Okay. Welcome all to Airtasker's FY22 annual results presentation. I'm gonna be running through our investor presentation over the next few minutes. If you do have any questions, please use the Q&A function, and we'll get to the questions at the end of the presentation. My name's Tim Fung. I'm the Co-founder and CEO here at Airtasker.
Hello, I'm Nathan Chadwick, CFO of Airtasker.
I'm Mark Simpson, General Counsel and Company Secretary.
Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, Mark. Airtasker is Australia's number one marketplace for local services. In really simple terms, we connect people who need work done with people who want to work. We are bringing e-commerce to the local services marketplace, and we believe this is a massive opportunity because if you look at the way that physical products are sold through e-commerce, there are these incredibly seamless experiences through platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, and Kogan. If you have a look at the services economy, it's absolutely still stuck in the Ice Age. You know, people still asking friends, going to the classifieds, going to these lead generation platforms, and it's just really difficult. In fact, it's so difficult that most people just don't participate at all.
We believe that there's a huge opportunity in e-commerce for local services. At Airtasker, our mission is to empower people to realize the full value of their skills. What this means is that creating jobs on Airtasker isn't the byproduct of the work that we do, it's actually our core purpose. We're at the forefront of the flexible working movement. 7.1% of Australians used a platform like Airtasker to find flexible work over the previous twelve months. Of those people, 34.8% of them chose to use Airtasker, which makes Airtasker the most widely used platform for flexible work in Australia. The way that we create these flexible jobs is through our open and infinitely horizontal marketplace.
Creating an open marketplace means that we don't use manual operations because we empower our users through a system of transparency and accountability to drive high-quality experiences at scale. Secondly, we're infinitely horizontal. There's not just one category on Airtasker or a few service categories. Customers can literally ask for any service that they need done. While any one niche can seem really small on Airtasker, whether it's getting a drone out of a tree or having a Star Wars-themed wedding and organizing stormtroopers through Airtasker. These niches can seem small, but the aggregate of all of these different niches that don't fit in, into any traditional service category is absolutely enormous. We believe that this flexible work that we're creating through our marketplace is really relevant right now.
During this period in which there's high inflation and increased cost of living, people really need to find ways to be able to earn additional income. Furthermore, with economic uncertainty, flexible work represents a great way for people to be able to come out of working in full-time jobs if they're made redundant or if they're furloughed from their work. It also has a way of easing people back in to full-time jobs when they're ready for that. This flexible work actually creates sort of an additional opportunity for people to be able to navigate these challenging times. In line with our mission, over the past years, Airtasker's invested significantly into building relationships with the Labor government and other regulators and unions.
Really what we've done here is made sure that Airtasker. People are aware that Airtasker is very differentiated from other, you know, ride-sharing and food delivery companies which characterize the gig economy. On Airtasker, the customer and the Tasker determine the price and the scope of the work that they do. Really, Airtasker represents independent contracting in its most pure form. Staying open, being proactive, and dealing with our government and regulators has been really an important investment for us, and we think that it's put us in a strong position with the changing government. A little bit about Airtasker's marketplace business model. Our open, infinitely horizontal marketplace drives organic customer acquisition and strong unit economics. First of all, this chart on the left here.
As liquidity in our marketplace grows, we generate more and more user reviews on our platform because every task that's completed generates about 1.8 user reviews. We now have more than 5 million reviews on the platform, which makes the reputation passport of each of our users really, really powerful. What this means is that our marketplace is more sticky and represents a really, really strong defensive moat and competitive advantage for our business. We should call out here that the metrics on this page are Airtasker only, and the addition of Oneflare, which we're gonna talk a little bit about later on, adds considerably more liquidity to the platform on top of the stats that are presented here.
If we look at that sort of cumulative network effect, advantage that we've built, this enables us to acquire and retain customers in a really, really efficient way. In FY22, we had over 427,000 unique paying customers. Of this, 63% of our customers are simply returning customers coming back for their second, third, or more tasks. Of those new customers that we acquired, more than 80% of those came from organic channels like SEO, organic social, and PR. We didn't have to pay for those users, and we have a very low overall reliance on paid marketing. Putting these two things together, this organic customer acquisition was then coupled with super strong unit economics.
Our average task price, that's the average price of an individual transaction on Airtasker, grew year-on-year to AUD 237 average in FY22. We then earned a steady take rate of between 16%-17% off each of those tasks. In FY22, that was 16.6%. We have a gross margin off that revenue of about 93%. The only costs that come out of that revenue are about 5%, which goes to our payments costs, and about 2%, which goes to public liability insurance costs. As we gather more data and we build scale, these costs are actually coming down.
What you can see in this model is that we benefit from the upside of inflation on the cost of services as the average task price goes up. The average cost of goods sold is actually mostly untethered to inflation. As such, we believe we could benefit in an inflationary environment, and we could even be an inflation winner. Given the COVID lockdowns in Q1 and Q2 of FY22, we believe that Q4 of FY22 best represents the underlying trajectory of our business. During this quarter, our GMV was up about 38% on PCP to AUD 54.4 million. I'm calling out here that this was about 0.5 below our guidance of about AUD 191 million. Of course, we hoped that this number would be higher.
We're very happy with these results, given the enormous headwinds that we faced in FY22, not the least of which was a quarter-long COVID lockdown across the entirety of Australia. During this period, our revenue was also up 31% on PCP to AUD 9 million. This included about five weeks of revenue contribution from the acquisition of Oneflare. That business is performing ahead of expectations. We do expect to see the full contribution of the Oneflare revenue roll through in the coming quarters. Given Oneflare's subscription revenue model is being layered on top of Airtasker's pay-as-you-go take rate model, we'll focus primarily on revenue as the key metric as we move into FY23 and beyond.
During the quarter, international GMV run rate also reached $9.5 million in May 2022, and $8.9 million in June 2022. This was up more than 112% on PCP and was towards the top end of our guidance of $8-$10 million run rate that we provided. Going a little bit deeper on our progress in the United States. A reminder, in the United States, we're in the zero to one phase of building a marketplace. During this phase, we focus on generating consistent flow of customer demand, which is measured in posted tasks. How are we going over here?
We hired a General Manager in the United States, Cam Swanson, who is ex-Postmates, Mobike, and Lime, and has incredible experience in launching new local marketplaces all across the world. He's just hit the ground running and actually was in Australia last week. Total rock star. Really excited to have him on board. During this quarter, posted tasks, our key measure, increased about 49% quarter-on-quarter, and that was up more than three times, sorry, at the same time in the prior year. What we're also really excited to see is that the supply flywheel has started spinning too. Demand has gone up, as you can see, 49% quarter-on-quarter. The supply flywheel, the engaged taskers, is also starting to organically build up.
That increased to about 11,000 offers being made by taskers in that same quarter. What is our strategy in the U.S.? Our strategy in the U.S. is to leverage our unique ability to go after the long tail of services. What we mean by the long tail of services, which we've spoken about a lot, are all of those tasks that don't fit into any specific category, like removing a spider from your home or getting a drone out of a tree. The reason why we go after this long tail of services is because in this space, competitors, conventional or traditional competitors like Angi or HomeAdvisor, or Thumbtack in the United States, or Checkatrade in the U.K., can't attack this space because their model is built on existing businesses and existing verticals.
They have to deal with suppliers who don't offer these kinds of services. This long tail approach is really counterintuitive to most people, as no individual service within the long tail appears worthwhile. In aggregate, the sum of all of these services that don't fit within any one particular vertical is absolutely enormous. By pursuing this long tail strategy, we're addressing this really, really large total addressable market, but we're avoiding competition. We can build liquidity outside of these big categories before we go and attack the main categories like cleaning, gardening, and moving homes. In the U.S., we continue to see really strong organic growth outside of our initial focus cities of Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, and Kansas City.
You can see here on the left-hand side, this organic overflow growth is being driven primarily by SEO, PR, and organic social. You can see that there in the blue bars. This is really similar to the overflow effect that we saw in Australia with Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth all growing off the back of a key focus on the Sydney market. This is also being driven by long tail strategy, which is generating a lot of PRable moments for us. For example, we're seeing things like lining up for the passport queue or storm trooper weddings are really driving a lot of PR and organic social activity.
Given the massive nationwide surface area that we have in the U.S., combined with this overflow of our posted tasks happening outside of our key cities, we're gonna be focusing our capital on a market that can drive greater SEO, P.R., and organic social activity through things like influencers and brand partnerships. We debated whether we would focus our efforts into the New York market or to the L.A. market, and we've elected to push into the L.A. market, really, with a full focus on our capital. The reason for that is there's less seasonality in the Los Angeles market. There's a greater degree of home ownership, and there's greater access to brands and celebrity partnerships. Across to the U.K., and we've seen some great results.
In the U.K., we're in the next phase of marketplace development, which we call the 1 to 100 phase. During this phase, we start to balance marketplace supply and demand in order to drive GMV, not just posted tasks. The result of this is that in Q4, our GMV in the U.K. increased 71% quarter-on-quarter and more than 104% on PCP. We also reached a weekly GMV of approximately GBP 100,000 per week, which is a great milestone to pass. During the same period, supply and demand continued to grow in line and quite balanced. Posted tasks was up about 115% on PCP and offers was up about 118% on PCP.
We achieved these strong results by running a very successful above the line campaign in the UK tube station. This turned out to be a really, really cost-effective medium for us to be able to build our brand. We also partnered with a great influencer named Phil Spencer, who is sort of like the Scotty Cam, you know, the host of The Block of the UK. He became a campaign ambassador for us, which was incredibly important for us to build our credibility. This has started to build up our organic PR momentum and resulted in coverage on ITV and BBC. Put Airtasker into the spotlight in terms of being an ambassador for the rising cost of living issue in the UK, which is really, really relevant at the moment.
We saw some really, really solid growth in Q4 of FY22, but if we do look back over the year, FY22 has been quite a challenging year, and there are a number of headwinds which we faced throughout the last 12 months. First of all, in Q1 of last year, we saw government-mandated COVID lockdowns. In Q1 of last year, this impacted us by something like AUD 10-12 million during Q1 and Q2. That was a very significant impact. Thankfully, we saw a really strong bounce back out of those lockdowns and into Q2 and Q3.
In the second half of FY22, we started to see excess rainfall and flooding, and it's been quite a horrendous situation with more than two times the amount of rain in FY22 compared to any year compared to the median year, I should say, before it. This does have an impact on our marketplace, particularly on cancellations, which can increase up to 1.5% during heavy rainfall. Thirdly, we saw a headwind in terms of the labor shortage. There's of course been depressed immigration, with 600,000 people leaving Australia during COVID and a much lower number of international students. This has resulted in a very low unemployment rate in Australia.
The effect that this has on our marketplace is that it increases the supply pressure. Supply pressure on Airtasker is a measure of the available workers on the platform versus the amount of demand on the platform. Thankfully, we've previously been really supply heavy. We've had a lot of taskers per job available. As that's eased off, that certainly hasn't been detrimental to our marketplace. Nevertheless, as the labor shortage unwinds, we think that we will be a net winner out of that situation. Overall, we delivered a strong result in FY22 despite these challenges of a difficult macroeconomic environment over the past 12 months. I think this really demonstrates a highly resilient and adaptive marketplace business model.
In FY22, for the full year, we saw GMV up about 23.8% to AUD 189.6 million of GMV, and revenue was up about 19.1% to AUD 31.5 million. This growth in revenue was delivered despite a decrease in the take rate from 17.4% to 16.5%. This accounted for about a 5.1% revenue difference on a like for like basis. Why was the take rate different in FY22 compared to FY21? Primarily the decrease in take rate was due to Airtasker helping taskers and supporting them during COVID lockdowns. We reduced our fees and allowed taskers to maintain their status on the platform.
This helped to build loyalty and make sure that we could bounce back with a strong base of supply post lockdowns. We also had some heightened cancellations which were caused by that excess rainfall. When the tasks happened, when they're organized, and then of course you have flooding, you see an increase in cancellations. That impacts our take rate too. We have seen that take rate since then stabilize much higher in June 2022. Given that on Airtasker as a platform, we do control the cash flow throughout our ecosystem. The take rate is really a measure of how much we want to share the total GMV between taskers, customers and Airtasker as well. We're very comfortable that we have control over the take rate. We're gonna monitor that, and continue from there. I'm now gonna pass to Nathan to provide an overview of key items in our P&L.
Thanks, Tim. Tim's covered a lot of the top-line financial performance already in the first part of this presentation. As discussed, we've shown here the Q4 performance alongside FY22. Given that much of the first half of the year was impacted by COVID lockdowns. Tim's talked to that. That translated by management estimates into lost potential revenue of more than AUD 2.3 million. As Tim's also called out, revenue in the first half was also impacted by our decision to build trust with our taskers with the freezing of their Tasker Tiers, and that resulted in that lower take rate. A lot of these factors, we feel that the Q4 revenue growth of 30.6% on Q4 FY21 is a strong result.
During FY22, we invested into growth in new marketplaces in the US and the UK. As you're aware, that's in line with our stated strategy, and that's reflected in that uplift in operating expenses from AUD 24 million to AUD 39 million. Around half of that increase is in higher marketing costs. That's split across the channels that we know work best for Airtasker in new markets as well as the scaling marketplace in Australia. That includes PR, content-based digital advertising, and The Joy of Done above the line campaign, which was launched in Australia and the UK in the second half. Tim's already spoken to some of those highlights of the marketing efforts, in particular in the UK, and we'll cover more of that later in the presentation as well.
Our technology and general and admin costs increased by around about AUD two and a half million during the year versus FY21. That's to support growth in GMV throughout the year. The balance of the uplift was in employee benefits expense. That's driven by a number of factors. We invested into our marketing team, to support those initiatives that we've talked about already across the U.S., the U.K., and AU. Those people are all based here in the head office in Sydney. FY22 included the full annual costs of our U.S. team, after acquiring the Zaarly assets, towards the end of FY21. We made some modest increases to our data science and data product teams as well, to use data insights to drive growth, through product improvements.
We also had some one-off redundancy costs of around about half a million dollars. Tim's now gonna take you through, in a little bit more detail, how we've allocated that investment across strategic investments.
Thanks, Nathan. As we've mentioned in some of our previous investor presentations, Airtasker operates marketplaces that are in different stages of maturity. In each stage of these marketplace development maturity, it generates different kinds of unit economics. For example, in Australia we have scaled marketplace that generate really strong gross profit, whereas in the U.S. and the U.K. we're building out new marketplaces that require initial investment to generate early liquidity and establish those network effects which deliver the gross profits that we've seen in Australia. So that we can break down the underlying unit economics of the overall Airtasker Group, we've created a notional non-statutory split of financial performance in which we allocate revenue based on the customer location for each marketplace, so, you know, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K.
We also allocate all the direct costs, like our marketing, our marketing infrastructure, customer support costs, et cetera, to each of the countries based on a relevant customer traffic or task volume split. All of the revenue and the costs are allocated out to the countries. At the head office level, we have two main kinds of costs. One is our operational costs. That's all of the engineering, maintenance, operations of the platform, plus any of the back office leadership, the finance team, the legal team, the HR team, et cetera. That's the operations side of the head office. We also have R&D investments, which are investments into incremental new products and features to generate new long-term GMV and revenue opportunities.
On this notional basis, our scaled Australian marketplace generated EBITDA of about AUD 19.4 million in FY 2022. This actually covered the full cost of our global head office operations, excluding R&D, and generated a positive combined EBITDA of AUD 1.3 million. On top of that, we are committed to R&D to unlock new segments of the marketplace. We've talked a lot about repeat customer purchase between the same customer and the same tasker. We're doing that by investing into contacts. We're also investing into things like Airtasker Pro, which is enabling us to unlock that high-value tradie segment.
We do and are very committed to investing into long-term technology and R&D. We're also committed to scaling in the U.S. and the U.K., and we're doing that in order to replicate the success that we've achieved in our scaled Australian marketplace. In order to do that, it requires investment in generating that initial liquidity and developing those network effects. It is worthwhile calling out the form of that investment is primarily variable marketing expense. It's investment into Google Ads, it's investment into PR, into branded organic and things like that. That investment into the U.S. and the U.K. can largely be dialed up and down as we see fit and based on the weighted average cost of capital that it costs us to invest into those markets.
To put that more pragmatically, in calendar year 2021, so in the first half of this financial year, the cost of capital was much lower. In the second half of FY22, the cost of capital has been much higher, and so we are moderating the investment into the U.S. and U.K. based on with that as one input. Airtasker is really well positioned for ongoing growth. We have about AUD 31.8 million of cash and equity receivables on our balance sheet. We've got a really strong gross margin of about 93% and overarchingly a very low cost to operate, which means that we can tune up these long-term investments up and down as we see fit and based on the cost of capital.
Given the current macro environment, we have implemented a program of efficiency, and we're really focused on initiatives that can help to reduce our fixed cost base. Fixed headcount has been reduced in long-term R&D and non-revenue generating functions. We've started to merge Airtasker and Oneflare business processes, so things like customer support. We've merged the two entities to create an efficiency there. We've merged our site reliability engineering teams and consolidated that function to make sure we're as efficient as possible. For example, we are reducing our G&A costs by, for example, reducing our leasing expenses. Oneflare had a physical premises, as did Airtasker. We certainly don't need two physical premises in the current hybrid remote working environment.
We are subleasing Oneflare's office, and that's a kinda meaningful cost reduction. Airtasker Australia, as mentioned, is already producing positive EBITDA. As a group, we do expect to be cash flow positive in the next 12 months overarchingly. We expect cash flow to improve quarter-on-quarter from here on in during FY23. All of this is based on the current run rate of investment into the U.S. and the U.K. I'm now gonna pass over the mic to Nathan to speak through some of the key balance sheet items.
There's only a couple of real call-outs here. Firstly, the difference between the cash and cash equivalents line there of AUD 28.2 and the AUD 31.8 that Tim's been quoting is a receivable from our May capital raise, which actually settled on the 19th of August. That's the difference that takes you to AUD 31.8. I think that when you look at that in the context of what Tim's just discussed around hitting cash flow breakeven positive towards the end of this year and the cost reductions that we've already executed on, that puts us in a really strong financial position. Certainly no need to raise capital off the basis of that capital of that cash amount.
The only other call-out here, that hasn't really been covered is the increase in the intangibles line. You can see that going from 9.6 to 23.1. That's driven by the acquisition of Oneflare, for the bulk of that, with capitalization of development costs contributing another AUD 2.5 million of that increase. Tim's now gonna talk through the outlook for FY23.
Thanks, Nathan. In FY23, we believe that Airtasker is pretty well positioned to benefit in an inflationary macro environment. First looking at the demand side of our marketplace. Flexible labor tends to be a cheaper alternative compared to traditional labor. We believe that that could actually drive greater demand. While we see that lower consumer confidence is probably gonna impact overall customer spending and thus reduce demand into services, we're actually seeing that about 70% of the jobs on Airtasker are essential services. They're non-discretionary services. We expect that to be quite robust during a high inflation period. Looking potentially more importantly to the supply side of our marketplace.
With less economic growth and potentially a tapering of job creation, we see that there's gonna be an increased availability of workers. Further, hopefully, we see a reversal of immigration barriers and COVID absenteeism, and I think that could also help to increase worker availability. We've also built out a new business model by acquiring Oneflare. Oneflare is actually a slightly different revenue model, which is largely a supply-driven model. This gives us access to the high-value trade segment, but it also serves to diversify our revenue models. Now let's look forward to the future. We've got a two-pronged growth strategy at Airtasker based on the different stages of marketplace maturity, which we've covered in the financial section earlier.
In Australia, we've got a scaled marketplace which already has liquidity and built-in network effects, and we're looking at leveraging that to continue to drive profitable marketing, and we're optimizing to generate as much gross profit as we can out of the Australian marketplace while continuing to drive growth. We're also opening up new customer segments and use cases in Australia. For example, we've developed a product called Contacts, which opens up the opportunity for rebooking. We've also acquired Oneflare, which enables us to access the high-value trade segment, which we believe is very meaningful. That's one strategy in the Australian market.
If we look at our new marketplaces in the U.S. and the U.K., we have a separate strategy, which is we're focusing on attacking the long tail of services to build up liquidity and network effects so that we can replicate the success that we've generated in Australia. In the U.S., our strong focus is on demand generation and creating new posted tasks which we're already starting to see be effective. In the U.K., we're building the brand and balancing supply and demand to drive GMV. We're seeing some great efforts now in brand and PR, and we've also got some really exciting partnership opportunities that we are exploring. As I mentioned, in Australia, opening up that high-value trade segment is strategically important to Airtasker.
As you know, we successfully acquired Oneflare on the 25th of May this year, about five weeks before the end of the year. The reason why we acquired Oneflare was to strengthen network effects. You know, we're bringing in 540,000 new customers to the Airtasker marketplace and about 1,400,000 new service providers. That's giving us more liquidity and better and faster matching, which is great for the customer experience. The second reason we acquired Oneflare is to unlock the high-value trades opportunity. Oneflare focuses on businesses rather than individual taskers, so it's a whole new category of suppliers for us, which is super exciting.
They also have a very different payments model, which is focused primarily on monthly, quarterly, or year-long subscriptions, which we believe will provide a great layer on top of the transactional or pay-as-you-go revenue that Airtasker generates. Thirdly, we believe that there are significant benefits from having a single technology platform. By combining our technology stacks and consolidating our back-office operations, we believe there's huge synergy to be had there. The integration of Oneflare into the Airtasker Group is tracking to plan. A reminder here that we believe it's important to first take over Oneflare, then build out the Airtasker Pro solution and only migrate customers from Oneflare to Airtasker Pro once we have really, really strong product market fit.
To date, we've taken over all of the software platforms of Oneflare, and we're currently working on extracting the network effect opportunities from the combined marketplace. Just bringing those customers together, sharing jobs across the two independent platforms and combining supply bases as well. Finally, we're also implementing a number of cost synergies. As I mentioned before, we've consolidated the two customer bases of Oneflare and Airtasker. We're also subleasing Oneflare's property, which is a significant cost synergy for us. In terms of product, our product teams continue to invest into the core Airtasker customer experience and our three-year product vision.
We've had an investment into the core product through things like a new posted task flow, which is really low friction. We've got both the before and after here. If you're an iOS user, shout out. I find it incredibly a better experience and super seamless. We're also on the right-hand side here really working through mobile native experiences to do things like verticalizing the post task form. For example, in segments like cleaning, gardening, and moving, you'll now have a verticalized experience where we predict the category that you're posting in and make it super easy for you to get through that flow. Other product investments include significant investment into smart Tasker alerts.
This is all driven by artificial intelligence, which enables us to match the right Tasker to the right task. Super complicated stuff because of Airtasker's infinitely horizontal marketplace, but really powerful work there, which helps to enhance that core experience of Airtasker. Finally, we're also working on our Contacts, our product, which enables that rebooking experience. For anyone who's worked with a Tasker, had a great experience with them, you can now pick up your app, find that Tasker, message them, and you'll be on a much lower fee rate for those subsequent tasks. In FY22, our marketing teams invested into a great deal of community and brand-building exercises.
We launched a number of community initiatives to build loyalty with our Tasker base and community, like freezing Tasker Tiers, implementing Tasker bonuses to encourage Taskers back to the marketplace post-lockdown. Of course, doing things for our community, like investing into COVID badges, which helps to create a more trusted and reliable experience. We also launched our Joy of Done, our brand campaign globally, and that saw prompted brand awareness increase in Australia by 15% and awareness in the UK jump by 21% in what is already a really strongly recognized brand. Some great progress there. We're also efficiently scaling marketplace growth in two things.
One is that we're absorbing existing demand through in-house content, which we can create on the fly to be super agile, and then finding those relevant seasonal messages. For example, if it's Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Halloween, we can then push those messages via a number of organic and unpaid channels like SEO, social marketing or even CRM. That's emails and push notifications. Finally, we're also inspiring new demand. As well as just sort of saying, "Hey, you already want this task done, we're gonna help you be that person," we also need to tell you, "Hey, Airtasker's that place where we can help you get stuff done which you never thought possible." The way that we do this is that we've done a great playbook where we can identify user-generated content. These inspiring people in our community.
We take those tasks, and we re-share that content through multiple platforms. That can include things like promoting it via TikTok or Instagram Reels, or by doing things like newsjacking in PR. Calling up the journos and saying, "Hey, we've got a great Tasker story for you here." This inspires users and helps to create more use cases for the Airtasker marketplace. I've given a pretty comprehensive update, hopefully, today about the fourth quarter results, the full year results, as well as progress that we're making across our growth strategy. Now happy to spend some time, and Nathan and I can take any questions.
I'm gonna curate the questions as they come in. I'd just remind you to use the Q&A function if you want to ask a question. We've had a number of questions in already. What I'll do where we've had questions, multiple questions that relate to the same topic, is I'll try and group them together, so we're not kind of repeating the same questions over and over again. To start us off, the first question relates to the current high inflation, high interest rate environment. How does that impact on consumer confidence affect Airtasker? And a related question, how much of Airtasker revenue comes from discretionary spend? Tim.
Yeah. I think on the inflation side of things, we did cover off on some of this during the presentation, but I think there's two sides to that equation. One would be on the revenue side of things and the marketplace growth side of things. We think that in an inflationary environment, we're gonna see a greater degree of supply coming into the market, less jobs being created, more available workers. We also think that the services on Airtasker are primarily essential or nondiscretionary, so you're gonna see those not be too impacted. We see about 70% of the services on Airtasker are in that nondiscretionary space. On the cost side of things, I think it's really interesting.
Airtasker has a cost of goods sold, which consists of really just payments and insurance, and neither of those things are really driven by inflation. That said, there is an increase in cost of capital, and for that reason, we think it's really important to be fiscally responsible and manage costs. For that reason, we've reduced our investment into long-term R&D in the later parts of FY22, and we're really managing that cost base to make sure that we're absolutely not reliant on external capital. In fact, we expect to be cash flow positive during FY23.
Okay, thanks. The next question's in relation to the U.S. Is the U.S. going to plan? How long before you see significant dollar growth as opposed to growth of a low base? Is the concept, the Airtasker concept being accepted in the U.K., and what further investment is required to achieve growth?
Yeah. Let's start with, I guess, the competitive landscape and how the US market is sort of adopting Airtasker. The first thing I can say is that in this infinitely horizontal open marketplace format, Airtasker is in a market of one. We don't have any direct competition in that space. We do have, of course, Craigslist and some of these open kind of social platforms. We've also got some of those traditional providers like Angi, HomeAdvisor, and Thumbtack, which all compete in that traditional space. For that reason, Airtasker is attacking what we call the long tail of services. Everything that doesn't fit into the Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack bucket is what Airtasker is focused on. Thus, our strategy is all around those cultural moments and that long tail of services.
In the U.S., I think the strategy is really starting to play out. What we're seeing is that in Australia, over the first sort of seven years of building a business, we invested about AUD 25 million, and it took us about three years to get to 1,000 posted tasks a week. We've been able to do that in the U.S. in about one year. We're definitely moving a lot faster in the U.S. There's of course trade-offs in either direction. I would say there's a higher cost of marketing in general in the United States. On the other hand, it's a much, much larger country. There's huge overflow opportunity in the total U.S. TAM. I would say that as a benchmark there, it took.
You know, we've been in the Australian market for seven or eight years. We're generating about AUD 19.4 million of positive EBITDA in the Australian market, but we did have to invest about AUD 25 million over seven years to get there. In the US, I would say that we're ahead of the curve in relation to what we did in Australia.
Okay. Next question is what plans are in place to recover the significant share price fall?
Yeah. I think it's fair to say that the entire growth and tech industry has been pretty heavily hit by you know what we would perceive as a somewhat indiscriminate you know hit on you know share prices across all growth and technology companies. What are we doing about this? We are really focused on just delivering profitable growth in our business. We're gonna keep our heads down and really just focus on that. I think one of the important things that we've done today is provide that breakdown of in Australia we've got a scalable and profitable business which is generating EBITDA and we're gonna continue to focus on that.
We don't wanna take our foot off the gas entirely when it comes to investment into the U.S., the U.K., and future product development, 'cause that's really how we drive long-term growth. Here at Airtasker, we're really here for long-term growth and long-term investment. It is a balance between being really fiscally responsible, focusing on cost management and making sure that we are absolutely not reliant on external capital, while also driving both the short-term and the long-term revenue of the business.
Okay, a couple questions about international expansion plans and growth. Do we have any further acquisition opportunities in Australia, USA, the U.K., et cetera? What other international expansion plans do you have and any impediments to local or international growth?
I think let's first start with the acquisition opportunity question. I would say that Airtasker has positioned itself really well from a balance sheet and a capital management perspective. I think we're in a very, very strong position. I think that a lot of marketplaces, as we've kind of illustrated, it takes time, and it requires a minimum amount of scale to create a really strong financial business model. For that reason, I think there's gonna be a lot of companies which are kind of on that journey, and they're gonna find it difficult during this next economic phase. I think that could present acquisition opportunities to Airtasker.
Second question, part of the question was, I think, about impediments to growth in the U.S. and the U.K. I wouldn't say it's about impediments to growth. Actually, as mentioned, there's not really a high degree of competition in the U.S. and the U.K., and we're actually tracking ahead of the speed that we grew in our Australian market. I think it's really more about refining and optimizing the growth strategy that we've set out and making sure that we're really balancing speed of scaling into those markets with financial efficiency too, and making sure that, you know, we're keeping the cost of capital in mind when we're doing that. Right now, that cost of capital is pretty high, and so we're being very, very responsible with how quickly and efficiently we scale into the U.S. and the U.K.
Okay, now a question about brand awareness. There was a step change in revenue and brand awareness, after we did the partnership with Seven West Media. How do you see the UK and US playing out in future compared to Australia? How do you intend generating the same level of brand awareness that was achieved via the Seven Network deal?
Yeah, it's been really incredible in Australia. For some additional context, our Seven West Media partnership wrapped up about 18 months ago or two years ago, and since then, we've successfully transitioned all of that investment which we used to put into above-the-line TV marketing into organic new media. Through things like TikTok, building an engaged audience on Instagram and being able to build brand through these newer kind of online channels. In the UK, we're also working on similar kinds of partnerships, you know, with the BBC, with ITV, with Channel 4 and folks like this, and we think there are massive opportunities there.
In the UK, we probably are coming up to that stage where we will start to invest into above-the-line marketing. We've got to there are lots of different ways that we can do that, including partnerships like the one that we did with Channel 7. In the US, we are in that earlier phase. We're not yet focused on just driving all our unprompted brand awareness. We're in the early stage there. As mentioned, in the UK, I think there really is an opportunity to do above-the-line marketing to build Airtasker's brand presence, and we may you know explore opportunities like the ones that we did with the Channel 7 in Australia, which was really a great experience for us.
Two related questions, I think. The current market has caused other growth companies serious problems trying to raise new capital. Can you maybe just comment on the ability to raise capital as a growth tech stock? I think a related question, explain a bit more about the decisions in relation to redundancies, considering the company is a growth company.
Sure. I think, first of all, let's talk a little bit about raising capital. Airtasker's got about AUD 31.8 million on the balance sheet. We have positioned ourselves so that on a monthly basis, we're gonna be cash flow profitable, cash flow positive, I should say, during FY23. We are committed to that given the current economic environment. In terms of raising external capital, if the current conditions persist, where the cost of capital is very high, we're not in a position where we need to raise capital, which I think is a great position to be in. What was the second part of the question again?
Second part was, just explain a bit more around the decisions on redundancies, given we are a growth company.
Where we made redundancies and headcount reductions at Airtasker during the second half of FY22 was primarily in long-term R&D and non-revenue generating roles. We did also create some significant efficiencies in our back office. For example, with Oneflare and Airtasker coming together, there were some, albeit a smaller part of the cost management and headcount reduction in functions like HR and finance as well. I would also say that part of the cost management we've done as well is to lower our forecast of a headcount expansion. That's been a really important part of making sure that we can get to that cash flow break even in FY23.
I think it's a really, really good question to ask about our growth versus our headcount. We're in a fortunate position in Airtasker where we've got the dynamics and the financial economics of, like, a real tech company, which is that scaling volume for the most part does not mean that you need to scale headcount. The vast majority of our marketplace is non-operational. Customers come together with taskers, and they work out the tasks. If the number of tasks is to 10x and our revenue 10x's, we don't necessarily need to have 10x more staff.
In fact, we almost certainly wouldn't have 10x more staff. There is a fixed cost which we need to invest into our product and maintaining the overall our platform infrastructure, which we've broken down in the financial economics which we shared today. That part is largely fixed. The great thing is, which means that it doesn't scale as revenue sales and margins should continue to expand. Of course, one of the great things is that Airtasker's built enough scale in the number of transactions on the marketplace to actually cover those fixed costs, which we expect to be in a position overall as a group to be cash flow positive by the end of FY23 on a monthly basis.
Okay, we've only got a few minutes left, so I'll maybe just finish off with a couple of a bit more technical financial questions. I think maybe Nathan covered this, but do you expect to reach cash flow breakeven with current cash at hand, i.e., you don't need to raise additional capital?
Correct. Yep. I think we've both covered that, but the answer is yes. Yep.
Okay. Can you give us an update on how GMV is going in FY23 so far in Australia and internationally?
Yeah, I'd say that we're seeing a pretty similar seasonal growth pattern, compared to FY22 and FY21. Noting that in both of those previous years, we had significant COVID lockdowns in the first quarter. You recall in July to October FY21, we actually had significant lockdowns in Melbourne. And then in July to October of 2021. Last year we also had significant lockdowns. We're tracking well ahead of those curves, but we also have less of an accurate baseline to kind of judge this quarter's performance. Maybe I'll just wrap that up really quickly. Both the first quarter of FY21 and FY22 were impacted by lockdowns. Thankfully right now we're not seeing that direct impact of COVID lockdowns and so we're well ahead of the seasonal expectation based on those last two years.
Okay. Do you track rescheduling or on the day cancellations, looking at the current COVID wave and what are their impacts, for task delays and cancellations?
Love this one. One of our key product investments at the moment is gathering more specific data on cancellation outcomes. Right now, for example, on Airtasker, if somebody cancels on you can't leave a review. We don't have direct feedback on what caused that cancellation or how it happened other than our own analysis. We're now collecting that from customers, and we expect to gather some really, really interesting insights here.
One of the things that I would call out about cancellations that is actually powerful on Airtasker is that on most of these sort of like advertising type platforms or lead generation platforms or directory platforms, you actually don't have a closed loop, i.e., the platform enables, you know, advertising or for two people to connect, but you don't actually know what happened. Like, was the experience good or was it bad? The powerful thing about Airtasker is because we have the end-to-end payment loop and the transaction is all managed through Airtasker, we actually know when cancellations occur, and this enables us to be able to actually focus in on that and amend the platform and implement incentives to make sure that we can reduce those cancellations as well.
That's what really is gonna drive the long-term customer experience on the platform and ultimately make sure that Airtasker remains the number one marketplace for local services.
Okay, last question. There have been a few others, but they're either really specific or probably not the right ones for this forum. Last question, can you speak a little bit further about the Oneflare acquisition and how that ties in with Airtasker Pro development? Seems like a bit of a duplication. Did we just buy customers?
Yeah, two things. The reason why we acquired Oneflare was there was threefold. One was strengthen network effects. Absolutely, yes, we bought customers and we bought a base of active service providers on the platform. About 540,000 customers, 14,500 active service pros. I think that is incredibly valuable. It's not one plus one. When you have a marketplace, it's one plus one equals, you know, three or more. That was one part of it. The second thing about Oneflare is that it's focused primarily on the paying customer being the small business that was active on the platform. This meant two things. One is that they have a different payment model.
It's actually the service provider who is the paying customer on Oneflare, and they typically pay through a subscription model. We think that this is really effective. Our customers on Airtasker have been screaming out for a subscription based model, and so layering that subscription payment model into the Airtasker marketplace, we think is gonna be very valuable. The second consequence of Oneflare focusing on the small business as the paying customer is that they have a high degree and a large suite of features which help that small business be successful on the platform. One example of that would be quote management.
They actually have a quite sophisticated quote management system, which allows that small business to be able to identify the jobs they want, push their quotes through, and then, like manage it all the way through, which is something that Airtasker hasn't yet built into its roadmap. Just closing the loop on that, I think there is definitely a network effect and a scale component of the Oneflare acquisition, but there is also a huge suite of features in the form of the subscription payments and the business features which we gain. We are gonna be bringing that into one platform, and the working title for that is Airtasker Pro. We're absolutely committed to that single platform synergy.
We also do need to moderate how quickly and efficiently we invest into some of these long-term product investments, given the cost of capital and the imperative to make sure that we're not reliant on any external capital raisings, and to make sure that Airtasker is cash flow positive during FY23 on a monthly basis.
Okay. That's it, Tim.
Awesome. Thank you so much, everyone, for your ongoing support and for showing up today. I really enjoyed sharing an update on the business with you all, and I hope to stay in contact. Thanks so much.
Thank you.