Nerdy Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
November 7, 2024

There are 6 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for Nerdy's Q3 2024 earnings call. With me are Chuck Cohn, Founder Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Nerdy and Jason Pelo, Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn the call over to Chuck, I'll remind everyone that this discussion will contain forward looking statements, including but not limited to expectations with respect to Nerdy's future financial and operating results, strategy, opportunities, plans and outlook. These forward looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. Any forward looking statements are made as of today's date and Nerdy does not undertake or accept any obligation to publicly release any updates or revisions to any forward looking statements to reflect any change in expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.

Operator

Please refer to the disclaimers in today's shareholder letter announcing Nerdy's 3rd quarter results and the company's filings with the SEC for a discussion of the risks. Not all of the financial measures that we will discuss today are prepared in accordance with GAAP. Please refer to today's shareholder letter for reconciliations of these non GAAP measures. With that, let me turn the call over to Chuck.

Speaker 1

Thanks, T. J, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. In the Q3, we continued to make progress against the primary goals we laid out for the year. The first goal we shared was scaling the winning product for every learner. As we have shared in the past, we have historically seen that getting new customers on our platform and into tutoring sessions seamlessly and with little friction involved is highly predictive of customer satisfaction, retention and ultimately lifetime value.

Speaker 1

We identified that the 1st 30 day onboarding experience was one of the highest impact areas where we could drive durable improvements to retention and lifetime value. We focused a significant portion of our product and engineering efforts towards this area, which has resulted in multiple key enhancements being shipped recently that will benefit both consumer and institutional customers. These improvements to the digital experience focus on the fundamentals of a great customer experience. Our new onboarding assistant enables the customer's peer placement request to be documented more accurately and efficiently, and we are seeing the improved completion rates and accuracy flow through to high quality matches, faster time to first sessions and higher levels of customer satisfaction. Our new tutor match tracker provides greater transparency into the matching process, making it easier for customers to manage their tutoring relationships, confirm scheduling availability and introducing new members to the full breadth of our learning tools available to them.

Speaker 1

It also reduces the amount of new client inbound service requests prior to being matched to their tutor, which we expect to pull through to higher levels of customer retention. These user experience pages are delivering improvements across the 1st 30 day period post activation for new customers. The specific areas that have improved include time to 1st tutoring session, 1st session attendance rates, higher levels of engagement in non tutoring products like live classes and AI tutor and a reduction in tutor replacement. These important changes are collectively leading to higher customer retention in new consumer cohort. Consistent with the early trends we shared last quarter, we shifted our product mix towards membership oriented around weekly tutoring habits, including our 4 8 hour options, coupled with digital experience improvements is positively affecting newly acquired cohorts.

Speaker 1

Among new customers that are now joining our higher frequency learning memberships this back to school season, we are seeing higher levels of tutoring sessions per week, higher levels of non tutoring engagement due to improved discoverability across the platform, higher average revenue per month and improved levels of retention in the 1st month. These trends benefited from further in quarter improvements in the digital experience, which we believe will drive more consistent customer usage and lead to improvements in lifetime value and unit level economics. These positive trends in new customer cohorts were partially offset by lower retention in older customer cohorts that included a higher proportion of low frequency learning memberships, which was a trend we spoke about last quarter. We expect this trend to continue through year end and then subsequently subside. As we've discussed throughout the year, we made substantial investments in the Varsity Tutors for Schools go to market organization and platform infrastructure.

Speaker 1

These investments primarily focused on 3 areas. The first was on converging the consumer and institutional platforms into a unified digital experience, which required significant product engineering resources and was an initiative we completed last quarter. We believe that will allow us to go much faster in the future. The second area of investment was enabling access to the varsity tutors platform for the entire school district in order to serve millions of students and to establish a high volume of school district relationship with the aim of building trust and credibility. As we roll out access to our platform in a new school district, we are laying the foundation to become their preferred tutoring platform when they look to implement paid high dosage tutoring programs in the future.

Speaker 1

The 3rd area of investment for Varsity Leadership Schools was in the expansion of the institutional go to market sales organization to drive further market penetration and bookings growth. In the Q3, we saw and continue to see strong interest in school districts signing up for access to our platform. We successfully enabled access to the Varsity Tutors for Schools platform for an additional 1,100,000 students, bringing the total to 4,400,000 students at nearly 900 school districts during the Q3. Student engagement with our platform was stronger than expected as students returned to school, demonstrating the relevance of our offering and the growing need for student support beyond the traditional classroom. As school started, significant effort was placed on trying to capture ESSER related bookings and to launch platform access at hundreds of school districts.

Speaker 1

That required us to expand significant internal resources to support these efforts in a short period of time. We believe this is a good long term investment. However, in the short term, it resulted in a trade off of resources and focus, which impacted execution in the consumer business. We believe our strategy to offer access to the VARCONCUTURES platform is yielding positive results by driving brand awareness and introducing our product to school district partners at a larger scale than ever before. 32% of paid contracts and 22% of total bookings value in the Q3 came from school district partners who initially partnered with us via no cost access to our platform and subsequently converted to our paid offerings.

Speaker 1

This strategy of providing access to our low marginal cost products that have high perceived value is allowing us to build a large number of relationships with school districts and positions us to drive sustainable long term growth within the K-twelve market. The investments in the go to market function and institutional sales organization in particular were made in anticipation of a higher level of bookings. Our thesis was supported by the prior 2 years of institutional bookings growth combined with the upcoming end of that sort of funding on September 30, 2024, which we believe could deliver a substantial amount of bookings with K-twelve School District. While we successfully executed 117 contracts during the Q3, representing an increase of 46% year over year. Those contracts only yielded $8,500,000 of bookings, which was below expectations.

Speaker 1

We attribute the lower deal size to several factors, including entering back to school with the newly hired sales team, being overly focused on the ESSER deadline versus other funding sources and to complexity involving onboarding pre platform access school district partners. The institutional opportunity within K-twelve schools represents a significant market opportunity and one for which we believe we're uniquely qualified. To better reflect the more normalized sales cycle in a post after environment that encompasses multiple different student populations and recurring funding sources within schools, we'll be moderating our level of spend to a level that we believe will support durable and profitable growth. As discussed last quarter, we've been working to modernize and enhance several components of our marketplace infrastructure. We are in the final stages of fully delivering several improvements to our underlying marketplace infrastructure systems, including sessions scheduling enhancements, invoicing and substitution automation and other improvements that we believe will allow us to provide best in class logistical reliability.

Speaker 1

Due to the resourcing required to support Varsity Caterpillar Schools in the Q3, certain marketplace infrastructure initiatives are taking longer than anticipated to fully implement. Once delivered, we believe that these initiatives will allow us to deliver meaningful gross margin improvements and operating leverage on a go forward basis while simultaneously improving the customer experience due to the higher reliability levels of our marketplace infrastructure systems. Taking a step back, we believe that the growing awareness and recognition by parents, educators and policymakers that high dosage tutoring is the most effective way to accelerate learning provides us with confidence in the demand for live tutoring in the years to come. We continue to deliver product enhancements that drive high levels of engagement with our platform, expand our customers' lifetime value and provide durable competitive advantages, which we believe will enable strengthening financial performance in the coming quarters. We appreciate your continued interest in our company and look forward to meeting the evolving needs of learners in any subject anywhere and at any time.

Speaker 1

With that, I'll turn the call over to Jason to discuss the financials in more detail. Jason?

Speaker 2

Thanks, Chuck, and good afternoon, everyone. As Chuck mentioned, we continue to make progress towards achieving the 3 primary goals we laid out for the year. In the Q3, we delivered revenue of $37,500,000 a decrease of 7% year over year. Revenue declined primarily due to lower ARPU in our consumer business. ARPU was lower due to a higher mix of lower frequency learning memberships when compared to the prior year period.

Speaker 2

Consumer Learning memberships subscription revenue of $31,400,000 represented 84% of total company revenue. Active members of 39,700 as of September 30 were up 1% year over year. ARPU of approximately $302 as of September 30 was up 7% from $2.81 at the end of the Q2 and resulted in an annualized run rate of approximately $144,000,000 from learning memberships at quarter end. Our institutional business delivered revenue of $5,400,000 a decrease of 3% year over year and represented 14% of total revenue. Our platform access strategy in our institutional business is allowing us to introduce our products to school districts at a much larger scale than ever before.

Speaker 2

As Chuck mentioned, our strategy to introduce school districts to the platform and ultimately convert them to our fee based offerings started to bear fruit in the Q3, with 32% of paid contracts and 22% of total bookings value coming from school district partners who initially partnered with Varsity Tutors for Schools via free access to our platform and subsequently converted to our paid offerings. We believe that providing access to our platform is allowing us to gain market share and that we are building a strategic and differentiated asset that positions us for continued sustainable long term growth within the K-twelve market. However, we are taking steps to moderate our institutional investments to reflect a more normalized sales cycle in a post ESSER environment that encompasses multiple different student populations and referring funding sources within schools that we believe will allow us to deliver durable and profitable growth as we move into 2025. Moving down the P and L, gross profit of $26,500,000 in the Q3 was lower by 9% year over year. Gross margin was 70.5% for the 3 months ended September 30 and compared to a gross margin of 72.4% during the comparable period in 2023.

Speaker 2

The decrease in gross margin was primarily due to lower ARPU, coupled with higher utilization of tutoring sessions across learning memberships in our consumer business, partially offset by lower seasonal utilization in our access based products in our institutional business. Improvements to our marketplace infrastructure systems, including scheduling, invoicing and substitution improvements are now expected to be fully implemented in the Q4. Once implemented, these initiatives are expected to yield gross margin improvement and operating leverage on a go forward basis, while also improving the customer experience. Sales and marketing expenses for the quarter on a GAAP basis were $20,300,000 an increase of $1,000,000 from $19,300,000 in the same period last year. Non GAAP sales and marketing expenses, excluding non cash stock based compensation, were $19,700,000 compared to $18,500,000 in the same period last year.

Speaker 2

Sales and marketing increases were driven by investments in our institutional sales organization in order to drive customer acquisition, brand awareness and reach. These investments were partially offset by consumer sales and marketing efficiency gains where we saw customer acquisition costs decrease by $1,600,000 or 9% year over year in the Q3. General and administrative expenses for the quarter on a GAAP basis were $31,800,000 a decrease of $3,700,000 from $35,500,000 in the same period last year. Non GAAP G and A, excluding non cash stock compensation expenses, transaction costs, restructuring costs and a provision for a legal settlement was $22,600,000 compared to $20,500,000 in the same period last year. Included in G and A costs were product development costs of $11,300,000 an increase of $1,200,000 from $10,100,000 in the same period last year.

Speaker 2

We believe our investments in product development and our platform oriented approach to growth have allowed us to launch and continuously improve our suite of subscription and access based products, which are allowing us to simplify our operating model needed to support the organization, allowing us to maximize our investment in the unified platform. Non GAAP adjusted EBITDA loss of $14,000,000 for the 3 months ended September 30 was above our guidance range of negative $17,000,000 to negative $19,000,000 and compared to a non GAAP adjusted EBITDA loss of $8,200,000 in the same period last year. Non GAAP adjusted EBITDA improvements relative to guidance were primarily driven by lower sales and marketing spend, operating efficiency gains and diligent cost controls. Compared to last year, non GAAP adjusted EBITDA was lower primarily due to investments in the Varsity Tears 4 Schools sales organization and product development to drive innovation and support our growth. As of September 30, the company's principal sources of liquidity were cash and cash equivalents of $65,000,000 and we have 0 debt.

Speaker 2

We believe our strong balance sheet provides us with ample liquidity to operate against our plans and pursue growth initiatives. Turning to our business outlook. We are providing 4th quarter and updating full year revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. 4th quarter revenue guidance reflects higher sequential quarterly revenues from Learning Memberships and varsity tutors for schools when K-twelve schools and universities are in session. For the Q4, we expect year over year consumer revenue will be impacted by a decline in the number of Learning membership subscribers due primarily to a higher level of cancellations from older cohorts who purchased lower frequency Learning memberships coupled with lower average revenue per member per month.

Speaker 2

In our institutional business, we expect that the lower bookings year to date will result in the flow through of lower revenues during the Q4 versus the prior year. For the Q4 of 2024, we expect revenue in the range of $44,000,000 to $47,000,000 For the full year, we expect revenue in the range of $186,000,000 to $189,000,000 We expect to deliver a sequential improvement in adjusted EBITDA from the 3rd to the 4th quarter, which we would expect to continue into 2025. 4th quarter adjusted EBITDA guidance primarily reflects the flow through of lower revenue year over year, coupled with investments in the institutional sales organization and in product development to drive continued innovation and growth. For the Q4 of 2024, we expect adjusted EBITDA in a range of negative $7,000,000 to negative $10,000,000 For the full year, we expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of negative $23,000,000 to negative $26,000,000 As mentioned, we believe we have ample liquidity to fund the business and pursue growth initiatives. In closing, thank you again for your time and for your continued interest in our company.

Speaker 2

With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q and A. Operator?

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our first question is from Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.

Speaker 4

Thanks so much for taking my questions. Guys, understood the various puts and takes in terms of the 4Q guide. But can you guys double click in terms of your visibility into stability in terms of the consumer side of the business? How do we think about timing there? And then stepping back more operationally, Chuck, can you talk about driving engagement with customers?

Speaker 4

How are you guys thinking about getting more frequency on the platform overall so that you do improve retention for consumers? Thanks so much.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Andrew. Good question. So the way that we think about the kind of consumer business at its level of performance in the quarter, which I shared a little bit in the prepared remarks, relates back to the old cohorts, which were a blend of customers that were on the weekly tutoring frequency and some that were not. Those that were not had higher levels of churn at the year end, which fall through to the quarter. Those that were on the weekly tutoring frequency had much higher levels of retention, which is attributable to the fact that tutoring is a weekly habit oriented activity that people get into every Tuesday night for French tutoring, every Thursday night for LSAT prep in preparation for going to law school.

Speaker 1

And as we got back into the school year and as we shared on the last quarterly call, we reoriented the focus towards memberships that were focused on weekly tutoring. And in addition to that, that alone from a mix perspective drove higher levels of retention and higher ARPU on both a kind of blended and year over year basis. And then separately, we made a series of product enhancements that we shared in the shareholder letter that improved the first 30 day activation. So they removed friction, they made it easier to schedule, they made it easier to figure out the status of your tutor to replace your tutor. And those are durable product driven changes that we're then seeing pull through to higher 1st session success rates and then a bunch of downstream positive metrics related to tutoring engagement.

Speaker 1

We've also made a series of improvements to the platform itself in a way that drive discoverability of many of the non tutoring products, including AI tutor, live classes, adaptive diagnostic testing and some of the self-service tools. So we have seen both 1 on 1 engagement

Speaker 4

on

Speaker 1

a weekly or monthly basis year over year. And then separately for non tutoring engagement, we've seen it actually grow quite nicely this back to school season in connection with both the mix changes and then all of the product driven changes. And all of that engagement then pulls through traditionally to much higher levels of retention. And so we're seeing among the 1st several months of back to school cohorts that all of the kind of negative year over year retention trends have reverted and we're back to parity. And we'd hope that through the product driven changes that we're working on right now, we have high conviction that those can then pull through to material year over year wins on retention on a go forward basis.

Speaker 1

So that's how we kind of model it and think about it. But as those cohorts pull through and shift the total answer of cumulative members, we'd expect to see retention the retention answer totality shift positively.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 3

We have a question from Greg Gibas with Northland Securities. Your line is now open.

Speaker 5

Great. Hey, Chuck and Jason. Thanks for taking the questions. Curious if we could go a little bit further on the institutional revenue, kind of what's driving the decline there? And nice to see that you enabled another 1,100,000 students up to 4.4 now.

Speaker 5

How is progress trending regarding kind of monetizing or upselling those offerings to school districts?

Speaker 1

Hey, Craig. Good question. So as we shared over the past couple of quarters, we were taking a big swing related to this back school season and making the most of the end to effort motion. And that was informed by the last couple of years of bookings and all the progress and success we've had. And one of the things that we saw this back to school season was that the platform access strategy where we give access to the platform had high levels of demand.

Speaker 1

We also saw that ramping a new sales team heading into that back to school season was a little bit more challenging than expected. And then ESSER itself did not create the level of urgency that we expected at that ninethirty deadline. And I think in retrospect, we're overly focused on that specific deadline as opposed to focusing on broad based strategic conversations that span a multitude of funding types and different needs based that districts have. And one of the really positive things is the extent to which as our platform and

Speaker 4

all

Speaker 1

of its product capabilities have evolved and all of the integrations that we've done, we're now able to accommodate and serve a broad swath of different use cases. And whether a school district wants to administer tutoring before school, during school, in class, outside of class, after school or on nights or weekends with parents, we've put in place the platform and software driven changes that allow for us to accommodate a broad swath of different needs. And that also spans different students groups, whether it's related to math or reading in K through 5 and remediation learning loss or whether it's related to certain special education students. There's a broad there's a way that our platform can accommodate many of these different student populations that have acute needs. So we're finding that there's these pockets that all school districts largely have that have good funding.

Speaker 1

We're seeing with that new with our new sales team, the deal sizes came in a little bit smaller, which we attributed back to a newer motion and newer team. And we would expect for the deal sizes to increase as we get farther into the school year and the team matures and we get a little bit better at the kind of platform access strategy. So I think we feel good about the deal volumes, but not the average deal size. But the platform access strategy itself is working, it's generating deals and they're kind of converting through and we're building a lot of trust. We put a lot of energy into it.

Speaker 1

And we think long term, it's a good investment. It will pay back. We're building trust with school districts. Short term, it's a complicated motion of having all the school districts for the first time this back to school season launch concurrently, but we made tremendous progress on the product front and we're seeing high levels of engagement across some of those school districts that then we shared some of the stats are pulling through to deals. So we feel good about the kind of strategic advantage we have related to the platform access and that how that ultimately accrues to strong relationships with those districts.

Speaker 2

Yes. Maybe just to put some numbers behind what Chuck said and appreciate the question, Greg. Platform access is allowing us to gain share in the market. We're building a strategic and differentiated asset that we think positions us for sustainable long term growth within this K-twelve market. Student engagement with the platform, as Chuck mentioned, was really high as we entered the back to school period.

Speaker 2

So it's showing clear evidence of the need for support beyond the traditional classroom. And the Platform Access strategy is starting to bear fruit. 32% of the paid contracts and 22% of total bookings value came from school district partners who originally partnered with Varsity Jewish with Schools via the free platform access and subsequently converted to our paid off high dosage tutoring offerings. So we think that that's going to continue into 2025 and well beyond that and feel good about the work that we did during the Q3 to onboard nearly 900 schools. Yes.

Speaker 2

And we definitely

Speaker 1

pay the short term price in terms of resource allocation as back to school launched, but we feel good about the long term strategic assets that we've built and how that ultimately generates growth and profitability.

Speaker 5

Got it. Very helpful. Great. And then I guess turning gears to the consumer side. Wanted to just kind of get a little bit more color on your expectations for maybe active member growth versus ARPAM dynamics in Q4 on a year over year basis?

Speaker 5

Kind of if you expect any changes in kind of dynamics there between those 2? And I guess separately as it relates to I think you spoke to lower customer acquisition costs you're seeing. Wondering if you could touch on kind of what's driving that? Is it different marketing initiatives or kind of go to market strategy, where you're maybe seeing success there?

Speaker 2

Sure. Thanks for the question. So the positive trends we're seeing in the new customer cohorts we mentioned on the call, those were partially offset by lower retention in older customers that included a higher proportion of the lower frequency learning memberships. That was a trend we spoke to last quarter. We think that will continue through the end of the year and then subsequently subside.

Speaker 2

We think we'll end the year with about 36,000 active members. You mentioned ARPU. Importantly, we saw ARPU improve from 281 at the end of Q2 to 302 at the end of Q3 as we focused on those higher frequency customers. That trend will continue in Q4. We think we'll end around 310 and then again continue to accrete as we move into 2025.

Speaker 2

Within marketing, specifically on the consumer side, we are seeing some efficiency there. Customer acquisition costs decreased by about $1,400,000 or 8% year over year in Q3. When you couple that with consumer sales conversion improvements, our cats were down about 14% in Q3, which we feel really good about the durability of that efficiency improvement as we move into 2025 as we're able to target our marketing investments toward higher LTV customers in segments that have quicker paybacks.

Speaker 5

Got it. Thanks for the color.

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Key Takeaways

  • Recent first‐30‐day onboarding enhancements—like the onboarding assistant and tutor match tracker—have sped up time to first session and boosted attendance, non-tutoring engagement, and early retention among new consumer cohorts.
  • A strategic shift to higher-frequency weekly tutoring memberships drove ARPU up 7% sequentially to $302 and improved first-month retention and usage in back-to-school cohorts.
  • The “Varsity Tutors for Schools platform access” program added 1.1 million new students (totaling 4.4 million across ~900 districts), with 32% of paid contracts and 22% of bookings coming from districts converting from free access.
  • Q3 revenue declined 7% YoY to $37.5 million and gross margin dipped to 70.5% due to lower ARPU and higher session utilization, but a non-GAAP EBITDA loss of $14 million beat guidance by $3–5 million thanks to cost controls.
  • For Q4, the company forecasts revenue of $44–47 million and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $7–10 million, expecting sequential improvement as new infrastructure upgrades take effect and spending is moderated.
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