Thanks everyone, for joining this morning, to Airtasker's FY23 interim financial results, presentation. My name is Tim, I'm the co-founder and the CEO of Airtasker, and I'm joined, by Mahendra.
Morning, everyone. I'm Mahendra Tharmarajah. I'm the CFO of Airtasker, as Tim mentioned. I joined the company in October last year. Pleased to be here. Tim.
Thank you. As a reminder, Airtasker, we're building the world's most trusted place to buy and sell local services. In very, very simple terms, we simply connect people who need work done with people who want to work. At Airtasker, our mission is to empower people to realize the full value of their skills. Creating jobs isn't a by-product of the work that we do, it's actually the core purpose of the Airtasker platform. On the right-hand side here, you can see some of our great community members, Tess and Miko. These are all members of the Airtasker community. Proudly, over a lifetime since inception, Airtasker has put more than AUD 428 million into the pockets of our taskers.
That's excluding all our fee revenue. That's how much has been paid out to create income and opportunities for our community, and a number that we're super proud of. Aligned with our mission to empower people to realize the full value of their skills, we've built a very unique marketplace. Airtasker's marketplace is unique for two reasons. The first is that we're an open marketplace. That means that we don't rely on manual operations in order to create quality outcomes in our marketplace. We've built a system based on transparency and accountability. That means two things. One is that we have a really scalable business. The second is that we have really, really strong gross margins, and we'll talk a little bit about, through our light touch model, having a 93%–94% gross margin .
The second thing that's unique about Airtasker's model is that we're infinitely horizontal. We don't just focus on one kind of service like cleaning or a few services like home services. We're a platform which lets people get anything done. This is really powerful because that long tail of services, all those things you can't get done anywhere else can be done through Airtasker. It also forms part of our growth strategy. Because we're able to do these remarkable services through the Airtasker platform, that creates really, really great content, and that helps to be able to talk to the media and tell stories about the Airtasker community. Following on from our marketplace model, we have really, really strong unit economics because the marketplace structure that we've built is very, very efficient and it creates long-term sustainable advantage.
Firstly, we have really strong, unique organic customer acquisition. We saw unique paying customers grow to 450,000 members in the trailing 12 months to December 2022. We've got a really low reliance on paid marketing. Over 63% of our customers are just returning customers coming back to use the Airtasker platform for the second, third or fourth time. Of the new customers that we acquired, 80% of those new customers came from non-paid acquisition or organic channels. We've also got really strong and profitable unit economics. Of every task that's completed, we pay out about 81.8% to our taskers and community. Airtasker has a take rate of about 16.6% ex- GST.
Of that, 16.6%, we have a gross margin of around 94%. About 2% goes out to pay for insurance costs, about 3.7% goes out to pay credit card costs, the rest of it is Airtasker's gross margin. If we look at how the marketplace is sustainable and builds a defensive competitive advantage over a long time, Airtasker is building out the reputation passport of our customers and our taskers. We have over five million customer verified user reviews that means that our taskers have built their brands on the Airtasker platform, that keeps them really sticky to Airtasker. Over the years, we've built the largest local services marketplace in Australia, we're now exporting that to the world.
In Australia alone, we've seen more than two million posted tasks over the last 12 months. We have over 112,000 unique active taskers on our platform, and we have an annualized Gross Marketplace Volume , the total value of all the tasks happening on our platform, of over AUD 200 million. Australia is an AUD 52 billion TAM. If we look at exporting this piece of software that we've built to the world, there's over a GBP 70 billion total addressable market in the UK and over a AUD 500 billion total addressable market in the US. It really is a 10x opportunity to take Airtasker's platform and export it to the world. We're in a really interesting part of the economy at the moment.
On the left-hand side here, we've charted what we call the Airtasker Wage Price Index. What this is it's a measure of how much supply is in the Airtasker marketplace, how many people want to do jobs, versus how many people are looking to hire people in the marketplace, the demand of our marketplace. What you can see is that during 2020, we really saw a labor shortage start to form during the COVID pandemic. There was less immigration, and there were a large number of government incentives which made people not want to be incentivized to work. During 2020 and 2021, we saw the labor supply index go down and then down again. However, we saw a really interesting phenomenon during 2022.
As the interest rates went up, we saw that the incentives to work really increased. We also saw immigration barriers start to reverse. What that meant is lots more people wanted to start working on the Airtasker platform. About halfway during 2000 supply, the number of people wanting to work increased slowly. In that last data point there, you can see in January of 2023, we've seen a phenomenal increase in the number of people looking to work on our platform. In fact, a 48% year-on-year increase in marketplace supply. What this means is that during the current phase of the economic cycle, we're seeing consumer confidence come down, and that means demand has gone down. In Airtasker's terms, posted tasks are starting to soften in our marketplace.
Less people are coming at the top of the funnel to post their tasks. On the other hand of the marketplace, we're seeing supply increase massively. What that means is the average task price has stayed about steady. The completion rate on jobs has increased massively. Cancellations in our marketplace has decreased a lot, and take rate or our revenue in the marketplace has increased as well because we have more taskers competing over jobs. Despite the decrease in our consumer demand. Taking that even further, Airtasker's got a really adaptive business model, which allows us to adapt to this low phase of consumer demand in the economic cycle. What does this mean? There are a few levers that we're able to pull during this period. The first is we've got proven elasticity of fee pricing.
What that means is that taskers really see value in Airtasker's platform. If we increase our fee pricing by 1 or 2 percentage points, we still maintain a really high degree of tasker engagement through our platform, so we can increase prices without losing demand in our marketplace. The second thing that we've done is we've introduced a Oneflare subscription model into our portfolio of revenue. The Oneflare subscription model actually experiences higher demand from businesses during this low part of the economic cycle because businesses are really looking to compete to be able to find new business. We're seeing a huge surge in increase in the amount of people signing up for Oneflare subscriptions, and that's seeing our revenue increase on that side of our business.
Overarchingly as well, Airtasker's got a really low reliance on paid marketing. That's an important part of our mix. We acquire a lot of our customers organically, which means that we can manage our cost base during this part of the economic cycle. Lastly, we've got significant cash on our balance sheet. We have AUD 23.3 million on balance sheet, and that puts us in a really good position as our cash burn starts to lower. I'm now gonna pass it across to our CFO, Mahendra, who's gonna talk a little bit about the results.
Great. Thanks, Tim. For the half, the group revenue was AUD 21.8 million, which was up 57% on the comparative period. In line with that GMV, our Gross Marketplace Volume was also up 58%. If we exclude the Oneflare marketplace, this is the business we purchased at the end of FY22, revenue was up 23% for the Airtasker marketplaces and GMV in line with that up 24%. All in all, a good result and quite pleasing. Next slide. Here we're looking at our current balance sheet and our financial position. We're in a pretty strong financial position at the moment. We've got AUD 23 million of cash and no debt. We were pretty pleased.
Our operating cash burn for the half was down 29% on the comparative period. The net reduction in our cash balance for the half was only AUD 400,000. We're continuing to focus on our cost base and our cash flow management. That's certainly one of the key foundations of our financial management. We presented this marketplace staging economics previously. What we're trying to demonstrate is, I guess, how the business is structured from a financial perspective. We've got quite a significant investment in our core infrastructure. Our global head office, which manages most of our operations, and that enables us to then scale through new marketplaces. What we've got here is the Australian marketplace, which is at the scaling stage. It's much more mature business.
We've got the U.K. and the U.S. as our new marketplaces, which are in the one to 100 phase and the 0 to one phase. Essentially, we attribute revenue to the local marketplaces, as well as any direct marketing and customer support service costs. Then our global head office basically carries the fixed infrastructure costs. The operating expenditure related to the platforms and then supporting those, so engineering, product support, maintenance, as well as all our back office support functions, so leadership and finance and then people ops. Then we've got a, I guess, what you might describe as a discretionary component, which is innovation.
We invest in obviously non-capitalizable operating expenditure to improve the features we offer to our customers and improve the customer experience to drive long-term growth in our marketplace volume and our revenue. On the next slide, we sort of break that down into what that means in financial terms. You can see here that the Australian marketplace is generating EBITDA of around 12 million for the half. That largely covers our global head office operating expenditure, which is about the same AUD 11.8 million, which gives us a positive net EBITDA at that level. We're then looking at the global head office innovation investment, which was AUD 2.1 million for the half. Expenditure effects and drive both demand and supply in those markets.
Next slide. Looking more closely at individual markets, we've got the Australian marketplace. This combines the Airtasker and Oneflare marketplaces within Australia. Revenue for the half was AUD 21.4 million, up 56% on the comparative period. Gross profit was up 58% in line with that, so AUD 20.3 million. As Tim mentioned earlier, our gross profit margin at about 94%, so that's sort of consistent with that metric. Next slide. Looking at the UK marketplace, this is a marketplace that's showing good promise. For the half, we've taken a view of looking at trailing 12 months revenue and Gross Marketplace Volume . Principally because the business is quite cyclical. In the smaller markets, there's a degree of seasonality.
To try and be more, I guess, to better reflect the performance of the markets and not show as much volatility between quarters, we've taken this approach. Revenue was up 153% to GBP 400 thousand in the half or the trailing 12 months to the half. GMV was up 83% to GBP three and a half million. In the U.S., our market is a much, much less mature. We're principally focused on our posted task volume and task offers. The demand side and the supply side of the market. We can see here that in the half year, the posted tasks or demand increased five times on the previous period, up to 34,000 tasks.
While task offers were nine and a half times on the previous period, up to 54,000. Good ratio of task offers to customer demand.
Awesome. Thanks, Mahendra. I'll now take a moment to talk a little bit about our growth strategy. As you can see, I think a lot of this strategy is consistent with the previous halves. We're starting to see the Australian market continue to scale, but also investing into the US and the UK. In terms of our strategy in Australia, it's really about scaling our home marketplace. In Australia, we've built these network effects and we've built this scale, and that allows us to really generate strong margins and positive cash flows over time. In Australia, we're really focused on improving customer purchase frequency. On the next slide, I'll talk a little bit about how we're doing that.
Our real focus is on improving that frequency so that we can increase the gross margin for the, continue to expand into the total addressable market of AUD 52 billion in Australia. We're then taking that, and we're really scaling it and monetizing it. Scaling it through smart and profitable marketing. Monetizing it by really thinking where is the value that our customers are getting from our product, and how do we make sure that we price it accurately and correctly to optimize for Airtasker's revenue as well. We're then taking the cash flows that we generate in Australia and using that to invest into building new marketplaces in the US and the UK.
As mentioned, in the U.S., we're really in that early stage, in the 0 to one stage, where we're still working on just ramping up base customer engagement. That means getting a flow of posted tasks so that we can build a steady stream of job opportunities for our Taskers, and that's how we build that core of the network effect. In the U.K., we're in that second stage of building. We've already got that engaged customer base, and we're really starting to scale it in the one to 100 phase. During that phase, we're starting to balance in supply and demand, and we're also trying to scale our financial metrics, like Gross Marketplace Volume. Let's go a little bit deeper into what we're doing in Australia to improve customer frequency.
First of all, we're investing into our core product experience to improve marketplace reliability. One of the things that we found here is that Airtasker can be stronger in terms of enforcing our community guidelines. For taskers, we're starting to rank them and form an algorithm to determine reliability. Where it's necessary, we're taking enforcing actions to remove taskers or restrict them from the marketplace if they're not following our community guidelines. We're also investing into enhanced marketplace matching. One of the great things about having a marketplace at scale is you get a lot of data about our customers and taskers and which customer suits which tasker best.
As we develop that machine learning and data science to be able to do matching better, we're building a really strong defensive moat around the business and creating a better experience for our customers. We're also improving purchase frequency by opening up new kinds of use cases for people to use Airtasker. One example of use cases is unlocking repeat relationships. Up until about 11 months ago, you actually couldn't find a tasker that you'd worked with previously. You couldn't get in touch with them, you couldn't stay in touch with them, and so every time you wanted to engage someone in the marketplace, you had to go and find someone new. You had to post a task, put it to the market and find that person new every single time.
About 11 months ago, we shipped a product called Airtasker Contacts. It's really simple. It basically allows you to keep in touch with all the taskers that you've worked with before through a really simple messaging system. You're able to hit a button and request to rebook that tasker through the marketplace. Then we have a really simple payments model, which means you're covered for insurance, you've got a really convenient way to engage and communicate with that tasker, and you're paying much, much lower fees to Airtasker for that. Instead of paying a service fee of, you know, somewhere between 11% and 20%, you're paying about 1.9%. Which makes sense for our customers and taskers, and it also makes sense for Airtasker. We're starting to see some really exciting engagement here.
On the right-hand side there, you can see the growth week to week in how many millions of dollars is being processed through that platform annualized. A really big opportunity here to capture that repeat relationship and to nurture that through Airtasker. The second thing we're doing to increase purchase frequency in Australia is to enable customers in the high-value task segment. If you recall, we acquired Oneflare in 2022. The reason for that was to, of course, enhance network effects, but also to move up into what we call the high-value trade segment. Oneflare has thousands and thousands of businesses in this high-value segment, and we're starting to migrate them across to Airtasker through our new product called Airtasker Plus, which is a subscription model on the Airtasker side.
That's going out as a proof of concept, this financial year. We're really looking forward to slowly migrating and bringing to the fore our vision, which is to bring the Oneflare and Airtasker platforms into a single unit and to create a synergy of having a single marketplace platform for both everyday jobs but also high-value tasks as well. Over to the UK, where we're establishing new marketplaces. In Australia, really focused on the frequency and new use cases. Over in the UK, we're actually focused on building those basics of what we created in Australia, the marketplace for everyday tasks. We're doing that through a few different methods. First of all, we're rolling out our proven PR playbook. We've done some incredible newsjacking.
As you can see here on the left, we had a Prince Harry lookalike, which managed to grab the headlines during the Queen's Jubilee. That was really a way to talk about all the novel use cases you can use Airtasker for. We're also expanding our local partnerships. We've got a fantastic working relationship with Dunelm, which is the equivalent of Spotlight meets IKEA meets Bunnings in the U.K. with over 188 stores. Airtasker is partnering with Dunelm to not only create local jobs but also to unlock our furniture assembly and installation services, which is really exciting. Thirdly, we're doing smart and efficient above-the-line investment into brand. We're doing that through some, you know, U.K.-specific localized channels.
Things like marketing, into the tube stations, which has been very, very efficient for us to grow, especially during the high point of our seasonality, which is typically in March, April and May as we go through Northern Hemisphere spring and summer. Across to the U.S., where we're in that earlier stage. In the U.S., we are also rolling out our PR playbook here. You can see here on the left, we've had some great spots, for example, on KTLA, which is the morning show over in Los Angeles. Putting on a whole segment about how to throw the ultimate Super Bowl party with Airtasker. All of that is happening completely organically and unpaid.
Really leveraging Airtasker's infinitely horizontal marketplace to tell these great stories and to inspire people about how they can use Airtasker. We're also doing the newsjacking. We're finding all these opportunities where we can jump on the back of hot trends that are occurring in the local marketplace. For example, during Harryween last year, everyone had wanted tickets to the Harry Styles concert, people were posting up on Airtasker to get those jobs done. Again, that allows us to really join the conversation in the local area leverage organic PR and organic social media off the back of that. Third thing we're doing is we're making sure that we've got the real kernel of a strong community in the Los Angeles area.
As you can see, here on the right, starting to hold in-person events, starting to actually work closely with our community. This community is really what helps to build the next and the next layers of taskers in our marketplace. That's ultimately what drives the network effects in our business. The U.S. market are really, really exciting to see that the pace of its growth is getting faster and faster from, you know, what it took 10 years to do in Australia. We're seeing that happen much faster in the U.K., and we're seeing that happen even faster across in the U.S. I'm really excited about Airtasker's growth strategy, despite the difficult circumstances of the current macroeconomic environment.
Ultimately, Airtasker is taking a really, really strong long-term view on the value that we're creating. That's all centered around Airtasker's mission to empower people to realize the full value of their skills. We're creating jobs, we're creating income. I believe that that is something that is important, not only during the boom part of the cycle, but also in the more challenging parts of the economic cycle. Now happy to open it up to some of the questions. I might pass it over to Mahendra to call out the first questions.
Sure. Thanks, Tim. The first question we have is, what will be the catalyst that will see investors attracted to the Airtasker shares and a decent recovery in the share price?
Every day we are focused on building value into this business and taking a long-term view on that. I think that rather than, you know, focusing on, you know, quick announcements or sort of short-term boosts to the share price, we're really wanting to take a sustainable approach, which is to build long-term value into the business. As Mahendra mentioned, revenue growth of 57% on PCP is really something that I think if we continue to just have our heads down, focus on strong, profitable unit economics and growing revenue while being disciplined on costs, I think that's ultimately the way that we're gonna build value into this business. Across all growth and tech stocks right now, I think we've seen a compression in valuation multiples.
I think the most important thing for us as a company is being focused on long-term value creation, focused on revenue, focused on customer value, and focused on discipline with costs. If we take care of those things, I believe the share price is gonna naturally find a strong recovery.
The next question is any idea on what the levels of leakage might be?
Really, really interesting question around leakage. There are actually multiple kinds of leakage in Airtasker's marketplace. One kind of leakage is the leakage where two people don't even wanna assign a task through the Airtasker platform. We are using machine learning to actually detect when that's happening and reducing that a lot. I actually think that has become a very, very small percentage now of Airtasker's marketplace. We've really got it clamping down on that one. The second kind of leakage we see is what we used to call AUD 5 leakage, which is when two people would agree to do a task on Airtasker, but not agree to the true value of that task.
Rather than the task being AUD 1,000, it would only be recorded as AUD 5 through our marketplace, and the rest of the transaction would happen offline. We've also shut down that leakage by creating a policy where you can't actually have a task completed for anything less than 30% of the starting price. That leakage has almost disappeared as well. There is a third kind of leakage, which is two people meet on Airtasker, do one job together. We monetize that really well. We earn a take rate of close to 17%. The following jobs all happen offline. Up until about a year ago, the leakage on that was 100%. All of those jobs went offline, and we didn't capture any of those things.
Through the introduction of contacts, we've now started to reintroduce that GMV back into Airtasker's marketplace. We've made it really easy for people to nurture a repeat relationship through our platform. Because of that, with zero marketing, zero incentives, we're seeing multi-millions of dollars GMV starting to flow back into our marketplace. That's growing at a compounding rate from zero to close to AUD 4 million of annualized GMV in the space of about 9 months with very little education and close to zero incentives. I'm really excited about that because it takes time to educate the population about the availability of this service. Each week we're just starting to see that compound and compound and compound. To look at what the upper bounds of what that could be.
When we acquired Zaarly in the US, we saw that repeat booking transactions were about three times the size of initial booking transactions. To put that into perspective, Airtasker's current initial booking transactions is about AUD 200 million a year. If you can kind of imagine, three times that for the repeat booking part, I think that addressable market is absolutely enormous.
Great. The next question is the current Australian macroeconomic environment, increasing interest rates, inflation, having an impact on any of the key tasks? Task categories, I think it is.
Short answer, yes. We are seeing impact from the macroeconomic environment. One of Airtasker's large categories is the removalist category, and we have seen some softening in that space. Actually, in the first half of FY23, we actually saw overall posted jobs, so demand still increased by about 10% or 11% in Australia, which was quite interesting to see, especially when, you know, platforms like hipages have saw a decline of about 8% during that same period. I think, you know, we're really starting to see those network effects start to really come through. Airtasker up 10%, hipages down 8%. We have continued to see some softening in FY23 on posted tasks.
Less people are coming to the platform to post their jobs because there's softening consumer confidence. As mentioned, due to increased supply, we're seeing higher completion rates, lower cancellation rates, and higher revenue intake rate. Actually it kinda shows the adaptability of our business model, whether it's demand high, supply low or demand low, supply high, we always are seeing a growth in our revenue line, which is really promising to see.
The next question is on the U.S. market. What is required to see a rapid growth in the U.S. market, which is a massive marketplace? How long do you think it will take to create a serious asset? What will be the key drivers of growth?
Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, we're obviously trying to make that, the U.S. market grow as quickly as we possibly can. You know, we're seeing somewhere between 5-10x annual growth on both posted tasks and offers. Off a base of very, very low. So, you know, we're clearly building traction, and we're building it fast. I think the great thing to see is that, you know, in Australia it took us quite a number of years to get through to that traction point, you know, where you're doing sort of AUD 25 million a year in a city. We see that be much, much shorter in the U.K. from, you know, five years down to a couple of years.
What we're seeing in the U.S. looks really, really promising, that it's significantly faster than what we're doing in the U.K. How do we do that? I think, one of the things we're starting to formulate or postulate around is what's the point at which we really hit a market with that above-the-line branding. In Australia, we did that, when we were at a Gross Marketplace Volume of around about AUD 15 million per year annualized. By partnering up with Seven West Media, we saw a real acceleration in that growth. Interestingly, the U.K. market is now coming up to that phasing where we've really built that initial traction and there's an opportunity there to really start investing and scaling above-the-line marketing.
We're looking at innovative ways that we can do that during a cash-constrained market and still maintain discipline in our net cash investment. Then in the U.S., I think that since that market is growing so fast and it's following the U.K. and being even faster than the U.K., the opportunity to do that might come a little bit earlier as well. I think in summary to the question, we do have to spend that time, whether it's a year or two or two and a half years, to build that base traction. We are starting to formulate a playbook around how do we really invest in brand to really turbo it into a big marketplace.
Okay. The next question is, are you still confident that the AU marketplace can continue to fund global head office costs going forward? I can probably take that one. Yes. I think at the moment, you know, we're keeping a weather eye on the performance of the Australian business and what's happening with the demand and supply metrics. Certainly if we need to take steps to adjust our run rate, we can do that. Next question is, are you still targeting cash flow breakeven on a monthly run rate basis by the end of FY23? Sorry, FY23. We were originally targeting the end of calendar 2023, and that's still the plan at the moment.
The next question is, early traction in the U.K. looks to be solid three and a half million pounds, trailing twelve months revenue. What level of scale, in your opinion, would need to be reached to call it a success and to be able to extract meaningful gross margin?
Great question. I would say that, you know, success is definitely, you know, there are different levels of success there. But the first unlock for us is can we get zero to one? Like, do we have something going here that we can build on? I would say we definitely tick that box. In fact, I'd actually point us back to 2019 where Airtasker actually decided that we needed to extract profit out of the UK market for short-term reasons. We removed all of the cost base out of the UK.
We have no fixed costs in any of these marketplaces, so when we removed all of the cash costs out of the marketplace, we were actually generating a net cash flow between AUD 20,000-AUD 30,000 a month that was coming from zero capital invested. Reflecting on that, these marketplaces can really be profitable whatever time you wanna turn off all of the marketing. The issue with that is the marketing is what enables you to grow that marketplace and level it up and really build those network effects. In 2021 we started to invest back into the U.K. marketplace. When does that marketplace become profitable, I think is an interesting question.
My view on that is that at about AUD 25 million of GMV, at a gross margin take rate of something like 15%, you're talking about generating, you know, about AUD 4 million, AUD 3.5 million-AUD 4 million of net profit margin out of that marketplace. I believe that's quite a hefty amount of money that can be reinvested into marketing to create that sustainable growth loop. I think somewhere in that range of sort of AUD 25 million of annualized GMV is when a marketplace can start to wash its own face and actually just invest in itself to keep it growing self-sustainingly.
I think one important thing to also mention is that the Airtasker has very, very low, close to zero fixed costs in each of these incremental new marketplaces that we develop. In order to be profitable at a, you know, at a bottom line level in each of these new countries, it's really just that the gross margin that we generate has to be greater than the marketing dollars that we wanna spend in that marketplace. We don't need to replicate the software development, the product and engineering side of things, which is a large portion of the fixed costs that we've baked into our head office operating costs already, and that are covered by the Australian profit margin.
The next question is, Slide 8 talked to lower consumer confidence and top of funnel demand softening. Can you unpack that a little? Is this being more than offset by more supply?
Great, great question. The short answer is yes. The increase in supply has more than compensated for the decrease in demand at a revenue level, which is why you're seeing revenue continue to increase and continue even into the second half of FY23. We're still seeing revenue up year-on-year despite the demand being very soft. As I mentioned, hipages, which I think is a decent proxy for some of the renovation jobs and some of that, actually saw a significant decline in posted jobs, about 8% already in the first half. During that same period, Airtasker saw growth of about 10% in posted jobs there.
I think that bodes well for Airtasker's position within the macroeconomic environment. In short, you know, what's really interesting is although you see slightly less jobs at the top of the funnel, we're seeing high completion rates, lower cancellation rates, higher take rates, and that means higher revenue despite softening demand. I think that bodes really well for the adaptiveness and the resilience of Airtasker's business model.
Cool. We've got a couple of questions here on customer acquisition cost. What is the customer acquisition cost for new customers in Australia, the U.S., and the U.K.?
Yeah. I'm happy, you know, for Mahendra, if you wanna expand on this any further. At a high level, Airtasker predominantly invests into brand marketing and organic acquisition to acquire customers. There's roughly two buckets. There's one bucket of direct paid marketing, which is, you know, you put an ad in Google and how much does that customer cost to acquire. And then the rest of our customers are coming purely from word of mouth and effectively because they've heard of Airtasker and they love our brand. To just kind of cover that off, around 63% of our customers are just returning customers. That's just, you know, they're coming back again and again.
Of that 37% of customers that are new customers, roughly 80% of those are coming from just completely organic acquisition. If you sort of reverse that math out, we're actually only acquiring about 7% of our customers through some sort of paid acquisition model. It actually makes up a very low portion of our total revenue. Which means that the CAC, when you look at that, isn't representative of the overall cost of acquisition of our customers.
Right. let me also add that I think on slide 9 in our deck, we note that, you know, paid marketing as a proportion of our marketplace volume is only about 2.5%, so it's quite low proportionately.
Yeah. I might just add one more thing to that, which is, I think that there's two angles to that. One is that, predominantly, Airtasker doesn't need to consume AUD 100 million of marketing costs to acquire a bunch of our customers, which is really, really a great thing. It means that during this tough time, where we need to be disciplined with costs, we can bring down that brand investment and not see too much impact on our top line growth. Of course, we're balancing discipline with costs with top line growth at the same time.
Okay. Can you explain the business model of Airtasker Membership?
Yeah. Really, really excited about this. Airtasker's traditional model can be framed up in some way as a freemium model. What does freemium mean? It means that customers can come in with very low friction. You get a lot of value from the product for free, and we only monetize it at the very back end of the value chain. As a customer, you can come and post a task, and it's free. As a tasker, you can join our platform for free. You can see all the leads for free. All of that is free. Only if you get a job in which you see money in your bank account or you're a customer and you get your job done, do you pay a small fee to Airtasker.
That's the freemium model, and that's really important because that's how you build up network effects. You let everybody come into the platform, use the product, get value, and we'll just monetize at the back end. That's been very successful for us in building network effects. However, some people prefer to take a more commitment style approach, which is I would rather not pay you a variable fee of AUD 16 or AUD 17. I would rather pay a subscription fee of maybe AUD 100, maybe AUD 200 a month and not have that. We think that's gonna be really, really powerful because it's gonna allow some of these small businesses that aren't so interested in the percentage model, to join our marketplace.
This is a proven model because Oneflare has a very, very active base of service providers paying somewhere between AUD 100 and AUD a few thousand dollars a year to use the marketplace. What we're gonna be doing is building our own version of that on Airtasker, migrating all the Oneflare customers across to that. That's called Airtasker Membership. We see it's the best of both worlds. We'll always keep the freemium model, but the Airtasker Membership subscription model will sit on top of that.
Next question is, we've gone from seeing Tim all over the media promoting Airtasker.
Well, quite interesting actually. I think, we're maybe the question asker isn't watching as much free-to-air TV, but I can proudly say that Airtasker's probably been on Channel 7, 9 this year more than 12 times already, whether it's on Sunrise, A Current Affair, The Morning Show. We're doing a lot. We've also had some great appearances in the U.K. market as well. I was over there a few weeks ago and doing media over there and off to the U.S. in a couple of weeks as well. You know.
Usually, I get the opposite, which is, "Tim, get off TV." Yeah, I'll take that one on point and hope to represent our brand in the best way that I can.
The next question is, what marketplace impacts are being felt by the new fee schedule released in February this year?
Super interesting. We continue to see incredibly high rates of supply. The fee schedule change that we made this year was as follows. Airtasker has a tiered pricing system, which is that our bronze taskers, if you're just doing one job a month, starts at 20%. Our top taskers were on a fee rate of about 10%. If you did, you know, thousands of dollars of jobs per month. We decided to do is bring that a little bit closer together. Our bronze taskers, our entry-level taskers, did not see a fee increase at all. We did do is we just made the platinum, gold, and silver thresholds all moved up a little bit closer. That was done for a couple of reasons.
Most importantly, we wanna give people who are new to the Airtasker marketplace a good start in that marketplace. We believe that this fee movement was the best way that we could increase prices without seeing a major decline in marketplace activity. That has proven to be true. Now, why is this the case? I think that percentage fees that Airtasker charges are often a little bit, you know, emotionally jarring. You know, you see a 1% increase, a 2% increase, that's not anything that people love seeing. Of course, when you do a price increase, you're definitely gonna get some feedback on that.
If you actually put that into the context of earning a AUD 200 job and seeing a 1 or 2 percentage point increase, you're talking about AUD 3-AUD 4 for the average job would be the maximum difference that you would see due to that price increase. Because Airtasker's got such a high-value proposition, you know, come in, use our product for free-See all the leads for free, talk to all of our customers for free, and we're gonna charge you an extra AUD 3-AUD 4 at the end of that task, only if you are successful, I think is a very compelling proposition. Because of that, we haven't seen any drop off, albeit, you know, I definitely received some feedback on price increases as per usual and as expected.
Next question is around our market international market expansion. When we enter new markets, cash burn will be required to gain market share. Is the plan to raise money to enter new markets or enter new markets slowly, lowering the cash burn?
I think this is a good balancing question here. Yes, we do have to invest into building network effects in new markets. The first thing I would say is it's almost entirely variable expenditure. What I mean by that is it's basically marketing expense when we go into these new markets, not fixed infrastructure, not tons of employees and all that. It is on a dial. We can dial it up or dial it down depending on the cost of capital. Cost of capital is very, very high, which it is right now because of, you know, current share prices and valuations. We're gonna be a little bit more disciplined. If there's an opportunity to go faster because the cost of capital comes down, we can move a little bit faster.
Where we are now is in a high conviction but disciplined approach. Which is that we're investing a couple of million dollars into both the U.S. and the U.K. markets to ensure long-term momentum is maintained. We're certainly not hitting the pedal super hard. I believe that, you know, if the cost of capital was different, i.e., if valuations and things were higher, we could be moving faster in those markets. I think what is really important for all of our shareholders is that we're really committed to not putting this company into a position where we're forced to raise capital. Airtasker is very much in a position where the AUD 23.3 million on our balance sheet is certainly enough to take us through to profitability and breakeven.
Great. I think that leads us on to probably the last question I think we have here, which is what's the market feedback from your various communications around the financial performance with brokers and fundies? You've touched on it already.
Sure. I mean, I'm happy to sort of give some light feedback. Hamish, if you wanna add anything. I think overarchingly it's a tough macro environment. I would say that, you know, with, you know, seeing hipages decline by 8% and, you know, have to really turn up the wick on ARPU and things like that, you know, that's kind of a sign of a challenging macro environment. To see Airtasker grow sort of 10% in posted tasks relative to 8% decline for hipages, seeing 57% revenue increase, 23% even without, you know, Oneflare being added, I think is a strong outcome. Whilst at the same time keeping a discipline on costs.
I think the results are really strong here. I really am proud of these results. Would I love to be moving faster? For sure. But I think, really important is the responsibility here, which is the longevity of Airtasker and making sure that we can continue to service our mission into the long run. That means making sure that we have enough cash on balance sheet, that means, you know, our goal is to keep that momentum on reducing cash burn happening over the next period until we hit profitability.
Great. I think that's the last question we've got, Tim.
Amazing. Thank you so much everyone for joining us this morning and the support in supporting Airtasker's mission and what we're doing. Hopefully as customers as well, helping us with that consumer demand or if it's your bag to be working through our platform too. Really appreciate it. I think my conviction is as strong as ever that what we're doing here is gonna be a really, really powerful impact to the community over the long term. Thank you very much.
Thank you.