Thank you everyone for joining us today, and welcome to Wishpond's 2023 First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Jordan Bones, Director of Marketing, and joining me on the call today are Ali Tajskandar, Chairman, Founder, and CEO of Wishpond, and David Pais, the company's CFO. This call is being recorded. We will have a Q&A session at the end of the call, which will be limited to analysts only. We trust that everyone has received a copy of our financial results press release that was issued earlier today. Listeners are also encouraged to download a copy of our quarterly financial statements and management discussion and analysis from sedarplus.ca. Please note, portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of these laws.
Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors, many of which are outside of Wishpond's control, that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance or achievements implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are further outlined in today's press release and in our management discussion and analysis. We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. We don't undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except if it's required by law.
We use terms such as gross profit, gross margin, Adjusted EBITDA, annualized revenue run rate, and monthly recurring revenue on this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definitions set out in our management discussion and analysis. With that, let me turn the call over to Mr. Ali Tajskandar, Chairman and CEO.
Thank you, Jordan. Good day, everyone. We hope that you are all keeping safe and healthy. We truly appreciate everyone for joining us today. We are very pleased with our first quarter results, which proved to be another strong quarter. Wishpond achieved revenues of CAD 5.6 million in Q1 2022, representing a 38% increase over Q1 2022, driven by the company's continued focus on organic growth and increase in sales activity and new product in introduction. I'm especially excited with the launch of our new website builder, which is powered by generative artificial intelligence, AI technology, and was released in Q1. The use of AI technology is rapidly changing the digital marketing landscape, and Wishpond is at the forefront of utilizing these new innovations to provide small businesses with new advantages against larger competitors.
We are actively working on developing additional AI-powered marketing tools, which we intend to launch in the coming quarters. As part of our continued cost reduction initiative we launched in 2023, we continue to monitor our costs and with the intent to optimizing operations and achieving cost-saving synergy. As a result, the company was able to achieve positive Adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2023 of CAD 209,000, an increase of 147% compared to the same period last year. Our commitment to having a focused mindset and realizing cost efficiency while still achieving growth, is what has permitted us to consistently generate positive Adjusted EBITDA. Our outlook continues to look promising for 2023. The increasing sales, positive Adjusted EBITDA, and improving margins.
We continue to experience increasing demand for our products and have not witnessed any slowing down or negative impact due to external macroeconomic conditions. We expect to continue growing rapidly as our sales pipeline remains robust and we continue transitioning to bundled product offerings to our customers. I will provide additional details on our outlook later on the call. First, I would like to turn it over to our CFO, David, who will review the financial results for the first quarter. David?
Thank you, Ali. I'm pleased to report that we had very strong Q1 results for the three months ended March 31, 2023. Our first quarter 2023 results are as follows: Wishpond achieved quarterly revenue of CAD 5.6 million during Q1, 2023, compared to revenue of CAD 4.1 million generated during Q1, 2022, an increase of 38%. Revenue growth was primarily driven by organic growth, resulting from stronger product demand and increase in sales and marketing activities and new product introductions. Wishpond's small decline in revenue of 5% from Q4, 2022 to Q1, 2023, was not unexpected and is due to seasonality in our business. Last year, we experienced a significant decline in revenue from Q4, 2021 to Q1, 2022.
In comparison, the seasonal impact was much less in Q1 this year, due to the acquisition of Viral Loops last year and the launch of Propel IQ. Wishpond achieved gross profit of CAD 3.7 million in Q1 2023, compared to CAD 2.5 million during Q1 2022, representing an increase of 45%. This was driven by an increase in overall revenue. Wishpond's gross margin percentage in Q1 2023 was 66%, compared to 62% in Q1 2022. The gross margins were within the company's historical range of 65%-70%. The United States remains our largest and fastest growing market, generating 75% of our total revenue in the quarter, with approximately 10% and 13% of revenue generated from Canada and the rest of the world, respectively.
During Q1, 2023, Wishpond achieved positive Adjusted EBITDA of CAD 209,000, compared to an Adjusted EBITDA loss of CAD 441,000 in Q1, 2022. The improvement is primarily driven by higher revenue, an improvement in gross margins, and our cost optimization efforts over the past year. We continue to have a clean and healthy balance sheet. As at March 31, 2023, Wishpond had CAD 1.9 million in cash and short-term investments, and the company has no debt. The reduction in cash balances was caused in part by payment of earn-outs for businesses acquired in 2022, investments in the business, and changes in working capital. Wishpond has a CAD 6 million secured revolving operating line of credit facility agreement with National Bank of Canada's Technology and Innovation Banking Group, which remains undrawn as of today.
In summary, Wishpond remains in an extremely strong financial position, with a clean balance sheet and growing profitability. Based on the company's performance in Q1 and growth momentum, we are expecting to continue delivering strong results in the rest of 2023. This concludes my financial update, and I will turn the call back over to Ali.
Thank you, David. I would now like to share with you some recent business highlights. On February 28th, 2023, the company announced that Gartner Digital Markets, one of the world's leading platforms for business software reviews and research, presented Wishpond with 5 industry awards, recognizing Wishpond's popularity and performance in the marketing technology space. Wishpond received awards and recognitions from GetApp, Capterra, and Software Advice, which are operated by Gartner Digital Markets. On March 9th, 2023, the company announced the launch of Propel IQ, the company's next-generation marketing technology platform. Propel IQ is the most expensive solution offered by Wishpond to date, combining Wishpond's award-winning software with its recent acquisitions to create one connected platform.
In addition to Wishpond's lead generation, email marketing, automation, and marketing technology solutions, Propel IQ includes SMS marketing from Winback, referral marketing from Viral Loops, and sales engagement software from PersistIQ, all integrated together into one platform. With Propel IQ, businesses can manage the complete customer life cycle on one platform, eliminating the need to pay for multiple marketing and sales tools. On March 30th, 2023, the company announced the launch of its new website builder, powered by generative AI technologies. With the website builder, small to medium-sized businesses can launch a website within minutes using AI technology, positioning Wishpond in the top website building platforms. Wishpond's AI-powered website builder is now available to customers using Wishpond's next generation, Propel IQ. Given Wishpond's management successful acquisition track record, we are once again looking at acquisition opportunities and building our acquisition pipeline, which consists primarily of small token acquisitions.
Wishpond has demonstrated a disciplined capital allocation strategy, having successfully completed six acquisitions since the company's public listing in December 2020. Our acquisition strategy has been to do token acquisitions of marketing technology companies that offer complementary product solutions to small, medium-sized businesses. Our acquisition targets have all been companies that can benefit from our sales and marketing expertise, and their products and solutions offer great cross-selling opportunities to our core Wishpond customers. Our acquisition strategy has worked to date, as this has added tremendous functionality to our product offerings, as well as complemented the company's organic growth very nicely. Further to that, on May 3rd, 2023, the company announced that it completed the acquisition of certain assets of Essential Studio Manager, ESM. ESM is a provider of business management software, including invoicing and customer relationship management solutions for small businesses in the services industry.
ESM is expected to be integrated with Wishpond's Propel IQ platform this year, and we will provide updates in the coming quarters. Wishpond customers using Propel IQ will be able to access contract signing, invoicing, and access other CRM functionalities from one single platform. ESM brings over 150 customers who are currently being onboarded to Wishpond family. We are currently in the integration process for ESM operations. We expect the integration of technology integration with Wishpond Propel IQ to happen in the second half of 2023. We'll provide further updates in the coming quarters. Management is very optimistic about the company's growth prospects. I'm pleased to share Wishpond's key goals for 2023. Number 1, increase monthly recurring revenues through both organic and inorganic means.
Two, scale the size of the sales team to help achieve the company's organic growth profile. Three, remain Adjusted EBITDA profitable by balancing growth with increased positive cash flow from operations. Four, invest in research and development so that we can continue to launch new AI-powered products and services to increase long-term value for our clients. Five, leverage the Propel IQ platform to further accelerate the company's growth, improve margins, and increase customer retention and long-term customer value. Wishpond's outlook for Q1 2023 and heading into 2023 remains strong and positive. Wishpond's performance is positive across all of its product lines and for the entire company as a whole. We believe that Wishpond is well positioned for continued growth and profitability. Wishpond is quick to achieve record revenue and cash flows in 2023.
This is driven by organic growth from ramping up sales of the company's new Propel IQ bundled product offerings, increasing the size of the sales team, and new product introductions. Wishpond continues to experience strong performance across all of our businesses with robust demand for our products. We expect organic growth this year to be in line with historic range of 30%-40% per year. We continue to sign up more new clients every day. We are getting very positive feedback from customers on our Propel IQ platform. However, with the training of new sales staff and transitioning sales personnel to the bundled Propel IQ platform, we expect some roughness in Q2, and greater revenue growth will occur in the second half of the year.
The transition of sales staff to selling the new Propel IQ platform takes time as sales familiarizes themselves with the product and value proposition. We expect to be Adjusted EBITDA positive in each quarter going forward. In line with the company's focus on profitable growth, Wishpond will continue to scrutinize all discretionary expenditures across the organization with the intent of optimizing operations and achieving cost-saving energy. With the launch of Propel IQ, we are expecting higher customer retention rates going forward. Clients are increasingly signing up for annual 12-month terms. Propel IQ improves the stickiness of our platform and aids in retaining customers for longer periods of time. The bundled pricing of Propel IQ is expected to result in greater customer satisfaction, less churn, and consequently, higher long-term value to customers.
Wishpond will continue to invest in research and development efforts to launch new AI-based marketing tools and products. The use of AI technology is rapidly changing the digital marketing landscape, Wishpond is at the forefront of utilizing these new innovations to provide SMBs with new advantages against larger competitors. We've already launched 2 AI-based products with Braxy and our website builder, and we're actively working on developing additional AI-powered marketing tools for our Propel IQ platform. We're in a very fortunate position to be able to lead the charge in applying AI to marketing applications, and to provide our clients with powerful tools that will help them grow their business more efficiently and profitably than was ever possible in the past. Wishpond is recession-resilient. Business has felt no impact due to recession, inflation, supply chain, or other macroeconomic effects.
In an economic slowdown, companies often reduce or freeze their budgets. However, they still need to acquire new customers to keep their business afloat, businesses find value in Wishpond's all-in-one Propel IQ software platform, which costs a fraction of all the individual products it replaces. Businesses keeping a close eye on their costs and looking to cut costs, find Wishpond as a more cost-effective alternative than internal marketing resources. Wishpond is an effective and affordable alternative that is thriving in a recessionary environment. Wishpond can continue to fund the growth of its sales team and new product launches from cash flow from operations, without having to raise additional equity or debt capital.
The cash flows generated by the company will continue to be reinvested in the business and allocated in a disciplined manner, which may come in the form of future acquisitions, share repurchases, or through acquired organic growth. In closing, I want to reiterate that Wishpond is an elite software company with profitable growth. Technology companies are known to burn lots of cash for many years before becoming cash flow positive. It is rare to find a software company of our size that is generating positive cash flow from operations, is rapidly growing with 30%, 40% organic growth, and maintains gross margins of over 65%. Wishpond is a unique, high-growth, profitable company, and we remain committed to delivering profitable growth in the future.
Wishpond today is in an enviable position with a growing customer base, increasing revenue, broadened product offerings, a balance sheet, and positive cash flow from operations. I'm extremely proud of what we have accomplished, and I'm excited with our future plans. Finally, I want to thank all the employees at Wishpond whose hard work has helped to elevate the company to a higher level. We want to thank our customers who rely on us to help them with their digital marketing needs. Also, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us on this call today. We look forward to providing an update next quarter. With that, I will now hand it back to Jordan for questions.
With that, we will now open the call to questions. Just a reminder that questions will be limited to analysts only. The first question is from Jason Zandberg of PI Financial. See if we can find him here. Okay, please go ahead, Mr. Zandberg.
Perfect. Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
All right. First of all, great quarter. Just wanted to just talk about your cash position. You know, I see that cash dropped slightly in Q1, and that we've explained that that was due to, you know, some earnouts. What I wanted to ask is: How confident are you that you can generate cash the remainder of the year? Knowing full well you do have a CAD 6 million secured LOC to back you up, just wanted to get a, your, you know, your outlook in terms of cash generation for the remainder of the year.
Yeah, for sure. Good question, Jason. The cash drop, as you mentioned, for a number of reasons. One, that I wanna add a little bit more color on, is deferred revenue, for example, at the end of Q4, was higher because we had some larger customers who prepaid for usage of the platform early. In Q1, we didn't have that, even though they were continuing with the services, but they weren't paying. Some of that deferred revenue you see coming down on cash collection wasn't as much in Q1. The second element of it is earnout that we paid in cash, knowing that, where we believe the value of the stock is, you know, didn't make a ton of sense for us to use stock for the earnout, even though we have that at our discretion.
Going forward, what we see right now is that our cash flow generation capability is quite strong. We are seeing that we are in a balanced state where I don't see, you know, in the rest of the year, for us needing to tap into the line of credit for continuing operations. I see that we are, you know, we are balanced, and we're gonna have continued increased cash flow put on the line. Right now we don't have a concern with that, but obviously we have the line of credit available as well. We, you know, obviously don't want to use that for operations, but use that for acquisitions or other things that might come our way. David, is there anything you wanna add?
Ali, I think you covered it off. You know, primarily the cash decline is due to working capital differences, deferred revenue in this case. A little more color in terms of the earnout. The good news is, you know, we pretty much cleared all the earnouts. There's literally only one quarterly installment left that we intend to pay, that we have to pay in July. After that, we're free and clear, at least, you know, with the current six acquisitions that we've made. Again, you know, just in terms of looking into the future, we don't expect earnouts to be used again.
Fantastic. If I could ask another question, just more housekeeping. Just wanted to get a number on sales execs at the end of the quarter. How many did you hire, during Q1, quarter?
I don't have an exact number, but I'll answer it in a way that hopefully gets to the heart of your question.
Sure.
We haven't really aggressively increased the size of the sales team because we've been in this transition from selling point solutions to more like bundled offering that we can see is becoming very successful, you know, when it's rolled out, the retention is much better, client happiness is great. We have been in that transition period, and our effort has been mostly on training and making sure that the transition happens successfully. It would have been quite difficult to increase the size of the sales team at the same time that that transition is happening. I expect by end of Q2 for that to be completed, and then we accelerate adding more people to the sales team in the remainder of the year.
Okay, great. If I could just ask one more question?
Of course.
That's just in terms of the Viral Loops contribution in Q1. Just trying to delineate the acquired revenue growth versus the organic revenue growth, if that's possible?
David, when was Viral Loops acquisition completed?
The Viral Loops acquisition was completed April 1 of last year, so we, you know, we didn't have the benefit of that revenue in Q1 of last year.
Right.
Generally speaking, we haven't really been breaking out the revenue for each of these divisions. More so, Jason, looking forward, you know, since we've actually integrated all of these into Propel IQ, you know, more so it's going to be a bundled sale. Breaking it, you know, I guess, especially going forward, breaking it out won't make a lot of sense.
I think what we do see, though, what we continue to see is that that organic growth profile of 30%-40% is still holding. If you look back at Viral Loops, what their revenue was when we acquired them and subtract that, or, you know, you can make certain adjustments to that. You'll see that close to 30% was still the organic growth.
Sure. Okay, thanks very much.
Okay.
Okay. The next question is from Gabriel Leung, Beacon Securities . Please go ahead with your question.
Gabriel, you're on mute.
Sorry about that. Hey, guys. How are you doing?
Hi.
Hey, just had some questions around the, I guess, the retraining of sales staff around Propel. Ali, how is this being done right now? Is it being done sort of batches within the sales team, or are they all doing it all at once, and hopefully everybody's done with it in Q2?
No, it has been cohorts, and, you know, most of the training is already done. That's not really where the problem is or where the challenge is. It's that after you finish the training, then you also have to do the ongoing coaching and make sure that people are successful. A lot of people are now becoming successful, but still, what we're seeing and what you usually see is that as you're transitioning, you differ a little bit before people's, you know, closing and all of those things get back to normal levels.
Got you.
We're getting there. I think that's why I do expect the end of June for us to be there.
I'm curious, you mentioned this being done in sort of cohorts. What sort of results, what have you started seeing within, you know, I guess, the first cohort that's done the training? What sort of results have you seen on the back of that? You know, you talked about Propel essentially, you know, resulting in sort of longer term contracts. Has that... I know it's obviously early, but any signs...
For sure.
-on that, on that perspective?
Absolutely. For sure, we're seeing the contracts that are longer, and for sure, we're seeing that the earlier account executives who've nailed it are quite happy actually, with the product offering. It is really a no-brainer in terms of the value proposition and, you know, comparing it with any competitors in terms of the value, in terms of the cost, in terms of everything that is built into it. The closing rate also is those who are in a little bit earlier. The closing rate and average deal sizes are comparable to what we had with the individual point solutions or what, for we call 1.0. We know that it works quite well.
On the account management, the other thing that is quite exciting is that it takes us less effort, less services to help or less people help to manage the accounts. It is higher margin, and better retention and longer term contracts as well. It really, this is best of all worlds.
Any sort of feedback from potential customers, any, in terms of pushback on the platform itself? Is there anything holding customers back from actually deploying sort of the full suite, or is it just really maybe a cost thing?
Yeah. No, I mean, nothing more than usual that, you know, obviously, when you're talking to different people, they might have different reasons for going or not going ahead with the platform. For most part, the reaction has been very positive. You know, the challenge has been whether it is portrayed the right way, and that goes back to the sales training. People who are properly trained and now up to par, their satisfaction is great, and people really get it. They look at it like, "Okay, wow, this is amazing." You know, it takes care of everything I need. I've never seen anything quite like this anywhere else.
Got you. I just want to clarify two points you made earlier, Ali. You said because of the retraining transition, you might see a dip in Q2. Do you mean a sequential dip, or do you mean a dip in the usual 30% organic growth?
What we currently expect is that Q2 numbers would be an increase over current Q1 numbers. No, I'm not talking about a dip over what we have. I think, you know, more than likely we'll be close to or similar to or in the vicinity of our Q4 numbers, which was CAD 5.9 million. No, that's gonna still go back to the growth, but I guess it's not gonna be at the growth levels that we ourselves have set out for ourselves. And I think it, you know, the way I would look at it is that we're revving up, right? Like, you have to kind of sometimes, you know, rev up the engine and then you can accelerate, and that's what's gonna happen in the second half of the year.
Got you. just one last thing. Is your plan still to take your sales rep count to about 70 to 80 by year-end? there's obviously a big push sort of in that Q3, Q4 in terms of hiring.
That's correct.
Okay. Got you. awesome. Thanks for the feedback and, congrats on progress.
Thank you. Great questions.
The next question comes from Nihal Popat. Go ahead with your question, Nihal.
Hey, Ali. Hey, guys.
Hi, Nihal.
Congrats on strong quarter here. You know, with another quarter gone, has the onboarding of customers from legacy products to the Propel IQ platform gone as expected? Has there been any surprises in terms of resistance from the customers to transfer over?
... I think, you know, some of the customers we're transitioning over, some of the customers, we might actually let them continue in the packages they signed up for. You have to remember that, you know, they had certain pain points and needs, and they might have come in with those expectations. It's not always straightforward to say, "You signed up for this. Here's another alternative, can you migrate?" We do that sometimes, we don't necessarily do that all the time. We grandfather them. It has been more important for us to offer it to new clients than migrating existing clients and risk challenges that might come with that.
Gotcha. No, perfect. Can you talk about, what's your plan on increasing, you know, hiring with the sales team? How long does it take from hiring an Account Executive until they're fully ramped up?
The training usually takes 2-3 weeks. Then after that, they're on the floor and start selling. In the first 1-2 weeks after that, they should have 1-2 wins under their belt. Really, by the end of the 3-month term, probation period, we have a fairly good idea of how they're performing. They should start hitting their normal quotas that we expect from established AEs.
Perfect. Maybe if we can talk about the product roadmap here. In terms of other AI solutions, can you talk about what we can expect being launched in the coming quarters?
Yeah, there's several things. I mean, one that we mentioned before is AI-powered email responder, that you go into your inbox, basically as a salesperson, and you have a whole bunch of emails. It actually helps you respond to them, and, you know, you don't have to spend so much time on every single one. It learns about your business and everything you've done. You know, that's one that is quite interesting. We might do things related to AI-powered live chat. We're experimenting with it right now. There are also opportunities for us to help with generating the content of newsletters that go out with AI, as well as generating, sorry, the content of outbound emails as part of Propel IQ platform. A lot of these functionalities, first, we do them internally for our own purposes and gain efficiencies.
When we see that they're working really well, we productize them. We're doing a lot of those things already for our team, or we're rolling them out for our team already.
Perfect. Maybe just a couple... Two more from my end. With Propel IQ, has there been a shift regarding the size of the customer you're now able to attract, given that it is such a comprehensive platform?
Not yet, because we're still going through the same ICP, you know, ideal personal profile. You know, that has been a determining factor in terms of the size of it. You're right. I think ultimately, this is a platform that sells quite well. We talk about small, medium-sized businesses because they have specific needs. They're underserved. There's so many of them, and we have a couple ways of onboarding them. Really, ultimately, nothing is stopping us from selling to larger customers either. For sure, that will be part of what we're gonna explore. What's really interesting about this and our pricing with Propel IQ is that pricing and our revenue generation also scales with that, right?
You know, if it starts with a CAD 1,000 up-front fee and CAD 300 a month, and now you're a larger business that has instead of 1,000 leads in the database on Wishpond you have 50,000, you might end up paying us CAD 5,500 a month because of that lead overage, right? You start sending invoices to your customers, and people start paying for those invoices. A percentage of that payment is, you know, through the ESM platform, percentage of that payment is gonna come to us as well. Increasingly, we're gonna work on usage-based and success-based pricing as well with Winback soon as well. One of the things that we're experimenting with right now is, well, let's collect a percentage of the revenue that is recovered, the shopping cart, abandonment, all of those things.
If someone actually, you know, ends up making CAD10,000 extra revenue through the use of Winback, well, we'd like to make CAD 1,000 of that. Those are some of the things that we're working through, and makes it more interesting to serve the mid-level of the market as well.
No, that's fantastic. That's clear color earlier. I appreciate that. One last one from my end. Can you, can you talk about your M&A pipeline? What type of product gaps are you trying to fill through M&A? Maybe some of the characteristics beyond the economics of the business that you're looking for. Because, you know, it's kind of clear with your ESM talking that, there might be other things in your scale that you're looking for.
Yeah. we're becoming more active in looking at acquisition opportunities. I think there's a few things in terms of acquisitions that we're looking for. Initially, at least right now, because our own cash balance is lower than it was, you know, before, it's gonna be more smaller tuck-in acquisitions similar to ESM. More cash-rich businesses that we can then take on debt, and it makes sense to take on debt to make those acquisitions. The other element would be, you know, I think the market conditions, we don't know how long it's gonna stay depressed, like, right now, but at some point, I think.
when there's an inflection and the price of the stock may expand, then we would like to, you know, do a raise and do a more aggressive acquisitions as well, so that, you know, the path from here, you know, let's say, I don't know, CAD 23 million revenue run rate or whatever, to CAD 100 million becomes a shorter one and more, a path of accelerated growth. So that's kind of the way we're looking at acquisition strategy. As we add more cash from operations, which we're very actively working on improving free cash flow generation, then we can actually use internally generated cash flow for acquisitions as well.
Perfect. Thanks, Ali. Thanks for answering my questions.
Thank you, Neil.
Great. The next question is from Neil Bakshi of Canaccord.
Great. good afternoon, Ali and David. Congratulations on the results.
Thank you, Neil.
The first question, just to clarify, the earn-outs that are left to be paid, David, was it about CAD 600,000 or so that have been paid out in July and back?
Specifically in Q1, we paid CAD 371,000. If you're asking about this current quarter, we actually did installments, earn-out to Viral Loops that was about CAD 330,000. If you're totaling the two, yeah, it adds up to CAD 700,000.
Okay. Great. Just a question with respect to, I guess the ESM acquisition. Nice to see this kind of small tuck-in that fits in well with the product portfolio you're looking to build with Propel IQ. Just wondering if you could provide more detail on, I guess, the rationale of prioritizing ESM versus other deals in the pipeline. Was it kind of a pain point you saw internally from talking to customers? Just maybe walk us through a little bit more about why ESM now.
Yeah, the reason ESM was interesting was that we were looking for this type of functionality. You know, back office functionality, invoicing, payment links, that sort of thing. The reason it is important is that, you know, we see that already with ESM, their churn is really low. Because it's the kind of thing that when it's, you know, embedded into your business, you know, that's your back office, you don't want to go anywhere. That was important. Also very important is that one of the points I made earlier, I think increasingly into the future, our revenue is not gonna be just from the subscriptions, but also usage-based, access-based fees.
ESM with, you know, sending more invoices or, you know, percentage of payments received through those invoices, contract signing, all of those things, really contributes to it. It is, you know, the local service-based kind of businesses, is not a category of businesses that we have a huge penetration with, and this actually makes it stronger and possible for us to gain more customers in, in that vertical. All of those things and we were able to, you know, find an opportunity that just price-wise made sense, technology made sense, you know, it just checked all the boxes.
Great. I appreciate that. I guess just one more question before I pass the line. Just with respect to kind of the organic growth outlook, in this kind of macro environment, I understand this hasn't been affected. Just to clarify, you're seeing potential deal cycles in Propel IQ to this point, it's actually been just as robust and quick as the current or the legacy platform. I guess I'm just wondering, is that, you know, alongside your expectations or a bit ahead of expectations of when you first launched Propel IQ back last year?
I think more or less consistent with our expectations. You know, we knew that it's a very strong offering, and, you know, something that is quite compelling to people. But when it comes to change management and training and, you know, all of that, and humans involved, it always takes longer than you expect. So that part of it, I would say, we wish it would have been even faster. But we planned for, you know, what we're seeing right now, this kind of period and transition.
Right. One more question just came up. I'm thinking about the expectation for record cash flows for this year, I assume, on an annual basis. If you look back in the last couple of years, some pretty strong, you know, cash flow generation on an annual basis. Let's say, you know, CAD 1 million was what you generated last year. Is it fair to expect, on a full year basis, that, you know, CFO should exceed around CAD 1 million or so? How should we look at compared to, I guess, 2020 was a real sticked out year for you?
I'll say a couple of things, and then David Pais actually, I think would be better positioned to answer that question. What I would say is that, you know, one thing we didn't really touch on much, we touched on a little bit in the slides, was cost savings. Last, you know, Q2, we did a lot of effort, you know, CAD 1 million of cost savings annually. Right now, over the past month and a half, and even coming to now, we continue to do a lot of those efforts as well, without loss of functionality, optimizations, tightening things up, consolidations, you know, renegotiating contracts, all of those things. Immediately, we're seeing our cash flow generation capability has improved quite a bit. I don't think some of what we're gonna see, we have to wait until Q3 or Q4.
I don't think so. I think we're gonna see some of the results already than in Q2. David, please correct me if I'm wrong or add any other colors that you might want to.
Sure, Ali. You know, absolutely correct. We have focused a little bit more on cost savings deal more recently, like April and May. In addition to that, I mean, there's two levers, right? I mean, there's the revenue lever, which help you generate more cash flow, and then there's the cost lever that also, if you save on your costs, you're gonna generate more cash flow. Ali kind of touched on the, you know, the cost-saving elements of that. On the revenue line, I mean, if you go from CAD 5.6 million and we grow from there, if, you know, just very simple look, if you take a look at our quarterly growth in 2022, right?
From Q1 all the way to Q4, you look at the cash flows that we start spinning off, you know, each quarter as the revenue grew, our margins also increased and our bottom line improved, and we expect that to happen this year as well. We expect Q3, Q4 to start building and all the foundation we built in Q1 and Q2 with Propel IQ. You're gonna see more cash flow from operations spinning out from revenue growth in Q3 and Q4.
We definitely currently expect cash flow generation this year to be record numbers. I don't see a reason to doubt that part.
Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. I'll pass the line.
Thank you.
Our last question is from Christian Sgro of Eight Capital.
Hi, good afternoon, Ali and David. Congrats on a stable Q1 at the start of the year. The first question I'll ask on is on Propel IQ. Do you go to market with any point solutions anymore, or do you go to new customers with the full Propel IQ platform, and it's kind of an à la carte? That's the way I've come to think of, if new customer conversations. The follow on there is it almost entirely, you know, monthly or annual contracts, like getting on, in the monthly subscription program right away? Sounds like the offering and pricing model is a little dynamic, which is good. Maybe just unpack what's commonly sold and what customers subscribe to.
I mean, majority of what we're increasingly selling is the bundled, excuse me, bundled offerings for Propel IQ. Still, we do have some point solutions that are being sold based on customer needs or based on inbound interest that might come, right? If someone is finding, let's say, Winback through Shopify marketplace, and all they want is just Winback, we'll still sell them that. All of those solutions are becoming smaller parts of our sales efforts. Generally, we are pushing for annual terms, and that's actually for Propel IQ's requirement. We're not doing anything, you know, below the 12-month terms. That's working well. With the AI-powered website builder, now we have an opportunity to also use that as a premium offering to get people in the door and playing with the platform.
Then when they're more serious and they want more functionality, which is Propel IQ, then we would use that as, you know, as a lead generation channel for us to get them on a demo and sell the rest of the platform to them.
That's great. That's a lot of helpful context, Ali. Similar question, the customer support, training, implementation, any hands-on work. I guess the legacy product could have had a fully managed solution, but how do you price out or sell your services now? Is there tiered, you know, we'll get you off the ground all the way to unlimited support? Like, how do you price and sell out to customers?
The base package is, you know, that CAD 1,000 upfront fee is for the onboarding, and that's where we're most heavily involved. Whether it's rebuilding their website on Wishpond or installing things or copy of the content or imagery, all of that. That's where we're really involved. After that, when we pass it on to them, we have a lot of, you know, we walk people through the platform on how to use it, and we give them a lot of resources, like training videos and courses on Wishpond Academy, and all of those things. If they want, they can always come to us, whether that onboarding specialist or someone from our support team, to help them. That's, you know, our involvement, ongoing is quite limited from that point of view.
What we do still do in the first few months of someone being on Propel IQ is build touch base with them, at least on a monthly basis, kind of as a marketing consultation. Okay, how are you know, using the platform? Do you have any questions? These are some opportunities I had identified for you, then pass it on to them. That's one part. The other element of it is that if someone, you know, wants to use a service on the marketplace and say, "All right, this is great, but I still want you guys to actually help me with coming up with outcome sales methodology for my business, can you do it all, and for me not to do it?" Yes, we have these, what we call flex plans, that generally would be for three-month terms or six-month terms.
We don't want it as an annual term. We actually, you know, we want that as a bit of a push to help them and then pass it on to them again. That goes to be as low as an additional CAD 300 a month, or as high as an additional CAD 1,500 a month, depending on what their needs are. We can help them through that period and, you know. But ultimately, they are in the driver's seat, and they can decide to what level they want those services and, you know, and, you know, we're there to support them.
Thanks for that, Ali.
No problem.
One, one-stop shop, which is the original value prop is still there.
Right.
Thanks very much for taking my questions.
Thank you, Christian.
There are no further questions, so I'll pass the call back to Ali Tajskandar for closing remarks.
Sounds good. Thank you very much. Okay. In closing, I want to thank everyone once again for joining our call. Thank you to the analysts for your insightful questions and for your continued coverage and support. Everyone, please stay safe and healthy. We look forward to providing more updates this year. Thank you.
Goodbye.