Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Research Solutions' financial and operating results for its fiscal second quarter ended December 31st, 2021. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Steven Hooser, Investor Relations.
Thank you, Carl, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Research Solutions' second quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. On the call with me today are Roy W. Olivier, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Bill Nurthen, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed this afternoon, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the second quarter of fiscal 2022. The release is available on the company's website at researchsolutions.com. Before Roy and Bill begin their prepared remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made today will be forward-looking and are under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors.
We refer you to Research Solutions' recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact the company's future operating results and financial conditions. Also on today's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors. A reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures is included in the earnings press release issued this afternoon. Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via the link on the company's website. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Roy Olivier. Go ahead, Roy.
Thank you, Steven, and thanks to everyone joining us today. We continue to make good progress in aligning our executives with the interests of our shareholders, focusing the team on issues that will deliver shareholder value and improving accountability throughout the organization. Our second quarter results underscore that our product and sales strategy is starting to demonstrate results. We had more new customers adopt the platform and have seen record upsells as existing customers upgrade features and seat counts. In fact, our net churn rate, which includes churn or dollars lost, and upsells, which includes upsells for features and additional seats, has historically been a high single-digit number, meaning our upsells have outpaced our churn by high single digits on a percentage basis. During Q2, we moved into the double digits for the first time.
In other words, our upsells outpaced our churn by over 10% on annual recurring revenue. Both the new and existing customer sales teams are performing at a high level, setting a record of 56 net new platform deployments for the quarter. When combined with our low churn and upselling of renewal customers, we reported a 36% year-over-year increase in ARR, 56 new platforms, and $566,000 of net ARR growth, the latter two were both records. Further, I'm excited that we're very close to a net ARR growth of $500,000 per quarter going into the second half of the year, which is typically stronger than the first half.
For our first six months of fiscal 2022, we added 93 net new deployments and 185 deployments on a trailing 12-month basis, up from 60 and 123 net new deployments for the same periods last year. The improvements we have made regarding our total addressable market or TAM, is starting to add value in terms of expanding our prospecting database. In parallel to expanding our prospect database, we're seeing strong performance from our sales teams, including those recently added. This translates into me having a lot of confidence in our performance for the second half of the year, and more importantly, reinforces that our strategy to expand our TAM and add more sales resources will help us drive strong performance in FY 2023. Revenue in our transaction segment increased for the first time in six quarters.
Recently, transactions revenue has been flat to declining due to the conversion of customers toward our platform offerings and an increase in customer downloads through non-revenue sources like tokens or open access. It is too early to tell if this trend will continue long term, but we have confidence that our overall platform growth and some changes we are making will help continue to improve transaction revenue in the short term. As a reminder, our platform helps customers optimize spend on articles in several ways. It presents the most cost-effective options to the researcher, which in the long term drives down their average article costs. One example of that is reuse rights, which is helping a researcher looking at an article understand that someone else in their organization has already purchased that article, and it came with reuse rights, allowing it to be downloaded again for free.
In addition, our platform helps researchers more easily find free or open access articles, or use subscriptions and tokens to obtain articles through our platform without a Research Solutions fee. This is a great value to our customers, but is a headwind in growing our article sales year-over-year. That said, this revenue savings for our customers translates to a higher return on their platform's investment, which results in a low churn rate for us. In fact, our churn turns negative as we upsell the features and number of users during the renewal process. In summary, our second quarter performance sets us up very well as we enter the seasonally stronger portion of the fiscal year. I'll provide some additional detail on our transaction customer count.
I'll provide some additional detail on our recent activities and strategic direction in a minute, but now I'll pass the call over to Bill to walk through our fiscal second quarter results. Bill?
Thank you, Roy, and good afternoon, everyone. Total revenue for the second quarter of fiscal year 2022 was $7.9 million, a 5.7% increase compared to the second quarter of fiscal year 2021, as we experienced growth in our SaaS platform business as well as some modest growth in the transaction revenue. Platform revenue increased 31% to $1.6 million, primarily driven by a net increase of platform deployments from last year, including 56 net new deployments in the second quarter and strong upsells of current platform customers. As Roy mentioned, the 56 net new customers in the quarter was a company record, topping the previous company high of 51 net new deployments, which occurred in the third quarter of fiscal year 2021.
Also a record was the incremental annual recurring revenue or ARR added in the quarter, which was $566,000. We have now added $1.8 million of ARR to the platform over the last 12 months. As a result, annual recurring revenue at the end of the quarter stood at $6.8 million, up 9% sequentially and 36% year-over-year, reflecting our continued sales and upselling efforts and low churn of existing platform customers. Please see today's press release for our definition and use of annual recurring revenue and other non-GAAP terms. Transaction revenue for the quarter was $6.3 million compared to $6.2 million from the prior- year quarter. This represents the first increase in transaction revenue since the fourth quarter of 2020.
Although transaction revenue has declined over time as our platform's core value is that it saves our customers on transaction costs, we do feel there will be a point where transaction revenue can potentially begin to grow again as we add more incremental customers to the platform. We are not ready to make a call that this is a return to growth for transactions, especially given the Q2 performance from a year ago was a low bar. However, we do view the result this quarter as a positive indicator. Transaction customer count for the quarter was 1,179 versus 1,153 in the first quarter of fiscal 2022 and 1,109 in the year-ago quarter. The increase was driven by an increase in both corporate and academic customers.
The platform business recorded gross margin of 85.6%, a 340 basis point increase from the prior- year quarter. We have previously quoted a gross margin target range for the platform business of high 70% to low 80% and now feel comfortable elevating this target range to between 80% and 85% as we have continued to be able to onboard customers with proportionally less labor cost. Gross margin in our transaction business increased 110 basis points to 23.4%. The increase was primarily attributable to reduced copyright costs, as we were able to lighten some of our copyright reserves in the quarter. On a normalized basis, we expect transaction gross margin to stay roughly at 22%.
Total gross margin for the second quarter was 36%, up from 32% in the second quarter of fiscal year 2021. The overall result was somewhat positively impacted by the improvement in transaction gross margin in the quarter. However, even if you normalize that, the result still represents 5 straight quarters of company gross margin growth. We feel this is one of the most meaningful metrics for the business and one we will continue to focus on in the future as it demonstrates our ability to profitably scale the business as we continue to grow platform revenue. Turning to operating expenses, one item of note is that in Q2, we booked all of the cost associated with the transition of the CFO role, which took place in the quarter.
This resulted in about $172,000 in additional operating expenses and about $147,000 in additional stock compensation expense in Q2. Total operating expenses in the quarter were $3.3 million, compared to $2.7 million in the prior- year quarter, due primarily to higher technology and product development and G&A costs. Net loss for the quarter was $482,000 or $0.02 per share, compared to a net loss of $261,000 or $0.01 per share in the prior- year quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $165,000 compared to positive $161,000 in the year- ago quarter. Turning to our balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents as of December 31st, 2021 were $10.7 million versus $11 million on June 30th, 2021.
The year-over-year performance from a bottom-line profitability and cash flow perspective was expected as we have intentionally made investments in product development and sales. We remain comfortable to make these investments, providing we are seeing corresponding growth in platform revenue and corporate gross margin. However, it is something we will continue to monitor over time. On a final note, there were no outstanding borrowings under our $2.5 million revolving line of credit, and we have no long-term debt or liabilities. Our line of credit is scheduled to expire this month. However, we are in process of renewing the line for another two-year period on similar terms. I'll now turn the call back over to Roy.
Thanks, Bill. The two main drivers related to increasing shareholder value come down to accelerating growth and acquisitions. I will now provide a brief update on the status of each. Regarding accelerating growth, we have been working hard to fully understand our TAM by country, by segment, and by vertical, and to build out a prospect database of decision-makers and researchers' contact information. We are making great progress on this project, which will continue for some time. This is giving us the confidence that the TAM is there and that we have the contact information to generate our growth targets. We also have been adding additional salespeople, which are helping with our new customer growth.
We have historically had around six salespeople, and we plan to grow that number by more than 2x by the end of FY 2022 to set us up for even more organic growth in fiscal 2023. We feel good about our plans to accelerate our market share penetration in the countries, segments, and verticals we choose to serve. We've also strategically increased our spend on product management and software engineers to accelerate our pivot from primarily a document delivery to a platform that supports researchers during each step of the research journey. Article Galaxy 3.0, or AG3, as we call it, released in the first half of FY 2022 and was the foundation for this pivot, and we're making great progress adding value to that platform.
Over the next two quarters, we will release full reference management tools, enhanced search capabilities, and new analytics reporting to establish us as the innovative leader in the space. We are now releasing new significant features monthly and have received positive feedback from both prospects and existing customers. As I have discussed previously, we're investing in two new products. Article Galaxy Scholar was formally released last month, and we continue to make progress with this academic platform. We've also started full development on an additional new product that solves a different problem in our customer base but utilizes some of AG3's capability. We are encouraged by our progress with both products and will monitor and report on their progress in future quarters. Regarding acquisitions, we continue to actively review and engage with several opportunities.
While we've had a lot of interesting conversations and other activity, valuations continue to be a challenge in today's market, primarily due to unrealistic valuations. That said, we have found some interesting opportunities that we believe represent a strong cross-sell and product differentiation opportunity for us. I hope to have more to report in this area soon. In conclusion, we are pleased with our strong performance for the first half of the year and with the progress we're making on investments to drive future growth. We're excited about the future and believe that we are on the right track. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A. Operator?
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. The first question comes from Allen Klee of Maxim Group. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good job on the quarter. Question, I heard you say that you increased your range for the platform gross margin to 80%-85%, and I believe this quarter you did a little better than the high of that range. Could you talk about what drove that this quarter and why would that wouldn't kind of maybe stay at that level?
Sure. Yeah. This quarter, again, you know, we have continued to see that we are as we onboard more and more customers, it's taking proportionately less labor costs to support those customers and proportionately less system cost as well. I think the move is that, you know, in looking at this, we've looked at that gross margin and seem to have consistently beat in that, and we're now feeling more comfortable that we can raise the range. The reason, I'm not sort of comfortable raising it beyond the 80%-85% that we talked about is just that I want a little more time to pass. We onboarded, as we noted, a record amount of customers this quarter.
I wanna see how that plays out over time and if we're comfortable with our present staffing or if we need to make some changes there. It is something where we feel good about where the metric is trending, and hopefully, you know, may be able to raise it a little more in the future should we see how this plays out as we onboard this amount of customers.
Thank you. I had two other questions. One is, maybe talk a little about what the drivers are for this, your fiscal second half seasonality, a nd then second, you said that you've historically had around six salespeople. You plan to double that by the end of the fiscal year. Have you added any yet or, you know, where does that stand? Thank you very much.
In terms of the seasonality, it's the only answer I have is it's the historic seasonality of the business. I'm not sure that I can tie it to anything particular. You know, in the academic segment, which is a very small portion of our business today, there is pretty strict budgetary approval cycles and then funds release cycles that suggest that our Q4 and our Q1 are better than the middle part of the year. In the corporate side, we typically don't have that type of dynamic. I can simply say that the seasonality of the business is something we see looking at the historic data over the last several years in terms of new bookings. Because of new bookings, of course, that's where a chunk of the renewals come up, which impacts the upsell part of the business.
It's just, you know, last three or four years, second half of the year is always stronger than the first. In regards to your second question, no. Well, we've hired one, but our plan is to get kind of people in seats in our fiscal Q4 for training and ramping to start them off in FY 2023. We're on plan to do that, but we're not, you know, we're not trying to put people in seats today. We're doing the work to get ready to do a recruiting blitz at the end of Q3 and start putting people in seats in Q4.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Richard Baldry from Roth Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Can we talk about, you know, where you see the opportunities to deploy those new sales heads, you know, would it be vertical, geographic, U.S., international, just so we get an idea of, where they'll be added and the opportunities they're looking at?
Yeah, great question. There's kind of a couple of answers. First off, we're gonna segment our sales rep by the number of users in an account. So when you think about selling to, you know, an AstraZeneca that has thousands of users or even a mid-tier company that might have 200 users, that's a different sales cycle than, you know, sub-20 users as an example. So we will continue to have kind of our executive-level salespeople that are used to dealing with large accounts focused on things that are larger from a user count perspective.
The new team will be brought in to work on the smaller accounts, which will be kind of a lower OTE role, mostly a telemarketing job, and will pursue the 100,000-150,000 accounts that we've identified that fall into that segment from a number of users perspective. Does that help?
Yep. Kind of looking backwards at the gross margin on the platform side, the dollars actually have been down now two quarters in a row, even while the revenues are going up. Can you maybe talk about what the components of that cost are, the fixed versus variable? I know you talked about the labor cost being down, but we can decide where that should flat line on a total cost and probably turn and start climbing with the revenues.
Yeah, no, good question. By the way, let me add one thing to your sales rep question. When we're doing the analysis today, you know, we think that the number of kind of larger user seat sales reps we have in the United States is the right number. We think we need to add people in Europe. Now, this is not the kind of below 10, below 20 seat group. This is the executive group that deals with larger accounts. We will add some larger account people, primarily in Europe. As I mentioned on previous calls, we have one person in Japan today that's running our Japanese business, and we are looking for partners in China, which is the number two research and patent market in the world today.
No, no real progress to report there, but some of our, you know, marketing spend is gonna be trying to expand what's going on in Japan and China specifically. I'm sorry, could you repeat your question?
Yeah, just on the platform cost side, because the dollars have been actually falling, but going down while the revenues were up. I'm sort of curious to the sort of fixed versus variable, the components in there. How do we think about when that, the total spend should turn and start climbing with the revenue?
Just to be clear, you're talking about cost, not ARPU?
No, the cost side of the platform.
Bill, do you wanna address that?
Yeah. A couple things. One, just to clarify, I mean, from a standpoint of the total dollar gross profit that we're seeing from the platform, that has been going up over the last few quarters. Really, there's two components. One is labor, which is the largest component that will go into the cost to delivering on the platform. There is the sort of hosting component to it as well. The labor is the largest portion, and that has been going up relatively lightly compared to what you're seeing in the platform growth year-over-year. The hosting component is a smaller component, but that does increase more dramatically with the growth, but not proportionately at the same rate.
Okay. Given, you know, every headline I hear lately is talking about inflation, can you talk about your ability to pass along sort of pricing to match any, you know, internal costs that would be rising? How you feel about, you know, sort of a price taker versus a price setter, you know, positioning in your space?
Yeah. That's a hot topic, and we have kind of three levers in that area. One is the platform itself. The second is the cost of the article. The third is the service fee we charge for delivery of the article. Our service fees are typically set as part of an annual agreement. Most of those agreements do not necessarily have a limit on our ability to renegotiate the service fee, but a few will have caps tied to, you know, consumer price index or PPI or something, b ut for the most part, we leave service fees alone and make very few adjustments to them, and they do require a contract renegotiation, which most of our contracts renew annually.
On the article cost, which is the bulk of our cost structure associated with the transaction business, those we can change whenever we need to change them. We typically change them once a year, and that's actually in January. However, we had an incident mid-year last year where a publisher raised prices mid-year, and we simply passed that price increase on. So we're pretty proactive about moving transaction costs. On the platform side, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we've got kind of double-digit net churn to the positive, and that is a result of us increasing seat count features and in some cases just raising prices. Although for the most part, what we end up doing, we kind of have a land and expand mentality from a sales point of view.
The new sales team, which is selling new customers that have not bought transactions from us before, we give them flexibility to land that account. Once we land that account, the renewal team does a fantastic job each year in uplifting number of users, uplifting features, and moving them more toward what we refer to as our standard calculator price. Does that help?
Yep, that's helpful. Thank you.
The next question comes from Adam Wilk of Greystone Capital Management. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. A couple of my questions were already asked, or you touched on them in your prepared comments. I appreciate all the color that you give. Really impressive quarter from you guys. I guess my only question, a little bit on the unpredictable side, but are we able to expect continued increases in transactions moving forward, or is this kind of a one-off quarter? How are you guys sort of thinking about that segment moving forward?
That's a great question. Unfortunately, you know, my crystal ball is not as good as I'd like it to be. I mentioned that we would expect, you know, positive news in the short term. The data, and we do tremendous data analysis on this, since I've gotten here and Bill's gotten here. Bill and I look at it every Monday, and it suggests that, you know, the decline is flattening, that we may be near the trough. As Bill mentioned, we're not ready to make that commitment externally. You know, I'd like to get another couple of quarters under our belt to see what's gonna happen there.
I am comfortable in the short term because of some things we're doing, frankly, with pricing that, you know, we'll not have the level of declines we've seen over the last, you know, year or two. Bill, anything you wanna add to that?
Yeah. I think that's pretty spot on, Roy. I think the one view that we have is that, you know, at some point here, as we add these customers to the platform, we do feel like it has to make a turn. As Roy said, it's kind of hard to see right now when that turn is gonna happen. We do feel it'll happen at some point, but I'm not ready to make a call just yet.
Yeah. If I can add just a touch of color.
Yeah, please go ahead.
If I can add just a touch of color. You know, when you think about, we have 650-some odd platform customers now. You know, a little less than 300 of those came on before 2017, and those were typically our largest transaction customers. You know, the big guys jumped on board first. They drive a tremendous amount of the transaction volume in dollars. Because they've been here since 2017, they've also seen the most savings in terms of reuse rights and tokens and subscriptions and all of that stuff.
When you look at, you know, their decline in year-over-year transaction dollars, it's driven by the fact that the platform works. One of the other pieces of analysis we did is we took all the customers that we brought on board over the last couple of years, and we looked at their trends, and we were pleased to find out that they spend around three times the platform cost on transactions. When we bring on a $10,000 customer, they're typically buying, you know, between $25,000-$35,000 worth of transactions, a nd that number seems to be holding pretty steady. What we have is those older, huge customers that are declining because the platform is doing its job.
as we start to pivot, the more of these new customers that are bringing in, you know, 3x of whatever we're charging them for the platform, that should be where we hit that trough and start growing. Does that help?
It does. Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you, a nd then, you touched on M&A activity, obviously. Is it, I guess, the absence of a deal at this stage, is it really just a function of valuations? Or is there, have you made it kind of further down the road with anything significant? It would have been nice to sort of see a deal completed by the end of last year or early this year, a nd clearly, public market valuations have come down pretty significantly in some areas, a nd I guess private markets typically lag behind a little bit, bu t I'm wondering if you've maybe seen any improvement on your end or any maybe flinching from people in the private market world. Again, I know you touched on it, but any other commentary would be helpful if there's anything. Thanks.
Yeah. No, I mean, you're spot on. Valuations continue to be kind of a challenge. Then, of course, our ability to fund a deal, you know. If you think about a wide net to do deals, if you had unlimited cash, our ability to do them is a much narrower net because we simply can only raise a certain amount of capital to get something done. I would say I have not seen any flinching from people that we've talked to over the last three or four months where we may have made an offer, and they turned us down over valuation. We'll see if that changes.
Like I said, I think we have found some interesting opportunities that are actionable, and I hope to have something to talk about in the near future. Like you, I'm disappointed we didn't get something done in that first nine months. That would have been fantastic, but it's definitely proven to be a tougher road than, you know, last time Bill and I were doing this, back in, you know, 2016 through 2020.
Great. Yeah. Thanks. That's helpful. I appreciate you taking my questions. Great job. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Peter Rabover of Artko Capital. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys, thanks for taking my call. Hey, I know we were talking about inflation and passing on prices, but I noticed that the ASP or the average price has trended down this quarter 2% or 3%. Could you give us some color on why that is?
Yeah. I mentioned a minute ago that our 2017, you know, previous under 300 customers were our largest customers, so that set a pretty high ARPU because these are guys that had a ton of seats. Then as we've continued to sell into the base, we focused on SMB, where that ARPU is lower. A lot of the new sales, you know, the ARPU is not that $10,000-$11,000 number. I think we've kind of telegraphed this on previous calls. We would expect that ARPU to continue to come down. I think occasionally we'll sign kind of one huge deal that'll give us a bump for that quarter. Generally we're selling into the SMB space, which is, you know, sales between 10 seats and maybe 50 seats. We do an occasional...
Like, we did a 300 seat sale in the last couple days. You know, to get to those 500,000 seat deals, those don't come along very often, and those are the ones that pull up our ARPU. Bill, I don't know if you have any additional commentary on that one.
No. I think that's accurate as well. I would expect it to come down. The newer sales are coming in predominantly at smaller ASPs, although we do feel like there's a big market out there for those sales.
Hello? Hey, sorry. You guys cut out there for a second. Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Okay, sorry. I'm sorry, but during the call, the operator kind of cut in to ask a question. I must have missed it. Did you say you signed a 300-seat deal?
Yeah, we signed a deal yesterday. It's an unusual deal for us in many regards. One is it's up to 300 seats. They won't sign and pay for 300 seats tomorrow, but they'll grow into 300 seats over time.
Okay. Wow, that's fantastic. That's great to hear. So, you know, I had a question that, you know, that doesn't really have a direct answer, but maybe you could share now that you're close to, like, 700 deployments or I guess maybe almost 1,000, to talk about, you know, where you. Like, just try to segment your customer base and your growth base. Like, where are you seeing the most growth and, you know, just something to think about. Is it pharma? Is it manufacturing? Is it, you know, is it biotech? Like, something to kind of start thinking about granularity.
Yeah, that's a great question. We have, you know, some data on that, but we're doing a bunch of analysis so that we can have what I call effective territory sales plans as we go into FY 2023. In other words, instead of just giving a guy a territory and saying, "You got to generate $200,000," we want to give our rep a territory, and we want to tell them, "Here's all your accounts in the territory. Your market share is 3%. We want you to grow from 3%-6%, and here's the accounts we want you to pursue to do it." We're doing a lot of analysis now. However, to your question, a lion's share of our business is still pharma and biotech. We do have installs in 62 other verticals.
Some of those are growing as we add content or functionality that's appealing to that vertical. It may be as simple as the sales reps more aggressively calling in that vertical like food or cosmetics. A lion's share of our business continues to be pharma and biotech. You know, by the next call, I can probably have a lot better info for you guys on a deep dive in terms of what I'm looking for is what user group is growing the fastest. You know, is it the 10-20? Is it the 20-50? Is it the 100 over? Where are we seeing most of those sales? Where are we seeing, you know, the most gross margin contribution total, including transactions?
'Cause that, you know, helps us identify the sweet spot of what we want our sales teams to be calling on as opposed to just generally looking to drag in $200 no matter where it comes from.
Okay. Thanks. I appreciate that. That's all I have for now. Most of my other questions have been answered.
Thank you.
The next question comes from George Melas-Kyriazi from MKH Management. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Good job on the continued sales growth. My question is about sort of the transactions is a very important part of the business. You have some direct competitors on the transaction side. Is the growth of the platform business and the investment that you're making on the platform side with AG3 and some of the new things that you are planning there, could that have an impact on the competitive dynamic for the transaction business?
Well, yes, I think it will. AG3 and AGS, as well as the new product we haven't really talked a lot about, they all have a transaction element. Each one of those are products that can drive up the transaction revenue or the number of transactions that we're processing through the various platforms. Some other things we're doing is we identified a series of improvements to our software that we think will help with driving more transaction business. You know, for example, we don't suggestive sell. I think that's how you and I would think about it, b ut in future versions of our software, we will literally proactively tell the researcher one of two things.
Either, "Hey, here's five other articles that are similar to this search you did and these articles that you acquired." Or we actually want to get to the point where we can say, "Over the last week, these new articles were released by these publishers that are related to the research project that you're working on." We have a series of about a half a dozen product initiatives that we're not gonna be able to implement all at once, but like one of them will be in this month's release that are all intended to help improve transaction uptake in our existing customer base. These are features that'll be deployed to, you know, all 650-700 customers on the same day.
These are things that we will be able to immediately know if they're working or not.
Okay, maybe just on the AG Scholar, can you try to size up the TAM there? What are sort of your initial steps to try to reach that TAM?
Yeah, I apologize. I don't know the TAM numbers off the top of my head, but I can. We'll see if we can pull those together. We do have the TAM. We do think it's a sizable business. You know, Well, I would say it's a sizable business. I'll have to pull the exact numbers. I don't remember them off the top of my head.
Okay. Are you devoting one salesperson to that at first or?
We have two people on it now. Two people are working it. We have a pretty active marketing campaign that includes webinars and a lot of conferences and a lot of presentations to library consortiums. You know, in fact, we had two webinars in the last month, and both of them were very well attended. I think the first webinar was around 100 people in attendance. Second webinar was 53 in attendance. The 53 one we did morning East Coast time, which was probably a mistake. Anyway, those are generating some nice leads into the group. You know, over the next few months, we will be attending a whole bunch of conferences, as well as additional webinars.
You know, frankly, I think the biggest mover for us in AGS is presenting to consortiums of libraries where we're presenting to a bunch of them at once. That's a pretty active part of our marketing plan.
Okay. Is there a clear competitor in that space, or is it kind of not very penetrated at all?
There's not a clear competitor other than a librarian that works in the library that makes the decisions whether or not you as a student or you as a professor can buy the article that you want to buy. In many cases, what our technology does is it allows that librarian to set limits and set rules around what people can buy and cannot buy and get out of the middle of that buying decision. We've had, you know, we have some libraries where they just set it up and let it run. We have other libraries. We have one library that made a pretty high risk decision to cancel all their subscriptions and tokens and simply use the platform and buy the articles one at a time. As it turns out, it actually saved them a significant amount of money.
I mean, high six figures, low seven figures. There's an interesting ROI developing from people that are using the platform. You know, not every customer is gonna do what that one customer did.
Okay, great. Thank you very much for taking my question.
Thank you.
Once again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Please press star then one now. The next question comes from Allen Klee of Maxim Group. Please go ahead.
Hi. For Article Galaxy Scholar, can you talk? Just go through again kind of what you're doing in terms of the additions that you're providing and how you're thinking about the rollout of the good better best strategy.
Yeah, I mean, good better, best was of course initially applied to the corporate version, which is AG3. The AGS or Article Galaxy Scholar version was actually just updated to include a bunch of AG3 features and will eventually be updated to include the good better, best features. In terms of what we're doing for the library, I mentioned a second ago, what we do is we help systematize the acquisition of articles for students or faculty, as opposed to students or faculty doing the research and then having to go through a library and we'll make the decision whether they buy it or not.
There are some unique integration things we have to do in a library in terms of single sign on and integrating to other sources of information because they obviously want our platform to check other sources for that article before they acquire the article, and those sources are different than what we do in the corporate space. It's a very similar platform. It actually looks the same. You do the search the same, you do the acquisition process very similar, only there are some checks that are going on in the background that are different from corporate. Did that answer your question?
Yeah. Thank you. Just your comments on plans to double your sales force and at least to get the bodies seated by your fiscal fourth quarter. Does that kind of imply that your kind of sales and marketing costs on a run rate will kinda double from a current run rate?
Not necessarily because the OTE of the smaller pharma biotech salespeople is gonna be materially lower than the existing team. Think about the existing team as kind of account executives that are or they are working assigned accounts. Those are typically higher paid people that are working more complex deals. Think of the small account team as more of like a geography rep in some companies that are just pounding a territory looking for smaller opportunities. Those smaller opportunities have a lower, you know, average revenue per unit, and they also come with a lower OTE. I would think the OTE of those people is gonna be half or a little more than half of our existing teams.
We'll have a little bit more data for you on the next call of the actual economic impact of those teams as we bring them on board.
Okay. Thank you so much.
This concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Roy Olivier for any closing remarks.
All right. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today on our call. As a reminder, we will be participating in the Roth Capital Partners conference in March. For more information on this event, please contact your Roth sales rep. We look forward to speaking to you again in May to discuss our third quarter results, and we hope you have a great day.
This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.