Bridgeline Digital, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Bridgeline Digital First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star, then zero on your touchtone telephone. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Mark Downey, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mark Downey and I am the Chief Financial Officer for BridgeLine Digital. I am pleased to welcome you to our fiscal 2021 first quarter conference call. On the call this afternoon is Eric Kahn, BridgeLine President and CEO, who will begin with a discussion of our business highlights. I'll then update you on our financial results for the quarter and we'll conclude by taking questions. On February 3rd, Bridgeline announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the stock of WooRank SRL. WooRank helps companies make intelligent recommendations for optimizing search engine organic rankings by increasing their online traffic, leads, and touchless sales with an artificial intelligence system. These capabilities fit perfectly into Bridgeline's e-commerce 360 strategy and broad suite of apps. Additionally, on February 4th, BridgeLine announced a registered direct offering of approximately $2.7 million with lead investors for this offering, including those certain of the Special Situations Fund and other institutional investors. Joseph Gunner, LLC, acted as a lead placement agent and Taglish Brothers, Inc. as co-placement agent. If you would like a copy of these press releases, you can access it on our website at bridgeline.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind listeners that during this conference call, comments that we make regarding bridge lines that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934 and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause such statements to differ materially from actual future events or results. These statements are made persuading to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The internal projections and beliefs upon which we base our expectations today may change over time, and we expressly disclaim and assume no obligation to inform you if they do. Results that we report today should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Changes in economic, business, competitive, Technological, regulatory, and other factors such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures could cause Bridgeline's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the projections or forward-looking statements made today. For more detailed information about these factors and other risks that may impact our business, please review the reports and documents filed from time to time by Bridgeline Digital with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, please note that on the call this afternoon, we will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures when discussing the company's financial performance. We provide a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our GAAP financials in our earnings release. You can obtain a copy of our earnings release by visiting our website. I would now like to turn the call over to Eric Hahn, our president and CEO.

Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks to our e-commerce 360 strategy, we're delivering another quarter with operating profit and 15% growth in subscription license revenue. Previously, I've called our e-commerce 360 strategy Revenue 360. Our new marketing team has refined the naming so it's e-commerce 360 going forward. E-commerce 360 has several components that have boosted the trajectory for Bridgeline to accelerate sales, reduce costs, and guide strategic growth through M&A. In eCommerce 360, we focus our business on guiding companies to grow their online revenue with apps that drive traffic, boost conversion, and raise average order value. eCommerce 360 leads us to develop and acquire many apps that increase online revenues from these three dimensions. All apps have a shared dashboard that evaluates the strength of your eCommerce site to make recommendations for the multiple apps we have that will help you grow. eCommerce 360 apps are out of the box, enabling them to sell with a touchless sales process for faster sales cycles with lower sales and marketing expenses. The recommendation dashboard further reduces sales costs by cross-selling the best app at the right time to help our customers. Because our apps are out of the box, we can increase our gross margins as a more significant percentage of our revenue is subscription and license versus services. eCommerce 360 guides our M&A focus towards apps that can drive traffic, boost conversion, and raise average order value. The dashboard simplifies integration of new products and accelerates cross sales across acquired customer bases. We recently made a huge step forward in eCommerce 360 with the acquisition of WooRank SRL. WooRank is an app that drives traffic with a recommendation dashboard powered by an artificial intelligence engine that evaluate your search engine optimization relative to your competitors and identifies areas of opportunity. It is smart enough to recognize the quick wins and the most complicated changes you can implement to drive more traffic. Check out woorank.com. Give it a try. It's really excellent. Woorank has a goldmine of data behind its AI dashboard that includes analysis of 50 million websites over the past 10 years. We intend to combine this data with the data we've accumulated about e-commerce to enrich the recommendation engine even further. WooRank will become the heart of our dashboard for all of our apps. We will expand its recommendation capabilities to identify traffic improvements and identify which of our apps can boost conversion and rave average order for our value best. WooRank not only gives us a traffic app, a dashboard, and big data, it is a lead generating machine. WooRank.com receives over a million monthly visits and creates hundreds of new accounts each day. In terms of lead quality, it collects more than 1,500 free trials every month where the customer is willing to enter credit card information to proceed. Very qualified leads. And like many software companies, Bridgeline's primary growth challenge has been lead generation. With a steady stream of leads from WooRank and our extensive collection of apps to sell each lead, we expect the combination to yield outstanding growth results. The WooRank acquisition was structured in such a way as to allow us to assume some of their debt. This reduced the cash outlay from Bridgeline so we could acquire with our cash on hand. We raised $2.7 million this month to help accelerate our growth and specifically invest in our ability to follow up on the massive number of sales leads that were now received from WooRank. WooRank will help us grow our top line, increase our profitability, and be a central part of our lead generation and cross sales. We'll continue to look for acquisitions, and we'll continue to only pick the companies that have outstanding synergies like WooRank. With WooRank's recommendation dashboard, will be even easier for us to integrate the next acquisition and make the most out of software and customer base. At this time, I'd like to hand the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Mark Downey, to speak through our results. Mark?