Safe Harbor Statements can be found on their website. Also, this fireside chat cannot be reproduced or a written transcript distributed without the express written consent of Water Tower Research. Brian, how are you?
Hey, John. Doing good and excited to be here.
It sounds great. Just to kick us off, look, not everyone knows SurgePays. Maybe you could give us a quick overview and give us some color on the addressable market and your business lines.
Sure. From a high level, our company caters to about a third of the country in the U.S. here. It's the, let's call it the prepaid market. There's 100 million prepaid wireless subscribers in the country. Kind of encapsulates that overall market, the blue collar working class all the way down to the government subsidized class. Our consumer demographic visits their local community store multiple times a week, and we use the point-of-sale platform at those stores to distribute our products. Our products range from prepaid wireless, subsidized wireless, other third-party payment mechanisms to help folks pay their bill at that store that's closest to where they live. We've recently integrated through a contract with AT&T. Now we're an MVNO, and what we've been talking about is that the MVNO market in the U.S.
is $30 billion last year, 2024, projected to be almost $53 billion in the next eight years. We want to ride that wave, and we want to do so at a grassroots level, right in the neighborhoods where our target market lives.
Now your distribution system is about 9,000 retail points now, roughly?
Yeah, and that's one of the growth focuses of our company. If you want to look at these entrepreneur-owned stores, and this could be anything from a gas station to a community market, a Hispanic store, depending on the type of neighborhood, but it is that community store, usually on the corner, within walking distance of neighborhoods that fall into this category. What we find is, even through government studies, which ironically came from the USDA, looking at the health of folks in various socioeconomic classes, is that our target market visits that community store four to five times a week, especially the cash-driven folks whose security is the cash in their pocket each month. As that depletes, you know, they don't just go to Walmart or Target once every two weeks. They constantly visit the store.
Understanding our customer base, and then understanding our clients, which are really our partners who are behind the counter working as clerks in these stores, our whole distribution mechanism is geared around helping these store owners make incremental money through transactions for products we provide, creating more foot traffic, and then helping them help their community and making money doing so. We have 9,000 of these stores right now. There's a big aggressive push going. Our goal is over 100,000. We've got the product suite we believe to do it. We're seeing some pretty exciting numbers come in as we grow this network.
Wow, 10x. That's an impressive goal. Why don't you tell us about the subscriber growth initiatives? Other than these that you've already talked about a little bit, I believe you're looking at the Lifeline program's subsidy model and your LinkUp model as well, the prepaid model?
Yeah, we've got a direct contract with AT&T where it really gives us three channels of revenue. One would be our prepaid brand, LinkUp. We've got some really aggressive rates providing it through the AT&T network, similar to Cricket, Boost, MetroPCS, some of the other prepaid companies out there that you may see commercials on TV. That's our LinkUp channel. You've also got our government-subsidized channel. That's our Torch Wireless channel. We've really seen some great numbers coming from the Lifeline side. Lifeline, for those of you that don't know, Lifeline is a program that was created by Reagan in the 1980s. What it does is if you're on any government subsidy program, food stamps, Section 8, Veterans Pension, Medicaid, then you qualify for free connectivity. Now it's evolved over the years to free wireless service, limit one per household. It's a really good program for us.
We've got that subsidized program. Just backstory for those who have been following us, when the ACP ceased being funded last June, we retooled that entire platform that built that $120 million of revenue and refocused it and regeared it into the Lifeline program. We're seeing some really exciting things coming from the Lifeline program right now, very similar to the scaling we saw in the ACP . The third channel that was created from our AT&T contract is our, it's actually, to put it in layman's terms, our ability to wholesale to other wireless companies. AT&T only lets a select few companies integrate directly with them. Since we already had a platform not only for maintaining customers, the CRM, we also have a platform for taking payments and doing transactions at the store, which is the SurgePays platform.
They asked us if we'd be interested in working with integrating other third parties, in some cases our competition. We've rolled that out as well. We've got three MVNOs now on our platform doing activations through our contract. Really, really exciting things that we're seeing right now. It's exciting numbers coming in. We're kind of managing the lightning hair on fire right now.
Maybe you can highlight some of those numbers, obviously public information, to how well you're doing and why are you so confident in your revenue guidance?
We're confident in the revenue guidance because the team that we've put together, we've got a really unique team. I tell people, in my opinion, it's by far the best team that's ever been assembled in prepaid. I'm obviously biased. The reason I say that is because you've got guys like me and the team that I brought to the table, which did a couple of billion dollars in prepaid. You've got an acquisition that we did a couple of years ago. We brought that entire team and we kept all of those entrepreneurs that built that platform to billions of dollars of revenue. We recently hired a sales executive last year that also built a company into the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.
In our market, if you look at it, we're in the telecommunications market, but in that prepaid niche market, prepaid wireless really has only been around since 2009 at a really explosive level. You're talking about what, 15, 16 years. We're kind of a new industry. It's a small-knit industry. When you have what we call in our war room, known revenue, you have people who bring a network of sales with them because they have a master agent hierarchy that they distribute through. As we bring these folks on, they bring their own network of stores on, we know the sales that we're going to hit. We're watching that right now. As a matter of fact, one of my, it's, I don't mind being wrong when I was off on our sales numbers and they're exponentially more than what we had projected and anticipated.
As we're looking at numbers right now, we can focus on the Lifeline piece. Again, for those that followed the scaling of the Affordable Connectivity Program, right now we're taking off in Lifeline faster than what we did in the ACP . We're extremely confident in both the projections we gave for the, you know, being cash flow positive by the end of 2025, heading out of the year. We're looking at blowing the doors off of some of the numbers we did on our best months in the ACP by the end of Q1 next year. It's exciting, and we do already live in 2026. I mean, we're looking at that.
We're looking at the numbers because we're also, you know, what's different about now in the ACP , ACP we had retooled our push to get behind one product, one program, one channel. That was that ACP piece. Now you've got your LinkUp, which is the prepaid. You've got your MVNE, which is the wholesale to other competitors. You do have your subsidized, which will grow at that ACP level. You've also got the top-up platform, the fintech platform, and then you've got ClearLine. All of those other four channels and subsidiaries will be growing simultaneously to the Lifeline piece. We'll never have that kind of negative comment about, well, you either have all of your revenue coming from one channel or there's a funding, you know, maybe the discount applied to the analysis on your stock, the valuation, because of the unsure funding of a program.
That will never happen again. We've got multiple channels that all contribute to the consolidated revenue, and everything has been geared to where it can either be subsidiaries can grow siloed by themselves, or in a lot of cases, in synergy together because they all use the same distribution mechanism. However you get in the store, whether it's signing up with a chain of stores or someone pulling a door one at a time, depending on what the lead product is in that area, we're seeing growth in all five channels. It's exciting. Like I said, there's long days right now, but when you get to see numbers to the minute and you get to see these sales just tick, tick, tick, and we know how many customers we have to have at a certain level to get back to profitability.
We appreciate the profitability, and what comes with it and what that enables us to do as a company. From top to bottom right now, it's a lot of excitement and electricity at SurgePays.
That sounds great. Maybe we take a quick step back for a second and say, okay, what's the rest of 2025 look like? What's the rest of 2026 going into 2026? I mean, you're obviously, I can hear the confidence in your voice, but can you give us a little more color on what we might see coming down the pike?
Yeah, I think, you know, there's always, when you put out numbers, you know, you subject yourself to scrutiny. I think it's important for folks that follow us to know, you know, with these four channels all going to market and essentially all starting at zero, you know, a couple of months ago, things scale significantly, especially when it's a 4X scaling, four different subsidiaries, and understanding that all four of these are recurring revenue models that grow scale-wise, skewed-wise into the future. I think what you're going to see is, you know, Q2 was a little bit of an uptick, but that was the priming across the board of all of these and getting the wheels cranking, the gears cranking. What we're watching right now is exponential growth. Obviously we've got to report Q2, that's a part of being public. I'm really excited to talk about Q3.
Obviously, you know, we don't have a Q4. It'll be a while before people get to see that, but we're going to do some things to create visibility of our real-time growth as much as possible. You know, we've got some huge subscriber growth numbers that are coming in, and, you know, well, in the thousands a day. I want prospective shareholders and existing shareholders to understand and, you know, be cheering for us on the sidelines as they watch this growth and not have to wait until all the way in the spring to hear what we, you know, we'll do in Q4 this year.
I think, you know, as people pay attention, they'll start to correlate what happened three years ago with the ACP when you saw the subscribers going up over a thousand a day and knowing that we have very, very similar, if not a little bit better because of our AT&T contract margins as we did in the ACP . Very simple numbers on the Lifeline program. There are certain states that pay extra money in the Lifeline program. A couple of them that we're focusing on right now, we know that at 100,000 subscribers in those particular states, we're breaking cash flow positive. That's just one subsidiary, one product, in a few states. The fact that we're doing, you know, 1,200 - 1,800 a day right now, and we're not even at full capacity, of just that product.
I mean, people watching us are smart enough to do the quick math of why we're excited. You know, if you look at it, it's what, it's almost the end of July. We're very, very quickly going to be back on the green, or green or black, depending on how you like to look at it, of the profitability meter.
Brian, that sounds really exciting. Unfortunately, we're running out of time, so I really appreciate you joining me today to talk about this. For those that want to learn more about SurgePays, please visit their website or access our research on WTR 's website. That's watertowerresearch.com. I want to thank everyone for joining us. The views expressed in this fireside chat may not necessarily reflect the views of Water Tower Research LLC and are provided for informational purposes only. This fireside chat may not be distributed or reproduced without the written consent of Water Tower Research and should not be considered research nor recommendation. WTR is an investor relations firm, not a licensed broker, broker-dealer, market-maker, investment-banker, underwriter, or investment advisor. Additional disclaimers can be found at watertowerresearch.com. We'll see you later, Brian.
Hey, thank you, John. Have a great day.