to you, here are the products as you go through the that we think you are likely to find have the appropriate clinical effect or be at the price point or sort of meet the search criteria that you're using. And the thing that's interesting about this breadth of data is we effectively have not made available any data offerings or monetizable data offerings based off of this. And we know this is an area of incredible need. We still continue to have a sector where most investors, most groups operating within the space are still effectively sticking their finger in the air and guessing when it comes to a lot of key business decisions. And WM Technology is uniquely situated to address that using the data assets that we provide. Moving on to the next slide. Here is an example of us putting that data to work. So when you look at this, you can see here that we've launched some early beta work around starting to personalize and customize the order of what people see on menus, the order in which filters start to appear on the menu surface based on affinity and first-party data around what that consumer has done in the past or what they're likely to engage with. And the thing that's interesting with that is that the rollout of this, which we have in beta and are looking to scale up coming into this coming year. We've already seen a 5% increase in conversion. And when you look at the growth of conversion across the platform this year. One thing we've seen is that we've had just over a 50% increase in conversion for users who have active sessions on the site, and that's a product of work like this. And frankly, we're just scratching the surface. We're going incredibly deep in this area of how we can help consumers make sense of the just absolute cacophony of clinical compounds and products and new brands that are coming out with each passing day. Moving on to the next slide. I think the other interesting element that's poorly understood is despite being a specialty marketplace, we still operate at a far -- or we still provide a far cheaper cost per click, then you would find with nonspecialized sort of nonmarketplace ad pathways, things like Google Adwords or sort of nonindustry-specific items, yet on the flip side, when you think about conversion, we drive conversion rates that are well north of 10%, way better than what you would find in almost any other marketplace and definitely way better than something like we will Adwords, where you're going to see something like a 1% conversion rate. And that's what you would expect because you're reaching those consumers in a generalized sense on a nonmarketplace surface where the hard question is how do I discover products, how do I explore and then how do I actually go through a checkout and shopping cart flow to actually purchase something. And what we see manifest and this is a huge area of opportunity for us as a company is, right now, on average, you drive a 5 to 8x return on advertising spend, the ROAS. And so we provide one of the most -- actually, by far, I believe, the most cost-effective way for cannabis retailers and brands to deploy their marketing dollars within this marketplace ecosystem to reach consumers and then to get them to actually convert. Moving on, just to highlight another area on the product side, and I'm incredibly product-focused as CEO because there's just so much opportunity to unlock. And frankly, there are so many problems that these businesses are facing. We currently have in beta and new admin 2.0. And what this does is surface and make more easily available data on how that business is listings, how it's promotions and ad campaigns are performing within the marketplace. But then we're also providing them relevant data, basically putting gamification loops in there to encourage these businesses to do things like turn on live menu integration with their POS, deepen or broaden sort of the depth of their menu. In time, this drives things like being able to push businesses to cross adopt other products that would increase sort of their effectiveness with consumers. We can prompt people to look at the inventory that they have and point them towards products that are selling with higher shelf velocity in the region, that sort of thing. So this is something that I'm incredibly excited about and something that we'll be rolling out of beta in Q1 of this coming year. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Arden to just talk a little bit about our financials and sort of performance metrics.

Great. Thanks, Chris. And so as Chris spoke about, given the high return that our clients receive, we generally have seen higher levels of spend by our clients, the longer they're with our platform over time and then also higher levels of spend versus other folks within the industry. What you can see on the left side is our average monthly revenue per paying client by cohort. And so a couple of observations. As you can see with our 2016 cohort, that's the line in the teal color, those clients came on board in month spending about just over $500 per month instead, which is equivalent to essentially our base subscription fee with some add-ons and upsells. Now that same client cohort today, as you can see far to the right, is averaging north of $5,000 per month in spend. You can see all the subsequent cohorts in the middle with the slope of the line, up into the right with higher entry points in month 1 as each cohort has come on board. Our more recent cohorts have been averaging about $1,500 in terms of spend in month 1 and getting to north of $3,000 at an accelerated pace. And you can see with our most recent cohort or 2021 class of clients granted not a full year's worth of data. They are spending even more in month 1 coming on to the platform. The other thing that we'd call out is the proof is in the relative comparison. So as Chris spoke to earlier, and as we disclosed most recent quarter are paying clients on average are spending around $3,800 per month in monthly spend, and that compares to some of the other solutions providers within the industry that now have publicly disclosed financials. And you can see that we are driving a monetization that is multiples higher than others within the industry. Next slide, please. And we've driven that monetization as well as client growth in and of itself pretty consistently within the U.S. over the last several quarters. So what you see on the top half here is our average monthly revenue per client over the last 5 quarters in the U.S. only as well as our average monthly paying clients the bottom half, both U.S. and Canada. Just a reminder that we reset our Canada marketplace in Q4 of last year and haven't meaningfully monetized that region for most of this year. In Q3, you can see that our growth spend per client was in the high teens on a year-over-year basis. And on a quarter -- sequential quarter basis was in the low single digits. Our average monthly paying client count was up year-over-year in the mid-20s and kind of in the mid-single digit range on a sequential quarter basis. Next slide, please. everything we've spoken about previously, both in terms of what Chris has covered in some of the cohort and spend curves that we've just gone through speak to the power of our business model. So at the end of the day, these strategies are operating model, the solutions that we provide, the ROI that we drive for our clients translates into we believe is a very attractive combination of high growth, high margin in terms of our financial model vis-a-vis the balance of the broader technology sector. Our year-to-date growth through the end of Q3 in the U.S. is north of 50%, as you can see on the top chart, just a reminder that over 75% of our revenue is recurring in nature when you look at our WM business subscription fees as well as our featured listing fees, which are subscription-like in nature. We also continue to see expanding gross margins. Our gross margins are year-to-date at over 95%, and that translates to the profitability that you're seeing here with 20% adjusted EBITDA margin. So as I mentioned before, we believe that combination of growth and profitability is pretty unique vis-a-vis the broader technology landscape. Next slide, please. And we have multiple ways to win and drive growth going forward. Of course, new license issuance, new markets opening up, new countries coming online as it relates to regulated cannabis usage and federal regulation presents that function growth opportunities for our platform. But when you look at our existing market in and of themselves, as Chris mentioned, we still only have about 50% of licensees on the platform as paying clients. So there's an opportunity for us to continue to expand share penetration and getting licenses on platform, especially within our emerging regions. And we are still underpriced versus other options, which is why we deliver the -- what we believe to be outsized ROAS and returns for our clients. We do think that there's opportunity for us to drive both higher levels of spend, given especially the new solutions that we have in the portfolio that allow us to grab for more share of wallet across both marketing and tech solutions budgets of our clients. Our existing markets in and of themselves are under store. We only have 1 licensed retailer for every, let's call it, 25,000 residents within our existing U.S. states where we do business. So there's a big opportunity as these markets continue to densify. And of course, as new markets come online, whether they be states this year in the U.S., whether it's additional countries internationally, as we acquire new capabilities. So just in Q3 alone, we acquired Sprout, Cambia and Ken Curran, as we mentioned on our last earnings call, we're continuing to see very robust inbound dialogue from several of our integration partners. And so we expect to be -- continue to be active on that front. And then federal regulation in and of itself opens up additional monetization opportunities for us as we've spoken about previously, whether that be taking take rates on transactions or engaging in payment-related monetization. So with that, that concludes our presentation today. Moderator, I don't know if we're taking questions at the moment, but I wanted to hand it over back to you.

Thank you very much. And yes, I believe we have time for a couple of questions. First off, could you guys talk a bit more about the ROI you deliver to your clients? For example, how are you able to achieve such tremendous ROI versus what we would see in a traditional marketplace?

Yes, I'll take that. So look, where it starts with is the user base. It's the fact that we've done this incredible job of down segmenting to that chunk of the population who consumes with a cadence of once per month or more. These people drive the highest basket sizes, they have the highest repeat order rates. But then from there, when you look at the fact that we've had such a large head start that we've spent the last 14 years working on things like how do we ingest POS data, cleanse it, how do we look at a cannabis consumer and provide them discovery filters based on not just broad category types like concentrate, but potentially sub goods that they're looking for, shatters, batters, waxes, that sort of thing. And so -- and then it's rigorous sort of work with the product team of AV testing and thinking about what's going to help smooth and optimize. I think we're really looking at the next phase of growing that ROAS with personalization. So putting the right content, the right products, the right ads in front of the right consumer. And that's going to help increase sort of the return or sort of the tendency of consumers to want to engage. But then the other part of it is, and I don't think you can ignore this too much, is that when you look at the SaaS solutions we provide and that we can sort of not just help give the inputs to make the marketplace storefronts, these businesses have shined but then with things like CRM and loyalty as well as sort of things like our reactivation campaigns. We can help these businesses then bring the consumers back in, that just helps underscore the ROAS or sort of the return that they're seeing. And I think the easiest thing is you compare that to something like a billboard or nonmarketplace based digital advertising. And one of the hardest things is there's just no way for them to shop. How do you -- even if you catch consumer intent, how do you then convert it. And that's really where having a marketplace and having a specialty marketplace just outperforms anything else out there.

Thank you. Another question, please. As you mentioned, it appears that there are multiple levers of growth in this business. What are the ones that you're most excited about or you think represent the biggest upside for this business?

Yes. I think as Arden mentioned, we have multiple ways to win and drive growth. These existing states are understored. So how do you -- as you increase stores, how do you take that 70%, 80%, 90% of consumer demand on the illicit side and you see to bleed it into the legal side. And so that's not just net new stores, net new businesses who want to use our SaaS suite or be on the marketplace, but that's also net new consumer eyeballs who are now being induced to shop legal, so to speak. But in terms of what gets us or what gets me most excited, I think there are a couple of things. I mean, look, at the broad macro level, federal legalization and what comes with that, the number of states that either are not legal or don't have functioning legal markets turning that on and having real markets, that's obviously very exciting. But I think maybe in the near term, 2 things just to call out, the fact that only 50% of clients we have are using our WM Technology platform, that's incredibly exciting because I think when you think about the interlock of the software offerings, how easy it makes things for these operators, it's a ton of value we're delivering for $495 or $500 a month, but then it's such an effective platform to augment and add new product offerings, either house built ones or ones that we acquire through M&A. I think the cohort curves of how those clients spend once they come on to the technology platform and the returns that they see speak for themselves. The other thing I'd mention is brands. About 5% of our revenue comes from brands, and we're rolling out a series of more focused product offerings for brands. And that's an area where we can really grab growth. Brands have outsized budgets to spend on both technology and marketing, and they've been incredibly underserved within the cannabis sector to date. Longer term, payments look, we -- when you look at our revenue streams, what you are seeing is a marketplace that cannot sort of derive any revenue from a take rate on GMV. And so we have all of these transactions we drive all this value we drive to businesses by helping them reach consumers who want to buy their products and helping consumers find the right product to buy. But because we can't put payment rails or we can't do other things with the current sort of federal framework, we can't put any take rates on that GMV coming through and separately because you don't have payment rails within that you have a more friction-ful checkout experience with sort of the consumer having to have cash on hand or finding ways to pay with sort of pin-less ATM or debit machines and that sort of thing. And then the other longer-term thing is data, data, data. We're really just scratching the surface of what we can do in terms of monetized offerings around our data, whether it be for operators within the space or people outside of the space, investors, people looking to understand sort of consumer trends, real estate, that sort of thing.

If you don't mind one last question, please. The -- just dovetailing on your comments on payments. I've heard this company described before is the square of cannabis, which is a very nice complement, I would think. But just thinking about that question on its head for a second. How do you view the long-term competition versus the non-cannabis technology providers out there? Where do you see the threats and the moats?

Yes. So I think one thing is -- I think there's a common misunderstanding that noncannabis players aren't in the space currently or that they're trying to find ways to enter the space. I think -- you look at the fact that there are ways to use traditional digital ad networks for as a cannabis operator, the thing is they just don't perform that well. Same thing when you think about things like the delivery space and the Ubers and Uber Eats and Grubhubs and DoorDashes, they've never really solved a lot of the problems that we've -- it's been necessary for us to solve within the cannabis sector of real-time live integrations with POS is how do you normalize and do the data that goes on that. So a consumer can actually shop, and it looks like a same shopping experience, not sort of sorting through the back-end database of a bunch of different POS systems. But really, to boil it all down, the shopping journey and the factors of which consumers shop for cannabis are more complex than almost any other consumer good out there. For all intents and purposes, this is over-the-counter shopping for a very complex range of pharmaceutical goods and breaking that down and making it understandable is something that we've learned over the course of our last 14 years. And so I don't think it can be understated or overstated. I guess, how critical it is that sort of accumulated industry knowledge and the work that we've done to help cannabis consumers understand what products they should buy and that sort of thing. And it's why we've consistently seen specialty marketplaces be able to outperform nonspecialty marketplaces for specialized or complex goods. And I would argue there's probably not a more complex consumer good or very few more complex consumer goods outdoor there than cannabis. And as I mentioned earlier, we're really in the nascency of the explosion in the number of brands, but then the form factors of products and the compounds within products.

Well, it's certainly a very compelling story, and we thank you guys for presenting here at the UBS Technology Conference. Chris, Arden, thank you very much for joining us, and have a good day.

Thank you.