NYSE:GRND Grindr Q4 2023 Earnings Report $24.02 +0.66 (+2.83%) Closing price 03:59 PM EasternExtended Trading$24.14 +0.13 (+0.52%) As of 07:49 PM Eastern Extended trading is trading that happens on electronic markets outside of regular trading hours. This is a fair market value extended hours price provided by Polygon.io. Learn more. Earnings HistoryForecast Grindr EPS ResultsActual EPS$0.04Consensus EPS N/ABeat/MissN/AOne Year Ago EPSN/AGrindr Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$72.09 millionExpected RevenueN/ABeat/MissN/AYoY Revenue GrowthN/AGrindr Announcement DetailsQuarterQ4 2023Date3/11/2024TimeN/AConference Call DateThursday, March 7, 2024Conference Call Time5:00PM ETUpcoming EarningsGrindr's Q1 2025 earnings is scheduled for Thursday, May 8, 2025, with a conference call scheduled at 5:00 PM ET. Check back for transcripts, audio, and key financial metrics as they become available.Q1 2025 Earnings ReportConference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptPress Release (8-K)Annual Report (10-K)Earnings HistoryCompany ProfilePowered by Grindr Q4 2023 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMarch 7, 2024 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 8 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:01Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Beau, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Grindr 4th Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Operator00:00:27I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Tolu Adiafe, Grindr's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am. Speaker 100:00:34Thank you, moderator. Hello, and welcome to the Grindr earnings call for the Q4 full year 2023. Today's call will be led by Grindr's CEO, George Arison and CFO, Vanna Kranz. They will make a few brief remarks and then we'll open it up for questions. Please note, Grindr released its shareholder letter this afternoon and this is available on the SEC's website in Grindr's Investor page at investors. Speaker 100:01:00Grinderdot com. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar such statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC. Speaker 100:01:29During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding non GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP measures, are included in the earnings release we issued today, which has been posted on the Investor Relations page of Grindr's website and in Grindr's filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to George. Speaker 200:01:53Thank you, Togo, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. 2023, our 1st year as a public company, was a success by every measure. We made significant improvements in our product, increased monetization for our weekly subscription and boost a la carte and exceeded our financial guidance. We continue to welcome more users to Grindr with average MAU growth of 8% for the year. The engagement has remained best in class with more than 121,000,000,000 chat sent between users. Speaker 200:02:23These strong results due to the hard work of our team and also to grant us enduring relationship with the gay community as we help users all over the world to finally connect with Ananda. We also embrace a deep commitment to service in the global gay community, most notably through our Grindr4quality initiatives, including connecting users to more than 235,000 HIV test kits in the U. S, an effort we are striving to bring to many more countries. In 2023, we also laid a strong foundation for long term growth, such as developing a robust product roadmap, which includes some great work we are doing on AI and adding outstanding, highly accomplished leaders to our team. In November, we completed a landmark step for Grindr with the refinancing of our debt, closing a new $350,000,000 facility with some of the world's leading financial institutions. Speaker 200:03:18Debt refinancing is a core team in the business world, but when the first public company serving the LGBTQ community can interest rate environment, it highlights not only the strength and credibility of our business, but also signals that we can help drive a more open and welcoming financial ecosystem. This is very important to our mission, and I want to thank Dana, her team and our banking partners for their work and support in making it happen. Further details about our performance and 2023 focus areas can be found in our shareholder letter, which I encourage you to read. Next, I'd like to outline our 3 key priorities for 2024. Given the robust nature of our free offering to increase monetization over the long term, we need to provide new value added features to our users that they're willing to pay for. Speaker 200:04:13To do this, we need to build features and products with a better understanding of our user intent. We know that the vast majority of Grendel's users use it for title baiting, but we also know that the same users use it for much more as a primary place to find long term relationships, a source for networking, for finding information about what's going on in the community, where the safe places are to go in different countries, and much more. Building features that better serve user specific intent will allow us to cater to the needs of our customers, creating value for them and opportunities for monetization for Grindr. Our second priority focuses on our brand and ensuring that we proudly tell the story of Grindr's great legacy of serving and positively impacting millions of people in our user community around the world. Legacy perceptions of Grind are rooted in societal, cultural and historical prejudice, sensationalism and shame, reinforced by long since resolved issues and inaccuracies about our product are still present all around us and live in our audience's heads. Speaker 200:05:16Left unaddressed, these inaccurate perceptions can have negative long term effects on our business. We recognize that creating value for our users and shareholders means taking these issues head on. In 2024, we're focused on amplifying the crucial and impactful work that is at our core by telling the true story of Grindr's growing culture and the real relevance and success of our product both within and outside of the community. And our 3rd priority is to build a performance driven culture of excellence and innovation. We started out with our return to ops initiative last summer. Speaker 200:05:51We believe strongly that the combination of an important social mission we have workforce planning to win is what creates great companies. We are focused on building out our team in key functions with high performance, and we believe that the strong performance driven culture will help drive strong long term growth for Grindr, starting with the 2024 guidance we are providing today. I'm excited to share more on all of these initiatives and much more about Grindr at our 1st Investor Day, which will be held on June 26, 2024 in New York City. The event will be a fantastic opportunity to gain deeper insight into our company and engage with leadership. Registration details will be shared soon. Speaker 200:06:34With that, I'll hand it over to Vanna to discuss our financial performance. Speaker 300:06:40Thank you, George, and hello, everyone. I'll start by summing up the year and then dive into the Q4. Grindr delivered outstanding results in 2023, with revenue growing 33 percent to CAD260,000,000 for the full year. And our adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 42% of revenue for a total of $110,000,000 Both revenue and adjusted EBITDA margin were well ahead of our original guidance for the year and our revenue increased further from our guidance update in November. Overall, our performance was driven by a combination of paying user growth and increased average revenue per paying user as we benefited from the success of the launch of the extra weekly subscription and a full year contribution from our popular Boost alacarte offering. Speaker 300:07:30In fact, our direct revenue grew by 38% in 2023. We continue to see strong engagement in our app throughout the year as average monthly active users increased 8% in 2023 over the prior year, and our average paying users increased 19% to a record 937,000. Our average direct revenue per paying user grew 16% year over year to $20.05 primarily driven by the extra weekly subscription. Turning now to the 4th quarter, revenue was $72,000,000 up 32% year over year from $55,000,000 This includes $62,000,000 of direct revenue, which was up 39% year over year and $10,000,000 of indirect revenue, which was up 1% year over year. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue for the Q4 of 2020 3 were $37,000,000 down 0.3% versus last year. Speaker 300:08:33An increase in people cost was largely offset by a decline in depreciation and amortization. Operating expenses excluding cost of revenue for the full year of 20 This $6,000,000 year over year increase reflects higher people costs, which includes a $9,000,000 severance expense driven by our return to office program. This was offset by lower depreciation and amortization costs. Net loss for the Q4 was $45,000,000 compared with net income of $5,000,000 in Q4 2022. For the full year Q4 of 2023, we incurred $61,000,000 $50,000,000 respectively, in expenses related to warrants and our debt refinancing. Speaker 300:09:25Adjusted EBITDA for the Q4 was 29,000,000 equating to a 40% adjusted EBITDA margin. Turning to our balance sheet, the headline for Q4 and the year was the new $350,000,000 credit facility announced in November. The facility consists of a new 300,000,000 dollars Term Loan A and a $50,000,000 revolver. This new facility was a key objective for us in our 1st year as a public company as we focused on replacing the much higher cost of debt we carried for almost a year. The new facility results in about $17,000,000 in annual interest savings. Speaker 300:10:07Inclusive of the new term loan, our net debt position was $341,000,000 at December 31, 2023. We ended the year with approximately $28,000,000 in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents. Combined with our strong cash generation profile, we have ample liquidity to run the business and execute on our growth priorities. Let me now turn to our outlook for 2024. We have set guidance for this year of revenue growth greater than 23% and adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 40%. Speaker 300:10:42Our guidance reflects our expectation of another year of strong growth and profitability driven by continued paying user growth, a full year contribution from our weekly subscription offering, which was rolled out globally in May of 2023 and contributions from existing and new offerings expected later in the year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin guide reflects investments in our strategic priorities that George highlighted, including product roadmap, talent acquisition and modest brand spending. I also want to briefly touch on how we're thinking about international opportunities. We continue to see fairly consistent and healthy MAU growth around the world and we have been pleasantly surprised by the pace of monetization. International markets contribute more than 40% of total revenue in 2023, responding well to the weeklies and boost product launches, despite us not having yet focused on our in market localization and price optimization efforts. Speaker 300:11:48As a result, we will be prioritizing go to market optimizations in key countries with the goal of further accelerating paying user growth over time. This effort is in the early stages, so we have not factored any uplift into our outlook for this year. With that, I'll ask the operator to open up the line for questions. Operator00:12:12Thank you very much, Ms. Krantz. We'll go first this afternoon to Andrew Merrick at Raymond James. Hi. Speaker 400:12:36Thank you for taking my questions. Wanted to talk a little bit about younger users. So can you talk a bit about your level of satisfaction in the top of funnel with younger users? Been hearing anecdotal reports of burnout with dating apps and some of the mass market comps. I guess, how are you tuning your product and AI to position Grindr well for changing consumer taste to the extent that you see them and maybe you don't? Speaker 200:13:01Yes. Thank you, Andrew. It's a great question. Maria should be joining the call. So we believe that Grindr has a lot of room to grow ahead in terms of acquiring new users, both in the U. Speaker 200:13:10S. And abroad. And we're seeing that happen in general in our product. We saw 8% mile growth last year and we expect that to continue in the future. The reason I think threefold and bear with me as I walk through that. Speaker 200:13:24One is that gay people have been connecting digitally for a very long time. That was actually true before the Internet dating took over. A lot of people would use phone dating services to connect, and then they shipped it on to the web. When I finished college in 2000, everybody I would meet in Washington DC or in New York was already on dating products like jay.com and Manhunt and others. And so this has been part of the fabric of the user base for a very long time. Speaker 200:13:51And all the research that we see out there suggests that this is going to continue. Secondly, the reason this is true is because the community is not as big as the straight population, right? We're a subset of the population. And so you want to be around people who are more like you, who have something in common with you. And the digital channels like Grindr are a great way to connect to people who are like you, especially with younger users who are still trying to figure themselves out. Speaker 200:14:19They just turned 18, they became adults, they came out potentially or just finished college. Figuring out what life would be like as someone who is different than majority of the population allows you to do that better if you're around people who are like you. And so that benefits you in being in a product like Render that has the full subset of the people in that community. And then lastly, even in real life, people oftentimes move into large cities. They go into neighborhoods and live in neighborhoods, right? Speaker 200:14:50Every large city has a neighborhood. And Grindr is a neighborhood on your digital device. It is a neighborhood on the phone. And so we are able to recreate that in real life experience for users already. And that's actually why our users use Grindr in so many other ways than just dating on all the other kind of ways in which they connect to come with each other. Speaker 200:15:10So that's kind of what we're seeing so far and what we think will continue to happen in the future. As far as products are concerned, it's very true that Grindr has a ton of room and opportunity to build new products to address the needs that users have. Our product development is done through understanding what users want and then trying to meet them in those needs through new features and new products. We have built a really robust product strategy over the last year that we're really excited about. And I think a lot of it is addressing their needs. Speaker 200:15:39So we're pretty excited about giving you a chance to kind of see more of that and hear more about it at the June Investor Day that we hope. Speaker 400:15:47Great. Really appreciate the color there, very helpful. And then maybe one more if I could. It sounds like you're still working on scaling your team back up after the return to office mandate. How has the progress been against your goals to date? Speaker 400:16:00Any significant learnings there? And maybe any specific areas that have been easier or harder to add headcount in than you had thought? Speaker 200:16:08Totally, yes. I mean, as you can see from our financials, we had about 100 people at the end of last year. So definitely much smaller than we had inherited when we joined and we beat that at about 225 or so. It's really important for us to be able to hire really right talent that is really committed to both the mission of the business and to working the way we as a business want to work. We are really committed to a performance driven culture in which work matters. Speaker 200:16:36We're doing really big things. The goals are audacious, and we want people who want to go after those goals by working really hard. And so I do not expect us to be able to get back to the numbers we're at in a year. Can you hire that many people in a year? Absolutely. Speaker 200:16:49But you won't be able to maintain your bar as well and you won't be able to integrate people into the company as well and so we don't want to grow that quickly. We are fortunate that we can supplement any needs that we have in hiring contractors. We have a really strong set of contractors supporting us in engineering and product and in some of the other areas. They are fully integrated with our team. So our pods in engineering, for example, combine contractors and full time employees together. Speaker 200:17:14And so it's a very integrated model of working and that's been going really well. Now that said, we've had actually incredible success in hiring. I won't share any specific numbers, but I was really pleasantly surprised over the last 3 months, for example, at the speed of being able to hire engineers and bringing folks on board. It's been really awesome. I think it speaks to the fact that we have a really amazing business. Speaker 200:17:34It's not common to find businesses that are growing as well as Grindr is growing and that have as high of an EBITDA margin as we're doing. So for a lot of people who want to be in a nimble environment where they can have really big impact, Grindr is a really affluent place to work. And so we've seen really great progress in bringing on board a great engineering talent into Grindr over the last few months. Speaker 500:17:55Appreciate the detail. Thank you. Operator00:18:00Thank you. We go next now to Rohit Kulkarni at ROTH MKM. Speaker 500:18:06Hey, thank you. Congrats on a great quarter and a good 'twenty three. First question to you, George. On this first priority that you outlined, you want to better understand user intent. If you could double click on that, perhaps talk about how are you thinking about new products, incremental investments and the ROI? Speaker 500:18:29It seems as if ROI is going to come in '25 and not in 'twenty four. So just maybe talk about what is it that you want to achieve when it comes to learning user intent? Speaker 200:18:41Yes, absolutely. So we believe that Grindr is used in a lot of different ways. That's based on data. We've even shared some data publicly. 90% of people are using Grindr for casual dating, but about 50% to 60% of people want to use it for long term relationships, for example. Speaker 200:18:58And then we also know that they use it for travel to kind of figure out what they should be doing when they travel to new places and kind of use this travel a lot. It's a really frequent kind of thing to do for health information and public health information in particular, for social connections with each other, for friendships. So there's a broad set of use cases that people already use the product for, which is really fantastic. We love that and that's a big reason why we have as much engagement as we do with, say, 121,000,000,000 chats shared last year. And so what we want to do with the product is to extend the product functionality to support all these different use cases. Speaker 200:19:33Right now, a lot of this happens through chatting with each other, which is great. We want to encourage that. But imagine a world where with a click of a button, you could go into a part of the product where everyone is engaged in desire to have a long term relationship, right? So it's a subset of our users, but they all want to date. Maybe your profile there is a little bit different, maybe slightly different type of a profile than you might have for your more casual dating experience. Speaker 200:20:02Maybe you say different things in it because people are interested in different information. Maybe your photos are different as well. So that would actually be really appealing to our users because we've heard that from them. They want that. And we believe that it will create actually better engagement with users to be able to kind of understand what the desires are. Speaker 200:20:19And so the products that we are envisioning are all built around what do users need, what do we hear from users and how can we satisfy those needs. As far as our eye on those things, we tend to think of the hard product development and where it kind of drives revenue in a very interconnected way, both along a la carte and in subscriptions. Some of the products that we're building and are testing such as Teleport are envisioned as a la carte products. So those will be on a per use basis, people will pay for them. And then some of the other products like dating, which is a combination of many, many features, we probably envision as a new subscription tier, where people will pay for that because it's a big value add. Speaker 200:20:59In general, my experience in building technology now for nearly 20 years is when you create value for people, they're very excited to pay for it because they see a lot of benefits from that. And so as long as we build products that create value, I'm very confident that we'll be able to drive good financials out from that. Speaker 300:21:17And Rohit, just to add a little bit to that. I mean, when you think about ROI, we're really thinking about just increasing the number of paying users. And as you saw, we increased it by 19% in 2023. And so as we put out more use cases that we've already done research on to recognize that, yes, our users are looking for Teleport, they are looking for things like right now and dating, there's like a lot of research that we put into play before we design the product and make sure it's pretty successful. That being said, usually our products take a V1 or V2 to actually really hit perfection and that's what you saw with Boost this year. Speaker 300:21:56Boost did a very nice job in our a la carte performing nicely for us. We did tweak it at the beginning of 2023 to really develop that kind of incremental gain. So yes, we think about the ROI, but we recognize that it could be a V1 or a V2. And before we do it, we certainly do user research to make sure we actually prioritize the products that they want. Speaker 500:22:20Okay. Thank you, guys. And one on '24 guidance, to the extent you can provide more color on the drivers behind the revenue growth, both on paying users and kind of ARPU as well directionally even? And also, obviously margins you're guiding to slight step down in margins although when all said and done they may still be above 23 levels. Maybe just double click on that too. Speaker 500:22:51What's your hiring outlook as well as how should we think about the cadence of margins as the year progresses? Speaker 300:23:00So certainly, we're really excited about another strong year in 2024, and I would say that our guidance is still extremely excellent. Certainly with respect to 2024, we're really thinking about the weeklies in the first half of the year. As you know, it really fully launched mid year in 2023, so we'll get the full year benefit of that. We also have a few new products that we've alluded to that we'll be rolling out that are already in test. Again, it could be a V1 kind of version. Speaker 300:23:30So right now, you see our guidance at 23% for revenue growth. Remember last year, we sold 25% and we actually ended the year with 33%. So there'll be more to come as the year progresses. I think you probably have recognized our philosophy is certainly to be more prudent at the beginning of the year as we still continue to test before the full rollout goes out. With respect to our investments, like George said, we have 3 real investments, product, brand, headcount. Speaker 300:24:03I would suggest that really from an EBITDA perspective, you're not going to see too much movement there because a lot of our consultants that are on board now, we're going to flip into FTEs. So I don't think you're seeing like any big bumps in terms of headcount spend. Again, prudent in our guidance at the beginning of the year to confirm that we will absolutely hit our numbers. Speaker 200:24:29Should I Speaker 300:24:29get all those things to grow it? Speaker 500:24:31Yes, absolutely. Well said and thanks and congrats again. Speaker 200:24:34Thanks. Thank you. Operator00:24:38Thank you. We go next now to John Blackledge at TD Cowen. Speaker 600:24:43Great. Thanks. Two questions. First, you mentioned that you plan to amplify the brand story as part of your 2024 priorities. Operator00:24:54But do you plan to Speaker 600:24:55adjust marketing efforts or launch a branding campaign to help with the story? Just kind of curious around color there. And then the second question would be around payer conversion that took a step up in 2023. Just curious about the drivers of the improvement there. And then kind of can we expect further conversion uptick as part of the 2024 outlook? Speaker 600:25:19Thank you. Speaker 200:25:21Great. Thank you very much for those questions. I'll take the first one and then Gennen will take the second one. So on marketing, just from a spend perspective, any increase in marketing spend is fairly limited. So its impact on margins is very small. Speaker 200:25:34But we do think that the work that we will be doing in marketing is very important and critical for the future. So Grindr has done amazing things historically in the community and frankly for the world and for people who need our product. We are in 190 countries and about 60 of those people to be gay and Glenda is the only way for people to be able to connect in many of those places. And but at the same time, there are a lot of assumptions about the product in people's minds that are just either not true or maybe were true a decade ago and have long been addressed and are we approach this there differently now. And so what our objective with marketing is, on the one hand, is to correct some of these assumptions and to really amplify the awesome things that Grindr does. Speaker 200:26:21To talk about the fact that, for example, last year, 230,000 people in the U. S. Ordered an HIV test through Grindr. We're able to get that at their home and about a third of those people had never had an HIV test before. Those are the kinds of stories that we don't talk about a lot, but we need to so that people have a better appreciation of what Grindr does and the role that it plays in the society. Speaker 200:26:44And then secondly, with our users themselves, they come to our social media channels to enjoy really fun kind of content. That can be really powerful in creating engagement with our users outside of the product as well as keeping us top of mind with new users in the future. And that's really effective. We have really powerful social channels out there. And so investing in content in those social channels is really valuable for us. Speaker 200:27:11And so we just recently brought on board a new leader for brand marketing. We actually moved him from the UK because he's so uniquely qualified to be effective for us. And already we are seeing really positive impact of the work that he and his team are doing. For example, recently they launched a new podcast and it's just taken off in a really incredible way with 100 of 1000 of people engaging with that podcast content across different social media channels. We think that's really powerful and can continue to do that will be really valuable. Speaker 200:27:42So nothing in terms of user acquisition focus from cost perspective, so that's not something we need to do or would like to do. But in terms of telling our story better across broader channels as well as social channels, I can't give you value. Diana, for the second question, we'll do it for you. Speaker 300:28:01Thank you for the question. So you saw that we grew our paying users by 19% in 2023 and really we can attribute that to our new product offerings. So yes, we put out the weekly subscription tier, which was really the same as the extra, but a lower price point. We were extremely pleased with how little cannibalization we had, how we converted more and more users. And in fact, we had a double benefit because often the weeklies ended up renewing and therefore that actually also impacted our ARPU. Speaker 300:28:33In terms of conversion, you're absolutely right. We had a very nice lift in 2023 for conversion. What I would suggest is we certainly see continued MAU growth and you should imagine that our conversion rates like there's no real expectation in our guidance so far of changes in conversion. We had a nice uplift in 2023. Speaker 600:28:56That's great. Thanks for the color. If I could just do one quick follow-up. George, just curious about your view of the competitive environment. Max launched Archer last year, last June. Speaker 600:29:11So just curious, just general competitive environment in the U. S. And outside the U. S. For Grindr. Speaker 200:29:17Absolutely. So we know that our users are going to be using more than one app. That's very common in the dating space for people to have more than one app, and that's perfectly okay. What we do want to make sure is that our users are looking at Grindr as kind of first in wallet product. As you think of the credit card analogies, meaning they want to come to us often and for all the things that they want to accomplish in the product. Speaker 200:29:41And it's really important for us to be serving them correctly through the right features and services to meet their needs. I think if you look at our engagement numbers, they're kind of speaking for themselves in terms of how active users are with the product. And so that's going really well and we haven't seen any concerns on that front in the last year and don't expect to see anything in the future. So from that perspective of competition, we obviously are we welcome competition and keeps us on our toes, but it's not something that we are in any way concerned about. As far as Archer specifically, I think there has not been a lot of conversation about that in the community because it hasn't really taken off. Speaker 200:30:16And so on that one specifically, we're not in any way concerned. But obviously, we're always looking at competition and ensuring that we are focused on the right things in that product. But I think in general, for a business like ours, the best thing you can do is listen to the user and try to follow in the direction that the user wants to go to and that way you can build really great products to satisfy. Speaker 600:30:36Thank you. Thanks so much. Speaker 200:30:40Thank you. We'll Operator00:30:44go next now to Emily Stikes at New Street Research. Speaker 700:30:49Hi. Yes. Thanks for taking the question. So a theme across a lot of data apps right now is that they seem to be struggling to provide the Gen Z audience specifically with an experience that meets their expectations. Do you feel like Grindr faces similar challenge? Speaker 700:31:05And if so, what is the plan to help cater to this specific audience? Speaker 300:31:11Hey there. So actually we are not finding that at all. In fact, we continue to enjoy an influx of users beginning at the age of 18. It really is a place where they discover themselves and they become part of the community and they chat with other folks in the community and really, I think link and connect. And so we aren't seeing any of those trends. Speaker 300:31:35In fact, you can see from our results, the paying users continue to go up. Our MAU continues to grow by 8%. I mean, this is a very, very healthy environment. Remember that Grindr was launched 15 years ago with the primary goal of connecting the community and it has done so in 190 countries. We're number 1 in over 180 of those. Speaker 300:31:58And our metrics in terms of chat, remember, time spent is 60 minutes on the app that has not dropped at all, really suggests to us that we remain a vital fabric of the community. Speaker 700:32:12Great. Thank you. Operator00:32:32And it appears we have no further questions this afternoon. Mr. Arison, I'd like to turn things back to you, sir, for any closing comments. Speaker 200:32:38Great. Well, thank you very much for to everyone who joined the call and for taking the time. It has been great to do this earnings call. It's our 1st year as a public company, and done really well, and so we're excited to be sharing these results. I'd just like to close out by amplifying a few points. Speaker 200:32:53First, we are obviously very proud of the performance that the client team delivered in 2023. It was in some respects a challenging year from the perspective of our some departures and whatnot. And so given that in that environment, the team performed as well as it did is really exciting. And we're also really excited about what we can do in 2024 as we have spoken to through our guidance. We have really great momentum in the business with both users and the products that we have today as well as really great momentum both domestically and internationally and with the things that we're going to do over the near and medium term. Speaker 200:33:27There's a lot of potential to offer new offerings to our users, some of which are already in test for us and some are being built this year to go into test late this year or next year. And I think that's going to have a really fantastic impact on the business, both from the user engagement perspective and the financial perspective. As we've seen many times, we're really early as we've said many times, we're really early in our journey as a company that's focused on financial growth in addition to user engagement. And so that really has positioned us really well to show great growth in the future. Glenda has built a really incredible asset over the last 15 years. Speaker 200:34:05We're just coming up on our 15 year anniversary, and so it's quite exciting. Our team realizes how important it is to nurture this asset in the future and to grow it as a durable, profitable and highly test generating business. We also recognize that we have work to do to help investors understand our story a lot better and appreciate the great business and product that Grindr is and to help make it easier for you to invest. And so we are excited for investors to come on the journey. We look forward to sharing a lot more about our story and what we intend to do in the future at our Investor Day in June and really look forward to seeing you there and introducing you to more members of our team. Speaker 200:34:43So thank you for joining us today and hope everybody has a great day. Operator00:34:48Thank you, Mr. Harrison. Again, ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude the Grindr 4th quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Again, we'd like to thank you all so much for joining us and wish you all a great day. Goodbye.Read morePowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallGrindr Q4 202300:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2x Earnings DocumentsPress Release(8-K)Annual report(10-K) Grindr Earnings HeadlinesGrindr to Participate in the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications ConferenceMay 6 at 5:47 PM | gurufocus.comGrindr to Participate in the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications ConferenceMay 6 at 4:57 PM | businesswire.comElon Warns “America Is Broke”. Trump’s Plan Inside.Elon Musk has avoided two major financial crises before. He pulled Tesla and SpaceX back from the brink of collapse and built two of the most valuable companies in history. Now, he's sounding the alarm about America's $36 trillion debt time bomb that could destroy the fabric of our society.As head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President Trump, Musk is exposing just how bad things are...May 7, 2025 | American Hartford Gold (Ad)Noteworthy Friday Option Activity: GRND, BC, AVGOMay 4 at 11:45 PM | nasdaq.comGrindr Announces Date of First Quarter 2025 Financial Results Earnings CallApril 24, 2025 | businesswire.comGrindr Inc. (GRND): A Bull Case TheoryApril 17, 2025 | insidermonkey.comSee More Grindr Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like Grindr? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on Grindr and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About GrindrGrindr (NYSE:GRND) operates social network and dating application for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities worldwide. Its platform enables LGBTQ people to find and engage with each other, share content and experiences, and express themselves. The company offers ad-supported service and a premium subscription version. Grindr Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in West Hollywood, California.View Grindr ProfileRead more More Earnings Resources from MarketBeat Earnings Tools Today's Earnings Tomorrow's Earnings Next Week's Earnings Upcoming Earnings Calls Earnings Newsletter Earnings Call Transcripts Earnings Beats & Misses Corporate Guidance Earnings Screener Earnings By Country U.S. Earnings Reports Canadian Earnings Reports U.K. Earnings Reports Latest Articles Disney Stock Jumps on Earnings—Is the Magic Sustainable?Archer Stock Eyes Q1 Earnings After UAE UpdatesFord Motor Stock Rises After Earnings, But Momentum May Not Last Broadcom Stock Gets a Lift on Hyperscaler Earnings & CapEx BoostPalantir Stock Drops Despite Stellar Earnings: What's Next?Is Eli Lilly a Buy After Weak Earnings and CVS-Novo Partnership?Is Reddit Stock a Buy, Sell, or Hold After Earnings Release? Upcoming Earnings Monster Beverage (5/8/2025)Brookfield (5/8/2025)Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (5/8/2025)ConocoPhillips (5/8/2025)Cheniere Energy (5/8/2025)McKesson (5/8/2025)Shopify (5/8/2025)Enbridge (5/9/2025)Petróleo Brasileiro S.A. - Petrobras (5/12/2025)Simon Property Group (5/12/2025) Get 30 Days of MarketBeat All Access for Free Sign up for MarketBeat All Access to gain access to MarketBeat's full suite of research tools. Start Your 30-Day Trial MarketBeat All Access Features Best-in-Class Portfolio Monitoring Get personalized stock ideas. Compare portfolio to indices. Check stock news, ratings, SEC filings, and more. Stock Ideas and Recommendations See daily stock ideas from top analysts. Receive short-term trading ideas from MarketBeat. Identify trending stocks on social media. Advanced Stock Screeners and Research Tools Use our seven stock screeners to find suitable stocks. Stay informed with MarketBeat's real-time news. Export data to Excel for personal analysis. Sign in to your free account to enjoy these benefits In-depth profiles and analysis for 20,000 public companies. Real-time analyst ratings, insider transactions, earnings data, and more. Our daily ratings and market update email newsletter. Sign in to your free account to enjoy all that MarketBeat has to offer. Sign In Create Account Your Email Address: Email Address Required Your Password: Password Required Log In or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google Forgot your password? Your Email Address: Please enter your email address. Please enter a valid email address Choose a Password: Please enter your password. Your password must be at least 8 characters long and contain at least 1 number, 1 letter, and 1 special character. Create My Account (Free) or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google By creating a free account, you agree to our terms of service. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
There are 8 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:01Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Beau, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Grindr 4th Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Operator00:00:27I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Tolu Adiafe, Grindr's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am. Speaker 100:00:34Thank you, moderator. Hello, and welcome to the Grindr earnings call for the Q4 full year 2023. Today's call will be led by Grindr's CEO, George Arison and CFO, Vanna Kranz. They will make a few brief remarks and then we'll open it up for questions. Please note, Grindr released its shareholder letter this afternoon and this is available on the SEC's website in Grindr's Investor page at investors. Speaker 100:01:00Grinderdot com. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar such statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC. Speaker 100:01:29During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding non GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP measures, are included in the earnings release we issued today, which has been posted on the Investor Relations page of Grindr's website and in Grindr's filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to George. Speaker 200:01:53Thank you, Togo, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. 2023, our 1st year as a public company, was a success by every measure. We made significant improvements in our product, increased monetization for our weekly subscription and boost a la carte and exceeded our financial guidance. We continue to welcome more users to Grindr with average MAU growth of 8% for the year. The engagement has remained best in class with more than 121,000,000,000 chat sent between users. Speaker 200:02:23These strong results due to the hard work of our team and also to grant us enduring relationship with the gay community as we help users all over the world to finally connect with Ananda. We also embrace a deep commitment to service in the global gay community, most notably through our Grindr4quality initiatives, including connecting users to more than 235,000 HIV test kits in the U. S, an effort we are striving to bring to many more countries. In 2023, we also laid a strong foundation for long term growth, such as developing a robust product roadmap, which includes some great work we are doing on AI and adding outstanding, highly accomplished leaders to our team. In November, we completed a landmark step for Grindr with the refinancing of our debt, closing a new $350,000,000 facility with some of the world's leading financial institutions. Speaker 200:03:18Debt refinancing is a core team in the business world, but when the first public company serving the LGBTQ community can interest rate environment, it highlights not only the strength and credibility of our business, but also signals that we can help drive a more open and welcoming financial ecosystem. This is very important to our mission, and I want to thank Dana, her team and our banking partners for their work and support in making it happen. Further details about our performance and 2023 focus areas can be found in our shareholder letter, which I encourage you to read. Next, I'd like to outline our 3 key priorities for 2024. Given the robust nature of our free offering to increase monetization over the long term, we need to provide new value added features to our users that they're willing to pay for. Speaker 200:04:13To do this, we need to build features and products with a better understanding of our user intent. We know that the vast majority of Grendel's users use it for title baiting, but we also know that the same users use it for much more as a primary place to find long term relationships, a source for networking, for finding information about what's going on in the community, where the safe places are to go in different countries, and much more. Building features that better serve user specific intent will allow us to cater to the needs of our customers, creating value for them and opportunities for monetization for Grindr. Our second priority focuses on our brand and ensuring that we proudly tell the story of Grindr's great legacy of serving and positively impacting millions of people in our user community around the world. Legacy perceptions of Grind are rooted in societal, cultural and historical prejudice, sensationalism and shame, reinforced by long since resolved issues and inaccuracies about our product are still present all around us and live in our audience's heads. Speaker 200:05:16Left unaddressed, these inaccurate perceptions can have negative long term effects on our business. We recognize that creating value for our users and shareholders means taking these issues head on. In 2024, we're focused on amplifying the crucial and impactful work that is at our core by telling the true story of Grindr's growing culture and the real relevance and success of our product both within and outside of the community. And our 3rd priority is to build a performance driven culture of excellence and innovation. We started out with our return to ops initiative last summer. Speaker 200:05:51We believe strongly that the combination of an important social mission we have workforce planning to win is what creates great companies. We are focused on building out our team in key functions with high performance, and we believe that the strong performance driven culture will help drive strong long term growth for Grindr, starting with the 2024 guidance we are providing today. I'm excited to share more on all of these initiatives and much more about Grindr at our 1st Investor Day, which will be held on June 26, 2024 in New York City. The event will be a fantastic opportunity to gain deeper insight into our company and engage with leadership. Registration details will be shared soon. Speaker 200:06:34With that, I'll hand it over to Vanna to discuss our financial performance. Speaker 300:06:40Thank you, George, and hello, everyone. I'll start by summing up the year and then dive into the Q4. Grindr delivered outstanding results in 2023, with revenue growing 33 percent to CAD260,000,000 for the full year. And our adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 42% of revenue for a total of $110,000,000 Both revenue and adjusted EBITDA margin were well ahead of our original guidance for the year and our revenue increased further from our guidance update in November. Overall, our performance was driven by a combination of paying user growth and increased average revenue per paying user as we benefited from the success of the launch of the extra weekly subscription and a full year contribution from our popular Boost alacarte offering. Speaker 300:07:30In fact, our direct revenue grew by 38% in 2023. We continue to see strong engagement in our app throughout the year as average monthly active users increased 8% in 2023 over the prior year, and our average paying users increased 19% to a record 937,000. Our average direct revenue per paying user grew 16% year over year to $20.05 primarily driven by the extra weekly subscription. Turning now to the 4th quarter, revenue was $72,000,000 up 32% year over year from $55,000,000 This includes $62,000,000 of direct revenue, which was up 39% year over year and $10,000,000 of indirect revenue, which was up 1% year over year. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue for the Q4 of 2020 3 were $37,000,000 down 0.3% versus last year. Speaker 300:08:33An increase in people cost was largely offset by a decline in depreciation and amortization. Operating expenses excluding cost of revenue for the full year of 20 This $6,000,000 year over year increase reflects higher people costs, which includes a $9,000,000 severance expense driven by our return to office program. This was offset by lower depreciation and amortization costs. Net loss for the Q4 was $45,000,000 compared with net income of $5,000,000 in Q4 2022. For the full year Q4 of 2023, we incurred $61,000,000 $50,000,000 respectively, in expenses related to warrants and our debt refinancing. Speaker 300:09:25Adjusted EBITDA for the Q4 was 29,000,000 equating to a 40% adjusted EBITDA margin. Turning to our balance sheet, the headline for Q4 and the year was the new $350,000,000 credit facility announced in November. The facility consists of a new 300,000,000 dollars Term Loan A and a $50,000,000 revolver. This new facility was a key objective for us in our 1st year as a public company as we focused on replacing the much higher cost of debt we carried for almost a year. The new facility results in about $17,000,000 in annual interest savings. Speaker 300:10:07Inclusive of the new term loan, our net debt position was $341,000,000 at December 31, 2023. We ended the year with approximately $28,000,000 in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents. Combined with our strong cash generation profile, we have ample liquidity to run the business and execute on our growth priorities. Let me now turn to our outlook for 2024. We have set guidance for this year of revenue growth greater than 23% and adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 40%. Speaker 300:10:42Our guidance reflects our expectation of another year of strong growth and profitability driven by continued paying user growth, a full year contribution from our weekly subscription offering, which was rolled out globally in May of 2023 and contributions from existing and new offerings expected later in the year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin guide reflects investments in our strategic priorities that George highlighted, including product roadmap, talent acquisition and modest brand spending. I also want to briefly touch on how we're thinking about international opportunities. We continue to see fairly consistent and healthy MAU growth around the world and we have been pleasantly surprised by the pace of monetization. International markets contribute more than 40% of total revenue in 2023, responding well to the weeklies and boost product launches, despite us not having yet focused on our in market localization and price optimization efforts. Speaker 300:11:48As a result, we will be prioritizing go to market optimizations in key countries with the goal of further accelerating paying user growth over time. This effort is in the early stages, so we have not factored any uplift into our outlook for this year. With that, I'll ask the operator to open up the line for questions. Operator00:12:12Thank you very much, Ms. Krantz. We'll go first this afternoon to Andrew Merrick at Raymond James. Hi. Speaker 400:12:36Thank you for taking my questions. Wanted to talk a little bit about younger users. So can you talk a bit about your level of satisfaction in the top of funnel with younger users? Been hearing anecdotal reports of burnout with dating apps and some of the mass market comps. I guess, how are you tuning your product and AI to position Grindr well for changing consumer taste to the extent that you see them and maybe you don't? Speaker 200:13:01Yes. Thank you, Andrew. It's a great question. Maria should be joining the call. So we believe that Grindr has a lot of room to grow ahead in terms of acquiring new users, both in the U. Speaker 200:13:10S. And abroad. And we're seeing that happen in general in our product. We saw 8% mile growth last year and we expect that to continue in the future. The reason I think threefold and bear with me as I walk through that. Speaker 200:13:24One is that gay people have been connecting digitally for a very long time. That was actually true before the Internet dating took over. A lot of people would use phone dating services to connect, and then they shipped it on to the web. When I finished college in 2000, everybody I would meet in Washington DC or in New York was already on dating products like jay.com and Manhunt and others. And so this has been part of the fabric of the user base for a very long time. Speaker 200:13:51And all the research that we see out there suggests that this is going to continue. Secondly, the reason this is true is because the community is not as big as the straight population, right? We're a subset of the population. And so you want to be around people who are more like you, who have something in common with you. And the digital channels like Grindr are a great way to connect to people who are like you, especially with younger users who are still trying to figure themselves out. Speaker 200:14:19They just turned 18, they became adults, they came out potentially or just finished college. Figuring out what life would be like as someone who is different than majority of the population allows you to do that better if you're around people who are like you. And so that benefits you in being in a product like Render that has the full subset of the people in that community. And then lastly, even in real life, people oftentimes move into large cities. They go into neighborhoods and live in neighborhoods, right? Speaker 200:14:50Every large city has a neighborhood. And Grindr is a neighborhood on your digital device. It is a neighborhood on the phone. And so we are able to recreate that in real life experience for users already. And that's actually why our users use Grindr in so many other ways than just dating on all the other kind of ways in which they connect to come with each other. Speaker 200:15:10So that's kind of what we're seeing so far and what we think will continue to happen in the future. As far as products are concerned, it's very true that Grindr has a ton of room and opportunity to build new products to address the needs that users have. Our product development is done through understanding what users want and then trying to meet them in those needs through new features and new products. We have built a really robust product strategy over the last year that we're really excited about. And I think a lot of it is addressing their needs. Speaker 200:15:39So we're pretty excited about giving you a chance to kind of see more of that and hear more about it at the June Investor Day that we hope. Speaker 400:15:47Great. Really appreciate the color there, very helpful. And then maybe one more if I could. It sounds like you're still working on scaling your team back up after the return to office mandate. How has the progress been against your goals to date? Speaker 400:16:00Any significant learnings there? And maybe any specific areas that have been easier or harder to add headcount in than you had thought? Speaker 200:16:08Totally, yes. I mean, as you can see from our financials, we had about 100 people at the end of last year. So definitely much smaller than we had inherited when we joined and we beat that at about 225 or so. It's really important for us to be able to hire really right talent that is really committed to both the mission of the business and to working the way we as a business want to work. We are really committed to a performance driven culture in which work matters. Speaker 200:16:36We're doing really big things. The goals are audacious, and we want people who want to go after those goals by working really hard. And so I do not expect us to be able to get back to the numbers we're at in a year. Can you hire that many people in a year? Absolutely. Speaker 200:16:49But you won't be able to maintain your bar as well and you won't be able to integrate people into the company as well and so we don't want to grow that quickly. We are fortunate that we can supplement any needs that we have in hiring contractors. We have a really strong set of contractors supporting us in engineering and product and in some of the other areas. They are fully integrated with our team. So our pods in engineering, for example, combine contractors and full time employees together. Speaker 200:17:14And so it's a very integrated model of working and that's been going really well. Now that said, we've had actually incredible success in hiring. I won't share any specific numbers, but I was really pleasantly surprised over the last 3 months, for example, at the speed of being able to hire engineers and bringing folks on board. It's been really awesome. I think it speaks to the fact that we have a really amazing business. Speaker 200:17:34It's not common to find businesses that are growing as well as Grindr is growing and that have as high of an EBITDA margin as we're doing. So for a lot of people who want to be in a nimble environment where they can have really big impact, Grindr is a really affluent place to work. And so we've seen really great progress in bringing on board a great engineering talent into Grindr over the last few months. Speaker 500:17:55Appreciate the detail. Thank you. Operator00:18:00Thank you. We go next now to Rohit Kulkarni at ROTH MKM. Speaker 500:18:06Hey, thank you. Congrats on a great quarter and a good 'twenty three. First question to you, George. On this first priority that you outlined, you want to better understand user intent. If you could double click on that, perhaps talk about how are you thinking about new products, incremental investments and the ROI? Speaker 500:18:29It seems as if ROI is going to come in '25 and not in 'twenty four. So just maybe talk about what is it that you want to achieve when it comes to learning user intent? Speaker 200:18:41Yes, absolutely. So we believe that Grindr is used in a lot of different ways. That's based on data. We've even shared some data publicly. 90% of people are using Grindr for casual dating, but about 50% to 60% of people want to use it for long term relationships, for example. Speaker 200:18:58And then we also know that they use it for travel to kind of figure out what they should be doing when they travel to new places and kind of use this travel a lot. It's a really frequent kind of thing to do for health information and public health information in particular, for social connections with each other, for friendships. So there's a broad set of use cases that people already use the product for, which is really fantastic. We love that and that's a big reason why we have as much engagement as we do with, say, 121,000,000,000 chats shared last year. And so what we want to do with the product is to extend the product functionality to support all these different use cases. Speaker 200:19:33Right now, a lot of this happens through chatting with each other, which is great. We want to encourage that. But imagine a world where with a click of a button, you could go into a part of the product where everyone is engaged in desire to have a long term relationship, right? So it's a subset of our users, but they all want to date. Maybe your profile there is a little bit different, maybe slightly different type of a profile than you might have for your more casual dating experience. Speaker 200:20:02Maybe you say different things in it because people are interested in different information. Maybe your photos are different as well. So that would actually be really appealing to our users because we've heard that from them. They want that. And we believe that it will create actually better engagement with users to be able to kind of understand what the desires are. Speaker 200:20:19And so the products that we are envisioning are all built around what do users need, what do we hear from users and how can we satisfy those needs. As far as our eye on those things, we tend to think of the hard product development and where it kind of drives revenue in a very interconnected way, both along a la carte and in subscriptions. Some of the products that we're building and are testing such as Teleport are envisioned as a la carte products. So those will be on a per use basis, people will pay for them. And then some of the other products like dating, which is a combination of many, many features, we probably envision as a new subscription tier, where people will pay for that because it's a big value add. Speaker 200:20:59In general, my experience in building technology now for nearly 20 years is when you create value for people, they're very excited to pay for it because they see a lot of benefits from that. And so as long as we build products that create value, I'm very confident that we'll be able to drive good financials out from that. Speaker 300:21:17And Rohit, just to add a little bit to that. I mean, when you think about ROI, we're really thinking about just increasing the number of paying users. And as you saw, we increased it by 19% in 2023. And so as we put out more use cases that we've already done research on to recognize that, yes, our users are looking for Teleport, they are looking for things like right now and dating, there's like a lot of research that we put into play before we design the product and make sure it's pretty successful. That being said, usually our products take a V1 or V2 to actually really hit perfection and that's what you saw with Boost this year. Speaker 300:21:56Boost did a very nice job in our a la carte performing nicely for us. We did tweak it at the beginning of 2023 to really develop that kind of incremental gain. So yes, we think about the ROI, but we recognize that it could be a V1 or a V2. And before we do it, we certainly do user research to make sure we actually prioritize the products that they want. Speaker 500:22:20Okay. Thank you, guys. And one on '24 guidance, to the extent you can provide more color on the drivers behind the revenue growth, both on paying users and kind of ARPU as well directionally even? And also, obviously margins you're guiding to slight step down in margins although when all said and done they may still be above 23 levels. Maybe just double click on that too. Speaker 500:22:51What's your hiring outlook as well as how should we think about the cadence of margins as the year progresses? Speaker 300:23:00So certainly, we're really excited about another strong year in 2024, and I would say that our guidance is still extremely excellent. Certainly with respect to 2024, we're really thinking about the weeklies in the first half of the year. As you know, it really fully launched mid year in 2023, so we'll get the full year benefit of that. We also have a few new products that we've alluded to that we'll be rolling out that are already in test. Again, it could be a V1 kind of version. Speaker 300:23:30So right now, you see our guidance at 23% for revenue growth. Remember last year, we sold 25% and we actually ended the year with 33%. So there'll be more to come as the year progresses. I think you probably have recognized our philosophy is certainly to be more prudent at the beginning of the year as we still continue to test before the full rollout goes out. With respect to our investments, like George said, we have 3 real investments, product, brand, headcount. Speaker 300:24:03I would suggest that really from an EBITDA perspective, you're not going to see too much movement there because a lot of our consultants that are on board now, we're going to flip into FTEs. So I don't think you're seeing like any big bumps in terms of headcount spend. Again, prudent in our guidance at the beginning of the year to confirm that we will absolutely hit our numbers. Speaker 200:24:29Should I Speaker 300:24:29get all those things to grow it? Speaker 500:24:31Yes, absolutely. Well said and thanks and congrats again. Speaker 200:24:34Thanks. Thank you. Operator00:24:38Thank you. We go next now to John Blackledge at TD Cowen. Speaker 600:24:43Great. Thanks. Two questions. First, you mentioned that you plan to amplify the brand story as part of your 2024 priorities. Operator00:24:54But do you plan to Speaker 600:24:55adjust marketing efforts or launch a branding campaign to help with the story? Just kind of curious around color there. And then the second question would be around payer conversion that took a step up in 2023. Just curious about the drivers of the improvement there. And then kind of can we expect further conversion uptick as part of the 2024 outlook? Speaker 600:25:19Thank you. Speaker 200:25:21Great. Thank you very much for those questions. I'll take the first one and then Gennen will take the second one. So on marketing, just from a spend perspective, any increase in marketing spend is fairly limited. So its impact on margins is very small. Speaker 200:25:34But we do think that the work that we will be doing in marketing is very important and critical for the future. So Grindr has done amazing things historically in the community and frankly for the world and for people who need our product. We are in 190 countries and about 60 of those people to be gay and Glenda is the only way for people to be able to connect in many of those places. And but at the same time, there are a lot of assumptions about the product in people's minds that are just either not true or maybe were true a decade ago and have long been addressed and are we approach this there differently now. And so what our objective with marketing is, on the one hand, is to correct some of these assumptions and to really amplify the awesome things that Grindr does. Speaker 200:26:21To talk about the fact that, for example, last year, 230,000 people in the U. S. Ordered an HIV test through Grindr. We're able to get that at their home and about a third of those people had never had an HIV test before. Those are the kinds of stories that we don't talk about a lot, but we need to so that people have a better appreciation of what Grindr does and the role that it plays in the society. Speaker 200:26:44And then secondly, with our users themselves, they come to our social media channels to enjoy really fun kind of content. That can be really powerful in creating engagement with our users outside of the product as well as keeping us top of mind with new users in the future. And that's really effective. We have really powerful social channels out there. And so investing in content in those social channels is really valuable for us. Speaker 200:27:11And so we just recently brought on board a new leader for brand marketing. We actually moved him from the UK because he's so uniquely qualified to be effective for us. And already we are seeing really positive impact of the work that he and his team are doing. For example, recently they launched a new podcast and it's just taken off in a really incredible way with 100 of 1000 of people engaging with that podcast content across different social media channels. We think that's really powerful and can continue to do that will be really valuable. Speaker 200:27:42So nothing in terms of user acquisition focus from cost perspective, so that's not something we need to do or would like to do. But in terms of telling our story better across broader channels as well as social channels, I can't give you value. Diana, for the second question, we'll do it for you. Speaker 300:28:01Thank you for the question. So you saw that we grew our paying users by 19% in 2023 and really we can attribute that to our new product offerings. So yes, we put out the weekly subscription tier, which was really the same as the extra, but a lower price point. We were extremely pleased with how little cannibalization we had, how we converted more and more users. And in fact, we had a double benefit because often the weeklies ended up renewing and therefore that actually also impacted our ARPU. Speaker 300:28:33In terms of conversion, you're absolutely right. We had a very nice lift in 2023 for conversion. What I would suggest is we certainly see continued MAU growth and you should imagine that our conversion rates like there's no real expectation in our guidance so far of changes in conversion. We had a nice uplift in 2023. Speaker 600:28:56That's great. Thanks for the color. If I could just do one quick follow-up. George, just curious about your view of the competitive environment. Max launched Archer last year, last June. Speaker 600:29:11So just curious, just general competitive environment in the U. S. And outside the U. S. For Grindr. Speaker 200:29:17Absolutely. So we know that our users are going to be using more than one app. That's very common in the dating space for people to have more than one app, and that's perfectly okay. What we do want to make sure is that our users are looking at Grindr as kind of first in wallet product. As you think of the credit card analogies, meaning they want to come to us often and for all the things that they want to accomplish in the product. Speaker 200:29:41And it's really important for us to be serving them correctly through the right features and services to meet their needs. I think if you look at our engagement numbers, they're kind of speaking for themselves in terms of how active users are with the product. And so that's going really well and we haven't seen any concerns on that front in the last year and don't expect to see anything in the future. So from that perspective of competition, we obviously are we welcome competition and keeps us on our toes, but it's not something that we are in any way concerned about. As far as Archer specifically, I think there has not been a lot of conversation about that in the community because it hasn't really taken off. Speaker 200:30:16And so on that one specifically, we're not in any way concerned. But obviously, we're always looking at competition and ensuring that we are focused on the right things in that product. But I think in general, for a business like ours, the best thing you can do is listen to the user and try to follow in the direction that the user wants to go to and that way you can build really great products to satisfy. Speaker 600:30:36Thank you. Thanks so much. Speaker 200:30:40Thank you. We'll Operator00:30:44go next now to Emily Stikes at New Street Research. Speaker 700:30:49Hi. Yes. Thanks for taking the question. So a theme across a lot of data apps right now is that they seem to be struggling to provide the Gen Z audience specifically with an experience that meets their expectations. Do you feel like Grindr faces similar challenge? Speaker 700:31:05And if so, what is the plan to help cater to this specific audience? Speaker 300:31:11Hey there. So actually we are not finding that at all. In fact, we continue to enjoy an influx of users beginning at the age of 18. It really is a place where they discover themselves and they become part of the community and they chat with other folks in the community and really, I think link and connect. And so we aren't seeing any of those trends. Speaker 300:31:35In fact, you can see from our results, the paying users continue to go up. Our MAU continues to grow by 8%. I mean, this is a very, very healthy environment. Remember that Grindr was launched 15 years ago with the primary goal of connecting the community and it has done so in 190 countries. We're number 1 in over 180 of those. Speaker 300:31:58And our metrics in terms of chat, remember, time spent is 60 minutes on the app that has not dropped at all, really suggests to us that we remain a vital fabric of the community. Speaker 700:32:12Great. Thank you. Operator00:32:32And it appears we have no further questions this afternoon. Mr. Arison, I'd like to turn things back to you, sir, for any closing comments. Speaker 200:32:38Great. Well, thank you very much for to everyone who joined the call and for taking the time. It has been great to do this earnings call. It's our 1st year as a public company, and done really well, and so we're excited to be sharing these results. I'd just like to close out by amplifying a few points. Speaker 200:32:53First, we are obviously very proud of the performance that the client team delivered in 2023. It was in some respects a challenging year from the perspective of our some departures and whatnot. And so given that in that environment, the team performed as well as it did is really exciting. And we're also really excited about what we can do in 2024 as we have spoken to through our guidance. We have really great momentum in the business with both users and the products that we have today as well as really great momentum both domestically and internationally and with the things that we're going to do over the near and medium term. Speaker 200:33:27There's a lot of potential to offer new offerings to our users, some of which are already in test for us and some are being built this year to go into test late this year or next year. And I think that's going to have a really fantastic impact on the business, both from the user engagement perspective and the financial perspective. As we've seen many times, we're really early as we've said many times, we're really early in our journey as a company that's focused on financial growth in addition to user engagement. And so that really has positioned us really well to show great growth in the future. Glenda has built a really incredible asset over the last 15 years. Speaker 200:34:05We're just coming up on our 15 year anniversary, and so it's quite exciting. Our team realizes how important it is to nurture this asset in the future and to grow it as a durable, profitable and highly test generating business. We also recognize that we have work to do to help investors understand our story a lot better and appreciate the great business and product that Grindr is and to help make it easier for you to invest. And so we are excited for investors to come on the journey. We look forward to sharing a lot more about our story and what we intend to do in the future at our Investor Day in June and really look forward to seeing you there and introducing you to more members of our team. Speaker 200:34:43So thank you for joining us today and hope everybody has a great day. Operator00:34:48Thank you, Mr. Harrison. Again, ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude the Grindr 4th quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Again, we'd like to thank you all so much for joining us and wish you all a great day. Goodbye.Read morePowered by