Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Blackbird plc full-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged; they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish our responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Blackbird. Ian, good morning, sir.
Good morning, Jake. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us this morning. Today, we've got a presentation team who I'll introduce as we go through. Steve will be the first one to present, but you know Steve White, our COO and CFO. Let's go straight into the deck. We are Blackbird plc. We are AIM-listed, and we have two products. We have our high-end, our Blackbird, which is for high-end news and sports, and we have our new platform, elevate.io, the vision of which is to be the pro video editor in a browser. It is the video editing platform for creators and for corporate video. Both platforms are built on our patented technology that allows for very fast navigation, smooth playback, and an efficiency that enables online video cost-effectively and on any device.
It's proven and tested on marquee customers around the world. Highlights of 2024 and early 2025. This has been a period of some really big landmarks. First of all, Blackbird was used at the very pinnacle of major sports and news last year, including the Paris Games, where 75 feeds of live sports came through the platform at any one time, and it was used by editors all around the world to cut stories and events from individual athletes and national champions for individual markets. Also, Blackbird division last year, for the first time, made a positive EBITDA margin of GBP 0.5 million, and also made a profit last year. What we've also done internally is also look at our talent in the company, and we brought in, we restructured our entire board.
Andrew Bentley, who you met last year, is our new Chair, and we brought in two other non-executive directors, Youri Hazanov and Nick Lisher. Nick, I'm going to introduce a little bit more later, but Youri Hazanov, just to give you some background again, is from YouTube and also latterly Jellysmack, where he has an intricate knowledge of the key players in the creator economy. Most importantly, early this year, actually back three weeks ago, we launched our creator payment tier for elevate.io. We are just early days at the moment, but we are about to say three weeks in. We already have 100 subscribers from around the world in multi-currencies, so a really big step forward for the platform, and delighted with that progress. Now I'm going to pass over to Steve to talk you through the numbers.
Thank you, Ian. Our revenue in 2024 was GBP 1.61 million, and whilst that was down on prior year, mainly due to the A+E Networks contract loss that we announced in 2023, we had a really successful half two, with four of our major deals being renewed. We did multi-year renewals with the global financial news organization and with FIFA, and we also had successful annual renewals with CBS Sports and the U.S. Department of State. That all led to our order book being up 3% at the end of the year at GBP 1.83 million. We have continued to be very mindful and sensible with our cash position and very tight in terms of our cost control, and despite the increased investment in elevate.io platform, our cash burn was down 1% year-on-year at GBP 3.8 million.
We have a very healthy balance sheet, no debt, and had GBP 3.8 million of cash at the end of the year. During the year as well, we raised GBP 1.1 million in terms of a placing to bring on board some high-net-worth engaged individuals.
Sorry, guys. The clicker's over there. Right, elevate.io is the big part of the presentation. elevate.io is how we are going to scale our company. It is the pro video editor that anyone can use, i.e., it's in a browser, it is easy to use, has one workspace, and is fully collaborative. Now, I've been lucky enough to bring on some really top talents over the last couple of years, including Sumit Rai, who's going to do a presentation in a second, and Nick Lisher, who's also going to present. Nick joined us as a non-executive director in August last year. He's since come on as a consultant to the executive team in January, and he's previously scaled successfully businesses at Depop, Nextdoor, and most recently at Flo Health, the world's largest health app.
Before I continue into this presentation, I'd also like you to hear from some of our users and subscribers to elevate.io in a short video.
I run my own social media agency, SOS Media.
I go to the University of California, Riverside, and I am a computer science major.
I'm editing something for my church.
I'm the communications and events manager for the Royal Institute of Navigation.
I spent my job as an auditor, and then I pursued content creation.
I work full-time doing financial modeling. I also work for the Graduate Student Affairs Center.
I'm currently with a company in Tennessee that does software development.
Carboncopies is trying to promote a concept called Whole B rain Emulation.
elevate.io has helped all of my work, so I love it being an interview.
elevate.io's been phenomenal. I would say it's quick, responsive.
Yeah, what's been great is that elevate.io just seems to work immediately.
I really like the interface. It's clean, it's simple, it's very solid financially.
elevate.io is such a straightforward user interface that really did not take much getting used to.
I just found it kind of simple and easy and organic to put a couple of things together, put a little typeface on there.
Especially on top of it being in the browser.
On top of it being in the browser.
The fact it's online, I feel like I can take it anywhere.
Easy on the go, not have to worry about taking hard drives or cards with me.
The portability is very important, and that's very powerful.
I find it very light, and I appreciate it because it did not slow anything else down.
While that video is processing, I can close that browser and work on other things. The in-flight feature, that is something new that I've never seen on other platforms before. I love the fact that I can collaborate with the products easily.
elevate.io ended up being one of the better options because we can collaborate.
We don't have to work in silos, and we know that we can always access what the other players are doing.
It's almost like Figma and Google Drive combined.
It's an absolute game changer for me and my work.
Super, thank you, Ian. Just wonderful to see some of the energy there from our early customers of elevate.io. Thank you for the introduction, Ian. It's really, really exciting to speak to you today about the future of Blackbird. Just to give a little color on why I'm so excited about elevate.io, as Ian mentioned, my background is as a CMO for some high-growth tech companies. When I was approached last year about joining the board of Blackbird, when I looked at the elevate.io product and what it was going to become, my overwhelming feeling was that I couldn't wait to put it in the hands of my teams. I just want to dwell on this statistic on the screen for a second. 91% of businesses now leveraging video as a key marketing tool. Oops, sorry.
Seventy percent of marketers say video outperforms other content types. What's happening out there in the market is that marketing teams, HR teams, internal communications teams are being told and are seeing the market and seeing that video creation, making more video, is the way to succeed. I spoke about this with an ex-colleague, and he said to me, "Look, I've got all this raw footage, and I need to make 40 different versions of an advertisement for paid social.
I feel like it would take me longer to write a brief for a professional video editor than it would just to pick up a tool and make it myself. That is why when I saw elevate.io, the vision from Sumit and his team and the brilliant work they have put together, I am so, so bullish that it is the tool that is going to transform marketers' and corporate teams' ability to make more video because video is becoming the most important communication tool, promotional tool, and advertising tool out there in the market. If you are a pro video editor, you have tons of brilliant tools to make very professional-looking video. If you are a solo content creator on TikTok, you have tools that give you filters for days.
For the teams that want to create pro video and want to pick up the tooling themselves, there is a sweet spot, we think, for elevate.io, and what I've personally seen leading those teams up until now as well. Let's dive into some more stats here. More video, more growth. I'll say that again and again. Teams are being asked to make three times more video than they were five years ago. 68% of marketers, 68% who do not currently use video, plan to start in 2025. The killer stat here is that 37% of them cite uncertainty about where to start. Now, if you're a small business, a team of 20 people, 30 people, you've probably got 20 or 30 4K cameras in your pocket if you're using iPhones or high-spec Android phones. You've got the ability to shoot video.
Salespeople are being told, "You need to make video to make LinkedIn work." HR teams are being told, "You need to create video to onboard people." Marketers are being told, "Video, video, video." These teams do not know where to start, but we feel that elevate.io is the perfect platform to get them going. Hand over to Sumit.
Thank you very much, Nick. Just to repeat what Nick said, when we obviously started on this process, as most of you who've been on the journey with us know, we looked at what the high-end tools that service the higher end of the market are capable of. Of course, with those tools come with some downsides, the installation, the complexity, etc. We looked at obviously all of the online tools as well, and we're already a provider in that space. Most of the online tools are very, very focused on very short-form video. They do not really cope with the needs of, let's say, the more organizational world, something that's slightly longer form.
We looked at the two together, and again, based on the technology that we've already developed within the company that's used, we've already solved a lot of the problems that it's very hard for the low end to deal with, and not just needed, for example, for the high end. For us, it was all about quality and convenience. It was all about being able to cope with long-form video, being able to have a stable platform that works, that's easy to use and smooth. Any of you who have used elevate.io, and you compare it to other online platforms, you'll immediately notice the value of our own codec and how much easier it makes producing video that's certainly longer than a few seconds long.
Of course, this is still an early part of our journey, but we are working on things like file management, a marketplace, further distribution, and more features, effects, and filters and things like that. Whilst we've got a long way ahead of us already, I urge anybody who hasn't tried it to give elevate.io a go because what you will find when you compare it to the high-end tools, obviously the ease of getting it running is a lot easier, but when you compare it to the low-end tools, you really will begin to understand that there's a lot more value for people who are creating slightly more complex video than just something very, very simple. Just to summarize that, the big things that we've always kept at the heart of the elevate.io strategy is that we always wanted the product to be browser-based.
Our real test for this, and we have a number of Chromebooks, very low-spec machines. These machines are sort of less than $300. That's always been our benchmark is that can this run on almost anything? Now, there is a limit. A 10-year-old machine maybe may struggle. Anything that's modern, anything that's being used from organizations to schools, we've had a lot of take-up within the education space. We know that one of our big selling points is not to have to have a very high-powered computer, which is very prohibitive for many environments. We also know that collaborative was always going to be at the core of what we do. This is something that the high-end of the market fails at very badly. We've often talked about the problems of whichever machine the project starts on, it will die and live on that machine forever.
It'll never move around, and it's very hard to collaborate. Even though there are tools which have come about in the last 10 years to help with things like review and approve, they're as an aside to the editing process. They're not fully baked in, and we are obviously moving more into that space already on top of the fact that we're able to do the genuine collaborative, both editors at the same time actually working on a timeline that none of the high-end software can do. The other thing, which is something that you're going to see more important or coming more towards elevate.io, is the idea of there being one workspace.
The idea that a team together can have five or six people or 20 people working in that team, and they can all access the media that they've used on previous projects, as well as core common assets like brand assets, titles, backdrops, or stings that they're putting together. It sounds trivial, but that's something that always gets in the way of the high end. There's always somebody sort of saying, "Where's that file? Where's that backdrop that we used? Or where's that B-roll that we used on that other project?" They're lost on a hard drive somewhere in a cupboard. We think we're solving three really important points. What I want to do is tell you a little bit about the things that we've just finished and the things that we're working on.
Those of you who have followed our journey, you know that we've spent a lot of time getting the infrastructure for elevate.io right so that we can speed up down the line. The usual way in software development is you get pace at the beginning, but then you slow down because you haven't set the infrastructure up right. For us, one of the largest pieces of infrastructure was that last point about the workspace and teams and building all of what we needed to do to make it so that we can offer our customers a genuine collaborative experience, not something that just runs on one machine or one individual user can log on online. Our billing is more than just a credit card. In fact, we support Apple Pay, we support PayPal, we support lots of payment mechanisms.
Billing is a lot more; it is a lot bigger than that. It is actually the management of the whole team. You may not see so much of that at the moment, but the infrastructure has been put in place to make it easy for organizations to expand. As we introduce different types of role, like a viewer role and more storage and more capabilities, we have the billing infrastructure in place. We have pricing in 31 countries. All of that infrastructure and the handling of that has been taken care of. Billing is not trivial. For those of us who have worked in online payments before, we will know that it can be a hugely complex part of the business, but we have made something that is going to scale, and it is going to be very, very streamlined. We are very happy with the progress there.
The other thing that we've been working on recently, for those who have noticed, is the support for vertical video and really any other resolution, so square video and 5:4, which is very popular in social media. Now, we know that this is going to expand our reach into the marketing teams and, of course, into more just general social media. It's something that the technology has always been capable of, but we wanted to make sure that our implementation of it was done well. We are very happy with what we've put together there. Now, the things that we're working on at the moment, we're very, very close to releasing comments. That, again, ties to the workspace idea because not everybody's going to be a video editor.
Not everyone you're working with, for some people, they're just going to be previewing what you've done and want to have a say. Rather than emailing that, WhatsApp, I mean, everyone we spoke to in focus groups said there's five different streams of conversation. There's people who are talking on Skype, people who are talking on WhatsApp, people who are talking on email, all just to get the feedback. It's really hard for an editor to assemble all of that feedback, which is all coming in at different times. We're building comments directly into the product so that people can share their videos with their team, have the comments made in real time. They can discuss it there. They can dismiss them when work is done. This is a common paradigm we're obviously seeing in other products. This is coming out very soon.
We're very pleased with the progress on it. It's going to really help boost the reach of our users. One of the biggest things that we've obviously had in the infrastructure, but we have yet to surface to the front end, is the true media management and folders and the ability for our organizations who are using us and the teams that are using us to organize their media effectively, not only within a project, but also with all the projects that they've ever worked on. Starting off within the project, we're making it so that people can easily separate their audio and their B-roll and their different cameras and just organize their media a little bit better. This is crucial, especially when you're working with other editors because you've got to have some structure.
Beyond that, we're expanding the media management so that it can be across the whole team so that you can now have organizations can categorize their media for their stings, their brand assets, the conferences that they've done. They can organize them all into folders, making it easy for people to be able to go back and say, "Let's use that video from last year," or, "Let's pick that B-roll that we used somewhere else." Yeah, that's important. One of the things which is also very important that we've been working on is the speech-to-text engine. That's the ability for users. This is like the first feature that's going to open up a lot of AI features for us. It's the idea that someone can produce their video edit and at the tick of a button get a really nice transcription, which appears on the screen.
We obviously will eventually build a translation into that and be able to go the other way and be able to do things like generative AI. These are features that save people time because doing transcriptions by hand manually, it's just so tedious that no one really wants to do it anymore. It really is much more effective to just be able to hit a button, get that transcript, whether it's for social media or if it's for long-form, like it's a conference, an hour-long conference, it's even more important to be able to click a button and have AI do the work for you because it's costly or time-consuming to do it yourself. That is another thing we're working on. It's one of many features that are going to be coming down the line in that space.
When you look at the roadmap, all of the roadmap that we've put together is really focused on servicing customers' needs as and when they come up and as and when we attack the markets. Whilst we have a general solution, it doesn't mean we can spend our efforts going to everybody at once. We do have to use our general solution and build up strategically the functionality to serve the different markets that we're going to be coordinating with marketing on so that they are focused to go and get that. The order may not always feel sometimes the easiest for us because they're definitely not the easiest to do things sometimes, but it's just more important in terms of being able to appeal to a different customer base.
You can see from this graph, there's some of the customer needs that we're meeting and some further information about stuff that's in the wings and then stuff that's being developed. We obviously lose timelines for this year.
Super. Thank you, Sumit. You heard one of our customers describe elevate.io as somewhere between Figma and Google Drive. I love that description. One of the reasons I love that description is one of the key growth engines that drives those products is that they bring more people into the creative process. As a manager, I wasn't spending much time in Photoshop 15 years ago, but I'm often invited into a Figma file to go and leave a comment or give a review.
Similarly, if I was working with an external designer 15 years ago, they would have sent me a JPEG or a finished design rather than inviting me into the software where they're creating to go and leave the comment directly. The comments feature that you saw from Sumit, we think, is a tremendous unlock for bringing more people into the video production process, both on the creation end, but also on the management end, which will start to permeate not only inside the teams, but outside the teams as they go to work with remote teams and freelancers and then with other clients as well. We have got to seed that. We have got to start it going.
What we're looking for today in terms of our go-to-market strategy, and I'll reference the previous slides I spoke about, that 67% of those marketers want to get moving with video this year, and a third of them don't know where to start, is we're going to focus on businesses that need to create more video. What we've seen so far from all of the customers we've spoken to, we've spoken to micro businesses, B2B companies scaling their LinkedIn content, for example, agencies and freelancers needing faster turnaround, and then high-volume content teams, so the marketing, the sales, the people in HR teams, the learning and development. We're going to find where they are. We're going to go to LinkedIn, go to YouTube. We're going to find engaging content leaders and teams.
We're going to do some community-driven marketing, so creator-led storytelling and live demos of elevate.io. What we're hoping is we'll start to see that premium and viral growth. By bringing in those early adopters and hand-holding them through the process, we'll let the companies experience elevate.io and then expand it inside and also outside their teams as well.
Thank you, Nick. In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, our really big opportunities lie ahead of us. As you can hear from Sumit, we've really built a product that is fit to the market. It's the sweet spot, as Nick says, that we're generating features and functionality against real customer needs. We've massively de-risked the platform by having paying customers now, as Sumit again explained. That was not an easy thing to do, not a mean undertaking at all. We've all had experiences where that's not gone well. It has gone really well for us. Finally, as features drop, and they're dropping really quickly, we're going to step up marketing activities under really expert leadership. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Perfect. Ian, if I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed, all of you, for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that is situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I would just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your Investor Dashboard. Guys, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions that were both pre-submitted ahead of today's event, as well as those that have come in throughout your presentation this morning as well.
Firstly, thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. Guys, at this point, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it is appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you.
Thank you, Jake. Okay, I'll handle the questions. I'll be the Ringmaster, as it were. First off, Sumit, I think, how are the plans to open up the elevate.io platform for third-party developers coming along?
We have always talked about a marketplace, and the way that we have built our infrastructure for generators and effects is such that they can be expanded upon. We previously talked about being able to allow people to create or third parties to create plugins which are for input, i.e., getting content into the platform, for processing it, for things like effects or generators, and then distribution to be able to publish to third-party sites. We have put the infrastructure in place to do that. We have not yet announced or created the environment with which third parties can actually build to that. We do build our own product on the back of our own APIs and our own design, which we will eventually make available to others.
A related question, Sumit. What kind of services, what kind of integrations with other services are planned for elevate.io?
Sure. The obvious one is getting content into the platform and getting it out. We have had many discussions with video platforms, some of the corporate platforms which are used obviously within organizations, about how we can tie it in so that that works quicker. There are obviously the very public ones as well. The obvious things to start with are getting video in and out. What we believe to be a huge advantage of elevate.io, because it is in the cloud, is generators that can pull data from other sources to create content for whether it's graphing, whether it's pulling in a Twitter feed or pulling in something like that to be able to rapidly create graphics and motion graphics for end users.
That is more adventurous, but in the initial stages, definitely, it is about helping tie us in with other people's existing platforms to make us more useful.
Thank you, Sumit. A question for Stephen. When might Spark be available as an export option for elevate.io users?
Spark at the moment is a development project. We use it for testing lots of technology, which has been moved into elevate.io at the moment and other products. Further down the line, which will probably come up later with Blackbird 10, we'll use Spark for testing that. We will need a few more testers on Spark. The distribution side of elevate.io will follow a bit later as we've got the editing sort of complete. That will not be Spark itself. It will use the technology of Spark, but it will be designed as a specific product to meet a specific need. Spark is really a research and development tool. A lot of you will have seen it. We're using that technology, using it as a platform to test the technology to release into our main products.
Thank you, Stephen. The question says, this one says, "The payment portal functionality looks great. What level are paid subscriptions at versus user registrations?" We are going to start giving out numbers that we think are really relevant to the platform. The numbers we believe are relevant are, of course, the paid subscribers, which we have released, but also the weekly active users and the monthly active users. The monthly active user is currently around 2,200, and the weekly is around 1,300. There are a lot of people that come into the platform that have used us, but they are not video editors every day. The people who use video every day on a regular basis are a much smaller subsection of that. That is why we think that the weekly actives and the monthly actives are the right metrics to go with.
It looks as though elevate.io is standing before an open goal in terms of opportunity, and there looks to be nothing to touch it in the cloud. What's your assessment of the competition? I think, Sumit, do you want to talk about that? You went through it a little bit, and then we.
Yeah. I mean, we already touched on it a little bit earlier. The high end is always going to be chasing the Hollywood end of the market, and that's understandable. The low end is definitely going for more, let's say, TikTok-style videos or short-form videos. Technically, that's all really their capability is. We do have our big advantage, and our big advantage is the codec. That's allowing us to make video that's slightly more complex. Beyond there, I think our ambition in actually creating a pro-level editor in the browser that is just more capable of producing different types of content rather than limited to very short-form social is really what sets us apart from other people. More than anything else, it is a complex problem.
We feel very confident for those who have used our product and compared it to others that we are a lot more usable. The experience is a lot smoother. The experience feels more professional. We do not see anybody coming at us in that space at all. I think that there are obviously some huge technical barriers that Stephen spent the last 20 years solving. We believe that competition-wise, we have put ourselves in our own bracket over here. Conveniently, it does also mean that we can drag people in from the lower end of the market as well.
Thanks, Sumit. We can see that Nick Lisher is now actively involved in assisting in the promotion of elevate.io. Youri Hazanov has a wealth of experience and relevant experience. Can you explain what Youri is doing? Yes. Youri is much more involved in the partnership side of things. As the product develops and, I have to say, we're getting very close to that now, Youri is going to be a lot more active in introducing us to creator networks and people at the very kind of forefront of the creator economy. Youri is very instrumental in helping us a lot with product development and strategy in the background. He will become more evident over the next few months as the product becomes ready for those kind of creator networks to use. Question to Nick. Why aren't we posting more on Instagram?
The videos by Kell were great as he left.
Yeah. Kell's well left. He's outside. And he put together the lovely video you saw from our customers, actually. Look, we've got a small agile marketing team. Part of me coming in and spending a little bit more time here in the building with the team is trying to focus us on whatever we can do to try and bring customers to the platform. Look, communicating to our existing customers about how to use elevate.io is really, really, really important. It just became a matter of priority and focus. Kell's an exceptional marketer, and he's brought some wonderful ideas to help us grow, not only in terms of what we're doing at Google and SEO and SEM, but also on social as well. It's purely a matter of focus and priorities. Kell is happily working away outside.
The next question was pre-submitted as well, so it might have already been answered in the presentation. For Nick, can you please clarify who you're now targeting? It was prosumers and teams, and now it seems to be a wider group, but I'm not sure exactly. I think Kell can go to it after, maybe just for clarity.
Sure. Excuse me. I tend to think product-market fit is both kind of like product up and market down. There are a couple of things influencing this. Influential point number one, with our rapidly improving product, and I say rapidly improving, who is going to get the most value out of that today? That is the product up. The market down is who out there in the market needs a tool like this? I think the sweet spot that we have seen, not just from theory, but from watching our customers use it, is that the customers that are coming to the platform are not people who have spent five years learning how to use one of the pro video editors. They are corporate teams. They are solopreneurs. They might be content creators with a little bit of hustle who want to make more video.
They are willing to join the platform to create multiple projects and potentially to pay for it today. It has been our synthesis of that, which has helped slightly hone what we see as today's product-market fit. That does not preclude the future vision of this being a very universal tool. I still believe strongly in that too.
Excellent. Thank you. How many fully paid users have the reduced cost per year subscription, and how many have upgraded to the higher tier? We do not yet have a higher tier. That is in the plan. There are a number of people that have got extra seats who are sharing and inviting others. Currently, everybody that you have seen or you have heard numbers of are in the reduced lifetime discount. What is the timeline for a pro or expert corporate tier being added? That is a question to Sumit.
At the moment, we're still building out all the functionality which is useful to the current market that we're after. It's not a huge amount of work for us to build out the enterprise tier, which doesn't have any functional differences, but it's more just the limits. We are just monitoring at the moment. We're trying to figure out from those who have signed up to the existing plan where their limits are, and that will help inform us as to make the right choice for the enterprise plan.
Excellent. Question to Nick. When can we expect to see reviews of elevate.io on social media or SME, editing, web presence, etc.?
Sure. That's a great question. Excuse me. It's something that we've been thinking about for a long time. We felt that it's only actually recently, and when I say recently, the last seven to 10 days, that we've been ready for prime time. What we've done is we've spoken to a lot of influencers about the platform and got feedback. Now that we have comments around the corner, portraits in, you can see speech-to-text on the roadmap, we're getting to the stage where we're engaging more with those influencers and saying, "Hey, it might be time for a review." That was a very tactical choice of, "Let's take them on a journey. Let's show them, get feedback on the platform. When we feel we're ready for prime time, then we'll activate those reviews.
Excellent. Thank you. Question for Sumit. Any quick fixes or must-haves on functionality currently not in the platform that have been requested by free users or things that might be stopping uptake?
There's a huge list. We will never be, we'll never finish them, but there will always be a long list of things to do. At this early stage, it's just so important that we focus on the right things. There are lots of things that we, with an unlimited resource and unlimited time, of course, we would have already addressed, and we will continue to. What we won't do is neglect the little things. I think that often happens with products is that they focus on just big-ticket items without failing to realize that actually, it's the little things that make a piece of software or anything we use in our day-to-day lives what makes it a daily driver. There's lots more to come.
Those who are watching the platform closely will notice the subtle changes and tweaks that we do to things to make sure that it's working correctly.
Thanks, Sumit. A question for Steve White. What has been the cost to acquire users so far, and what is the conversion rate to fully paid of any tier?
We're not going to give exact checkouts, but because it's early days, we've been encouraged to see that our customer acquisition cost is in line with the average B2B marketing customer and that's acquisition costs.
Thank you.
Obviously, over time, we've mentioned things like comments and everything, and those viral factors hopefully will help us reduce it.
Okay. Thank you very much. Question, which I'll take. Do you foresee a capital raise to support marketing costs, or is this being managed on short surges of SEO and targeted campaigns? I have to say a mixture of a lot of things, really. We've obviously been very strict and disciplined with our cost base, and we'll continue to do so, making sure that the interests of shareholders are always at the right forefront of our mind, given the fact that we are all shareholders too. There are no other people who will do that. One of the great things about being on the capital market is that we can tap it occasionally for top-ups, which we did last year in 2024 with a small tactical raise. Yeah, we'll be very mindful of diluting any shareholders, of course, but should we need to, we might do.
Are we going to see any good news this year as a rapid increase in the share price? You are more in charge of the share price than we are, I think. You can certainly buy shares. We hope so as our numbers ramp up and features drop. We are scaling the product, and a lot of this product has been de-risked. I cannot be a forecaster of share price, of course, as my record shows, but yeah, we hope so. When can we expect the player to start earning substantial revenue, Stephen?
Most of the product has to nearly. We need to get the editor really working. The player, it's a big project that takes time. Just having it there in the background allows us to keep it up to date. All the new technologies, which I'll discuss a bit later maybe, will all come out in the player first, where we can test it on a very wide range of people. Yeah, it will happen at some point, I'm sure.
Why is it taking so long to make a profit, and what is the target date for reaching it? As I said, we've got a strategy, and we are executing against it really quickly and really well. We're delighted with the product that we've released. We've de-risked an awful lot of what we had to do, including the payment gateway. We're in a position now to really ramp it up. As Nick said, it is approaching prime time. We feel we're in a fantastic spot. Thank you for your patience. We do appreciate it. Question that's just come in. Regarding elevate.io's ability to scale without breaking, what is the most concurrent usage you've had editing at the same time so far, and at what point would industry experts, competitors acknowledge that you've cracked the problem of cloud editing at scale where others have failed? Sumit.
I think only the market gets to dictate whether we've cracked the problem at scale because of just general uses of it. We've tested it up to 25 users with concurrency, which is obviously well beyond what would be a meaningful number. Scale, we're not at all concerned with. Most of our infrastructure is in Amazon and can almost scale infinitely. We haven't had any significant outages in any way, shape, or form. We've had a huge, a very high percentage of uptime. That's not a concern for us at all, the scaling side of it. That's definitely stuff that we've built in from the start.
Great. Thank you very much. Another question for you, Sumit. When do you expect elevate.io will be complete enough for professional teams to feel ready to rely on it for their work?
We still have work to do in that area for the highest end of teams. Nothing stops the teams which are within the corporate sector, within marketing teams and things like that, from using it today. There are individuals who will want just that nth degree more of functionality, and we will just be continually adding that on and on. It is hard to say the exact time for that. It is just that we are working towards that, for sure.
Thank you very much. A question for Nick. Do you have any imminent plans to use affiliate marketing for elevate.io?
That's a great question. Yes, potentially. I think my experience with affiliate marketing is if you can get your key channels running first, then it's a great way to scale because you have almost a guaranteed CPA behind it. There's a few things I think we need to finish off with our strategy on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google before we address it, but it's definitely one for the future. Great question.
Thank you. How many of the 100 paying users came directly from paid-for marketing? About 90%, I would say, currently. Could we have the update on EVS use of Blackbird codec? Yeah, EVS are using it. We have a lot of contact with EVS on a very regular basis. They are a public company, so I have to be careful about disclosing deals that they have made. I have to say there is some life in that product, and they have started to sell it. I am going to be very conscious about the fact that they are a public company. I cannot tell everyone about their deals, but there is movement. Are you able to give information on any developing partnerships and to aid penetration of elevate.io into the marketplace? That is, as I mentioned earlier, what Youri Hazanov will be working on.
Youri is very well connected in that space. We have not been at a point where we would put it in front of someone to actually use it in anger, but that is approaching very quickly as we have portrait and other features dropping very soon. Yeah, we are imminent on that area, or at least in the next few weeks. Do you have someone working on strategic sales partnerships with other organizations? If so, what can you tell us about its activity? I think it is a little early for strategic sales for elevate.io for reasons I have given earlier about the product readiness. We will have that in the future. It is certainly an opportunity for us. What is the current MAU? We have announced that it is 2,200 approximately.
How do you plan to increase the number of monthly active users through increased features and functionality and marketing as we've gone through? What is the acquisition cost of the first 100 clients? We answered that one. Thanks, Steve. Is Morgan Henry still with us? No, Morgan Henry sadly left the company. We are working very closely. Sumit is working very closely, and I work very closely with the developers. Yeah, he's no longer with the business. How many elevate.io clients are you expecting by 2025 year-end? We will give forecasts out, but we're not giving forecasts out just yet. We're saying that as we're thinking that as we get towards the interims in September, that would be a good runway to have seen what the uptake has been and what the CAC is and how it's working out and how much money we have.
I think then we can start to give forecasts. It's very, very early days at this stage, but we will be announcing it in due course. What do the GBP 100,000 in development fees per the account relate to, Steve?
Yeah, they're just small deals with and small development deals with various clients really.
Can you explain why the Powered by Blackbird revenue rose GBP 188,000 to GBP 388,000 this year?
Yeah, I think there was one point in the accounts, unfortunately, where there was a misdisclosure in terms of in the strategic report under the KPIs, you'll see that the actual Powered by Blackbird revenue was about GBP 216,000. So again, it was the minimum guarantee. As Ian says, we're very pleased to see that there's movement in terms of sales activity for EVS.
In November 2024, elevate.io users surpassed 40,000. How many users are there now? A good question. I'll go back to the earlier answer is that a lot of the people that have come in through certain types of marketing were not people that were going to make videos every day. The people who make videos every day are a smaller subset. We have talked about the monthly active users and the weekly active users as being key metrics that we will follow, of course, as well as paid subscribers. Just to remind you that monthlies are 2,200 and the weeklies are currently around 1,300. How do you define an active user? Nick, do you want to?
Technically or theoretically?
Yeah, I'm trying to think how. An active user for us is someone that comes in.
Yeah, somebody comes in and uses the platform. We've actually been conservative in terms of the numbers we've given out. We've actually taken figures of people who've come in and then used the platform after seven days of first joining.
Yeah. We flip around with that. Sorry if I wasn't completely fluid with that last question, but we've trained around different metrics. Having the ability to upload content into the cloud for your elevate.io account on the move from mobile will be a great game changer. It's something we can expect in the future, Sumit.
Yes, it's something that's already designed, and it's just in the process of being built out.
EVS question we've covered. Share prices bottomed out, paid users minimal. Will we get a return this year on my investment over the last 25 years? Waiting and hoping. I would refer back to the earlier question that as we've de-risked this platform an awful lot, now it's up and running. We've built a payment gateway. People are paying from all over the world in multi-currency. Howard, yes, we're on the right track. Question from Philip. Are you completely confident this will definitely gain the necessary market traction and financial success, or there are significant risks? We've tried to de-risk it as much as possible, Philip. We are a tech company in the U.K., and we're building something that hasn't been done before. There are, of course, going to be some risks. We've thought through the users. We've thought through the problems that they have.
We've built something that is unique in the market, and we have the right leadership in place to continue to do that and also to market it. I really feel that we're in a great spot. It's not without its risks, like any company. Got a question, not a question, but I'd like to say a huge well done to you and all the team. elevate.io is wicked. Thank you very much. It's very kind of you to say so, GR. How does the product fit with the non-M&E industry, such as professional video who are involved in the communication of information and professional involved in the tax and business education and overall courses?
Yeah, great question. I think you saw a couple of customers in the video that work in a similar background than you do. My question back to you is pick it up and have a go and get in touch if you've got any feedback. I think there's a ton of video content that is not the showy, flashy marketing stuff that is internal communication, that is communication with clients that needs to be created, that I think elevate.io is very, very, very well suited for.
I take it you're generally trying to grow organically. It's a real mixture, actually. We're growing both organically through paid search, through other platforms that Nick talked through earlier, through SEO, through the virality of the platform being a review and approve app and a future distribution app. Yes, in many ways, we're looking to grow. We're only pulling all the different levers.
Yeah, if I just add to that, if you look at the growth of a lot of the companies that we like to keep company with, we talked about the Figma, the Canva, etc., that a lot of the work that you're doing early on is you're seeding. You're finding those customers. You're manually onboarding them, and you're finding out what value they get from the product. There's a fair amount of that before the snowball starts to roll itself down the hill. It does, and I've seen it before. I think we're focused on the right things at this stage.
Okay. Do you feel your team size and budget is hindering your progress and speed? Would it be financially better to be in the midterm to gain more employees, team size, and grow at a faster speed to acquire revenues faster? I guess everyone would always like to have more money, and we'd always like to have a bigger team. As it happens, we have a really fantastic development team that I think is quite optimally sized in many ways. They are really all fantastically talented senior individual contributors. I am delighted with the size of the team. One would always wish to have slightly more, I guess. Question from Philip. Well done. It is a really complex subject, and you clearly understand all aspects of it inside out. You have my confidence. Thank you very much. That is very kind of you to say so. Question from David.
You said that you had sign-ups from over 100 countries, but this is a disadvantage in terms of marketing and in terms of understanding your users. I did not actually say 100 countries. I said we had multiple countries. I was saying that because we were processing customers in multiple currencies rather than countries. Yeah, it is not 100 countries. There is some concentration in North America, Canada, U.S., and the U.K., and some of Europe. That was probably the main concentration. Have you looked at the full market competition, claiming what you have is unique is a big stretch, do not you think? What is unique?
I mean, I'm happy to answer that if you like. We've looked as extensively as we can. Whenever we find a competitor, we'll go and kick the tires in ourselves and find out what we think about it. I think, again, I will reference my personal experience leading marketing teams. I think what is unique, and I think Sumit laid out really well in his slides, is the mixture between being a tool that is easy to use, that people can pick up, that haven't had previous video editing experience, that is browser-based, but also has the high quality of the underlying codec technology. I think the mix of those two things, I don't see anyone else doing that in the market, and that's why I would bet on it winning long term.
Question from Nathan. Will we be able to get some elevate.io merch? We might put it as some bait. If you come to the AGM in June, we might be able to have you sort out some T-shirts. That would be great. I'm glad that you'd be able to wear it. Sumit, you're sporting an elevate.io T-shirt. I think everyone's jealous. Question from Grant. Anyone showing interest in acquiring the company? No active conversations with Grant at this stage.
Guys, if I may jump back in at this point, and thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. Ian, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with. That would be great.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much, Jake. Thank you very much for listening and your questions this morning. It's really amazing to see how engaged you are. It's very gratifying for us, and especially having the compliments. Very positive question session. Thank you very much. Really just to say, again, all our big opportunities lie ahead of us. We've done an awful lot of thinking about this. We've done an awful lot of work in looking at what the problems are, what the exam questions are for us to answer in the market. We've got a huge market to sell into. We've de-risked the product an awful lot, and it's really about ramping up the marketing now as the features drop. Thank you very much for listening. We really appreciate it.
Ian, that's great. Thank you all for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? It will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order for the management team to better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Blackbird, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good morning to you all.