Hello, welcome to the Freelancer Limited full year of 2022 financial results presentation. My name is Matt Barrie, I'm the Chief Executive of Freelancer Limited. With me today in the room I have Neil Katz, who's the Chief Financial Officer of Freelancer Limited. I've got Shaun McMeeking, who's the VP of Sales. I've got Adam Byrne, who's the VP of Product, and I've got Drew Davis, who's the General Manager of Workshift. After the commentary, you may address questions in the Q&A to any of the people in the room. We'd be happy to answer those questions for you. In FY 2022, our gross payment volume was AUD 1.127 billion.
It was down 10.5% on PCP, or in US dollars, $79 million, down 16.4% on PCP. The Freelancer GMV was $128.4 million, which is down 4.5% on PCP. The Escrow GPV was $953.4 million, which is down 11.7% on PCP. Revenue was down 3%, $55.7 million. Freelancer was down 1.1% for particularly breakeven at $45.6 million. Escrow was down 11.1% at $10.1 million. For the year, even though Escrow is down a little bit, it was profitable in FY 2022.
FX was a tailwind of 7.6% in FY 22. 74% of the group revenue is in US dollars, 9% is Australian dollars. We had negative operating cash flow, -$4.2 million for the year, and ended with cash and cash equivalents of $23.4 million, down 23%. Now, going segment by segment, Freelancer revenue was effectively flat at $45.6 million. We saw a couple of things happen in the year for FY 22. We saw a rolling off of the super seasonality we saw with COVID, and we think that we should be kind of in the clear now back into normal sort of seasonality, 'cause I think the pandemic is mostly waning, at least we're hopeful mostly waning.
It, you know, did negatively affect a number of core metrics, primarily, project fees. The other fees, like memberships and so forth, weren't affected. In 2022, we also, to the positive, we made a lot of improvements to the product, the profitability of the acquisition programs, and we also rectified what we believe is a long-standing problem in the core marketplace. I think we're set up for a very good year this year, in the core marketplace for Freelancer. We added 6.7 million new users, 1.2 million new projects. The average project size continued to lift. It was up from $235- $252, which is up 7% on PCP. It's the highest value to date, on record.
Liquidity in the marketplace remained strong. The percentage of bids that are received in 60 seconds dropped slightly from 59%- 51%. That's mainly due to our efforts to kind of knock out the spammy bids that freelancers are using automated tools to bid. That reduced slightly, but the liquidity does remain strong. If you look at the five minute bids within five minutes, it's pretty much the same. It actually increased from 84%- 87%. Liquidity is good. We just knocked down a lot of the quick bidding that from freelancers don't read the profile, the product descriptions properly. The contest liquidity remains exceptionally strong. It's pretty amazing.
In fact, there was a tweet last night by a U.S. marketer, actually, that said Freelancer probably is kind of one of the most underrated websites on the Internet. He was raving on about contests and how good they were. About half the spend was in contests. On average, there's about 320 entries in a contest, which is pretty remarkable given the fact that the contests start from $10. You can go all the way up to very large scale contests. The largest contest we're about to run in the next 12 months is with the National Institutes of Health in the field of gene editing. The prize purse there is $6 million.
You know, from AUD 10 bucks to AUD 6 million plus, you can use contests to do things for you with pretty remarkable results. We had three missions last year in terms of the product and the engineering. The first was to improve the visual design, responses to the UI/UX to get it consistent. I think we achieved that very, very, very well. If you use the site frequently, you'll see there's been dramatic improvements there. We've got a really good platform now from there in terms of the design. We also made enhancements to the payments, enterprise features, matchmaking, and collaboration. I'll go through that in a second.
We also made a lot of improvements in terms of the acquisition, retention, and engagement of clients in the paid channels. In terms of visual design, if you know, there's been quite a number of improvements. You can see kind of the look and feel as to kinda where it's trending towards. You know, we made improvements to how we kind of re-represent core elements on the site in terms of, you know, what people look like, what users look like, what projects look like, and so on. I won't go through a lot of detail here, but, you know, there's, you can see that if you use the site frequently.
We also made improvements to our quotations product, which is just the ability for freelancers to send an invoice to someone and just collect the payments. There's a lot here to come. You know, we really polished up that channel. I think that's gonna perform very well over the course of this year. We also by virtue of that, we reduced a lot of spam in regards to what we call hire me spam. This is where people will click on users' profiles and attempt to hire them on the website. The way it worked in the past was a little bit clunky and quite spammy.
With quotations, it behaves more like a modern social media platform now, where you can basically ask to connect to someone. If they connect to you, it's the freelancer that initiates the hiring of themselves by sending a quotation rather than the other way around, which has a few issues with it. I think that there's some phenomenal improvements there. Certainly the feedback we've got from all the freelancers is a much better experience for them and they're much happier and it's reduced a lot of the spam they've been receiving from all sorts of actors. In terms of the enterprise features, we enhanced all the invoicing and how we present it, so it's quite professional now.
The enterprise platform integrates into SAP Fieldglass, and there are a couple of other vendor management platforms that we're integrating into over the course of this year. You can see here in terms of our efforts to reduce the spammy bids on the platform, we've done pretty well. Over the course of 2021, you know, there's a lot of automated software that's being used by freelancers, and it got to a point where about 30% of the bids coming in the platform came too fast, within 15 seconds, which is, you know, not reading the description and not filling out a proper bid. We've managed to knock that out quite successfully with actually increasing the broader liquidity at the higher time efforts.
We also fixed a major conversion problem with the main funnel of projects. I think it's a problem that's been affecting the main core marketplace since 2016, and that is and correct me as we merge the code base together. That is basically that too much money was being asked to fund projects up front. We fixed that, and when behavior adjusted that, I won't repeat a previous quarterly update, but we saw quite good retention updates, upgrades from that once we pushed that out. We've also made some good advancements to collaboration. The core underpinning of our collaborative efforts is the groups functionality, which you can think of it very similar to like a Facebook groups style interface.
It underpins things like workrooms, where people are working on a project together with maybe a team of freelancers and a team of colleagues. That's live, and that's growing extremely strongly. It's one of the fastest growing things on the platform today. We have community groups. We have official groups, and we have private work groups on the site, where people can communicate, in, from everywhere, from a small team to a large team. We've got groups on the site that have 6 million people communicating simultaneously in them at this point in time. We think that's really gonna drive engagement. The key thing about engagement is lifting the average project size. We'll see that, you know, in the last, you know, quarter in particular, that the average project size lifted very strongly.
At $250 or so, we still think we can add a zero to the average project size. Because $250 is a relatively small amount of money, even for a developer that may be in somewhere like India where, that earns, you know, maybe 1,500, 20, you know, 2,000, $2,500 a month. That's a big lever we can pull and we'll continue to over the course of 2023, is these collaborative features. I'll talk about that in a second. Now, I talked a lot about the acquisition in the previous quarterlies. We were focused on the paid acquisition. The profitability here has improved dramatically. We've both cut spend and increased profitability in this channel.
In the fourth quarter, it was up 58% on its on the low for the year, and ended up 23% on the previous corresponding period. Looking at non-brand Google, for example, profitability is up 77% on the low and 43% overall for the year. We can talk about that further later on in the Q&A if you've got any questions about the paid acquisition. We've got, you know, got quite a number of good organic hits out there in the media in the last number of months. There's been quite a number of hits that have got syndicated quite widely. This just shows us some hits that we've got in The Wall Street Journal as well.
We've got a marketing campaign that's underway at the moment around, you know, back to work, which we normally do at the beginning of the year. Where people are getting excited about, you know, 2023 and what the what holds in store for basically creating new venture creation, as well as improving the businesses they currently run. In 2023, in terms of the product and engineering, our mission will be fourfold. The first will be taking this UX and design to the next level, really from consistency to delight. I think you're gonna see dramatic improvements in the product that's really gonna I think amaze users and really drive engagement.
We're also gonna continue launching collaborative features to drive retention and engagement to get the average project size up. I, as I said before, I think we can get this up 10x with a bit of effort. There'll be also be a heavy personalization to drive conversion in the core marketplace. Just the core platform. We've got some pretty amazing things. In fact, in today, we're gonna ship something where it's gonna really help drive the conversion in the funnel. I see Adam smiling. There's about four or five things that are ready to ship literally right now, one after the other in an orderly fashion that I think we're gonna have a pretty decent year for the core marketplace.
I know that's something that everyone's been focused on for the last number of periods. The other is to now focus the acquisition efforts on the organic channels. Now that the paid channels, we've got that, you know, under control. We've got that under the new LTV predictor model which is really now focusing on the free or effectively organic channels for marketing, things like search engine optimization and so on, throughout in-built browsing in the platform and so on. That's gonna be a big focus of 2023 is on the organic channels, on the paid channels, right? Each of these, basically, you know, combined, well, I think will have cumulative effects.
One division that's strong in the FY 2022 was the enterprise division. There's a lot of iron in the fire here, as I've described many times. Of course, Sean's here to answer any questions you've got in the Q&A. The GMV in that division was up 101.5% year-on-year. That's growing quite strongly. Starting to become a, you know, a reasonable percentage of the total GMV. November 2022 was an all-time record in the month, surpassing the August record. In terms of just some highlights, there's quite a lot. There's actually too many to actually put, you know, give everything justice.
You know, we could finalize commercials with a Middle Eastern branch of a Swiss-based global pharmaceutical company, and it was executed. We've got a top, you know, Big Four professional services firm. It's not Deloitte, that we've executed commercials for a pilot. We've onboarded a global transportation leader. This is a multibillion-dollar company, who are using us to basically launch a new service offering. It's a company that everyone has installed on their phone, probably on this call. We've got a number of actually global talent providers that we're integrating with. It's actually more than one.
There's other vendor management systems and so forth that we're going to be using as a Fieldglass, a channel. We also got quite a pipeline of engineering services proposals in with both existing and new customers, ranging from, you know, the big guys we work with like Deloitte and the big computer company and so forth, right through to a number of governments, as well as a global BPO and a national telco. There was one downside in the enterprise division, which may turn into positive next week. We're not quite sure. There's a $1 trillion market capitalization, a global technology company. It's a household name, and we've spent 18 months working on this project.
Went through all the onboarding, signed the scope of work, went through all the vetting and so forth. Got green light on the system. Literally last Friday we got news that the entire division where we haven't started operating yet in terms of answering calls that we're providing basically a level of support organization and multiple people for them. They've got a number of other vendors that actually are live and have been live for some time. The whole thing has been shut down and merged in and restructured as part of a thing that the CEO's announced. We've actually got a meeting lined up next week where they're...
We were actually the lowest cost provider of anyone, they're quite impressed by that. They've actually invited us to come back in figure out how we can kind of play a role in the organization more broadly. You know, that whole spend there's three vendors that were already supplying services under that program, including a fairly substantial client, one of our main competitors. That whole thing's been restructured and shut down. It's a bit of a disappointment. It's a 200,000 person organization globally. We're hopeful that in the next couple of weeks we'll get some clarity about how, you know, what role we can play.
They've invited us to come back in and try and figure out given the fact that we offer the, you know, the broadest offering of these at a effectively lower price. In terms of Myki, that continues to be executed on. In fact, there's an upscaling that's happening right now in terms of the engine service engagement that's gonna more than double in terms of the opportunity there in terms of engineering services. They've also hired on their end a marketing team. Really the focus now is on, you know, continually pushing out some features. Right now we're really trying to get the volume growing in this platform. They've got a marketing team they've just literally hired now.
In fact, I'm in meetings this morning with that team to basically kick off and set some targets. There's a bunch of things happening there. On the global fleet and the field services engagement we've got, which is with a global computer and print company, I would like to mention the name. In any, you know, month now, you know, there'll be announcement about this. We've got approval to kind of announce who they are and so forth as part of the work. You know, we've got quite a good integration here now. We've integrated our system directly into theirs through EEG, where that's all now integrated into, I believe full 10 cities as of yesterday.
Sorry, as of next Monday. Yep. I think two cities are done. Yeah. Chennai, Ahmedabad and Delhi are going live on the 23rd, tomorrow. Next Monday we'll have Mumbai going live. Then effectively, 10 cities will be live integrated out of 18. There's eight more cities to launch over the course of the year. Indonesia, we're doing well over six cities. We've contract's been extended. Australia and New Zealand, we've now again re-signed the engagement and that's also extending. We signed the scope of work for Malaysia in the last quarter. We've got work orders that are going live now through as of this month in Malaysia.
In terms of rest of world, there are quite a number of conversations going on right now with multiple country heads, and it looks highly likely the next country will be America, the U.S. In addition to all the brackets work we're doing, it looks like we're going to go to installation work as well. There's a lot going on there. We've done paid engineering services, integrated both of our systems. I actually have another proposal going in to actually do the next level of work on the engineering service front. We're doing extremely well and going from strength to strength. In terms of NASA, as I've mentioned many times before, that contract is upscaled from $25 million- $175 million.
We're one of 31 vendors in the program, but we're effectively the biggest. We're doing some, you know, big challenges for them. There's a big one coming up. I won't go into the detail here, but there's a big one coming up, which is a $6 million prize per person that's all the gene editing, and that's in US dollars. Overall it's about $10.6 million. We are seeing an increased frequency in the last couple of weeks of task orders coming out. We expect to see an increased value of those task orders as a $175 million program. In fact, that's the NOISE2. NOISE3 is being talked about now, which we would even expect to be an upscale yet again in terms of the opportunity.
That's going very, very, very strongly on the NASA front. In terms of Escrow.com, we obviously had a phenomenal year in 2021 with this business. We grew in the high 70% year-over-year in terms of GMV. The first half of last year was extremely strong. It was the second highest half in the history of the company. But in the tech wreck and crypto sort of crash that happened in May of 2022, the volume did go down quite significantly. In fact, in the fourth quarter, the volume was down 48% on PCP at AUD 189.5 million or $124.5 million, which is about 53% in US dollars, right?
Overall, for the year, the volume was down 11.7% to 953. Despite that drop in FY 2022, the business was profitable, that division. In fact, we are seeing a bit of an uptick in the volumes that have come through in the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter is higher than the third quarter. Into the new year, we've seen a bit of an uptick again. In fact, February, this February, this month, is shaping up to be the best month since July 2022, possibly June 2022. We're very confident that this quarter's GDP will be higher than the fourth quarter.
The volume has yet to return to the, the sort of, you know, what I say, you know, giddy highs of 2021 when the tech market was going completely gangbusters, both in the equity markets and, you know, venture financings and so forth. Basically, the drop is over 75% of that drop is attributed to these mega domain name transactions that we've talked about before, which are these $10 million-$20 million US domain names. When venture capitalists pull back funding, you know, start-ups don't need to have these premium names. You know, tech companies are cutting costs, et cetera. The, the domain name market, you know, the liquidity drops. The pricing still holds strong, but the volume drops in terms of, in just simply transactions not happening.
Now, I will say that we, in this year already, last week, we did do a domain name, a mega domain name, in the $10 million-$20 million range that went through successfully. We're starting to see some stuff kind of tiptoe back in. In fact, we have a transaction that's been in the negotiation for a couple of weeks that would be the biggest in history for Escrow.com, if that goes through. It's still not confirmed, but it is significantly larger than a $10 million-$20 million transaction. That's probably all I'll say. It'll be a pretty marquee transaction if it goes through, and it's been many, many weeks that it have set up and went. Hopefully, it will go through shortly, and that could really signal a big thing.
A lot of the pullback that happens in mega domains where tech start-ups or crypto start-ups, while I don't think you'll see a lot of volume in crypto domains in the next 12 months. I think you will see that replaced and probably by an even bigger frenzy in artificial intelligence domain names. The boom in generative AI is gonna be bigger than the boom in crypto by far, because I think it's a far bigger. The generative AI impact in the next 12 months, I think, will have a far bigger impact on the world than the launch of the commercial internet back in 94, 95, 'cause we went mainstream. In fact, I said in the economic commentary AU, which will be out in the next day or so, on AI.
You can see here in Q4, there was a bit of an uptick from Q3. We had a very strong 2021. We had, you know, Q1 of 2022 was pretty good, then just this huge kind of drop that everyone saw across tech and so forth in Q3. Q4 was up. Q1 this year will be up again. I think, you know, I think we're starting to see some confidence come in into the high value transaction across, I guess all industries. I think, you know, we will see a bit of an uplift from here. You can see there's a drop in the last two quarters, we'll have a turnaround this year.
In terms of priorities, the priorities at Escrow are, number one priority is customer feedback. Number two, improve the KYC experience, because really, payments is quite simple. It's 99% authentication and 1% accounting. If you know someone is exactly who they actually is supposed to be, then, you know, it's a debit and credit throughout the door payment, right? That authentication is really key. Obviously Escrow has a fairly unique, in somewhat some regards, like a regulatory monopoly, simply because it's just so hard for other companies to get, to get licensed in this space, in large value payments. The problem is that there is...
The large value payments are quite high friction because you do have to KYC people quite intensively, and you have to understand what's going on, the nature of transaction, what's relevant, the documents and so forth. We really want to try and make that as slick as possible, best in class, and that will reduce the friction for the end-to-end transaction flow. We also want to support more transaction types and more verticals. We're doing some custom things in IP addresses and construction and things like, you know, solar panel installation, which is a kind of a derivative. Overall, really quite a slick integration in terms of checkout experience and automate a lot of the internal processes that we have.
In terms of partner activity, we've got kind of a number of things happening. We've got the green light on a number of snakes for real estate. We've got some construction solar. It's kind of where we're gonna start there in real estate. A number of the M&A marketplace is actually going pretty well, like your Flippa and your MicroAcquire, which is now called Acquire.com. You know, the case in point, they've got a great domain name to kinda take MicroAcquire to a better brand, and that's why companies are willing to pay, you know, big money for these sort of things because they're more memorable. We've got some decent traction in IP address, the IP address space. As I said, we're gonna do some custom things there.
We've got some things happening in solar and construction. Now moving on to Loadshift. 2022 was a pretty transformational and marquee year for Loadshift. It's now, Loadshift and Freightlancer are now merged. There is no longer a Freightlancer brand. It is all under Loadshift. Drew Davis, who's the general manager, is here in the room if you want to ask any questions after the commentary. Now this year is gonna be a pretty amazing year because this is the year where we're just really gonna execute on how much of this AUD 1 million a day of GMV that gets, notional gross load volume that gets posted will be converted into pay through the platform, revenue generated from that and the price of the full marketplace experience.
I did put this graph in, although it's not an apples and apples comparison. I kind of put that in the commentary, I thought I still put it in. When we took the loans off and merged them in from Loadshift and merged them into the marketplace on Freightlancer and rebranded the whole thing Loadshift, there was a load volume drop in FY 2022. The volume was down 11%, the total kilometers was down 16.5%. That's a little bit of a misnomer in some ways because on the Loadshift platform, originally as a bulletin board, the loads automatically got delisted in three days. On the marketplace model, they're up to 30 days.
There was some loads on the old platform that were being reposted in various forms or ways which don't get reposted. You can't. This is not really a direct comparison of the before and after, but that's why there's a bit of a drop in that graph. In the meantime, what's actually happened is quite a number of the metrics have gone up. The average load value has gone up, the AUD per kilometer is load up, has gone up, et cetera. Before and after the actual notional gross load volume is actually still trending up. It's up 7.4% on the year, simply because a number of the other metrics are trending up at the same time.
There are also a couple of freight forwarders that we kicked off the platform that had no intention of paying through the site and the marketplace model of kind of just standing out some jobs, and they got a pretty good free ride for a long time while they were doing that. We kicked a few of them off as well, which also took a bit of volume, but that volume would never have never have converted. We've done some, you know, pretty amazing loads. You know, we've got some pictures in some of the, in the presentation, so we'll look at what we do. We move, you know, the bigger and the uglier it is, the more we specialize in it.
The second half of 2020, GPV was up 63% on the first half. The average completed load size was a bit over AUD 5,000. The freight charge was at AUD 3.49 a kilometer, which is up 21.6%. We're basically hitting record after record, week after week. Like, literally this week, we hit a big uptick in carriers quoting, the number of carriers quoting, the number of quotes on the platform, et cetera, all the liquidity. It's really humming along right now. The ops team who are there kinda for a year now is to simply just convert as much of that freight to being paid on the platform as possible.
The old model was basically, drivers would go to the bulletin board, they pay their AUD 79 a month membership. That was it. They just got phone numbers to all the shippers. It was just the Wild West. A few things that happened here, one is that's actually a pretty terrible experience for a shipper, because a shipper just gets bombarded with phone calls from everyone, and they don't know what's going on. If there's no reviews, there's no feedback, there's no ratings, there were scams that were going on where people were taking deposits and not showing up. There were dodgy operators that weren't licensed properly. There were dodgy operators who didn't have insurance. All that sort of Wild West can't exist anymore. Under regulatory changes around the change of responsibility, you can't have that model.
It just, it's not feasible. Everyone has responsibility for safety in freight, you can't let that operate, even if you can't just claim you're a platform. What we do is we basically vet the drivers. There's feedback, there's, you know, there's someone to assist in terms of the operational load, ensuring that someone turns up and gets delivered and so forth, helps you find a quality operator and so on. It's a much better experience for the shippers. It's actually a better experience for the carriers as well. We offer, you know, invoice financing through a partner button, the drivers get paid on time reliably. We've got invoicing, we've got pro forma invoices that get generated automatically on the loads and so on.
The carriers get to build reviews and ratings, and so they stand out in the marketplace. The good guys stand out dramatically from the bad guys who have got poor reviews and bad ratings. In fact, we've seen jobs, and, I'm sure you've probably got some data on this specifically, but we've seen jobs go through where the shipper is paying not just 10, 20% more...
Oh, over 50%.
For a high quality carrier, but substantial. Numbers like 50% or even more, right? So it's a better experience all round. You can see here, this is, you know, the daily quoting carriers. In fact, this week, the numbers actually spiked up even higher. The liquidity on the supply side is there. It's very strong. You know, we're really jazzed about this business.
At the moment, about 9% of the loads that are getting posted, there are about 220 loads a day going through right now, that will grow to about 270 in the next month or two as we get through the January, February period, where typically, some of the construction projects are a bit quieter because of the restrictions on the larger vehicles on the roads. We're about a 9% award rate. That award rate is biased all of those low-end loads just happen automatically, et cetera. You can see it's, regardless, it's growing very, very strongly. It'll continue to grow. The number 1 thing to focus on this year is just how high can we get this number, right?
It's going to grow multiples of this number. Multiples, right? It's really just how much of this AUD 350 million of freight per annum that we have today can we convert to a paid model and a commission model, et cetera, and so on. We'll continue to deliver new features for the drivers that makes their life easier. We've got some pretty amazing things coming out in the next couple of months to really make it super easy for a driver to find jobs, find back loads, you know, win work, stand out from the competition, and get paid reliably and quickly in a very professional manner. There's a lot happening there. As you can see, we've got, you know, improvements now.
We can see insurances and certificates and so forth, based on our freight category. Overall, that's the highlights of the three divisions. I'll open up for Q&A in a second. Please get your questions ready. In terms of group profitability, you know, while there was a, you know, operating loss in 2022, we have, as we flagged in many quarters before, been making a lot of cost cuts and improvements. Operating costs in the fourth quarter were 12% lower than the third quarter. You know, the efficiencies will become evident this year. You know, for example, marketing is down 26% in the fourth quarter. We do expect a profitable year. Escrow.com was profitable last year.
4th quarter last year was effectively break even. We've continued to focus on growing revenue. I think Core Marketplace, Enterprise, Escrow, and Loadshift all have some very good upside this year. There's a lot of irons in the fire for some, you know, potentially spectacular returns from two of the efforts we're working on. We're continuing to just be tight on costs and just really make sure we've got some, you know, real efficiency there. We're effectively, you know, coming down the Work to go. It all depends day by day, kind of a few things, but we're basically there. That's it. Well, I'll open up now to Q&A.
Again, you may address your questions to anyone in the room. I've got Neil Katz, who's the Chief Financial Officer. Shaun McMeeking , who's the VP of Sales. Adam Byrne is the VP of Product. Drew Davis, who is the General Manager of the Loadshift division. Alex, if you could open up, please, and then maybe just read out the question.
Hey, hey, Matt. I'm just wondering with your report on your update in October, you writ here that we're getting knocked around with the crypto crash. Also you writ that inflation is the highest it's been in over 40 years.
Yep.
I'm just wondering, like, how's our business going compared to our competitors like Upwork and Fiverr in this environment? Are we holding up all right, or are they...
Neil, did you happen to read Upwork's? Upwork did come with their financial results last week, I took a quick look at the sense, Neil has taken a look at it.
Yeah. No, Upwork did. You know, also, had a tough economic environment, and, you know, they've had large operating losses. Particularly they had a particularly bad quarter. I mean, their Q3 was terrible. In Q4 it stabilized a bit, but they're still, you know, not profitable. We're operating in a similar sort of economic environment to them and sort of feeling the same kind of macroeconomic sort of headwinds that our competitors are facing.
Yeah. The difference is we're not running at a massive loss. I think they've still got a bit of a Silicon Valley mindset where you kinda, you can run very large losses. You know, we've been pretty careful on the cost side, although the first half of last year we did kind of staff up a bit quicker than we. Because we expected that, you know, initiatives like Loadshift or what have you would be generating revenue significantly faster than they were. We've come. I will say in 2022, there were a lot of things where we just had to kind of merge things together and get platforms built, get platforms live.
Whether it was, you know, Deloitte getting the platform ready to take jobs, whether it was Loadshift and Freightlancer merging, whether it was getting the integration done for the Printer and Computer Company so that jobs could actually be done in an automated fashion between the two platforms without a human in the loop. All that sort of stuff, there's plenty more. There was just a lot of work to get that ready. Now it's really just now focusing on just operation. In terms of the crypto side of things, I mean, I don't think the crypto market will come back at all. Even though I'm quite negative on it, even though I was an adjunct professor in cryptocurrency for 14 years at The University of Sydney.
I think the generative AI boom is gonna be gigantic, and it's gonna affect everything. It's gonna affect every type of job, white-collar job. I think there'll be a boom in, you know, obviously in the, in the domain market there as well.
Over the long term, we're gonna be able to outrun these guys, do you think?
Look, here's the thing, right? It's a marathon. You know, I've been going at this since 2009, effectively. They are formed by the merger of a bunch of companies that went back to 1999. Back in the 2000s, when Elance and oDesk were private, they raised $200 million in venture capital, and they were kind of burning it all on paid marketing and so forth. You know, the history of this business is I raised, I think, $1.5 million and bought a company and didn't raise a single cent of financing until we went public and went IPO. We were the first to go IPO. We were the first to get a $1 billion market cap.
You know, we were first out there, and we have substantially higher valuation at that point in time. Now, you can argue that valuation was, was too high, and the valuation's come down dramatically, obviously, since IPO. You know, we did overtake them at one point after they spent hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital, and we'd raised none, right, effectively. You know, if you think about there are 8 billion people on the planet, there's probably, what, 2 or 3 billion people now on Facebook. We have the biggest user base of 65 million. I don't know what their current numbers are, but I would guess, you know, 10, 20 million, 30 million, whatever the number is.
If you add up all the people on all the marketplaces globally, you're probably lucky to get to 100 million out of 2 or 3 billion that might be on Facebook, right? We're still, you know, really early days in the space. Why is it taking so long? Why, you know, why does it take so long to kind of. You know, if you think about the market, and you look at it, you know, some of the largest companies in the world by market capitalization are global marketplaces of products. You've got your Amazons, your Alibabas. You've got your Etsys and your, you know, eBays and so forth. Delivery of a service online is significantly more complex than delivery of a product.
I mean, a book is a book. You go to Amazon, you know what a book is, and so forth. You buy a website, it's very quite complex. You like it, the tech guy hates it, the marketing guy loves it. This, that, and the other. It's difficult to deliver a service compared to delivering a product. Also, the whole industry is delayed substantially for products because it wasn't until the late 2000s that emerging markets came online to the internet. It's only really about 15 years that you've got places like Philippines that have been connected to the internet. Then people had to go online, learn about software, learn about all these trades, and then the.
Effectively, the internet and the human computer interaction bandwidth had to get good enough that you could actually work efficiently and effectively over the internet. It's really only in the last, you know, 10 years that, you know, this has started to come to fruition, that people have started to realize, oh, I can work with someone online, and the software's there, and the tools are there, and sophistication is there. But it's very, very early days in the space. I think certainly we can to catch up and to overtake. I think their market cap, you know, I've always marked capital as $1.5 billion. $1.5 billion US. Right?
I think we'd certainly have the ability to kind of overtake that, and I think we've got the ability to. You know, we've got a lot of parts to this business. We're a lot more complex than their business is. Even in the core platform of Freelancer, just excluding Escrow and excluding Loadshift. On the Freelancer platform, we're far more complex. They don't do contests, they don't do international, they don't do international payments, they don't do languages, they're only in US dollars, they're only in English, they're only in projects. They've also kicked off all the low-paid workers because they wanna focus on effectively high-end. They can't do what we do with our enterprise edition. I don't see anyone in Upwork where you can do gene editing. I don't see anywhere that you can even get a laptop repaired.
You know? They don't have an offering like we do for dealing with MyGigs, right? We actually do a lot more things. Now, we've arguably we do too many things, and we probably under-resource them all, and that's why it takes a long time. I think we've got the ability to Some of these things to really start firing. I think we've got substantial opportunities to overtake them. Certainly quickly on the profitability, right? Right. Yeah. Next question.
Yeah. Thank you.
Matt, there's a question from Vesta in the chat.
Yeah.
The question is, from Vesta: With such a significant drop in share price this year and such a large loss in market capitalization, what's the company's strategic plan to regain those losses? What specific steps is the company planning to take? Yeah. No, I agree. There's been... The share price baffles me where it is. I personally think it's a gift. I'm waiting until 4 o'clock tonight, when I'm out of the blackout period to buy some stock. Look, there's a lot of companies that have been beaten around the head. You know, that's a lsson we learn in the market.
you know, I think the thing is, I mean, there's always things you can do in terms of, you know, capital markets activities and so forth. I think the number 1 thing is just getting the revenue line, printing results, getting the revenue line moving and demonstrating a track record of financial performance. I think that's ultimately what you, what you need to do on the market, is just, you know, get the revenue line moving at a rate where investors start to look at it and go, "Okay. This is really it." I mean, there's a lot of value in this business, right? If you think about it, we've got, you know, three businesses here, in that, in that share price, in that market cap.
They're all strategic gems. You've got the largest marketplace in the world for, by number of users and projects in terms of, you know, online work. You've got effectively, you know, I want a better words, it's a regulatory monopoly, not in terms of large value payments. Albeit it's a very small business in the scheme of things in terms of the global payment space. You know, if you think about payments, retail, e-commerce is a potential retail payment unless they figure out how to... You know, unless the world figures out how to buy things online and how to value, and that's what we do with Escrow. Then we've got Australia's biggest transport marketplace in terms of freight, right?
You know, does more freight in a given day than the Earth to the Moon did week. You know, these businesses are all phenomenal businesses of their own, right? That all builds into the share price. I mean, it's just really, it's execution, right? It's execution. At number one, it's execution on the Freelancer core marketplace. I'm really confident now we've got that in a great place, and this year's gonna be phenomenal. Adam's nodding his head. I know, Adam, in a second, do you wanna add some color to that? I'm pretty damn excited about the core marketplace, finally. I think we've got through the issues. I think we've got the core structure fixed. I think we've got the core infrastructure in place.
You know, I think it's really gonna start to happen in a, in a, in a decent way. All the things happening in enterprise are amazing. That the GMV, I mean, is where it is. I mean, Shaun McMeeking comes in every quarter, the GMVs are way up, right, each quarter-on-quarter, right? It's only just scratching the surface with some of the opportunities, like literally scratching the surface. You know, one enterprise in the Fortune 500 probably has a labor bill in the $10 billion or so plus, right? Convert, you know, just 5% of that to the cloud and, you know, huge opportunity in terms of the GMV. You know, there'll be one customer that'll come along at, in enterprise where it'll do more than the GMV of the entire company, just that one customer.
On the Escrow division, you know, we got beaten up a little bit in the second half, but that will come back. I'm very confident that'll come back. You know, as I said, we did make a transaction. We've got a very, very, very large transaction that's, you know, hopefully gonna go through. Hope it's not strategic. We'll see. Loadshift, this business is there. We don't need sales. There's $1 million a day of notional gross load volume being posted. It's just converting that, right? You can see we're doing that. The award rate's flying. It's just converting that, right? Just focusing on what we're doing, which is the operations side of things.
you know, and to answer your question, the big thing we're gonna do is we're gonna show financial performance, right? That's the number one thing. Thanks, Vesta. Next question.
Hey, Matt, just one more question on the Loadshift business. Currently the model is that they can just go onto a website and get a phone number.
Yeah.
You're gonna sort of change that. I think, I've had it explained to me that it's gonna be more like an Uber model, where you sort of, you click and you get the job paid and all that. I'm just wondering, like, is there a bit of a concern that now that these guys have got each other's numbers, that they'll just sidestep that model and won't use our platform to pay the commission?
Good question. The old model, which doesn't exist anymore, it stopped existing in August of last year, was you pay $79 a month, and you can see all the phone numbers of everyone who's all the shooters.
Right.
You, yeah, put it in your phone book. As of August, that's stopped. If you do pay your membership, we do allow you to see some phone numbers, but under an acceptable use policy. You can't sit there and look at 100 phone numbers and not quote. You've got to quote from the site. We're pulling a lot of the off-siting activity onto the site. Now, yes, there's some legacy phone numbers that people can store in their phones, things change. The other thing is, shippers don't want to be bombarded by 50 people calling them in 15 minutes. They just don't want that. They don't want to have a whole bunch of people on the phone that they don't know, you know, pitching them all sorts of things.
They want an orderly managed, you know, way of moving their freight. Over time, phone numbers change, and this happens and that happens. Obviously every day there's new shippers, and so on. Yeah, we'll eventually, you know, find a way where you can do audio calling and, you know, we won't be phone number smashing handout. We'll just make it so there's not an incentive to go off the platform because the carriers will want to be paid on time. I mean, a lot of these large enterprises, if we have like a Newcrest or a Boart Longyear, which we do hundreds of loads for a year, you know, they want to pay 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, right? The driver doesn't want that.
They want to be paid on time, upfront, right? Newcrest doesn't mind if there's a financing charge that comes through, right? So there's a lot of advantage to them being on platform, even though there's a fee. I don't know, Drew, maybe you want to add some color to that.
Yeah, sure. Also on top of that, carriers are starting to learn the importance of being rated on our platform. Taking jobs off-site is one thing, but in doing it on-site, they'll get their rating with a Newcrest or a Boart Longyear, and it opens them up to a lot more work. Also being able to charge a reasonable fee. As we've discussed, some carriers are getting 50% more than others just for having a really good rating on system. I think as we educate more carriers that are coming onto the platform of the importance of building up a portfolio on Loadshift, the need to have jobs go through the system will grow greater.
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of carriers that are frustrated with the old bulletin board model because nobody stands out from anyone, right? Literally, the load goes up. There's a bunch of phone calls that come in all of a sudden. The shipper doesn't know who's who. Doesn't know why would I pay more for this person versus that person. You know, maybe a few people with gifts of the gab can kind of, you know, talk over the phone and convince them this, that, and the other. With the platform, you've got ratings, reviews, you can see the insurances, the certificates.
You can speak to our operators, who know who the carriers are and We have a big map of the world where we know all where the drivers are and this, that, the other end. You know, at the end of the day, the cost of freight in some of these businesses is minuscule compared to problems caused by the freight not arriving reliably on time, right? If you run a mine that's in production, you want that up, you want that to be up 100% of the time, 99 point whatever% of the time, you want that operating, right?
If you need to ship a part or a grader or something, involved in the construction or you know, in terms of operations, maybe a part breaks and you need to get that shipped out or whatever like that. You know, the cost of getting it there is irrelevant compared to the operating losses from the mining stops, right? Yeah, that's why, you know, Newcrest does not want the cheapest carrier. They want a, the reliable, the highest quality carrier to get there and make sure it's, you know, there on time and in a good order.
We've also actually, which has been interesting over the last few months, started to see carriers and logistics companies bringing their own business to the Loadshift platform that they've already locked in outside. The job hasn't been posted on the system, and then they've come in and posted it on our platform to make use of the rating system and to make use of the secure payment gateway. It's been a really interesting shift that once carriers have come on the system, they've seen how they can fit in with the rest of their business model. As that continues to happen, the risk of off-siting diminishes.
Also the carriers realize now that because the marketplace model is fairly new, if you get your reviews now, you'll be top of the stack in terms of, you know, in, you know, the organic listings on the site. When you bid on a job, you'll be at the top because you've already got your reviews in. They're all, you know, the carriers are all like, "Okay, let's get our reviews now quickly." Right? You know, I'm very excited about that potential because it's something that's just an absolute game of wins. By the way, the model, just so everyone knows, the actual stack is exactly the Freelancer enterprise stack. The same stack that we built Deloitte MyGigs for is the same stack for Loadshift. We've got rid of the separate code base.
It, you know, all the features that come into Freelancer in the core marketplace and all the features we built for our enterprise customers, get them made available for free with Loadshift. Effectively the technology costs to that business are minimal. It's just the customization for freight, right? All the audio-video calling and GPS tracking and all that stuff, invoicing and integration into SAP and all that sort of stuff that we have in Freelancer, that's all free now for Loadshift. Free. That's pretty amazing.
Okay, Matt.
Yep.
I've got a question here for me from Douglas over in Portland.
Yep.
With the for enterprise, with the current economic environment and cost cutting across a number of companies, is this helping the sales pipeline and or faster adoption by existing enterprise customers? Yes, Doug, the short answer is yes. You know, Q4 was clearly the strongest sales pipeline that we had. The, you know, every single week, there were big companies in the news for announcing significant job losses, particularly in the tech space. That's our bread and butter in terms of digital work, development work, software engineering work, et cetera. You know, we're able to facilitate that because our team is in a very strong position. We actually have a very experienced team on the enterprise side.
We have highly skilled people running our NASA program, highly skilled people who are running our Deloitte program, highly skilled people running the field services program. And on top of that, these companies are announcing their job losses. They're going through the process of working out where those job losses are gonna be, and once those decisions have been made, the focus is then on cost cutting. We are fielding more inquiries in Q4 and Q1 than we have in previous quarters. As Matt mentioned, there's a significant number of proposals that are in progress. In terms of our existing customers, one of our major customers, being one of the world's largest software vendors in the creative space, you know, 30,000 employees around the world.
Since January first, they've increased their forward bookings to $373,000, which included a $250,000 purchase order received last week. Their use case is pretty cool, right? It's their certification team, they're using freelancers to build out exams online, building up a bank effectively of exam questions. That's a, you know, that's a signal that, yes, in the news there may be all of these, you know, companies that are experiencing some tough times, but it's actually fast-tracking their discussions around contingent labor and how they're actually gonna employ a Deloitte-style model, if you like. Just last week, we had another inquiry of a.
Actually, Deloitte did a demo of MyGigs to one of their health clients, and the health client said, "Can we have something like that?" Certainly we're very confident that the signals that we're seeing are positive and trending in the right directory. A little bit similar to the escrow side, where we're seeing, you know, domain sale, a number of domain sales already in the first, you know, six weeks of the year, but also a pipeline of domains coming through. When the tide does turn, and Matt talked about it will turn, both on enterprise and escrow with, you know, maybe a shift from crypto to AI. We have a strong team that's ready to take advantage of when that tide does turn.
We're very confident. We've just won some contracts against our competitive set, you know, be it Fiverr, Stoke. Just on Friday, we had a We've just gone through a basically a four-month competitive pitch directly against Stoke and directly against Deel, and we won that competitive pitch. That's actually around two, up to AUD 200,000 a month in GMV for the enterprise side. It's about 70 contractors, essentially building a major company around the world has essentially built out their marketing division through freelancers. They wanna shift 70 of those freelancers off Upwork into Freelancer in the next three months.
Again, that's just another example that, regardless of what we see in the news, you know, in reality at the coalface, we're seeing a lot of positive signals in our sales pipeline coming through.
Our model is basically, we don't charge big upfront fees or, you know, monthly fees unless there's some sort of integration that they want to do, and there's an engineering service that's a number once off. You know, it's on demand, right? You don't need the labor, you don't pay for it, right? You know, from the enterprise side, we make most of our revenue off the fee the Freelancer pays. It's very inexpensive on the enterprise side to adopt, right? There's only that sort of 3% fee, unless they're using insource, in which case there's a per seat licensing fee for any internal work, or unless there's some engineering services. It's very inexpensive.
I think it's, you know, it's a good model for the times. Next question. Any other questions? Don't be afraid.
Good morning, gents. I've got a couple. First is just, can you put some numbers around the potential Deloitte contract, the external kind of placement? You know, say its three-year run rate, what kind of magnitude of revenue could that generate for Freelancer?
Well, we actually have a 3-year forecast that was provided by Deloitte to us. We've also had a meeting of last year to try and set those targets in stone. Incidentally, it's funny you bring it up. Sean actually emailed last night to like a meeting to try and get those numbers. We have. I kinda wanna, I don't know if I should mention the numbers or not, but like.
Well, their comment to us was that they basically have enough projects already, that's the equivalent of the Freelancer business in itself, right? The question now is, in the last 6 months, they've doubled the number of internal projects within the firm. Their focus now with leadership is increasing adoption across the, what is it, 35,000 users that have been on board, and that's gonna quickly go to 50,000. Once they get that activation clear and all the, you know, all the marketing within the firm that really sells the use of MyGigs-Yeah, the expectation is that the external projects will start flowing from internal to external. At the moment, there's, you know, there are thousands of unique users visiting the platform every month. We've got.
whilst we're making the final kind of product enhancements over the next couple of months, the shift hasn't moved yet to external. However, nonetheless, their goal is that MyGigs becomes a daily habit to really transform the workforce in their business in the US, so as far as consulting goes. They can see that evident in the, as I said, the number of internal projects has more than doubled. The next phase of that now is just working on that activation piece and really making sure that any further, you know, product enhancements, for example, when they adopt the groups functionality, which is about to happen when they adopt, you know, some AI functionality, then we'll really start to see...
Well, this year is the year that we'll see the ramp-up in external projects.
We got, we do publish the average project sizes. The average project size at the moment is around $1,469. I mean, if you run the numbers on, say, 50 projects a day, you'll kinda see what the GMV kinda looks like over the course of a year, just on 50 projects out of, you know, 35,000, right? It's something-
That's about $27 million GMV. Is that right?
Yeah. About that, yeah.
So, so revenue-
You know,
Revenue for Freelancer.
Sorry, Greg. Revenue to us will be 10% on that. Unless.
Yeah.
Unless it goes to preferred freelancing, which would be 15%.
Right.
Right, right now, Greg, you know, at the moment, like, we might be doing, let's say, 50 projects a month. You know, when we met with them, you know, we put forward 50 projects a day. Their response was, "You know, why can't we be doing 500 projects at a time?" We just gotta nail down those numbers. As I said, the beauty is that these projects are already in the ecosystem, we don't have to kind of sell it into them. We just have to give them the confidence that they shift those projects from internal Deloitte employees or alumni, and make that step change and push them out to the external cloud, to our-
Yeah.
You know, our freelancers, which we're building a select talent pool for those projects as well.
Well, I guess I'll say, I mean, they gave us a forecast. This was about 1 year ago. The forecast is not a fixed forecast, it's just a really rough estimation, right? We obviously need to. I want to couch this. This is not, there's nothing firm about this, and there's nothing. It's just their estimate that they provided us to try and have a discussion around adoption, right? To turn that very rough estimation into some sort of firm target that we can galvanize the marketing team that Deloitte's brought on to really start growing adoption. Because all their focus up till now has been really internal, and they've done quite well with growth for internal. What we're trying to do now is we're really trying to get the external part happening.
Just we want to get some numbers locked in that we can communicate to their team so that everyone kinda knows what we need to do to keep them breaking down. The number that's in their pitch deck that they came up with, that at year one, year two, year three, the year three number was $34 million in GMV US. Right. Again, that's just a very rough forecast that was pre-going live, pre-everything, right? That was based on the assumption of $2,000 a project, is their assumption, right?
Right.
What we need to do is we need to basically get some targets locked down. There's literally a call that's probably already happened with Mike this morning, where there's new hires coming on the Deloitte side, Seth Gallagher and so on. We've gotta just really start getting... Now, that's, again, you remember, that's also just U.S. consulting. Deloitte's a large organization, and there are many branches around the world. Outside of consulting, you've got tax, audit, and all these other divisions which are completely separate from consulting. We have in the U.K., Australia, Switzerland, and New Jersey, we've got various levels of engagements, discussions, what have you, some earlier stage, some a bit later stage, about coming onto the MyGigs platform as well.
You know, it's one of those things where it's, you know, we've gotta, again, heads down, see what we can do and work with their team to drive the marketing as much as we can. There's quite a number of marketing activities underway right now.
Okay. Kind of following on from there, you kinda mentioned they've got other departments, tax and so on, but you also mentioned earlier they've got a customer in the healthcare space that was also interested. This, the tech stack's already built, the model's built. Incremental GMV coming through incremental revenue. I assume the only incremental cost for you guys is the cost of the chaperones and the cost of actually.
They're paying for some engineering. There's some features we haven't turned on yet. Alley projects are not live yet. Contests are not live yet. You know, things like groups are not live yet, et cetera. They're all things kind of in the short term engineering plan to turn on. That's being paid for with engineering services. That's. There are some features that we'll turn on that will increase the ability for the platform to generate projects and GMV. That's kinda well, that's well underway and that's upscaling. It's, it should be doubling in terms of the revenue line there in the next couple of weeks. Yeah, the platform right now can take projects. It is successfully completing projects.
I mean, there's some examples in the PowerPoint of, kind of, what's being done. It's, you know, there's quite a number of different use cases the platform is being used for. Yeah, as of today, it can take Like, literally today, there could be something going out from the CEO saying, "Okay, everyone, I want you to do, you know, one project and kinda report back, you know, what.
Yeah.
What you've done.
I was more trying to get at what the incremental revenue would convert to the bottom line. What's the additional cost of goods sold and operational costs?
Well, all the engineering we do on the platform is paid for. We make a margin on that engineering. Right? That's all being paid for. There's a per seat licensing we get for the internal. Then we get the percentage on the freelancer side. On the enterprise side, it's a 3% to 0% sliding scale based upon what GMV they deliver. They're currently paying 3% on that side. It's currently 3 + 10 or 3 + 15. Over time, as the volume goes up, that 3 will go to 0.
All right. Maybe I'll put it this way. If PwC came along and said... Or let's say Accenture came along and said, "We want the same.
Yeah.
They're going to provide an additional $100 revenue for Freelancer. What is your... What's that operational, say, at the EBIT level, what's the cash conversion, taking into account that you've got a, obviously more hosting fees and so on, but the key incremental cost for you is probably the chaperone cost to actually make sure that the customer gets the right freelancers. Is that right?
Okay. There's a couple of engagements happening around that. There is a bit of customization that would have to be done if they want exactly the same thing. The customization would have to be look and feel, obviously. You'd need the logo and the colors to be updated, which is very simple. There would be integration into whatever their ERP system is. It might be SAP Fieldglass or it might be slightly different. You would need to integrate with their single sign-on, so just so when, you know, they come to work in the morning and they kinda, you know, type their password in and it gets integrated and their directory, so that it would synchronize, you know, the profile photos and their bios and stuff just synchronized in the same place, right?
There is a little bit of customization work there that would be paid for in order to do that, to get that exact potential experience and have a Freelancer branded experience. That would all be profitable for us, because we get, you know, our engineers get paid to do that. In terms of the actual service delivery, once it's, that's up and live and running, there is virtually no incremental cost. You know, we have vetted talent pools already. All the enterprise customers want their talent to work for other customers, so there's not a work classification issue. If a Freelancer is working for multiple, you know, multiple enterprises, there's no risk.
The risk goes down in terms of that employee being, that client, sorry, that freelancer being misclassified as an employee.
Yeah.
In terms of incremental costs, it's just there's some recruiters handling projects. Recruiters are profitable in themselves. Hosting costs are de minimis.
It would be not too dissimilar from how the consumer market-
Yeah. Multiple projects for the consumer marketplace is the same sort of thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Just last question around Loadshift. You kind of talked about this great momentum, can you put some kind of revenue dollar value-
Yeah.
What the incremental increase you would expect in 2023?
I expected someone to ask that question. We'll break out the numbers when they get significant. Let me put it this way. There's about a 9% award rate right now. The question is what percentage can that award rate get to, in terms of the, you know, the theoretical maximum or the practical maximum? I personally think at some point, and I don't know if it's 2023, I think at some point that number is gonna be north of 60%, in terms of, you know, a job gets posted and 60% will get funded and awarded through the site. It might be higher than that, I think we should be able to get it to about that level.
I, that number I get to because with the experience with the Freelancer marketplace and the experience with buying 20 competitors and looking at the financials for 200 or so businesses that are similar, I kinda know what the fill rates are like on freelance marketplaces. Freelance marketplaces are the award rates and the completion rates are lower simply because someone might wake up in the morning and go, "I wanna be an entrepreneur. I'm gonna do a startup.
I'm gonna make an app, and it's gonna be Uber for pets." They get excited, they go to the website, they start, they post the thing to get a logo done, and they go, "Oh, gee, I don't know really how to tell a programmer to make an app," and, "Oh, gee, this is a lot of work." You know, it goes by the wayside. While on the other hand, if you've got a Cat D12, you know, bulldozer, you don't post a job on Loadshift saying, "Move it from Townsville to Kalgoorlie," unless you've actually got a Cat D12 bulldozer or you're looking at buying a Cat D12 bulldozer. There's some people who are like looking at purchasing equipment in an auction or whatever, and they wanna get a price quote, right?
Outside of that, you don't have an entrepreneur going, "Maybe one day I'll get into construction. I'll post a job to move a bulldozer." It doesn't happen. I think at some point, I'm not saying 2023, but I think at some point that award rate will be 60% award. The award to funded rate is between 90% and 95%. The jobs that get awarded, they pretty much all get funded. There's sometimes a little bit of a thing where something gets canceled or what have you, or delayed, but it's about that. You've got the AUD per kilometer in terms of what we're seeing at the moment. That number is steadily going up with, you know, fuel costs and inflation obviously, and what have you.
You know, you know, $350 million of volume at, you know, 60% is, let's see, at 210, you know, ultimately at 13% at the moment it's not there. At the moment, the model is, the clients pay 3%, shippers, the shippers pay 3%. Right now, as of today, like right now today, if you're not on a legacy Loadshift membership that you got prior to doing the merger, we're honoring the people that have got legacy memberships that are staying on that, they're currently paying 0. If you right now, if you pay for a membership as of today, it's 5%. You're either paying 3 + 0 or 3 + 5, or if you're not on a membership, you're paying 3 + 10.
If it's an enterprise job that goes through, like from a Newcrest or Boart, because if it comes from the sales team, they're at 10. As of today, there's a small number of drivers that are on 3 + 0. There's a certain number that, of new drivers today are on the membership of 3 + 5. Anyone who's not on the membership paying 3+, they're paying the 10. If it's an enterprise job, doesn't matter who you are, you're paying the 10. Right? That gives you a feeling for what the commissions are like. Ultimately, if you've got, you know, $350 million as of, you know, times by 0.16, times by 0.13, that's, you know, $30 million in revenue.
I'm not saying we'll be able to do that this year at all, I'm just saying if we were running at 60% award rate, we'd probably have, you know, $25 million or so of revenue this year. As a realistic revenue, not like a TAM. You know, the TAM's closer to $50 million, right? Of course, those numbers are rising. The question just is how quickly can we get that award rate up? 'Cause there is a graph in here, where we show where we've got it to so far. Although I will say this graph right now, it's biased on low-end jobs.
Jobs that go in for $500, like move a car, they seem to get awarded and happen without, you know, anything being done, which is great. Exactly, that's Freelancer works. No one touches it. It can go straight through. That 9% is not 9% of $350. That's biased for low sides. As that goes up, the average, you know, job going through there will go up as well. I don't want to kind of forecast for this year because I tried doing that last year, and I kind of bit myself. We are in a position now where it's really just heads down and getting that number up as much as we can. That will jump.
You know, we're already getting some days this week we're up at 10%. You know, it's strongly rising. What will you know, just continue to rise is just a few more things in the funnel, a bit more education on the driver side, you know, to put it through. People are getting some reviews and feedback and seeing the benefit. You know, the liquidity on the carrier quoting and what have you is great. I mean, the numbers have spiked up again even this week in terms of quoting and through the site and so on. It's just really just some consumer behavior behavioral changes, a little bit of product stuff and building out the ops team. The ops team are humming.
I mean, you know, if the ops guys, the average load is about AUD 5,000 and if an ops person can do, you know, 5 a day, that's AUD 25,000 of GMV a day. Or sorry, 6 a day. That's AUD 30,000 of GMV a day just from 1 person. We already have 1 ops agent that's reliably doing that. The other team are growing strongly. We've seen now, last month, a new ops agent did AUD 100,000 of GMV in the first month. We've got a new ops guy this month that looks like he'll do it, AUD 100,000 in his first month.
The ops team are figuring it out, and it's just a matter of product and ops and what have you to get that number moving. There's substantial uplift here and to look at the question, I took the question from Deloitte of what are the incremental costs that happen here for each unit of revenue or GMV that's coming on the Loadshift. The tech stack is basically 90% free, right? Like, I mean, how many people are in the total engineering team on Loadshift? Stan's team and Naveed's team.
I'll have to check, but I believe it's something on the order of five.
Yeah. We've got five people in technology in this business driving that revenue line. Is it 5 people in ops?
Five people in ops.
We've got the general manager.
If you include all the people in technology.
Right.
it's probably closer to seven. Yeah.
Seven. I mean, the numbers are different. Yeah. We could pump through, you know, double, triple the number of jobs and we wouldn't be changing the number of engineers. You'd maybe have a few more ops people, but that's the ops people are profit. The one reason why I'm so excited about this business is just that it's just a demonstration. You take all the Freelancer code, you just split it off in one niche. You find a source of jobs for that particular niche and, you know, it's, you know, the costs are very, very, very low to run that business. Very, very, very low.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Any other questions? Anything coming through the chat, Alex? No.
Can I just ask a question? Sean, thanks for that comment. Matt, can you just elaborate on your confidence in the main marketplace? 'Cause it's been a drag for a while.
Yeah, I know. It looks like the trust me, this has been the thing that's been... Thanks, Matt, for your question. Yeah, this has been the thing that's been my bugbear because this business, prior to 2016, you didn't touch it, and it was growing 50% per year revenue year-over-year, right? For years, right? Then from 2016 onwards, it just kinda started to flatten a little bit. There's a lot of things that were going on at that time. You know, the Some of the revenue was a bit soft, so we tightened it up. We unsubscribed about 20% of our revenue from client subscribing to memberships that were not getting any value from them.
There were a lot of things that were happening because you understand, I only raised that AUD 1.5 million to go public. That was to buy a business. I never had a single cent of operating capital. It was probably the leanest business you could possibly find that's ever gone public. From 2013 to 2016, when we went public, there were just a bunch, you know, revenue was growing. There were a number of things we had to do to have a platform where we could have millions of users and really, you know, tighten everything up. From 2016 to 2017, 2018, there was a fair bit of, you know, cutting stock revenue, fixing stuff up. There were a lot of products, frankly, errors that we made with, in terms of quality and so forth.
This whole move fast and break things methodology that came through from Facebook was. We adopted that was terrible, right? You wanna move slowly and carefully because it's the tortoise that wins the race, not the hare, right? If you know you can reliably have a pipeline of things shipping into production and not have anything break, that pipelining effect, like you do have in computer architecture, you that's where you get speed from. You don't get speed from just being super fast and shipping something and having it break and then going and having to figure out what the hell was it, right? That's where you lose all your performance.
It has been a bugbear of mine that there's, there has been, and certainly with investors, the share price reflects that, you know, mea culpa, right. There's been a lot of great things happening in the background. We have done, and I know investors were quite frustrated for many quarters, we were saying, "Oh, we're fixing the front end infrastructure. We're fixing this. We're fixing that." Whatever. I know Greg, he had a comment to us like, "Gee, if I see that one more time, I'm gonna scream at you." Right. That sort of thing. Maybe, Adam, you can give some commentary on why we think we're in a pretty good place now.
Yeah. I mean, I just wanna reiterate that idea of getting away from move fast and break things and really a big focus on product quality moving forward. You know, there's a famous Navy SEAL saying, which is, "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast." I think we learned that the hard way back in 2018 and so on. There really is a big focus now on product quality, and it's coming through in our 2023 product mission. You know, the first and the number one top, of top when taking our UX and design to the next level, from consistent to delight. Really, you know, last year we had a big focus on it, but really it's just getting the platform consistent.
You know, before then, the platform, you know, was pretty wildly inconsistent. We'd just come out of a migration, and, you know, there was still quite a bit of sort of cleanup work from a design and UX perspective. I think we're there now.
That's. The reason why it's relevant is it just slows everyone down. If an engineer's working on designing a new feature and then they can't just de-take, you know, drag a design element in, like, you know, they've got a certain widget, and they don't drag it in it. They've got to make a new widget, and then you have inconsistency of which widget do I use, and then you've got testing problems. All this overhead comes in because you've just got all these different ways of doing things. To make things worse, we had over four different platforms. You had iOS, Android, mobile web and desktop and the four different code bases and inconsistency across all of them, even on different pages on the same platform with the same thing, right?
We just got all that unified in the code bases, and we built a design system. You just drag that widget out, and it's the same everywhere, and it works everywhere. That's given the productivity improvements to the team, but as well as made it easier to get things out in terms of testability, quality, and so on.
It's just improved the client experience as well. I mean-
Yeah.
this, you know, really has improved the design and the UX of the website. That does lead to con-conversion in-
Yeah.
-increase. Separately, there's been a big focus as well last year, and it's very much coming through to fruition this year on collaboration. That does have a direct impact on retention and engagement. Retention and engagement do have a direct impact on revenue. You can see some of those in the group's numbers, which we shown in the presentation.
Yeah.
That's growing very, very quickly, and that basically forms the backbone of our collaborative suite that we're building out with the goal of increasing retention on clients. Once we increase retention, that naturally leads to revenue. Yeah, I mean, I think the other major point, I guess, that we're really focused on is personalization. Again, it's really all around retention and engagement.
Yeah.
There's some stuff coming out there very soon. I unfortunately can't quite talk about it yet, but...
Yeah. We've got. Adam's smiling a little bit. There's five or six things which literally are ready to go live as we speak, and we just want to make sure that. We've got a very robust A/B testing framework now that actually verifies enrollment before we push things into an A/B test. You don't have, you know, gives you a very high reliability of the results of when you actually do get something out. We're just perfectly choreographing that out.
Yeah.
Right now. Something's going out today. Something else will go out in the next few days.
Yeah.
Over the next few weeks. There's a lot of personalization coming. I don't want to give away the secret sauce yet, I think that's gonna have a big lift on the metrics. Big lift on the metrics.
Yeah. I absolutely agree.
Yeah.
Cool. Thanks for that.
Any other questions for now? Nice, no? Okay. As always, you're welcome to have a one-on-one with myself or any of the team. You just contact us at investor@freelancer.com or my email address Matt@freelancer.com. We're available to run you through or talk you through or answer any question you've got in a more private setting. Thanks for tuning in today. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next quarterly results. Thank you.