Hello everyone, and welcome to the Q1 2023 Expensify earnings call. Today you have myself, Ryan Schaffer, and Anu Muralidharan. Our CEO, David Barrett, is laser-focused right now on working with the team to get everything ready for ExpensiCon, our conference next week, and we'll be doing a number of important product announcements there, and he is working side by side with the team, heads down to make sure that everything is ready. Today, Anu and I are gonna take you through the slides. Without further ado, let me throw it to Anu to read the legalese and take us through the business section.
Thanks, Ryan. Good afternoon, everyone. First, the boring stuff. Before we begin, please note that all the information presented on today's call is unaudited, and during the course of this call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in the earnings release that we issued today, along with the comments on this call, are made only as of today and will not be updated as actual events unfold. Please refer to today's press release and our filings with the SEC for a detailed discussion of the risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made today.
Please also note that on today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. While we believe these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Please refer to today's press release or the investor presentation for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most comparable GAAP measures. All that said, next slide. Let's begin. I wanna remind you and walk you through our long-term strategy in brief. Start off with the three secrets to Expensify's long-term success. First of all, the market is enormous, and we remind you of this every time, but almost no one in the market is actually using any software product, which means the primary competition is really just Excel and paper.
The richest opportunity when you consider the whole market isn't enterprise companies, isn't the top of the market. Rather, it is all the small and medium businesses out there that have taken together the largest number of employees, and that's really the value proposition. The difficulty is: how do you acquire these varied small businesses at scale? This is our third and most well-kept secret and why you should believe in us. We are the only company out there, the only product out there, that has a viral word-of-mouth adoption model, and this allows us to absorb the lion's share of this market profitably, and that's really our ambition. We are trying to build a billion-user platform, and we hope you'll come along with us for that ride. Next slide. Not gonna spend a ton of time on this, and we've shown this many times.
This is probably by now your most favorite slide, but this just illustrates again the richness of the opportunity as you go from enterprise, which is small, concentrated, few companies, large, in size, to a huge range of small and medium businesses with a huge collection of employees taken together. Again, reiterating that when you look at the small and medium business market, and if you're looking at a company that has a top-down sales-driven business model, it's not easy or at all possible to profitably acquire the small and medium business segment. You need a product-led growth model. You need a viral adoption model, and that's why we are interesting. Next slide. Just a quick recap on how the bottom-up adoption model works.
Expensify is one of the few products out there that solves a real pain point to a largely ignored segment of the market. That's the employee. Employees have a genuine need, and we are the only ones that built a product and continue to cater to this audience even when their company has not adopted the product. An employee can download the app, use it for free, and because it solves a real pain point for them and for free, they end up telling their friends, they end up telling their family, really anybody that they know who has a job, who likely has the same pain point. What ends up happening is large swaths of individual users are using us for a business use case. Sometimes it ends up being various groups within the company.
This is a tidal wave that ends up taking the company with it, and we are able to convert this company into a paying customer without ever reaching them with a salesperson, and that's really the beauty of the bottom-up adoption model. It can be executed at scale across the market because it doesn't depend on us increasing our head count or spending sales dollars on it. Next slide. While we acquire companies when they're small, or at least relatively small, our philosophy has always been to never let a customer ever outgrow us. We are really the only product that is free, caters to an individual, and so has consumer-grade UX, but at the same time, we also have enterprise-level scale. We have cross-sell capabilities, so we have a rich suite of features, and we also have global reach. Next slide.
You've seen this slide many times, but, you know, this is our robust roadmap, and as you see it more and more, you notice that more and more features that are gray, which means they are planned, become green, which means they are in beta, and then go on to becoming blue, which means they are now fully launched. The way to read this again is to go from left to right. Anything on the far left is aimed at getting more viral lead generation into the platform, and anything on the far right, it's aimed at making the product, making the subscription richer for existing and targeted companies who are our customers. Next slide.
Having recapped on the long-term strategy and the value proposition of the company, I wanna give you a few strategic Q1 updates before I pass it on to Ryan for financials. There are three things I wanna talk about today. Next slide. The first one is our accounting channel, and we've talked about this channel with you many times, but again, as a reminder, we consider this channel to be our goldmine. That's because every accountant has the ability to bring us hundreds of customers who in turn represent thousands of paid members for us. Not only is it a question of scale, it's also a question of quality because these companies are generally set up by the accountant who is well-versed in industry best practices, and we also train them, so they're well-versed in our product best practices.
These companies are ideally set up, and so they become extremely easy to support for us and also, as a result, very easy to retain, so there's high retention in this channel. There are two things we've done, and we've talked about in the past as well. One is we've assigned a partner manager to the 500 or so accounting firms that are already on our platform. These partner managers are all Expensify employees, and their job really is to give these accountants one-on-one support as they onboard new customers and white glove support again as customers end up having issues or need to, you know, evolve their setup because they're growing, so on and so forth. We keep this channel very warm. We keep them very well supported because it is a great opportunity for us to disproportionately grow our paid members.
We're also hosting ExpensiCon 3, and of course, as the name indicates, we've done it twice in the past. The idea behind this and this one is gonna bring 140 of the industry-leading experts, accountants, and large firms, and we're gonna bring them to Italy. We have thought leadership sessions, trading best practices, understanding their pain point even more, so we can fine-tune our product to them, and of course, to have a good time 'cause nothing else breeds loyalty as a good time together, right? That's the accounting channel. Next slide. We are also working on our sales efforts, and, you know, we've talked about this again in the past, every quarter 'cause we've been working on it quite consistently.
This effort and this update always leads to a lot of questions around where sales fits in with our bottom-up adoption model and product-led growth model. I wanna address that head-on. The way we think about our growth opportunity, the shining star of our growth story is really bottom-up adoption, is product-led growth. We think of product-led growth and viral growth sort of like a sailboat. When the wind is high, everything is exponentially faster, and the wind really can be thought of, besides a lot of other things, one of the primary drivers is macroeconomic conditions. Of course, right now, given the macroeconomic conditions, wind is a little bit low.
What would be great, what is a very good business is the ability to supplement that growth with something consistent, something steady, albeit modest, and that's what we consider our sales efforts to be. It's sort of like a motorboat that supplements the wind in our sails, and when the wind is slow, we wanna be able to depend on the motorboat to keep going, and when the wind comes back, we can go much faster once again. That's the strategic goal behind building the sales program. It's not intended to replace viral growth. It's not intended to even go head-to-head with it. It is intended to supply a consistent backup. All that said, let's talk a little bit about the results. We've been working on this for a little over a year.
Our SDRs, who are really the agents that we've hired, and, you know, we've been using a flexible outsourced model for all of it, as a reminder, but our SDRs are really the people that we've hired who hit the phones and call prospect lists and get us more direct outbound lead gen volume. We've been ramping up this program more recently. You can see they've really kind of settled into a rhythm in the 1st quarter of 2023, and you can see here from the green bars that our incoming lead pipeline is growing very healthily as a result. We've also continued doubling down on our guides program, and you might know that externally as our setup specialists, and their job is to absorb these incoming leads and to convert them at better and better rates.
We've been tracking the deals that guides win and how many paid members they convert. What's been really encouraging is every month in the first quarter of 2023. The number of paid members and the number of deals that our setup specialists have been able to convert has been consistently doubling. Every month it's doubled versus the previous month, which again, is a very encouraging leading indicator for growth and just these efforts overall. Next slide. Last but not least, I want to come back to what we're going to do for product-led growth. Of course, the macroeconomic conditions are not under our control, but it's cyclical, and what goes down must come up, just like what goes up must come down.
Ignoring that for a second, what we want to be ready with is as the market sort of recovers, we want our entire product roadmap to be complete, fully launched and polished. That is a very ambitious goal because we have a pretty robust roadmap, as we've shared with you in the past. What we've done is leaned on an external contributor community, so more outsourced engineering resources to supplement our internal engineering team. This graph shows you the number of jobs, the number of pull requests, the number of engineering hours that we have been able to use the external community for.
The idea behind this is not just to use them to launch new products, new features, but to also lean on them simultaneously to keep finding and fixing bugs so that we can move fast without breaking things, or at least without completely damaging the quality of the product that we are building. Again, as a reminder, the point of using contributors is to go fast when we want and slow down when we don't need to go so fast. When you hire a lot of engineers, you are kind of bearing that cost on your income statement for a really long time. You know, at the risk of damaging morale, you can't really let employees go and hire them back quite as fast.
Or as the market has shown us, it doesn't really work because other companies doing that makes the headlines, and it's really bad press too. What we do is lean on this contributor community, and there are no contracts. We basically just work with them on a per job basis, so we are able to sort of expand and contract much more nimbly, and that's the idea behind it. Those are the three major updates, our approved channel, our accounting channel, our sales channel, and our contributor community. All of the progress we've made in the first quarter has been very encouraging, and we think of it as really setting us up for success as we go into 2023 further. With all that out of the way, I'm going to pass it back to Ryan to run us through the financials.
Great. Thanks, Anu. All right. Hey, everyone. Happy to see everybody again. I'd love to take you through the Q1 financials. Revenue was $40.1 million. That is just a tad hair down year-over-year. One thing to consider is that our cashback is contra revenue. As the card continues to grow, and it has been growing quite nicely, that actually pulls down that revenue number. If you were to, you know, adjust for cashback, you would see that revenue is actually higher. We have higher, you know, we have more users than we had last year, but actually the card is more successful. That pulls down revenue. We get a flattish, slightly down revenue year-over-year. Our average paid members were 747, up about 6% year-over-year.
Our gross interchange, $2.3 million for the quarter, which is up 85% year-over-year. The card continues to grow quite nicely, despite kind of some headwinds elsewhere in the business. Next slide. Our operating cash flow was $7.6 million. Our free cash flow was $10.2 million, which we're quite happy about. Our GAAP net loss was $5.9 million. Our non-GAAP net income was $4.1 million. The difference, again, between GAAP net loss and non-GAAP net income is stock-based compensation. Our adjusted EBITDA was $8.7 million. Let's talk about what happened in Q1. Our customer count was up in Q1. However, we did see activity across our customers decrease, which resulted in a net decrease in paid members from Q4.
Basically what that means is, let's say the average customer has 14 paid members, and we basically saw that decrease to 13 or, you know, 13.3, something like that. We saw a kind of a decrease across the board, a small decrease, but we have so many customers that even a small decrease in activity kind of outstripped the increase in net new we saw. Subscription members did increase in Q1, but our pay-per-use member decrease was larger than the growth in subscriptions. This wasn't a big churn off of customers. It was just an average decrease in activity across the board. The good news is that we believe, because it's not a big churn off of customers, that we believe the activity decrease is due to economic conditions.
We think that is expected given the environment, and ultimately, we think it is temporary. No one thinks the economy is going to, you know, be bad forever. It's cyclical, right? It's going to come back up. As long as we retain these customers, when activity goes back up, you know, their user counts will increase. We want to make sure we're retaining the customers, and if there's kind of some choppiness in terms of their activity going up and down, we'll weather that storm, obviously because we are cash flow positive and it's just kind of a sign of the times. Next slide, please. We don't give guidance, but what we do do is that we let you know how the first month in the, you know, current quarter is trending.
As you can see in April, it's the yellow bar furthest to the right, we're continuing to see some volatility. It actually looks remarkably similar to the kind of up and down we saw in 2021, if you look over on the left-hand side. As you can see in every single one of these months we are having our subscription numbers increase, but the pay-per-use is kind of going up and down a lot. We are not through the woods yet on the volatility. Next slide, please. Let's talk about free cash flow. We had a strong free cash flow in Q1, $10.2 million, and people say, "Okay, what are you gonna do with it?" You know, great free cash flow, what do you do with it?
We obviously we're spending it more and more on sales and marketing, but also in Q2 we're gonna take the free cash flow from Q1, we're going to do a $3 million buyback in the open market. That starts tomorrow. Also we're gonna reduce our debt by $8 million. As Anu said, we are positioning ourselves for success in the future. Our sales efforts are starting to show some real results, and free trials have seen a huge jump, so we are optimistic for the future. We think that the investments we made there are starting to show kind of some early green shoots data that makes us quite encouraged. We're well capitalized and our free cash flow is strong, and we're using that positive free cash flow to reduce our debt, and we're also returning value to our shareholders via buybacks.
Very soon we'll be starting the migration of our users to our next-gen platform. Nothing to announce today, but expect more announcements from us soon during ExpensiCon 3, which is May 18th to 22nd. We have a lot of product changes that we've been in the lab cooking for a while, we're excited to get those out in the open here pretty soon. Next slide. Just as a reminder, this is the future we've been building. A lot of our efforts on the engineering side have been really focused on this new platform we've been working on. We've put so much work into it, and not very many people have seen it yet, which is why we're so excited to start getting actual paying members onto it.
But as a reminder that the Super App that we're building right now is, it's expense management, corporate card with cash back, invoicing, billing, chat, corporate travel management, personal travel management, P2P money transfer, bill splitting, and a personal wallet, all for $9, all in one app, and coming to you very soon. We're all very excited about that. All right. Now we'll throw it over to Q&A. I believe our first analyst is Natalie Howe from Bank of America.
Thanks. My question for you guys is, pay-per-user went down, and you guys have previously said that they do pay a premium price, and you're trying to find a good balance of subscriptions and pay-per-use. I think you guys have mentioned 20% would be your ideal number. Have these trends sort of had you guys on that path, or have you guys started thinking about that balance earlier than you anticipated?
Great question. Yes, we are being successful in converting people over from pay-per-use to subscription. We are seeing increases in subscription. However, we also saw a decrease in pay-per-use this quarter. Again, that doesn't mean the customers left. It just means that they had less employees that were active. We are seeing pay-per-use come down, but this quarter it was kind of a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. We're moving people over to subscription, but also they also decreased. Yes, our pay-per-use percentage did go down, but part of that is attributed to general less activity, and also part because we've been successful in converting. It's a little bit of both.
Okay. Cool. Thanks. A quick follow-up: It appears that sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue went down, but you guys mentioned you're doing, like, more investments into that SDR program. Can you provide a bit of color there?
Sure. We've been... we ramped down some of our marketing as we ramp up our sales, but they didn't coincide perfectly. We added 100 SDRs in Q1, but a lot of those came on board kind of towards the tail end, so the cost wasn't fully baked into the quarter. We should expect to see an increase in sales and marketing in Q2, especially because we have ExpensiCon 3 also, it's kind of a double whammy there. We have our big conference, and then also our SDR costs are gonna be fully baked in for the full quarter. We should expect to see an increase in sales and marketing going forward.
Okay. Thank you.
That program is also getting more and more efficient. Like, all of our setup specialists and SDRs are getting more and more trained and becoming better and better. We don't think that we need to keep ramping it up.
Mm.
A higher ROI. Or rather, we don't need to keep ramping it up to get bigger results. We can just improve the ROI. Ryan's right. Like, the full cost is now baked in, so Q2's gonna come in a little bit higher on that cost alone. I don't think I would expect that it's gonna keep ramping up because we are investing in the channel. We're investing in the channel not just in terms of growing the head count of those agents, but also making them better and more efficient.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. We added 100 SDRs in Q1, we are not adding 100 SDRs in Q2. We are t raining, and, you know, making them more efficient and maybe even, you know, cutting low performers.
Yeah
it's not 100 per quarter that we are adding.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. All right. Next we have Steven Enders from Citi.
Thanks for taking the question here. There you go. I guess I just wanna ask a little bit about the new Expensify that you talked about, both in the press release and hinted at in the call or in the transcript here. I guess what is the biggest change that we should be, I guess, looking for? Kind of any early preview for how we should be kinda thinking about what that could potentially look like, both from an app basis and how it might change the business overall?
Great question. We are expanding the use cases in which you might use Expensify. Right now people use it, you know, for expense management or, you know, if you're on a, on a business trip. You can actually go to new.expensify.com right now and sign up. There's also an app in the App Store. What is available to the public right now is basically like Slack or WhatsApp type functionality, and we have more product announcements, again, coming in ExpensiCon 3, but very shortly we are going to be adding all the functionality that we are have in our existing Expensify product onto the new platform.
Once we have parity there, and then we're gonna start launching into all of our new use cases, and there's a lot of really exciting new use cases you can have when you have all these on one platform. It'll be a mix of new functionality that we haven't had and also bringing existing functionality onto the new platform.
Got it.
That will ultimately result in more activity, basically. Let's say, maybe you don't go on a business trip, but you do talk to someone within your business, through the Expensify platform. You know, that's activity as well. We're trying to add use cases beyond, you know, I had no expense this month, so I didn't have an expense, so I wasn't active. We're just making it. Trying to turn Expensify into something that you use every day instead of maybe once a month or sometimes for some people, less than once a month.
Gotcha. Okay. No, that's.
Because like having viral lead gen, like if the goal is to have bottom-up adoption, then you wanna turn every one of your individual users into sort of your champion, right? The more functionality we give them to live easier lives, the more they're gonna talk about us. That's really both... There are some features that are aimed at increased activity, simply to turn more users into paid members, and there are others that are aimed at better viral lead gen, so it gives individuals more opportunities to talk about us. There's a bit of both.
I guess, is the view here that it's, A, both to increase growth, the viral nature, but also to maybe to have a more consistent subscription user-?
Absolutely
number instead of the pay-per-use? Okay.
Sure.
Okay. That's helpful. I wanted to ask on the credit card side, I mean, you know, looks like pretty good growth here, but, I guess where are we in terms of the ramp-up curve to having that move from contra revenue to revenue?
Yeah
Being recognized in a more, more traditional way?
Yeah. We have all of our, like the operational perspective, we have all our work done. We have all the contracts done, we have the revenue recognition related, like memos from the auditor. The tough part is over. As you probably noticed, like this roadmap right in front of you and the slide I was presenting around, like you seeing contributors more and more in order to keep executing on this at more rapid pace. The challenge is always engineering resources and sort of prioritizing what is gonna bring the most return to our business. That's kind of where we are. Like we are right now working on implementing the new program, but then launching it only to ourselves, like moving all of the Expensify employees off the old program into the new program for our card.
That'll give us good testing ground because we are all super users of our card. Obviously, like every single employee uses the card every single day. We are going through the motions on that right now, and then once we are done with that, I think we'll start to build it out or rather like launch it to specific companies. Maybe we launch it just to someone adopting the card new. We'll go through the re-carding exercise, but it'll have to get prioritized in a sense. Everything is about like, what is gonna get us the biggest bang for our buck from an engineering perspective. That's gonna be the consistent answer going forward, 'cause we are done with everything that we are actually done with everything that we don't control, and now we control this, so it's about prioritizing it appropriately.
Perfect. Okay. Appreciate the response there and both of you for taking the questions here.
Of course.
Thank you. All right. Next we have, Mauro Molina from Piper Sandler.
You can hear me okay?
Yeah.
Yes, we can.
I just have a couple questions around the SDR initiative. First off, what sort of drove the decision to outsource the SDR functions out to that vendor that you mentioned? In what scenario might it make sense for Expensify to bring that sort of initiative in-house over the long term? Second thing around that is, how long might it take to reach sort of a break even or a flip to a positive ROI? Thanks.
Yeah. Good question. Let me start by just kind of summarizing like our general approach to doing something in-house versus outsourcing. SDRs are a classic example. Whenever we have a job that is repeatable, that you can write down, and it's simple, and someone can execute it over and over again, so it's a matter of doing it many times and requires very little skill and is repeatable, that's when we outsource it. What we can do then is hire a large number of agents, give them a very clear set of instructions, even diversify across multiple vendors, and that way we have some negotiating power in terms of pricing, and we can get better bang for our buck. What we then do is manage them internally.
The way we've structured the sales program is we have internal employees on our sales team who do things like partner management with our accounting channels. They handle the more strategic pieces of the business, and then they manage the setup specialists. The setup specialists have something of a lower skill than our internal employees' job because they are converting incoming leads. They need to be able to anticipate and block and tackle. It's not so high skill that they require the kind of training that, and kind of experience and generalist tendencies that we've hired internal employees for.
The setup specialists and our internal employees manage the SDR pipeline, and their job is really very repeatable, and they have a script, and they hit the script, and they just do it over and over again. That's sort of how we've structured it. Never say never, but I don't think the SDRs are the type of job requirements or the type of job profile that we would ever take internally, 'cause we could do it much more cost-effectively and ramp up and down much more easily if we outsource it. That's, let me stop there and see if that answers your question.
Yes, that's helpful on that front. actually.
And-
Just as a follow-up to that part.
Yeah
... before, touching on the ROI, how long, how easy is it, so to speak, to ramp up the SDR headcount month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter? That's all I have there.
Yeah. That's also a very interesting question. We started this effort late last year. I want to say, like, Q4, like October, November. We did in fact think that we told these vendors, we started with very few just to like test if this thing can work at all. You know, when we saw that it could work, we wanted to scale it to 100. We started with like 10, and then we wanted to scale it to 100. We did notice that it took those vendors up to a month to hire them, and then a few more weeks after that to just like give them some basic training and let them hit the phones.
That's why while we started this initiative and kind of announced that we're ramping up in Q4, we didn't fully ramp up till maybe mid, Q1. It was a continuous process. It didn't go from 10 to 100 overnight, but it went from 10 to 25 to 45, so on and so forth. It seems like it takes them something of a quarter to get to a 100. That said, it's also behind us, and going forward, and I think we were responding to another one of your questions earlier, but we are not trying to keep growing the headcount. This is where maybe I'll come back to your second question.
The idea behind this entire arm of our growth model will be to make it yield something consistent, something steady, something modest that we are happy with, and to do it more and more cost-effectively. Right now we have something like 70 setup specialists and 100 SDRs. The idea isn't even to maintain that. The idea is to sort of deploy that, identify the real winners, and then very aggressively performance manage the bottom of the team, if you will, and then keep optimizing so we can kind of identify the 20% of the team that contributes to 80% of output, because that's generally how it ends up being.
That's the challenge now. Like over the next few quarters, that's what we're gonna be focused on, identifying the winners, identifying, you know, the losers, so to speak, and then being aggressive about managing this program for ROI. I'll let Ryan add anything that he wants to as well.
Yeah. I would just say it's pretty flexible in that we can drastically upscale and downscale the numbers inter-quarter. We're not locked into annual numbers or anything like that. It's very flexible, which is one of the reasons we like it.
All right. Thank you all very much.
Thank you. All right. Up next we have, Daniel Jester from BMO. BMO.
Thanks for taking my question.
Yeah, Daniel.
Thank you. Maybe starting on the paid [audio distortion] growth there. Back to my [audio distortion] had pretty strong growth now. [audio distortion] aid look like for really the avenue of growth You [audio distortion].
I think there's a little bit of an echo. Anu, could you mute yourself real quick? Sorry about that, Daniel. Sorry, could you repeat the question? Sorry about that.
Is this better now?
Yes.
Awesome. All right. On the free product, or the free, the free trials, you've talked about growth there for a while. It's been pretty good for a bit. Can you give us any sort of like color about the conversion rate of those free to subscription, or is it more important to look at those free trials as drivers of growth for interchange?
Good question. The free trials. I see. The free trials are not related to the free plan. There's a free plan where you can use, like, basic Expensify Light for free. You can run, you know, a simple business off of it for free. The free trials are for the paid program. What we've seen is basically we're, you know, we're really focusing on our sales and marketing. We've seen a substantial increase in the number of free trials for the paid product in Q1 versus previous quarters.
Basically what we're saying is that's some encouraging data because it's a huge lift in the free trials. It's not related to the free plan. I understand. Now that you say that, I'm like, "Yeah, that is actually kind of confusing." Yes, we have a free plan. Then when you are trying to pay for our product, we give you a free trial. We've seen those free trials increase substantially in Q1.
Gotcha. Okay. That is helpful. Then maybe, you know, philosophically, I know you're not gonna give guidance, but as you think about sort of the growth trajectory this year, obviously the macro is what the macro is. Do you think that interchange growth is really gonna be a big potential overall growth this year? Maybe kind of walk through the puts and takes for the different variables in terms of getting the top line moving again?
Great question. Now, the interchange isn't revenue. I know a lot of people adjust for it in their models, but, by GAAP, it's not revenue. interchange is growing well, and, when we do get that moved over into the interchange, you know, line item, we think that it is reaching a point where it's gonna be, you know, a good contributor to the top line revenue. Now in terms of the subscription, we're adding new customers every quarter. you know, subscription numbers are going up. The pay-per-use has just been kind of all over the place. I think that if we continue to retain our customers and kind of continue to add more when this kind of decreased activity from, you know, economic conditions stops, we're gonna be in a much better place in the future.
We're kind of just, like, waiting out the storm and making sure that we don't lose, you know, our customers. If their activity decreases, obviously we, you know, the, we don't love that, but we wanna make sure we're holding onto customers. We do believe that as everything kind of opens up, you know, people are hiring, activity overall increases. Also, we're adding new use cases to our platform, which gives people more opportunity to be active on our platform, that we'll see those activity numbers increase. We ultimately believe that the decreased activity is temporary. Obviously in the short term, you know, in Q1 it did decrease, which, you know, kind of hurts us a little bit.
One more if I can squeeze it in. You know, the product roadmap has been very compelling. You've made a lot of progress there. Can you just help us think about customer usage of the various products and how that has trended? You know, I'm just trying to get a sense for what the demand pull for your customer base is, for some of the new products that you're launching and some of the new pipeline that, you know, we'll hear at ExpensiCon. Thank you.
I can't say too much 'cause I don't wanna spoil them, basically almost everyone uses expense management, right? It's Expensify. People know us for that. We're seeing more and more people using the Expensify Card. Actually, all the kind of turmoil in the banking sector has been a big boon to us, card-wise. We saw a lot of, you know, customers come over to the Expensify Card. After that, you know, we are seeing people wanna use the invoicing solution. I don't have any official numbers to give there, but we have. We're getting a lot of good feedback from the chat product, and that's currently, you know, only available if you go to, you know, new.expensify.com.
We do have people actually actively using it. I think that's kind of all that I can say right now without spoiling, you know. I would just say stay tuned. ExpensiCon is coming up, May 18th. We're gonna have a number of announcements there. We're excited to start migrating customers over to the new platform. We think it's gonna be a big boon to the business, and it's something we've been working on for the last couple years. We're all just excited to get it in the hands of more of our customers.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. All right. Next up we have Sam Flynn from Lake ... Nope. We have Mark Schappel from Loop Capital.
Hey, guys. Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Oh, perfect. Thanks for taking my question. Sort of two quick ones for you. The first thing, have you seen... Obviously subs were up in the quarter, which is great, but just wondering if you've seen any turnover from your larger accounts.
Churn has been quite low. It's the decrease in paid members is more just kind of an overall decrease in activity across the user base. What we see actually is most churn being in the smallest segments of the business, like, the ones and twos, one and two employee businesses. In general, the larger the business, the less likely they are to churn, and the higher our net seat retention is. It's ... I think maybe It's kind of the opposite, right?
It's the bigger customers are not churning and the smaller customers, those are the more likely to go out of business kind of in an environment like this or kind of be there for a couple months and bounce off type of thing. They're also our smallest, the one in two customer segments is our lowest revenue customer segment. In general, it's not from a churn off of customers, it's just the decrease in activity across the board, which we feel is attributed to the macro element.
Perfect. That's helpful. I appreciate it. Secondly, and then I'll hop off, just wondering what sort of trends you're seeing in business travel recently.
I think we've seen a return in business travel. As a reminder, business travel isn't a one-to-one. We don't need people to take, you know, two or three trips a month in order to be active on the platform. We need them to expense one item, right? They need to buy a cup of coffee from Starbucks or, you know, a dinner with a client type of thing, and then they're active on the platform. It's not. If let's say travel increased 3x, that doesn't mean our subscribers are gonna increase 3x. We need the unique number of business travelers to increase. We don't need the actual current audience of business travelers to travel 3x more. It's a little different, I think, than what people expect.
One thing, a boon that business travel does for Expensify is it creates more opportunities for word-of-mouth growth because you are experiencing the pain point that we solve. The worst part of expense management is going on a trip or maybe back-to-back trips and you have this huge pile of receipts, and then you start complaining, you know, to your network. If you're complaining about you have this problem, you're more likely to hear about Expensify, and that creates an overall lift. Business travel is good for the business, but it's a little different than what the way you think because we're not, like, pulling transactional revenue off of business trips. We just, business travel creates activity, and that's how we monetize.
Great. Thanks again for taking my questions.
Thank you. Next, I believe we have Sam Flynn from Lake Street Capital. Let's see. I think that. Actually, no, my list is wrong. That actually, that is the end. That is the end of the call. Sorry. I was operating off an old list. All right. Thank you everyone for joining the call. We really appreciate it. We love talking about the business with you all. Just kind of as a closing, we're all very excited.
I think we had a little bit of a shareholder letter in our earnings release from David. We're all very excited about the future of the business here. We've been cooking in the lab for a long time on our new platform, and it's so close to being released. We are excited to get that in the hands of, all of our users. We'll see you all next quarter. Thank you all very much.
Thank you. Bye.