Good afternoon. My name is Sylvie, and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to Thinkific's Q1 2022 financial results conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being broadcast live on the Internet and recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star then number two. Thank you. I would like to turn the conference call over to Janet Craig, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Sylvie, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Thinkific's earnings call for the Q1 of 2022. Joining me today are Greg Smith, Co-founder and CEO, and Corinne Hua, CFO. After the prepared remarks, we will open the call to questions. During the call today, we will make forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We undertake no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our regulatory filings that were filed earlier today. Our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures. They should be considered as a supplement to, and not a substitute for, IFRS measures. Reconciliations between the two can be found in our regulatory documents, which are available on our website.
In addition, our commentary today will include key performance indicators that help us evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate business plans, and make strategic decisions. Such key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different to similar key performance indicators used by other companies. I should also note we have a slide deck that supports our remarks available to download on the webcast interface or on our website. Finally, all dollar amounts discussed today are in US dollars unless otherwise indicated. I will now turn the call over to Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific.
Thank you, Janet. Hello, and welcome to our Q1 earnings conference call. Thank you for joining us. At Thinkific, we remain fanatical about our creators' businesses and continue to advance our products, platform, and features to support and expand their success. In the Q1 , as we continued to execute our strategy, we also had to make some very hard decisions. As you know, in late March, we announced a reduction in our workforce that resulted in us having to say goodbye to about 20% of our staff. During 2021, we increased our workforce significantly and could have grown into our cost structure, but we knew that wasn't the right thing to do, and we needed to increase efficiency and effectiveness and better align our workforce to focus on our growth drivers.
To be clear, we made these changes with growth as our priority, and we continue to invest in sales and marketing as well as research and development, but are now doing it in a more efficient and effective manner. While restructuring wasn't easy on those that left the company or those that remained, we did our best to lead with empathy and kindness. Going forward, we remain focused on working together as a team to deliver value for our business, our customers, and our shareholders. Turning to just some of the highlights of our performance. Q1 revenue grew by 42% to $11.8 million. This was driven by Q1 ARR, annual recurring revenue, which grew 33% year-over-year to $46.4 million.
ARPU, average revenue per user per month, grew by 13% to $120 per month compared to Q1 last year and grew 5% quarter-over-quarter. Total paying customers grew year-over-year 21% to 33,300. Payments performed well in our first full quarter of results. Gross payments volume was $11.9 million, which represents a penetration rate of 11% of GMV processed during the quarter, up from 6% in Q4. Our success would not be possible if it weren't for the incredible creators on our platform. I continue to be amazed by the creativity, originality, and commitment of our creator community. The impact our creators have is tremendous, and we remain fanatical about supporting their success and continuing to improve our platform, add new features, and launch new products.
We continue to see great businesses creating learning experiences with Thinkific across a variety of verticals, from crime prevention courses to painting or even the banking sector. One creator that recently touched our hearts and underscored the impact that one person or a small business can have on others is ShooTV. ShooTV has over 80,000 participants enrolled and uses a variety of methods to work with its participants, including live events, on-demand learning, as well as communities. A purpose-driven organization is focused on supporting parents and teachers for children with special educational needs or disabilities. ShooTV offers best-in-class training for parents and educators working with these students.
Ian, one of the founders, has a child who is a student with special needs, and he and his partner were finding that parents and teachers were not equipped to create success for students both at home and at school and managing the transition between the two. For example, transitioning back to school after summer break. For an autistic child that creates friends one year and finds the following year he is in a new class with none of his friends he has already made is extremely disruptive and distressing. ShooTV was able to address this through training for parents and teachers. Ian shared with us that what really gets us excited is hearing how valuable or life-changing our content is for parents. Also how we are changing the thinking of teachers on how to approach the way they teach and work with students with special needs.
As you know, Thinkific Payments was available to all creators in the United States and Canada in early November. We are in the early stages of expanding Thinkific Payments support for creators doing business in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. We're very happy with the uptake we have seen on payments, and believe it will be a short and long-term value driver for our business. It will be a significant contributor to ARPU growth this year. This quarter, we continue to enhance our feature set and broaden our offerings across our pricing tiers, including new features for reporting and refund management that save time on business and administration for our customers. As you will recall, we believe Thinkific Payments can reach penetration rates similar to other SaaS players in the range of 20%-30% of GMV in the midterm. The long-term potential being even more substantial.
Each quarter, we continue to improve the customer experience and add features to help our creators succeed. The importance of this continued innovation and responsiveness to our creators cannot be understated, and we believe this innovation and creator-centric approach is what drives our success both now and in the future. Making it easier for creators to get started is foundational to their success. This past quarter, we made it easier for creators to do just that with tools that allow faster website builds, launching and managing live events, as well as a faster onboarding experience. We also continue to lead the way in helping creators sell more. Improvements to our platform in the Q1 include new subscription tools, helping more creators build sustainable subscription-based business models, as well as further improvements to Order Bumps and to our high-performing checkout.
On top of that, we delivered enhancements to Thinkific Payments to simplify administration so creators can focus on creating and selling learning products. We made important improvements to our security features, a key area of focus for our larger customers, including multi-factor authentication. We are calibrating our pricing strategy to ensure we align our success with that of our creators. This is tied to the constant innovation to help our creators' businesses and ensures they are supported with the price point and feature set that best supports their stage of business. This move is an important decision for us, allowing to price for value and is revenue accretive. We continue to see signs that our market is growing. Whether we're looking at the rise of entrepreneurship, the growing knowledge economy, the increase in creators building and monetizing audiences, as well as in people's desire to engage and learn online.
Looking at our evolving go-to-market strategy, we are encouraged by the early traction we are seeing. We're leaning into top-of-funnel awareness strategies, which will provide a better reach for us at a lower cost. We have become more efficient in our paid ads channel and are improving the integration between our product development efforts and our go-to-market outreach. Our sales and marketing strategy focuses on supporting creators on their journey from becoming problem aware, solution aware, and then evaluating and finally choosing Thinkific. Bringing this all together, we are pricing for value and being revenue accretive, evolving our go-to-market strategy and capturing higher quality customers, and we've restructured for efficiency, effectiveness and a focus on growth. These decisions all serve to move our business forward with long-term sustainable growth as the objective.
In the near term, we have a number of levers to drive revenue, whether it's upgrades to higher tier plans, new Plus subscriptions and of course, Thinkific Payments, as well as adding new customers. Our decision to adjust pricing will create downward pressure on the number of paying customers, but also improve ARPU. We're confident in this decision as it will drive revenue growth and aligns our success with that of our customers. Before I hand the call over to Corinne, I wanted to note that last week marked the anniversary of our first year as a public company. It's been an exhilarating, inspiring and very special time in Thinkific's evolution. During this year, we have accomplished much as a team, and we are excited about what is ahead. Our successes could not have been done without our dedicated thinkers, our team.
Their relentless focus on excellence, teamwork, and results, not only for our business, but also for our customers, has made this happen, and we're having fun doing it. Now to speak about our current results, I'm going to turn the call over to you, Corinne.
Thanks, Greg. It was another strong quarter with performance in line with our expectations. We continue to grow our customer base, expand our ARPU, and the initial adoption of Thinkific Payments has been robust. Q1 revenue was up 42% compared to 2021, landing at $11.8 million. This was driven by growth across all our key performance indicators, and of course, our investment over the past year in customer success, research and development, sales and marketing all contributed to this top line growth. Q1 ARR was $46.4 million, growing 33% year-over-year based on our growing customer count and the continued expansion of Thinkific Plus. We're also seeing existing customers upgrade to higher tier plans.
Average revenue per user per month increased 13% year-over-year to $120 per month, a significant year-over-year increase in this metric and up $6 over Q4 of 2021. We're consistently seeing increases to ARPU from creators upgrading to higher paid plans as they experience success in the platform. We're also seeing larger deals from our Thinkific Plus customers. As a reminder, Plus is our highest tier plan, ideal for scaling and larger businesses. We continue to see Plus becoming the platform of choice for larger businesses looking to add education to their business offering and for existing customers who are scaling to new levels of success.
We remain excited about the potential for ARPU expansion in 2022, as we expect to see continued upgrading to higher paid price plans, larger deal sizes from Thinkific Plus, and greater adoption of Thinkific Payments to drive further ARPU growth. We ended the Q1 of 2022 with 33,300 paying customers. An increase of 21% from the Q1 of 2021. This is a reflection of the large and growing market we see in front of us and our solid position within the market. This growth is on top of the exponential increase we saw during the pandemic. While 21% growth in paying customers is significant, we do believe that growth will accelerate as our new marketing strategies take hold and the market continues to grow.
In the short term, however, as Greg mentioned, there will be some downward pressure on new paying customers as we're implementing new pricing strategies that are revenue accretive but may impact customer retention. In its first full quarter of our launch in the U.S. and Canada, Thinkific Payments continues to be well-received by creators. Gross payments value, or GPV, which is the total value of GMV processed using Thinkific Payments, was $11.9 million for the quarter. This represented a penetration rate of 11% of the $108 million of GMV processed during the Q1 of 2022. Moving now to our P&L. As mentioned earlier, our revenue grew 42% year-over-year to $11.8 million.
Gross margin for the Q1 of the year was 73%, compared with 80% last year, as we continue to invest through most of Q1 in building capacity and tools to build best-in-class customer support. Later this year, we expect gross margin in our subscription business to return to 80% and see a mid 20% gross margin in our Thinkific Payments revenue. The resulting gross margin will therefore be impacted by the revenue mix of the two. In the Q1 of 2022, we spent $21.6 million on operating costs across sales and marketing, research and development, general and administrative expenses, and restructuring charges. We've invested heavily in R&D over the past year, almost doubling our headcount year-over-year. This is reflected in an increased year-over-year R&D spend of about $5 million.
We will continue to build this team in the coming quarter to deliver on our product roadmap. Within sales and marketing, we spoke last quarter about changes we are making to address the evolving market. This quarter, sales and marketing spend came in about $1 million lower than we had originally forecasted, as our team was able to achieve some efficiencies in our paid ad spend while still hitting the top end of our revenue guidance. For the quarter, sales and marketing increased $3.1 million relative to the Q1 of 2021. G&A spend was up $3.2 million compared to Q1 last year, with increased expenses reflecting our growing team to support our expanding operations, along with the expenses related to public company costs, which we didn't incur in the prior year.
G&A expenses continue to be a focus to ensure we are sized and staffed appropriately. Lastly, the restructuring costs incurred during the quarter totaled $2.3 million, net of stock-based compensation expense reversals. Looking ahead, we expect spending to come down as a percentage of revenue across the board as we move forward with a leaner, more focused team through the balance of 2022. Some departments will have a gradual return to growing expenses in the H2 of the year as we continue to invest in expanding our platform. Taken together, these investments resulted in adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter of $9.3 million, compared to a loss of $0.5 million a year ago.
This was better than we had expected and reflected in our Q1 outlook, largely driven by the efficiencies that our sales and marketing team was able to execute during the quarter. You'll find a summary of the calculations of our adjusted EBITDA in our press release, MD&A, and investor presentation on our website. Our expectations for the Q2 of 2022 are revenue in the range of $12.4 million-$12.6 million, representing year-over-year growth of approximately 37%, and adjusted EBITDA loss in the range of $7.7 million-$8.3 million. Thinkific expects continued growth in revenue in the Q2 of 2022, driven largely by ARPU growth as well as new paying customers. The adoption of Thinkific Payments, revised pricing strategies, and customers moving up pricing tiers will all contribute to ARPU growth.
Our adjusted EBITDA outlook is driven by increased efficiency within the broader Thinkific team because of our workforce reductions. In 2022 and beyond, Thinkific believes its growth will also be fueled by our large and growing TAM, broadening and deepening our ecosystem, the launch of new features and functionality, the increased adoption of Thinkific Payments, and increased effectiveness in our sales and marketing. To wrap up the call, I will turn it back over to Greg.
Thank you, Corinne. Before we open the call up for questions, I wanted to close on a few key points. We made hard but necessary decisions in Q1, which illustrates the discipline of our management team, as well as our ability to make decisions and execute quickly. With our product-led strategy, our differentiated platform, and our ability to engage, help, and convert creators, I am confident in our ability to capture the market opportunity we have in front of us. Strong management team, exceptional thinkers, and creators that continue to show all of us what is possible make me very confident about the long-term trajectory of this business. I'll now turn the call back over to Sylvie, our operator, for questions.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. You will then hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request. If you would like to withdraw from the question queue, please press star followed by two. If you're using a speakerphone, we do ask that you please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Please go ahead and press star one now if you have a question. Your first question will be from Thanos Moschopoulos at BMO Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Greg, can you expand a little bit in terms of just some of the early signs you alluded to in terms of the changes you made to your sales and marketing strategy and what you're seeing on that front?
Yeah, happy to. As we've talked about, we saw a shift, or on prior calls, we talked a little bit about a change in the market in the H2 of 2021 and that shift away from the same level of urgency we'd seen in 2020 amongst the customer base and people entering the funnel being a little earlier in their journey. Still seeing a large and growing market there. We've tailored our approach to fit that shift in the market. What we're leaning into is leaning into more top of funnel content-based marketing, which is the bigger reach, lower cost marketing, nurturing through the funnel, so helping people convert through the funnel.
On the product side, making it easier for people to get started with improvements to ease of use on the website building tool, also seeing improvements. Some of the early indications that this is working really is that we're seeing early improvements in our ad spend in terms of the efficiency there. That's a good early indication and tends to be the channel that we see perform better, faster when we make changes to it. Some very early indications on the top of funnel and content-based approach as well, but that one takes a longer definitely to see the long-term impacts of it. Consistency through customer success metrics and conversion rates in the funnel. Those are positive signs. It is early in the shift in the go-to-market, but it is the earliest signs where we're seeing some positive results in terms of the changes we're making there.
Okay. Can you expand on the new pricing strategy you alluded to? Just looking at the website, it seems like it hasn't rolled out yet. Any comment in terms of timing or in terms of, you know, how you're tweaking the pricing would be helpful. Thanks.
Yeah, for sure. We did send a note out to customers last week or last month that it was coming in May, and I believe it's May 18th, 19th, that the actual changes start to happen or affect customer accounts. We do expect a minor improvement in average revenue per user there. It should be, as we mentioned, there should be some downward pressure as you do when you make changes to that for the sake of retention, but we expect it to be accretive to revenue. Yeah, that comes out latter part of this month. Although the impacts of that will take time. I don't expect to see every impact of it, positive and negative, hit right on that day.
It is something that, because of the way people react to pricing changes, takes a little bit. It'll take a few months to play out what the full impacts of that are. Really the shift here is that this is working in the direction of better aligning our success with our highest quality customers, those who are getting the most out of the platform, and aligning our success with their success, while also maintaining that balance between free and easy to start at the low end so that people who are just getting started still have a friendly platform to join, evaluate, try out, and get moving on.
Okay, that's helpful. Can you comment on churn trends? I mean, were they relatively consistent versus last quarter? Anything interesting on that front?
Yeah, no major variations there. Slight, actually, slight uptick, but very, very slight in churn, but not something that sort of deviates from the overall long-run positive trend that we've seen. Yeah, overall, seeing the same trend we've seen over the last number of years on churn, which is overall positive there. But again, I think we do expect over the next quarter or so that we will see an uptick on or a downtick on the retention side just because of some of the intentional choices we're making around things like pricing that would be revenue accretive, but negatively impactful on paying customer count.
All right. I'll pass the line. Thanks.
Thanks.
Thanks, Thanos.
Mm-hmm. Next question.
The next one?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Next question is from Todd Coupland at CIBC.
Good evening, everyone. Have you made public the percent increase in the pricing of the platform?
Yeah. I can share and talk about that. I mean, it has been sent out to a large number of customers that are on it. We have a Pro plan and a Grow plan. I probably shouldn't get into all the specifics here 'cause I might get a few of the specific nuances depending on the individual customer. The Grow plan had a scaling metric that brings people up that is an optional add-on to the Pro plan, and we've moved that Grow plan to a fixed fee. The specifics will kind of depend on the customer. There is the option for people to, you know, drop the Grow plan and just move to the Pro plan.
There's the option for them to keep it. For some customers, it may actually be a reduction in price, but we do expect overall the change to be accretive to revenue and to ARPU.
Okay. When you think about churn through this, like would you still expect net of that churn to have customer additions as you implement this in Q2?
Yeah, that the expectation there was that there is some downward pressure. We're obviously still adding customers every quarter in terms of with our marketing efforts. How that actually plays out next quarter, not entirely clear on the total customer count, just because the reaction to the pricing is something that we can't predict perfectly. We do expect to continue to be adding customers from the marketing channel, losing some from the pricing change and overall the combination of those to be revenue accretive, but the exact impact on total customer count, I couldn't predict.
Okay. I think you had said with the updated go-to-market, bringing along those longer decisions, I guess, is a way to abbreviate what happened, that you're really not gonna see the benefits of this updated go-to-market probably for a few quarters. Is that still the right way to think about that?
That's correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. You know, as more economies open up and, you know, we're seeing, you know, trends toward services from online purchases playing out in the market, is there still more post-pandemic, I guess, dynamics to work through in the online learning market? Are you seeing anything along those lines that would be helpful in understanding your business as economies open up? Thanks a lot.
Yeah. Thank you. I hesitate to get my crystal ball out for all things future on the state of the world, but the overall impact to us that we've seen so far and what we're looking at our data is we continue to see improvements in a lot of the engagement metrics. Let's speak specifically to what I think you're getting at on the consumption, so the customer of our customer, the consumption of courses, and we're seeing positive indications there in terms of enrollments and engagement in learning products. Really seeing that there still is growing demand there on that side, the consumption of our customers' products.
All right. I appreciate the color. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Next question will be from Richard Tse at National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Just a few questions. One on sort of capital allocation. No doubt you've been, you know, very responsible in terms of taking some of the initiatives you've had to become more efficient. You do have considerable amount of cash on the balance sheet, and the stock has, you know, been under pressure. Like, is there a chance here that you can sort of go out and maybe buy back some of your stock? Like, what are your thoughts on that? Is that something that's sort of been in discussion? Give us a bit of color there.
No immediate plans to do anything in that realm. We've got good growth drivers I think we can invest in, and so our focus really, both from a mind share headspace perspective of management leadership in the company and also financially, is really on how we drive growth for the company.
Okay. In regards to sort of the price changes, can you maybe give us a bit of color in terms of how you came to that decision in terms of making these changes? You know, I understand, you know, what's happening there, but how? What was the genesis of that, and like, what did you do to sort of specifically make the changes that you're making today?
Yeah. We really see pricing iteration to be a continuous improvement process for us that involves continuously adding value for our customers as we iterate on pricing and packaging and ensuring really some of the ethos behind it is ensuring that our customers are on the price plan and have the feature set that is best for their business. That's part of the mentality behind doing that, and that means keeping open that lower end for the people who are just getting started, making sure they have a place to land and grow from, but also aligning our success with that of our customers. Looking at the, really, where we made the change was on that Grow plan, and that really is a feature set for people who are already successful.
They have volume, and they're looking for additional feature set. We've been adding features and functionality to that plan to give people more functionality. Now it's just making sure that we've initially setting a fixed price there on that one to capture the right amount of value to support the value we continue to add to that plan. Again, I think for us, pricing is a continuous improvement process.
Okay. You know, R&D, I think in your prepared comments, it sounded to me that, you know, that's still a pretty considerable focus in terms of the investment to come. Like, it seems like the platform is actually quite robust as it is. You've got payments, you know, sort of you have this sort of app store. What pieces are you missing in that you need to sort of continue such a kind of a lean in on R&D here?
Yeah. It's less so that we're missing a core functionality and much more that we sit at this very favorable position of being essentially that core operating system, that central piece of software for our customers' businesses. We're the piece that they connect to any other tools that they use, the place they sign into every day to see how their business is doing, to engage with their learners and students, to build and then deliver their products they're creating. What that gives us is that central data point to see what else are they using, what are they wanting to use, what are they paying for even with other solutions. That creates opportunity for us to solve big problems for them that could be revenue accretive both to them but also to our business.
Because we sit at that center point, it's more about adding, as opposed to filling really big gaps. One of the challenges I think we saw recently was on the communities front and seeing that more people were looking to, even a number of years ago, move some of their private communities away from Facebook and moving them to their own website under their own brand. We launched a communities product which adds considerable value to our customers to be able to have their own private hosted communities, delivered through Thinkific. It was not necessarily something people were identifying as a big gap, in what we serve, but it certainly added a lot of value for them.
Okay. Thanks for the color. Appreciate it.
Thanks.
Next question will be from Robert Young at Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good evening. I was hoping you could talk a little more about the cost of acquisition being lower. I think you said that you had better ad efficiency, but you're also targeting customers earlier in the funnel, and so those two things seem at odds. Are you targeting a different type of customer, higher value customer, more towards like the Plus customer? Is there anything there to understand maybe a bit better?
Long term, we expect improvements to our CAC as we, you know, continue to go after, you know, both customers at the self-serve side as well as Plus. We've seen some improvements as we talked about the efficiencies in our paid ads. It's not really a change in the customer that we're going after so much as just how we're spending our dollars to make sure it's providing an efficient return. There are some short-term impacts that you're gonna see with the noise from the restructuring, but overall we're gonna see, you know, long-term a positive CAC. We're returning to a more continuously improving CAC.
Okay. That's something you think has got some durability and cost of acquisition.
Yeah.
Should be better going forward. Okay.
Exactly. I think this is a great example of that we've been able to lean into this last quarter.
Okay. Then the ARPU growth this quarter was pretty strong. I think you said 11% adoption in payments. It strikes me as that the ARPU grew more this quarter than last quarter, but you grew the adoption a little bit lower. What would it be that balances that? Is it something beyond payments obviously, or am I just understanding that incorrectly?
There was a continuous growth in payments. We saw, you know, really strong because it came out in November and so obviously, you know, a really big uptick right from the beginning 'cause there was some good demand for it at the beginning. Expect there to be continued growth. It seems to be also upside there. This quarter, we also saw improvements from customers using higher tier plans, including Plus, as well as people just, you know, gradually upgrading within our self-serve. Just continuously across the business, some good growth.
Okay. Which of the three things that you highlighted, the upgrade to the higher paid plans, I think Thinkific Plus and the adoption of payments, like which would have been the biggest factor there?
The upgrades to Plus was probably the largest driver for us in Q1. However, I don't wanna minimize the fact that all three of them contributed positively, and we expect that to continue as we go into Q2.
Okay. Is there anything in Q1 that seasonally benefits the Plus side of the business?
No, nothing seasonal at this point. Just, continued success, I would say in that side of the business.
Okay. Maybe one more seasonality question, just the GMV. I would think that Q1 normally sees a seasonal decline. It was up a little bit quarter to quarter, is that typical, or maybe just talk about seasonality on GMV. I'll pass the line.
Yeah. GMV has, I think, increasingly become something that we don't focus on the aggregate amount as much just because there are so many factors that affect it from an individual creator's campaigns and their running to some of that seasonality. We did see some growth in GMV. You know, you've been cycling over the strong Q1 we had a year ago. Obviously there's a variety of factors that impact it. It's probably the metric that we have the least control and visibility over. What we're also looking at is things like the growth in the success of our customer across other metrics like enrollments or the engagement they have in their programs, and those things are continuing to grow as well.
The big piece we're very focused on now obviously is the GPV, the gross payments volume at that $11.9 million and 11% of the GMV. Wouldn't say we saw strong seasonality factors in Q1 there on the GMV, though, to be more specific to your question.
Okay. Okay, thanks. I'll pass the line.
Thank you. Next question will be from Martin Toner at ATB Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thanks for taking my question. Have you implemented price increases before? What was the impact on customer counts?
We have done pricing price changes in the past, but they're all sort of quite different because this one is on one specific plan, so it only affects a portion of the customer base. It is harder to just, you know, correlate exactly based on prior changes what those would be. We've made changes in the past on the Plus side and not seen negative impacts on customer count, but those tend to be a different nature of customer with a higher level of their own revenues and ability to pay. This is a little bit more in that middle range of customers. We haven't made one sort of this nature.
In the past, we've made it where we've kind of added a new plan or a new mechanism of pricing. This is a bit of a different shift, so it's harder for us to just tie to a specific number of change in customers in the past.
Gotcha. Given that you're kinda targeting a plan that's mostly comprised of successful traders and you're trying to align yourself to their success, the churn, you know, should be, shouldn't be that bad, right?
Yeah. I mean, you may see people who are on that plan but don't need the features on it drop down to the level below it, or take a break and come back when they've got a level of success where they wanna continue paying. I think part of it is even just flagging for people who aren't seeing their own personal level of success today that it might be a time to drop to a lower price point. For the ones who are successful, no, I wouldn't expect to see much change on that.
Great. Thanks. Can you talk a little bit about payments? You've talked in the past about how improving the value proposition by offering payments is kind of part of a virtuous cycle that should help the entire business overall. Are you starting to see any evidence of that happening?
We are seeing great success for our customers on our payments platform, and a lot of it has to do with the selling features that we offer. When we talk about, you know, it actually helping the whole platform, a lot of it has to do with once we have a customer leveraging our payments platform, we are then able to help with other things like high-performing checkout or Order Bumps or how we're able to leverage the point in which they hit the checkout within the learner's experience. There's just kinda like no shortage of opportunities once we have control of that checkout moment. We are quite excited about what's possible.
Some of that speaks to, you know, what Greg was talking about earlier about our R&D investment and us continuing to find ways for us to solve, you know, bigger problems for our creators and helping them earn more on our platform.
That's great. Thanks a lot. That's all for me.
Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. Your next question will be from Gavin Fairweather at Cormark. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Just on the pricing, how common would it be for a creator to start on your Pro, Plus, Grow plan versus, you know, Basic or Pro?
I'm gonna have to look. That, I don't have in front of me. I'll have to look that one and check and get back on that one. In terms of actually starting on that plan, we do see people jump to any one of our plans. People come in often on Free, but sometimes immediately select a paid plan, sometimes select a trial. We do run trial campaigns more and more now, and people will come in and trial a campaign that or trial a plan that may include that Grow plan, which would mean that then when they come off of the trial, that they are starting right away on that plan because they wanted some of the feature set that was on it.
There are some people definitely who are starting right at that price point, but I don't have right in front of me the number that are actually starting on that plan.
Okay, that's fair. I mean, I thought kind of intuitively like maybe more would start at Basic or Pro, and then so kinda thinking through your growth additions, you know, maybe they're not as impacted in the H2 as your sales machine is kinda fine-tuned there.
Yeah, you're right in that actually the most popular starting point for people is that Pro plan.
Got it. Okay, maybe just on operating expenses, if I'm kinda doing the math here, you know, the guidance implies kinda $17 million in cash OpEx for Q2. How should we be thinking about kinda growth off of that base kinda post-restructuring given, you know, inflation and any kinda strategic investments you'd like to make?
We are focused very much on executing on our plan in front of us, and so, you know, looking at how do we best leverage our investments to get a good return. We're only, you know, looking to give guidance at this point up to Q2 and, not much beyond that. We do see, you know, continued opportunities for us to invest in our growing market. Lots of opportunities for us to, you know, continue to find ways to lead the market and, provide solutions that creators are looking for. Not looking to, you know, spend anything in areas that are, you know, dramatically new outside of, you know, our current product set and quite excited of what we're building from that perspective. Continuously feel as though, you know, our current plans are well-funded, and so we're in good shape going forward.
Okay, great. I think, you know, in the past couple of quarters, you've kind of, you know, helped us out to understand the amount of payments in the queue. Can you help us out on that front for Q2?
We're not looking to continue to share, like what are we looking at, you know, penetrations of GMV for Thinkific Payments specifically. As we get a more material number, we plan to share that, you know, on our financial statements as a separate line item, kinda like breaking out the gross margin as well. At this point, you know, trying to kind of stay focused on our revenue number. We've seen good adoption of Thinkific Payments, expect that to continue, but not looking to provide a specific guidance number on that right now.
Okay. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Gavin.
Thank you. At this time, we have no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Smith.
Thank you, Sylvie. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you for the great questions. Really appreciate it. Just I'll share that very excited about some of the things we have coming in the future on our R&D roadmap, and some of the features we're building and we'll be delivering later this year for our customers to help grow their success. Thanks again everyone for coming, and look forward to chatting with you again next quarter.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending, and at this time, we do ask that you please disconnect your lines.