Investors looking for growth the past few years have been herded toward the FANG stocks. While the Amazon and Netflix of the world have, to varying degrees, delivered what investors have wanted, well, experts know there is another level. Yeah, that level, those out-of-size returns that investors crave, can only be possible with small-cap stocks, which have been ignored to a degree we have not seen in decades. A small cap can transform itself in an instant. Take Vancouver-based tech marketing firm Wishpond, which trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol WISH. If you look closely, WISH has made moves in AI that could be a game-changer. We sit down with Wishpond's CEO, Ali Tajskandar, to talk about the dramatic changes the company has made of late. It is so great to see you again, Ali.
Great to see you as well. Thank you.
Wishpond reported record adjusted EBITDA of CAD 1.7 million in fiscal 2024. That's a 129% increase over last year, and you also generated positive cash flow from operations of CAD 519,000 in the year. Can you first tell us a little bit about how you were able to achieve such improvement in profitability?
Yeah, I'm very excited about that. It is a result of a lot of the work that we've done to reduce costs and increase efficiencies across the board. Some of the specific changes that we made, for example, is improve the revenue per account executive that we bring. We started the year with a lot more account executive salespeople than we ended the year, while bringing the same revenue and actually more, per account executive, and that helped us a lot. Other elements are also use of AI in our own operations and using SalesCloser AI, which is our own technology, to augment our sales initiatives. All of those have really helped, and profitability and cash flow have been a priority for us because ultimately, that's what a business is supposed to do.
What makes this even more exciting is that we've done that while investing heavily in our product initiatives, especially SalesCloser AI, which is really a game-changer.
I want to talk to you more about SalesCloser AI, because on your recent conference call, you mentioned that SalesCloser AI is now generating approximately CAD 800,000 in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, with much of that growth occurring in early 2025. That is some tremendous growth to have achieved in such a short amount of time. What do you think has contributed to all this acceleration and growth?
It's a product that we're definitely a pioneer in the market for, using AI to basically power phone calls or Zoom calls, where AI is the one talking to people with natural language and learning about their pain points and demonstrating things to them or booking appointments for them, all of those things. What we're working on is democratizing creation of AI agents for any business. It is something that a lot of businesses see the value of it, that, well, instead of hiring 20 more salespeople, maybe I need three, and I can augment the rest of it with AI. Because of that strong demand and because of us being really a pioneer in that and having one of the best technologies there's a lot of demand for the product, and as you said, much of that CAD 800,000 ARR came in 2025.
About the first three months of this year, about half a million dollars of that ARR was achieved in three months. It's the fastest-growing product that we've launched ever. As a result of that, now we've hired more salespeople to sell SalesCloser AI as well, which only accelerate that growth. We're investing a lot of our dev resources, R&D resources in that product as well now.
I'm so curious to see what the future holds with AI. I do want to ask you a little bit if you can tell us what your outlook is for Wishpond in 2025 as we look ahead.
In 2025, I think it's going to be a transformational year for us in a number of ways. One is, financially speaking, re-accelerating our growth, increasing our MRR, increasing our profitability for the rest of the year. I think the other element of it is going back to SalesCloser AI and our product initiatives. The vision that we have of the future, which is now closer than ever, is having a fully autonomous marketing and sales engine. Imagine, as opposed to hiring marketing agencies and paying a whole bunch of money for ads and for designers and copywriters and developers and all of those things, you basically are interacting with AI and saying, "Father's Day is coming," or, "Holidays are coming. I want this campaign."
It can actually come up with a strategy for you, can create the landing pages, the website, the ads, the automatic follow-up calls, all of those things. What is great about what we're doing at Wishpond is that over the years, we've built this all-in-one marketing and sales platform, that now we're adding AI capabilities, too, and a lot of it we've already done. With SalesCloser AI is a full bundle, and that's what we're continuing to work on, and that I think you're going to see a lot more of that in 2025 happening.
It must be amazing to see your vision coming together into what you-?
It's re-accelerating.
That's amazing.
Right.
We wish you the best as well. Wishpond's CEO, Ali Tajskandar, thank you again for being with us today.
Thank you. Great to be here.