Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Blackbird PLC interim results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and 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 those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, 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 team from Blackbird PLC, Ian. Good morning, sir.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for joining this morning for Blackbird PLC's interim results presentation. Today, we're going to take you through a lot of information. We're going to take you through product strategy, marketing strategy, talk you through our early metrics, and talk about what happens next. Of course, as always, we'll have an extensive Q&A session. Before we start, though, I want to talk about one particular thing, which is where we are in the journey. We are at our product market fit stage, and we've talked about this when we came in June and also back earlier in March. In our product market fit stage, we are learning. We are delivering features, still very basic features, actually, and we're learning from that data. We are not in our scale-up phase at present.
Our product market fit stage is going to run into 2026, and it's at that point that we will move into our scale-up phase. What's interesting about the product market fit phase from our perspective and from your perspective is that it's generally done 99.99% of times in a private environment with VC-backed companies, generally on the West Coast of the U.S. This is a very different scenario. This is a public company that is taking place in the U.K. As such, it's a rarity. It's an outlier. It's a possibility for us all to invest in something that is really potentially very, very special. I don't see Blackbird and Elevate as part of Blackbird as being a 10-bagger or a 100-bagger. This is potentially an enormous return. This could be a thousand-plus-bagger. I think in that respect, it does come with risk, and it does come with patience.
Nothing is nailed on in this, and we're going to do something that is ambitious and potentially industry-defining and industry-changing. Please make no mistake about what we are trying to achieve. We are very close now in terms of our development, certainly in terms of the length of time this company's been around, to reaching that growth period, to reaching that optimal growth period. I think that I would finish my introduction by saying I've been meeting a lot of actual potential users recently. There are people that are working in teams. There are people that are making or responsible for video on a day-to-day basis. I have never been more confident that we have the right vision for Elevate, that we have the right product for Elevate, that we have the right timing for Elevate to deliver into a huge global addressable market.
With that, I'm going to start off the presentation and now move it to the first slide. Sumit and I are going to be presenting today. I think you all know Sumit very well. He's our Chief Product Officer and indeed responsible for a great deal of the vision that you all experience with Elevate. We are starting a revolution. We are starting a co-creation revolution. This is something that we've identified with our ICP, which is founders, entrepreneurs, and small businesses, that by their very definition, they are working in teams. They are co-creating. Right now, there is no workflow that is anything other than a slightly archaic linear format where they're frustrated by this on a day-to-day basis. Just to give you an idea about the scale of that ICP, in North America alone, there are well over 40 million small or medium-sized businesses.
That's without the rest of the world being thrown in. It's a huge potential market. Let's hear a few words from them from a recent event we attended in the U.K.
We've just taken a look at Elevate, and everything I kind of wanted us to do as a video editor, it just intuitively does. I instantly knew how to use it. That is really, really, really key. It looks and feels like a serious piece of editing software. I used to head production for a major global media company.
I instantly could see that this is fitness for video.
From what I've seen of Elevate, there's a lot of features that I would benefit from. The interactive thing alongside one of my views, that really took me for a ride.
I love the collaboration features and live collaboration, both with the team and with the client, the customer. I think the company, the editing team, they really, I think, had a life changer.
I'm excited to see how it develops to help bigger production companies like ourselves.
It's a game changer.
Right, so obviously a blustery day there out in Hertfordshire, where we went a couple of weeks ago, but really rewarding to hear the feedback on people's first impressions of Elevate. It's got better since then, where we've gone to marketing events in the last few weeks, where people are, again, as I say, using collaborative processes on a day-to-day basis, but have nothing that really satisfies their needs. On this slide here, we've plotted our product roadmap on the lower axes there against the potential growth that we've seen, the growth that we're looking to deliver. This is really a guide to where we are today, which is pretty much halfway through our product market fit phase, where features are delivering at pace.
Sumit has some exciting news on that to talk to you about in a few minutes' time, to really take us to the next phase, which of course is scale up into 2026. Some early leading indicators. We've got quite a few different range of numbers here. The first one is in terms of signed-up users. We've got 110,000 signed-up users now to Elevate. This really shows that there is a problem in the market that we are there to solve. It doesn't necessarily mean that we have the solution yet, but it certainly means there is a problem-solution fit. In terms of conversions, we now converted almost 700 people into being paid subscribers. As you can see on the next number, in terms of retaining those subscribers, churn is certainly a focus for us.
Churn is something that we are really making sure that we address, and that is mainly through new features and features that are being delivered on a rapid basis, but also through alignment to our ICP and almost also to engaging those users along the way. We could have spent more money in the last few months on making sure that when we came to you this time, that we had a higher number of current paid subscribers, but it wouldn't have been money well spent. We're really now focused as a business on making sure that we're delivering the right features at the right time to improve that churn number, to make sure that we are going to be spending the money the correct way.
We've got 1,450 returning users in August, which gives us a really nice trickle of users to make sure that we have enough data to make sure our features are landing well. Since launch, we've had an 81% increase in engagement. That means that people that have come into the product have ended up exporting a video at the end of it. It is a really good idea that we are improving all the time with our features. What we've done now is really try and align that more with our ICP. The ICP, just to remind us, is those founders, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and small marketing teams that are large in number and engaging those guys to use Elevate on a day-to-day basis. A brief look now at some financial metrics. We've had some quite good improvements here.
We've had a 21% improvement in cash management over the year, so that is down to GBP 1.5 million over the half. We've had GBP 600,000 worth of revenue come in. It's slightly down on the Blackbird side. This is mainly due to some whole deal losses, but also a non-repeating transaction that happened in half one, 2024. The positive news is that Blackbird is now EBITDA positive H1 for the first time. We also did a small top-up raise to take us through the product market fit stage over the summer of GBP 2.1 million gross proceeds. I'm now going to show you a short video, which is a rough cut of a YouTube video that will be released shortly, showing how Elevate is a collaborative platform for marketing teams and social media teams. Excellent.
You also got a sneak preview there of our first partnership and collaboration, which is with the London Cavaliers. More news to come over that over the next few months. Why is Elevate needed? Why is Elevate required? Yes, it's very simple to use, and that's a huge benefit to people. Yes, it allows complete freedom to operate from the browser, which gives access and freedom of movement. The most important thing is that it's collaborative features. Collaboration is not just a niche part of the way teams work. Collaboration by definition is exactly how teams work. It's not just the multiplayer aspect of our platform either, which is, of course, the jewel in the crown, the bit that separates us out from really everything else. The fact is that we have this incredible access to assets as well. We can manage assets. We give immediate access to teams' assets.
There is no upload and download. There is instant review, which we just launched in the last couple of weeks. There is the leaving of comments for asynchronous collaboration. It's a much larger part of the workflow than just purely the multiplayer. The multiplayer really does differentiate us from any other editing platform. The integration with everything in the backend as well is hugely, hugely important. Why us? This is the investment case, really. Why would you invest in Blackbird PLC? Because we have Elevate. First of all, it's the technology. You've heard about the technology many times. This allows for advanced manipulation of content under low bandwidth conditions in a browser, and that is completely game-changing compared to any other platform out there. It's given us a massive head start in terms of how we've managed to develop Elevate and have it in the market.
You've heard that many times before. I just want to focus on team for a second. Team, I've never worked in a team that is as talented or as proficient as the team I currently work in. That goes from everyone from Sumit and his product team to the development team, to our marketing teams. They are exceptional. We are really, we're very lucky to have selected such an amazing group of people. We're very active in making sure that we keep those people at the very best levels. The other thing that is really important to mention here is TAM. As I mentioned at the very, very start, we've got a huge global addressable market. This global addressable market is not just video editors. This global addressable market is all the people that work with video. I saw an interesting anecdote recently about Uber.
It was when Uber presented their initial investment deck. They estimated their TAM to be the entire taxi market of the world, but they got it wrong. They were out by a factor of eight. It was eight times as big as that because before Uber, people didn't take taxis. It was too difficult. They took taxis once or twice a month, and now they take taxis two or three times a week. It's a huge, huge different proposition because Uber made it so easy. Figma had the same situation. Figma had a TAM that was very small when they first launched because no one had design software unless you were a designer. Now everyone in the company has access to Figma because it's so easy to use. You can review and approve, and you can input on the design as the process goes along. Elevate is very similar.
When people came to us over the last few weeks and said, yes, we have one or two Adobe licenses in the company, and then people send me the exported product, I write back my feedback on email, and that's how it works. Elevate will be entirely different. Elevate will be, they will have access to that video directly. They will be a customer of ours, and therefore our TAM is many times larger, in fact, than the global video market that's the editor's market today. Gives you a bit of an idea about the investment case. Right. Pass it over to Sumit.
Hi, everybody. When it comes to product, I think I want to take you on a little bit of a journey of where we started the product market phase, where we are today, and where we're going. If we cast our eyes back to February when we actually put in the gateway and we sort of went out into the market, what we had put together was essentially an editing and collaboration capability. It was so crucial for us to get the collaboration elements built into the product early on. There's no way they can be added later, and it's such a fundamental part of what we do. This is something that people are only just beginning to understand is the importance of collaboration in the Elevate story.
If we were just building a video editor that was just going to compete functionally with the desktop tools, we would have not much of a future because we'd be fighting against an incumbent, and we'd just be able to do what they could do, but they could only do it. What was so important was for us to acknowledge that just like lots of other adjacent industries in design, in 3D, in accounting, in CAD, and general marketing, products have come about that actually enable teams to work together to achieve something. That doesn't mean that everyone becomes Ridley Scott overnight. It doesn't mean that everyone's going to become a colorist. What it does mean is that they can get involved in the process. We put in place, as we launched, what was not hugely available to everybody was a lot of that collaboration infrastructure.
What we were light on, and we were well aware of this, was that the general editing capabilities in the way of effects, our media management was very, very lightweight. Processing was, you know, we're lucky that we've obviously got the infrastructure and the experience from the original Blackbird product to help us. That was also limited to a bit of a broadcast world, whereas we operate obviously in a much broader world. We went to market with what we knew was the foundation of what we did. During that product market phase section that we're in at the moment, we've learned an awful amount from our users. The telemetrics that we have in the product tell us how people are using it. They tell us when they're using it.
They tell us to what extent they use it, and it shows up where there are problems or misunderstandings in how the product works. For us right now, the value comes from having small clusters of users in these clusters, which gives us a really good indication of how it works in education or how it works in finance or how it works over here. What we don't need is 10,000 users in each one of those sections. We get more than enough from the users that we have that are free users and, of course, the paying users, which we get to learn a lot more from because when you're paying for something, your behavior tends to be slightly different towards it. Where we've arrived at today, based on all the information we've understood, we've increased the collaboration capabilities.
The recently released review mode has gone down incredibly well with users. We've increased some of the editing. What we've made a big move forward is in media management. As we know, we're not just building an editing tool. We're building a collaboration tool, editing, and media management. We obviously have future plans for other things too. The media management is something that is almost impossibly done today. In fact, just earlier this week, we were with an analyst, and their exact story was the hard drives for the projects that we get made for us just sit in someone's bedroom stacking up over time. That was their exact words. We know it's the exact experience that we had for people. We know that media management is an opportunity. It's a whole business in its own right.
We are in our infancy of it, but we now have team folders within the projects themselves. As of today, team folders will be released so the entire team can have media management at the top level of the product, not just within each of the projects. Our effects and transitions, we have a lot of interesting things coming, but there's a lot of work that's happened behind the scenes that people won't have noticed. We've quite severely improved the way that the video editing is composited within the product. That's going to give us a lot of opportunity to use gaming technology to actually produce some much more advanced effects using the GPU on the computers, which is now becoming prevalent. This is incredibly important, especially for the low-end machines like Google Chrome. Of course, our accounts and payments were increasing the ability for us to manage people.
It's also super important that we ensure that our way of managing our customers is done really well. During this period and up to this period of time, we've had an unbelievably high obtainability. The system has been there. We've had minimal disruption. We've been able to identify where problems are lurking, and we've been able to deal with them now before we have a much larger user base. I'm incredibly happy with how this phase has gone. Of course, we're only halfway through the product market fit phase, and we've got a lot more to come. This is where we see things moving when we get to the end of that phase. We will improve the collaboration furthermore, which we're really happy about. We will include more editing. You'll have noticed in the last week, we introduced fundamental editing tools like the preview in and out points.
We've got a lot more of those to come. Our media management will be improved to include things like search that you just don't get in other products. Our effects and transitions are really going to come to life. Another area that was released just today, and it's only available as of about an hour ago, is the mobile upload capability. Anybody who now accesses from your phone, if you access your Elevate account, it will give you a web interface where you can upload content directly into a project or a team. We advise people to share it to their homepage so they get the full experience of a progressive web app. It's a great experience. It's only the beginning. We know that the mobile element will play a vital role in collaboration, and it will play a vital role going further forward in things like distribution.
We're going to be improving our accounts and payments to different types of payment lengths, as well as different types of accounts. As I mentioned, our media processing will just improve further and further to cope with a much wider range of file formats. From an AI perspective, we've already introduced a very lightweight version of AI, but we've got lots of really exciting AI integrations with third-party companies coming. That makes the beginning of our marketplace. It's only a small effort by the end of this, but it's going to be the thing that will be useful during the scale-up phase. Over to Ian.
Great. Thanks, Sumit. On the marketing side, our marketing, of course, will naturally trail product because it's really important that we are data-driven, that we can see that the product is delivering on the feature side, which, as we can see, is rapidly happening with some really exciting news happening in the last few days and even this morning. Our marketing story started with search. We started with search last September. Search certainly did bring in a large number of users, but search doesn't need to engage users. We wanted to make sure that we have engaged users as we go through this product market fit stage. Learning was always going to be a little bit limited from those guys. Wherever we are now, we've broadened our marketing strategy out to include events. Building awareness to our ICP directly through events and PR as well.
You might have seen some stories come out about Elevate over the last few weeks, and indeed through organic social videos. There's been a lot of work done in the background on that as well, where you've seen our team deliver videos to Instagram. Our Instagram views have gone past 100,000 now. We've got over 2,400 followers on Instagram. It really shows that there's an effort there to make sure people come and understand Elevate, but they understand what Elevate can do, what it's for, and our message. As features start to land, we'll build out this further. We'll really start to unlock over the next few months as we go through the product market fit stage, access to much larger audiences, audiences that will be involved through partnerships and through influencers and through referrals. Referrals, of course, will be the start of that product-led growth area as well.
This will all happen over the next few months and through the back end of product market fit stage. In conclusion, I'm going to finish the same way that I finished my intro, which is over the last few weeks, we've met a lot of people who are directly interested in Elevate. I've never been more confident in the fact that we have the correct vision for Elevate, that we have the team that can deliver Elevate, and we have that ability to execute over the next few months. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. We will now take questions. Thank you.
Perfect, guys. That's great. If I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed.
Jay, sorry, I was going to think we're going to finish with a video that shows the profitability and the accessibility of Elevate through another YouTube ad. Give me a second.
Perfect, guys. If I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. While the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd 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 dashboards. 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 made their way through throughout your presentation this morning as well. Firstly, thank you to all of those that are on the call for taking the time to submit their questions.
At this point, if I may just hand back to you to read out those questions and give your responses where appropriate. If I pick up from you at the end, that'd be great. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Okay, I'll start and I'll read through the questions. First one is for Sumit. Can you please tell us more about your plans for the marketplace and the kinds of companies and services you're hoping to have posited in the early stages of that?
The good news is we've already begun work on the marketplace in that things like the AI services that we've implemented are essentially like the marketplace. They're using third-party services. We don't have to have other companies build them. We can build certain marketplace items ourselves that interact with other companies. In this case, OpenAI has obviously been our first partner. However, we are working with some very well-established video companies who make things like the visual effects in terms of how do we actually bring some of their technology into ours and make that available to others. It will be in the space of visual effects, in the space of data providers, obviously the AI providers, and of course, distribution. Going out to other platforms like YouTube, for instance, we can do that work ourselves. We don't have to have them do it.
As soon as we get established, we do want to have more and more companies who want to take our rest of the U.K. and build the things themselves.
Thanks, Sumit. Second question. I know Blackbird can help almost any type of team or creator, but having worked in creative agencies, it seems particularly ideal for that market. Have you considered positioning Elevate as a video editor that's tailor-made for creative agencies?
Yeah, I wouldn't say that we want to tailor-make it for any specific industry itself, but it is a great use case. We do believe that the creative, we're already beginning to see creative industries or companies that we're working with ourselves as a company, seeing the value of Elevate. Even the people who worked with us to put together some of the marketing assets, the videos that you've just seen, are instantly seeing the value of the product themselves as we've been using, obviously, to build out the content. Definitely, the creative industries are going to be a market that we're absolutely going to want to go for. We believe that the way we're setting up the product means that creative agencies can much easier help organizations that have Elevate themselves with some of the higher-end work and things like that.
It's a definite industry that we'll want to be working with.
It's a great observation. Again, coming back to the collaboration point as well, which is creative agencies, by definition, work in a team environment, whether it's just with their own team or whether it's with the client. Some of the feedback that we've had over the last few weeks is that we've always talked about how Elevate helps with speed and ease. It's more than that. It helps make it bearable. I mean, it's almost unbearable the way that teams have to operate now today, where they have to upload and download stuff and send stuff by email backwards and forwards. We've really thought about this process. Sumit's team and the product team have really thought about how this process should happen. What's the logical way this process, at least the workflow, should happen? Absolutely, creative teams are very much a part of our plans.
We are delivering to ICPs where the feature set that we have today really resonates, and we will move towards creative agencies as we get further down the line. Question for Ian. During the IMC presentation after the AGM in 2024, you stated, "We want to build a company worth in the tens of billions." Today, are you more or less confident about that ambition and why? I said it a couple of times in the presentation. I'll say it again. I'm very, very confident. The main reason that I am so confident is that on the product side and on the dev side, we've solved so many problems already. We've created this product. It works beautifully. We are layering on features at pace, and we are now in direct conversations with our ICP.
That is the people that will buy this product, the people that will use this product on a day-to-day basis, and they will talk about how this product works for them and grow the product out. I've never been more confident about how this product and this company will grow. It is an excellent time, I have to say. A very exciting time. Question four. My concern here is that other tech companies are moving faster than us. We do not seem to be selling our product, and the selling side is failing because of the product developers. Failing the product developers. We are too slow. We were promised further news in September, which has not materialized. We need to update our promotion of the sales side to be more effective.
I will revert back to the very first thing I said, which is we're in a product market fit phase. The product market fit phase allows us to be data-driven to make sure that we're developing the correct product at the right time for the market. We will scale up in time, but we need to, at this point, get that product absolutely right. There is literally no point in spending vast amounts of cash on a product that isn't ready for the market to be scaled.
Can I add to that? Sorry. For a SaaS company, to accelerate in the wrong direction is guaranteed failure. If you don't have those clusters formed and understand where the earliest success is, and then accelerate into them, you just go into the whole market, you can't boil the ocean. It won't work. There's a catalog of companies that tried that and have just burned through cash and failed miserably at the tail end of that. There are a great number of successes of companies that have gone about it in the right way and therefore found their area to then lead into when they go to the scale-up phase.
Thanks, Sumit. Question five. Could you give the current cash and short-term investment balance at the end of September?
Whilst we can't give you an exact cash balance because we're in a closed forum and that would require an R&S, what I can do is give you an indication. We had GBP 2.3 million of cash and short-term investments at the end of June. We brought in proceeds of just under GBP 2 million from a fundraise subsequent to that period. In the last quarter as well, our cash burn was a six-figure number. I'll let you do the math.
Thanks, Steve. Question six. What is your goal for the product market fit stage in terms of users, MAUs, and paying subscribers? The conversion of MAUs to payers is good at 24%. Why is the conversion of sign-ups, 110,000, to MAUs so low? What precisely are you doing to address this metric? Our metrics really are going to be around engagement, around retention, and around conversion. They're the key things that are going to be leading indicators of whether we'll make Elevate a success. Yeah, we agree that certain areas of the conversion are currently pretty healthy and some need focus. To answer the question about the 110,000 to conversions, I will just pick up on that point. We started this in September 2024.
We were using our search budgets for a wide variety of markets, again, to learn, including India, including Philippines, and including other markets where there wasn't a very high propensity to pay, but it was good for data. Therefore, we wouldn't always expect those subs or those users to convert directly into paid subscribers. There's a variety of reasons for different levels of conversion. I think the point I would really like to leave you with is it's really about those leading indicators of retention, of engagement, and then of conversion. Anything you'd like to add there, Tim?
I think that reiterates the point that, as you pointed out, the conversion of the regular free users that we get is low. That would be madness for us to do more of that at this stage. Finding those clusters and finding those early adopters is the goal of the product market fit phase. At the back of that, we'll not only have the product that is relevant to them and more, but we will have a deep understanding of those users. That's what we lean into.
Question seven. Why have we not released a player? Was it advised as it was part of the overall Elevate project? Surely, if we'd released a player by itself in the past, as many shares as wanted, maybe that would have increased the share value. As I understand, the player would have been a successful tool and substantially increased revenues and share value. I think it's a double header for you two, guys.
Yes. I'll start. The player, we've been using it and the technology in the player, we've pushed straight out into Elevate once it's been tested. We've been using the player as a testing tool for the technology. What we want to do is to get Elevate to be really, you know, really finished and beautiful before we start diversifying too much. What we have decided is that we will make the beta player available to all users so that people can try it. There's quite a lot of technology coming down the pipeline that we will be able to test in the player. I think you can expect that for the users who want to do it, which is quite a few, they will have access to it. The key focus has to be to get the editing function working.
We will learn almost like a product solution fit stage with the player, what sort of things people are looking for there.
You have also got to look at the order and the relevance buying order. The distribution capabilities of Elevate are clean on the top of when we're into the established market. They're not, but we have to have that bit first. Otherwise, we're not going to have enough users to warrant the use of the player. Right now, it's more important that the player is being used to build out the playback technology. In fact, the player division has pioneered the new way of compositing and the way that we're handling and working with things like the GPU, which will not only just help the editing process, but will actually help the output, the ultimate output. It is a joint effort. Of course, the player is the testing bed for the new codec and the way that things work in Elevate. It is happening. You just can't see it.
Anytime you see a video playing back within Elevate, you are looking at the player.
Thanks, Sumit. Question eight. Can the company explain why it has failed the shareholders so badly to allow the price to have dropped so far? What are the remedies to restore shareholder value? Can we please from now on have target dates that the company agrees with shareholders to meet? Sumit, can we have the outstanding features which the shareholders want so that we can go to the next stage? When will we meet the prosumer stage? Okay, so I'll take a, there's quite a few different points in there. Why have we failed shareholders so badly? I mentioned before, we're in the product market fit phase, right? We're putting out information fairly regularly and numbers too to explain where we are with that stage and what that stage really means to you guys as investors, but also to the customers, which are oh so important to us.
It really is about delivering features on a rapid basis and learning from those and learning from those. Now, in terms of when we are going to start delivering those features, Sumit, I know that they're coming thick and fast. Do you want to take that part of the question?
Yeah, the development process that we run through is an agile process where we make a release a couple of times a week. You don't always know about it because it's often things that are happening behind the scenes. When there's obviously something notable, we do tell everybody. The last couple of weeks, we've had a good cadence of about one a week. Over the summer, things were slightly slower, but even before the summer, we were in the same process. It's really important that we don't rush junk out the door. The easiest way to kill our effort going forward is if we put product out that is unstable, not thought through, and not good for users to use. We will get absolutely nowhere.
Whilst that might be frustrating from a shareholder point of view, it will only guarantee a further erosion of shareholder value if we actually are halfway, you know, 90% of the way through a bridge, and then it's the last 10% of the world. Let's just make it out of polystyrene. You can imagine what the outcome would be. We're really going to stick to doing things the correct way because it's so important that we do it the correct way for the users and that we do it the correct way for how our product will grow and have a future. Putting something in the market now that's unfinished or not complete or incorrect would be catastrophic.
I think to finish this question as well, this is where it takes a visionary investor, is that we do risk this product enormously. We started off with a PowerPoint document back in 2022 and have now come to a functioning product that has audiences, that has customers all around the world and works better than any other product that even comes close to trying to do what we're doing. It has been a fantastic achievement on behalf of the teams that work for us. I'm really proud of where we've got to. Unfortunately, the institutions, or at least a couple of the institutions, haven't recognized that, haven't seen that that is something of an achievement and haven't seen that de-risk. A number of them have sold out, and that has been damaging to the share price.
I think this is where the visionary investors, and I hope we've got quite a few of these on the call, is that look at the share price now. Look where we've got to, right? This is an absolutely, it's a huge opportunity for people to get involved with the stock right now, I have to say. Because we've come so far and we are so much closer to be able to show that growth. If you're understanding what we're saying, what Sumit is saying about where the product's got to, then I'm sure that you'll understand that investment case. It's a shame that the rest of the market, certainly some of the institutions, haven't seen that.
They haven't seen it yet, let's say.
Correct. What is our relationship with Avid? Rumor was that we are doing a deal with them. No. We are not in the Avid area at this stage. We are very much in the creator economy and Avid's not a bet. For Blackbird, ex-Elevate, the second half of 2024, EBITDA was GBP 672. Do you want to read this one to see if this is?
Yeah. Yeah. For Blackbird, Elevate, the second half of 2024, adjusted EBITDA was GBP 672,000, giving a full year of GBP 490,000. These GBP 600,000 plus the expectations for the second half, adjusted EBITDA for Blackbird, excluding Elevate, bringing it to GBP 700,000, plus for the full year after first half one of GBP 127,000. What I would say on that one is that, yeah, revenues year on year are not going to be the same, neither is our cost base. We're not going to give out some, you know, we're not going to give out forecasts by division at this stage. You know, as per the guidance that we gave in the RNS, we're expecting Blackbird to be profitable for the second half of the year and the full year too.
Okay. Next question is a finance question as well. We'll just...
Yeah, the first half of 2025, corporate overhead hasn't moved much at GBP 500,000 for the six months. Can you break this down? Is this all salaries of how many people? It's principally the Board plus one other member. 80% of those costs are salaries and associated costs such as, you know, employers' national insurance. The other items in there are costs that are being listed, such as London Stock Exchange costs, Nomad costs, or audit costs, etc.
Okay. One more finance question for you.
Can you break down, first off, operating costs? Blackbird, excluding Elevate, and Elevate. No, Blackbird has been halved. Is this all employee reduction? Yeah, the vast majority is employee reduction on the Blackbird side, but also we have repurposed some of the team as our focus of investment is on the Elevate area.
Perfect. Thanks. Okay, longer questions here. Keep the questions on a bit longer, please, just so we'll get through these questions. The first one, my question on the definition of product market fit and capital efficiency. The company is investing heavily to build features for the highly competitive professional creator market. Yet there appears to be a clear product market fit today with existing product in the enterprise sector. For instance, large finance institutions like Lloyd's or Barclays could immediately deploy this for internal training, using it to rapidly create and share videos on everything from new software rollouts to critical compliance updates. This market represents immediate multi-seat license revenue. Could the board explain the strategic decision to prioritize a cash-intensive development race over pursuing these large-scale enterprise contracts that could be landed now? What is the sales team actively doing to penetrate this corporate market?
Yeah, can I? Great question. Really thought through. Let me give you a little bit more clarity on something. Where you've said that we're targeting the higher-end creator market or the professional creator market, we're not. We've been quite clear that one of our big ICPs is the enterprise sector. There is a slight difference in that you're quoting Barclays and Lloyd's, and we're more looking at the SMEs. There is a very good reason for that because it may seem like, oh, we could just very easily deploy it there. Barclays and Lloyd's are two companies I know very well. I built their streaming infrastructure. I know exactly how you build video product within those organizations. Unfortunately, the procurement process to do that and the amount of hoops we'd have to jump through with organizations like that would not give us a quick-to-market ability to build revenue.
We are more interested at the organizations that we've been meeting in the last two weeks at the Technology for Marketing Forum and Ideas Fest and organizations that can move very quickly. Barclays and Lloyd's are absolutely our target, you know, at the right time. I know the people there. They've got auditoriums. They have edit suites. I know the person who runs video. We absolutely want to be used in those organizations. Getting in, as a cloud product, getting in and deployed within those organizations right now is actually something that would take longer. We are going to be focused on enterprise. We definitely see, and this is very much the Figma story. Figma is promoted and loved by designers who are freelancers and small agencies, but really they make their money out of Unilever. It's the 1,000 customers they have that spend GBP 100,000 with it.
That's our North Star. We definitely know that Elevate, more than any other video editing product, will be able to scale into larger organizations and provide them with their desktop editing capabilities. It's a market I know very well, very passionate about, but not one you can just easily walk into.
Excellent. Next question. My question is on the definition of product market fit and capital efficiency. Sorry, that was previous. I have a process question based upon yesterday's Barclays Eagle Labs presentation. We had a marketing presentation and engineering presentation delivered by the same person with a clear barrier between the two, so much so they called it out after finishing their marketing element. The presenter was obviously an expert in the engineering details but seemed less comfortable delivering the marketing message, which is the first part. I would agree. Thank you for the question. I would say that yesterday's presentation didn't meet our normal high standards of a product that we put to the market. I think we've all learned a little bit there. Tim's an excellent presenter when it comes down to the, as you call it, engineering, but on the actually the editing side of it.
We've learned that we certainly should have a two-handed approach to that and make sure there's a presenter that can deliver the marketing messages proficiently as well. Thank you for the question. Ian, I was hoping you could elaborate on the evolution of your growth strategy. The aggressive exponential growth curve that you outlined back in May appears to have shifted back towards a phased focus on achieving product market fit. Was this slowdown a deliberate strategic choice to prioritize product quality and user retention over sheer acquisition numbers? Was it more of a reaction to the market headwinds? Crucially, what milestones must be reached before we can expect a return to the exponential growth? Great question. There was obviously early signs of exponential growth, which is fantastic. What hit us was the churn.
Therefore, we've learned from that churn and made sure that the new subscribers coming on board or the new users and subscribers coming on board are engaged users that align to our ICP. I'll reiterate the key things that we're looking for going forward in terms of metrics. Our retention of those subscribers is engaging with those subscribers and conversion into pay. They're the key areas that we're looking at. They're the lead indicators of what we're doing. It's a learning phase.
I think it's worth adding that we could have continued the expenditure that we were making in search and continued driving through that. We would have over 1,000 paying customers by now. We could have easily bought users. That doesn't help us. What helps us is we learn enough from the circa 350 that we have that are telling us and informing us about everything. We don't need three times as many; that would have been too costly to acquire. What matters more is that as soon as we work with those 350, we'll use the money we've got to acquire 2,000 rather than the 1,000. It really is about being disciplined and us pulling back where we needed to at the right moment, rather than just for the sake of pushing in a narrative that's still only in the hundreds. It would have been futile.
It would have been, yeah.
A linked question there, Sumit. With around 57% of all paying users having churned, what level of retention uplift do you expect once the missing features like captioning, mobile uploads, and graphics go live? When will those features be fully released?
Yeah, so mobile uploads obviously just went live. AI captions is being very, very actively worked on, and we're hoping to see that by the end of the year. There are a whole bunch of other features that are coming out, especially in the graphics and animation space and transition space. There are others, by the way. I didn't even, you know, some of the graphs don't show things. One of the biggest impactful things we've added recently was the boundary boxes. That was a very expected behavior that we wish we'd had sooner, and we've now put out there. All of these features, and we talked about it quite a lot in the team recently, people come to us for the big features, but they stay for the little things.
Just simple things like the folder management and relabeling things, and some of those smaller features that we've neglected a little bit in favor of bringing in some of the bigger features, we now have a dedicated team that is going around ensuring that when people are in the product, they have everything they need. Churn is a result of them not being able to achieve what they need to do in the most convenient way. We now have to work on the, okay, what is it we need to do to keep people on the product? We learned a lot about bringing them in. What do we do to keep them in there? What are the things that they absolutely need to get about doing their day-to-day? How do we prioritize that?
Like I said, we've established a new team that is dedicated towards the smaller, more hygiene factor features that will help reduce that churn. Of course, in time, as we just add some of the bigger features, that will also help reduce that.
I think the other point as well about the numbers of paying users is when we reported back in May, we were at half price. We could have continued going at half price and seen that conversion change. We are in a learning phase. When you double the price of a product, you're judged by a new metric. You're judged by a new standard. Of course, we're judging out of our standard of $15, GBP 15, EUR 15. As the exit survey tells us, and people that get churned tell us, for that price, we're still here to have all the right features. That is indeed the learning that we are taking on, or we knew anyway, but we're taking on. We're adding features all the time. The next question is quite similar. You're 4,697 paying users, but only 344 active. Does that mean that roughly half have canceled?
Could you break down growth to ads, churn, and net growth? Do you see patterns? We're not going to give any further numbers out. Most of it can be done through triangulation of numbers, I think. We are a company that has given quite a few numbers today. I know it's never enough. The thing is, we're giving far more information out than any other company that would do in a similar stage of development. As I mentioned before, behind closed doors in California. Remember, the numbers that we give out also go directly to our competitors. It's always good to remember that when we're being asked for numbers. It's not just in a closed environment, unfortunately. Yes, indeed. As I said, the exit survey always points generally to the same thing. Can we have more features, please? We will stay.
You use slight missing features, captions, animated graphics, mobile uploads, as reasonable cancellations. Which of these are the highest priority to deliver? What is your timing for closing these gaps? How will you prioritize given limited resources?
Yeah, mobile uploads are available. Captions and animations will be seen as yet.
Okay, I think the next question is about product features as well. You've emphasized collaboration as a key differentiator for Elevate. What is the average number of active users per paid account? Are most paid users solo or part of multi-seat teams? Any information you can, I mean, does improve it?
Yeah, we're not publishing the number at all. What we have seen is that as we've increased the amount of seats that users or a team is able to have, we're seeing further collaboration. The review user has brought in more collaboration as well. Again, because there's a lot of misunderstanding about this, that video editing traditionally is not a very collaborative process. We know that. That's why we're building a collaboration version of it. Much like producing a print brochure 20 years ago was, you know, left to a designer and then an art worker, and then it went to the printer. It was a very linear process. The video is being the same. We're doing the same with what we're doing. We expect collaboration to grow as the product grows and the market grows for this, and it becomes more available.
Just to give the previous question, actually, it was slightly different than just product market fit phase. It was a little bit about the paid users. It was, yeah, thanks for the update on this phase. You're telling us what potential paid users could do with knowing a little more about what it is that's coming in order for them to buy the future of the product. Why are you not telling people, more people about what's coming? That's a very fair comment. We've actually been discussing this recently. We used to run a podcast at the beginning where we did discuss things like up-and-coming things. We're bringing that back in some format.
We're not exactly sure of the exact format of it, but we expect in the next few weeks to see a new format where it is more, it updates from me, Kell, the engineering team, and things that will be hinting at what is coming. More importantly, not every one of you, especially as investors, uses the product. You don't necessarily know some of the wonders that have happened, like the feeling of the new boundary boxes or how the looks are working. You just maybe hear about them in brochureware, but it will be an opportunity for you to watch this and actually see them in action and obviously discussing maybe some up-and-coming things. We're definitely going to keen to do that and look after our user base.
Thanks, Sumit. Question/statement. Pricing strategy, keeping the early bird discount longer, could have brought goodwill while the product matured. Yeah, thank you. That's a very good point. To the point I made just slightly earlier, we are in a learning phase, and therefore we thought it was valuable to learn about how our product will be received at full price. Again, yeah, I do think that's an interesting point. You featured a meeting with Boris FX. If you want to go on LinkedIn, is there anything you can share on that?
I think nothing to share other than we are obviously in constant conversations with Boris FX.
Other folks.
Yeah, how we utilize some of it.
Yeah, absolutely. Noticed. According to respected ADVFN members, adding mobile upload functionality to Elevate requires only a one-day work for one person. Do you concur?
We don't concur. It didn't take one day, but the good news is today is the day, and it is available. Please take a look at it and then, yeah, reimagine whether that was one day's work.
Guys, I have to say, I think I would love to be able to click my finger on all these features just landing the product overnight. It would be amazing. You've got to remember that no one else has built what we've built, and we built it in a very rapid amount of time. There are no global product layouts. It's not easy. It's really not easy, and the team are incredibly talented and working incredibly quickly. Thank you very much for that question. Ian, can you say a little more about the employee numbers and cutbacks that you mentioned in the interims? Are features being delayed due to lack of developers? We've really, we are constantly being disciplined about cost. Cash is a concern for not just us, but every company in the world today, and we must be very disciplined about that.
We review our teams all the time. I have to say that it's definitely not down to lack of developers that the products are arriving when they're arriving. I wouldn't say they're delayed at all. They're arriving when they're arriving, and they're working at pace. We have an exceptionally talented development team working on them. Great work from Kell and Chiara on the social videos. Give yourself a round of applause. Everybody loves you.
Thank you.
What do you consider to be your biggest threats to not realizing the amount of the TAM?
as we move into the scale-up phase.
Having enough marketing spend?
Yeah,
it's a worry that we're not going to be able to communicate into the market with the effectiveness that some organizations may have. I'd say that that's probably a threat to us.
Exactly. Not being able to explain the benefits of the product to a wide enough audience. That's true. As I said at the beginning, it's not a risk-free investment. It's a potentially huge return, but not risk-free.
I can add another one, actually. The biggest threat to us not being able to realize a large amount of TAM is if we go down a too niche angle. If we build a product like most of the online products that are available today in this space, remember, we still see ourselves as the only professional-grade product in this space. Most of the players in this space have gone down a very, very narrow, very limited market. That market, all of them are in it. They have not only taken a very small slither, or let's say it's a large part of the market, but a very unwilling to pay part of the market, and then they have divided themselves amongst themselves. What we mustn't do is say, right, let's just focus on this one thing over here.
That would be a threat to us if we force ourselves, or we're forced into that space. All you're doing is limiting yourself at the outset.
Just to check, another question on that, question 36. How do we fund the business over the next few years, given the small net new customer growth and the high cash burn without massively diluting your loyal and long-term shareholders, given the share price of GBP 0.019 and the market cap is sub GBP 10 million? I think the key thing there is that we're building a revenue engine, and a revenue engine has to be profitable. You put a pound in and you get more than a pound out as profitable. If we can show that revenue engine working, or we can show massive improvement towards that revenue engine working, we have an investment case that we think is sound. We think we have visionary investors here and other places that will back that, given the huge amount of opportunity there is in this TAM. That's how we'll do it.
Can I answer the one about Blackbird?
Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah, fantastic.
Shall I read the question? Again, to a respected ADVFN member, Elevate is a light version of the software you've already developed for Blackbird. Why is it taking so long, and could he develop Elevate from scratch in a few weeks?
The answer is no, you couldn't have developed Elevate from scratch in a few weeks. Blackbird is actually a different product in a different market, although the technology has been applied directly to Elevate, and there's quite a lot of technology that hasn't yet been applied in Elevate that we'll be rolling out over time. The key difference, if you think of it from a practical point of view, is that often in the Blackbird editor, you take three months to install it and white glove treatment to train people up. Whereas Elevate, you can just come to the website, and the feedback I've had from a lot of people is they can just sit down and use it. It's like the different audience and the different market and different level of support.
It is a new product, but it has actually been accelerated a lot because all the internet side of the technology has been ready-made. Now we're moving on to GPUs. There's obviously synergy between the different parts, the different editors. In fact, a lot of the work we've done is synergy between them for the new development. Elevate is actually a masterpiece in beautiful design, and that reflects a different audience from focusing entirely on efficiency and people that get paid to do it or they don't get a job versus creators who actually have aesthetic sense and they want a beautiful product as well as beautiful professionality.
I think it's fair to say the packaging was also completely different. One is an on-premise installation and, like you said, L&D process. The other is something that sells in the cloud and is aimed at a different market. The heart and the core compositing is absolutely identical. In fact, innovation sometimes that Elevate drives end up back in Blackbird and vice versa. The truth is it's taken many years to develop the Blackbird product as well. It's not something that was built overnight, so there's no reason to Elevate. The heart of both products is absolutely the same. The packaging of them is different. It's like, you know, a bit like Stephen and I. Packaging is different, but the heart's absolutely the same.
Exactly.
Nice knowledge. Right, question for Kell. Kell, you've made many short videos aimed at beginners. Are beginners a key part of the marketing reach?
Yeah, so beginners, and by the way, credit to Chiara as well, who's making a lot of videos and doing amazing jobs, not just me. I think beginners are definitely a big part of it because Elevate is being built to be a super intuitive, super easily accessible video editor. We want to introduce Elevate to beginners because it's so easy for them to get into it. It's kind of like linking back to the Uber TAM story that Ian mentioned earlier. People that would have otherwise never video edited because the current offerings are just way too complicated, require heavy machinery. They are giving video editing a shot now because Elevate is making it so accessible and so easy for them to get started. Yes, beginners are definitely going to be very important for us.
Thanks, Kell. Do you see the instant review tool as a way to help the virality of Elevate?
Yeah, 100%. Definitely. It's the way in which people will, their first touch will probably be for the foreseeable future. The most likely way that you'll use Elevate for the first time will be as a reviewer. We definitely know that that will be part of our viral flywheel, and it's the great way to get it into people's hands. FrameIO had exactly that same experience. Most people's FrameIO experience started with receiving a link and being able to review something. Yeah, it's a big part of our strategy.
Will you need further funds to scale up to the scale-up phase? Our ambitions are big. Our ambitions are industry-changing. Yes, we will need more funds in the scale-up phase, but we're taking our revenue engine to the market for that revenue phase, for that scale-up phase. How often will you be communicating the updates of your leading indicators to shareholders and investors? Monthly? I think we'll be taking our leading indicators to you guys when we have the end-of-year results and, you know, other moments that are set pieces like the AGM. As I said, every time we release numbers into the market, they go directly into the dynamic and exciting and fervent market that there is here and direct to our competitors. We must be careful about how often we release all these numbers. Will any of you be adding to your shareholders' current record bargain-based share prices?
With you all clearly being very confident in the future, also great to see the adverts. They look really sharp and really demonstrate Elevate and its use. As you know, we are big supporters of this company. We're all of us around the table here investing almost to our max in terms of how we can support the company. It is a bargain basement, and you know, if we have funds available, then I'm sure we'll be investing in this exciting time. Thank you very much for that.
I don't even mind saying that. I obviously don't have to declare mine on another board member, but I believe I was the largest trade, buying trade on Monday.
There you go.
Under 2P, it's, when we talk about shareholder value, we'll judge whether 2P was good shareholder value in the future. To be clear, we only get the opportunity to buy stock at like 10 days a year.
Yeah.
We get limited opportunities. The opportunity is there for us at the moment, and that's great.
Clear for you.
That's right.
Question from Jimmy Louis. I searched the internet to ascertain the opinions. What I have seen, the opinions are good. I'm personally in support of your aims. Thank you a lot, Jimmy. When will Elevate be finally ready, finished, and beautiful? Oh, I love the finished one. When is it finished, Sumit?
It will never be finished. That's the point behind it. It's an ongoing product. Already, it feels a lot more finished than it did six months ago. Those of you who use the product will know how much the last two months have meant in terms of its development, in terms of maturity. We expect that certainly by the end of the product market fit phase, we're going to be in a great position. Even by the end of this year, I think people will be pleasantly surprised at how good it's getting. That's the feedback we get from a lot of users and a lot of the different focus groups that have remained constant from the beginning of this project. The feedback has been phenomenal in terms of the progress.
Thank you. Please describe the plan on what to do or fast publish, I think, is a good thing to know.
Yes, quick publish. Beta is how it's going to be built on their menu. What that allows you to do is to publish video of any length in almost no time, in seconds. It creates a web page with a link, and you can share the web page.
It also gives you feedback on how many views you have and allows you to clip out the best bits and reshare those. It's a very easy way to distribute your content externally, without having to do a render and people download and upload stuff. It's obviously very useful for development because we can put the new technology in and roll it out to thousands of people and see what works or what doesn't work.
Yeah, learning stage, mate.
That's why we've limited it so far. It will be hard to find, but it will be available to everyone in a few weeks.
You've spoken for some time about the uniqueness and strength of Blackbird's technology and now Elevate. Given that there has been no major strategic partner or keystone customer who's really wanted to lean in and commit to being part of this journey, do you want to look for this type of strategic involvement? Certainly, in terms of the partner, we are doing the development and rollout ourselves. In terms of the customer, I think that's actually something that we'll start to look at.
The collaborations, we're working with organizations in collaboration with them to not only learn deeply about them, but to co-share in marketing activities, which gives great exposure for both organizations.
Question 51. Elevate is amazing. Thank you all. SBS , I imagine if you wanted to, you could put your feet up and do whatever you want in life.
That's what everybody wants to do.
What motivates you to develop Elevate, and what are your ambitions for it?
It's very rare you get a chance to change the whole world. Right back at the beginning, I invented cloud video editing, but the market was very small. In fact, everyone's always been saying we were too early. Now we've actually got a massive market, only billions of billions. With Sumit here in product, we're actually making a tool that meets that need. I'm very happy to supply the technology for that product.
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. How close are you to releasing AI captions capability?
By the end of the year, it could be sooner. We're absolutely keen. I've released text-to-speech and speech-to-text when I was at the venues, probably the first to market. Sometimes it's not just a race to be first. You've got to do it well because no one implementation of captioning, we feel, is good enough for the kind of editor that we're building. We are doing quite a good implementation of it. We want to make it so that it really does work to scale, not only for people who just want to capture a small Instagram post, but also somebody who would use it to caption a two-hour documentary. The plans for it are going to be very, it's going to mean that it's going to be a very good implementation.
Thanks, thanks, Sumit. Yes, we absolutely know that's fundamental. It's fundamental to the expected running of this product. We're really focused on it. Stephen here, well done on your amazing innovation and total determination. Thank you very much, Philip. Given that the next results are six months down the road, are you going to give Kell an update on numbers before then? I'll refer back to my answer a few minutes ago, which is these numbers go directly to the competition. We give out far more numbers than any of our competition do. I would like to say that probably not. We are going to be doing it on set pieces. I'm a professional, in, tax and business advisor. As a consequence, I come across different trades and professions. I'm in favor of initial face-to-face workshops.
However, once there's been a minimal level of learning in the future, I would consider online updates. How would Elevate fit in with a live online meeting? Do you want to talk about that?
Sure, yeah. We also really, really understand and see the value of a face-to-face, especially at this stage that we're at now where we're building our initial customer base. A few of our initiatives in the last couple of weeks and months have really demonstrated that. For instance, the events play a big part in this. We've gone to events and we've been demoing Elevate to so many different people and so many different teams, showing them exactly what's so special about it, how to use it. That's been really, really effective. It's our first real play at like really just face-to-face, almost a white glove type of initiative. The reception has just been absolutely incredible. It's been so validating talking to people. What we've seen coming out of those is that it's very effective in generating leads and actually onboarding people onto the platform.
100%, we're doing a lot of education. We had our first play at the webinar yesterday, as you know. That's going to improve and develop, and we're going to teach people how to use Elevate at this point in time. We're a lean marketing team, but at this point in time, we can really do that. It's all about educating people, showing them how to get onboarded and showing them how to make videos.
Thanks for your help. Question on EVS, Steve.
Yeah, is there any update on EVS? There are two sides actually to EVS. We did announce in the RNS as well that we have actually been included as part of their offering for the Winter Games in 2026. That will happen in Italy early next year. The second side to it is the technology licensing deal. All I can say at this stage is yes, EVS have been rolling out IPTV via Create to other customers. At the moment, we are not in excess of our annual minimum guarantee. When we are, then we'll let you know.
Thanks, Steve. Ian, you're targeting the U.S. East Coast. Do you have enough people out there to achieve your ambitions? Will you go there yourself to push the product?
I would say at this stage that we are targeting the East Coast in terms of clusters, in terms of seeding. Yes, we have enough people there to do that. Will I go out there personally? I don't think that I need to at this stage, but I was certainly visiting the U.S., I would think, in the next few months for different reasons. I would think, you know, very possibly go to the East Coast. We have someone on the ground in New York already. We send people when necessary when we're doing events. Yeah, we're happy with our team presence over there currently.
What is your target for paying users at the end of the product market fit stage?
I think this is more about momentum. This is more about engagement and about retention and about conversion to paying users as opposed to absolute numbers. We will know when that stage is reached. It will be very much a case of selling that revenue engine at that particular point in time. Hi, in which month will product market fit phase actually be complete? Sam, do you want to hear?
I think we end up on the scale and it shows towards the end of February 2026. You don't send the data in the diary and it's just that's exactly what happens. We will produce a bit more guidance, obviously, around the time and be clear about it. It also doesn't mean that there is physically a day. I mean, it will be a period where we say, okay, this is complete and we're moving forward.
Excellent. Thank you. When you take on users, do you request data such as student, filmmaker, charge, etc.? Maybe you want to build on this one, Kell.
Absolutely, yeah. We have an onboarding survey, and we've had that since the beginning of this year. We've had that for quite a while. We have a lot of data about our users, what kind of profile they have, what kind of skill level, what kind of videos they're making. That data has been very valuable, and we use it all the time when we do our analysis. In addition to that, we also have our active survey. When people decide to leave, we also collect data and ask them why. It's all about learning. It's learning through quantitative data, but also very much through qualitative data. Yes, we're absolutely doing that.
Thanks, Kell. Question for Sumit. Will we be able to store our projects in a folder in the near future? Will we be able to duplicate our projects soon, Ian?
Yes, so team folders come out today. Project, being able to access the team media from a project within the media interface, is going to trail slightly later. Duplicate project is almost ready to go. It's obviously a key part of a few things, one of which will be multiple sequences. Being able to have demo projects, which is also tied with duplicate projects, is coming as well. Lots of things in that space coming.
I love the next question. When the marketplace is up and running, will there be a merch store so we could purchase those cool t-shirts? Great presentation and update. Confidence restored. Thank you very much. It's very hot. Happy to hear it. Nice to hear that. I think we should. I think it's not our top priority, obviously. Why not? Kell, any chance you can make a video of a gorgeous setting just prior to a volcano eruption, then post it on your YouTube channel? Faster with Elevate advertising, of course.
That is a really good idea. I should have come up with that. Yeah, we need to do that. We need to do that. We'll scout out locations starting tomorrow.
Thanks, Kell. I sometimes think investors don't realize how complex a development this can be. Perhaps you communicate to investors that this is very hard. I think the podcast is going to go a long way to explaining the problems that we're solving, right?
Yeah, I mean, the good news is that the development team, who are obviously the core team from Blackbird, have been working on the core engine for a long, long time. A lot of the people who worked on Elevate have only been working here for three years, including myself. The one thing that we're very confident about, and that we have achieved within the product market fit stage, is that we now know how to do everything that we need to know for this, at least for the foreseeable future. There will, of course, be challenges that come down the road when our ambitions widen. We're very, very confident. You have to remember at the beginning of this, we had an idea of how, for example, multiplayer and the multiple cursors and conflict resolution would work.
We were sure of it, that we knew it could be done because of adjacent industries, but could it be done on a video timeline? All of the really important things that we didn't, we may have had confidence in, but we didn't have the full answer to, we have achieved as part of this phase that we're in at the moment. Everything we have been scared about has been solved and is working. Now we just have a lot of execution work and tidy-up work to get to there, and then into scale-up. The process will begin again, and we'll set our ambitions higher and have to go and solve more problems. The efficiency of the team is absolutely through.
Also, their understanding, you know, three years is, and some of them less than three years, and some of them, one of our developers only being with us a few weeks and already being responsible for the in and out points and the preview player, that's been his first piece of work, all achieved certainly within the last month. What's important is that the knowledge within the organization, within the development team of what is the right thing to do, is now becoming second nature. That's really important because this is not a trivial subject. It is a very detailed subject. It's stoked with legacy. It's got nuances that you wouldn't believe. That's just very obvious, by the way, when you look at the other online video providers.
Some of the other online competitors, you can tell that they have not understood the video production process because of the way that they've done certain things. For us, you know, that team is really gelling.
Thanks, Sumit. Hi, when will you need your next cash injection, especially as you realize marketing is critical to realizing a large amount of TAM? We answered this a little bit earlier where we will be needing cash to scale up, of course. We will be taking a revenue engine investment case to investors to do that. I think when we can show that past improvements of the put a pound in and get, you know, a profit out, then we have a sound investment case to get new investment. Do you have any IP that protects your product from replication? Steve, maybe you want to take a what?
Yes, we have quite a few patents for the technology, mostly the compression technology that also makes the system very efficient on data rate, as well as responsive and smooth. Yes, we have quite a few patents there.
Okay, question 69. If your new customer growth continues to underwhelm, how will you fund the business? It's easy to detail how you'll fund the business as we go to plan, but with the share price at GBP 0.019, what are the options if slower than growth happens? To answer your question, quite frankly, is that we are in an area where we have a huge potential opportunity to provide a return. It is not a risk-free investment. You know, it might not work. At this point in time, we've de-risked this product to an enormous amount versus where we were six months ago when we last spoke to you and certainly two years ago when we put this plan to you. I would say that we're in a fantastic opportunity to deliver versus where we were. As I said, it's still not risk-free. Stay focused. Sumit, we love you. And four kisses.
Next one. How are we getting this message out that one of the things that sets Elevate apart from the seeming competitors is that they're so much more robust and able to do more than short videos? Haven't seen this in the marketing messages. Over to you, Kell.
Yeah, so how do we get that message across? We get that message across through several different channels, right? You can't just use one channel to say something one time and then expect, you know, everybody to learn about that. I do think we speak about that. We talk about that on the website. We talk about that on our blogs. We make YouTube videos where we show how you can create longer form content, not just vertical shorts on TikTok or anything like that. If you're just following our Instagram, then that might give that impression that we're focusing on the shorts, but that's just because we're targeting the users on Instagram. If you're looking at our YouTube videos, it's quite a different story. We are showing landscape videos, longer types of formats. Yeah, we will continue doing that.
We always talk about how incredibly responsive Elevate is versus other offerings, and that's really what sets us apart. We're a serious tool that works in the browser.
Fantastic. Thanks, Kell. Another statement. Looks like the presentation's gone very well. The stock price is up. Thank you very much. It should be. It's massively understood by the market. I'm really pleased that we managed to explain it all a little bit. I can't emphasize enough how important the Q&A is to us. Thank you so much for always taking the time to speak with us. You're very welcome. I think it's really important because it's not an easy thing to understand sometimes, as Sam had said from brochureware and other announcements. It's really good to be able to talk to you directly. How many paid users are now needed to break even at the current cash burn? Do you have enough for paid users by mid to end of next year? I love the fact you keep asking me for numbers.
I'm not going to give any more numbers out than we have done. We give a lot more out than other companies at our stage of development. I hope you bear with us, and we'll release them when we think it's the appropriate time. Share price of GBP 0.0025 since your presentation started. Maybe a daily presentation for World Wonders. Thank you, Philip. May well be. I'm now going to go into question 76, which I think might be the last question. Hi, is the plan to scale and then sell Elevate or not? No plans to sell at this stage. We're a listed business, and therefore we would love to enjoy the growth and rewards that come with being on the markets as we grow. No plans at all to sell the business. Thank you very much. Anything else anyone would like to add? Oh, okay.
Jay, go ahead.
Absolutely, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much, guys, for being so generous with your time and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. If there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you afterwards. Ian, perhaps before we finish, just really now 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 some closing comments, that'd be great.
Thank you very much, Jay. I would say that's a very engaged session, and thank you very much for all your questions. We don't underestimate how engaged you are. We know you, and we know how important you are to our development. It's a huge pleasure to be able to talk to you on these occasions. I will just finish by saying that I've never been more confident. I've never been more confident in the fact we've got the right vision, we've got the right product, we've got the right timing, and we've got a huge global opportunity. I hope you enjoy the ride with us. Thank you very much.
Perfect, Ian. That's great. Thank you all once again 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 really better understand your views and expectations. This won't take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Blackbird PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.