WM Technology, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to WM Technology, Inc. Q1 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, VP of Investor Relations, Greg Stolowitz. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today to discuss our fiscal 2023 first quarter results. We have our Executive Chair, Doug Francis, and our CFO, Arden Lee, with us today. By now, everyone should have access to our earnings announcement. This announcement is also on our investor relations website, along with a supporting slide deck. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements, including statements about our business outlook, strategies, and long-term goals. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. They are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. For discussion of risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC's website and our investor relations website, as well as the risk and other important factors discussed in today's earnings release. We specifically disclaim any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. For the benefit of those who may be listening to the replay or archived webcast, this call was held on May 9th, 2023. Since then, we may have made announcements related to the topics discussed, so please refer to the company's most recent press releases and SEC filings. Also during this call, we'll discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures in addition to financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for the information prepared in accordance with GAAP. The reconciliation of these measures to our GAAP results can be found in our earnings presentation available on our investor relations website. And finally, this call in its entirety is being webcast from our investor relations website, and an audio replay will be available on our website in a few hours. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Doug.

Thanks, Greg, and hello to everyone joining us today. We had a good first quarter. We beat our expectations for revenue and adjusted EBITDA and generated positive free cash flow before making payments related to last year's headcount reduction. While we have more work to do, we believe we are on the right path. I said back in March that focus is the key for us this year. Focus on our marketplace, delivering value to our clients, and driving profitable, sustainable growth. We made progress in the first quarter on all three areas. On our marketplace, we've been using AI-driven algorithms to drive more personalized user experiences based on our first-party user affinity data. This includes personalized sort orders for menus that users see, as well as personalized product recommendations in our add-to-cart experience. We've been deploying new language models to expand our product catalog and brand matching efforts. With more accurate tagging of products to brands, we're able to drive better user engagement and conversion through better search results, more relevant product information and product recommendations. On delivering value to our clients, our teams have been actively executing on the first phase of an in-market activation across our major regions with our street teams, which are helping clients expand their reach and impact. We've increased our on-the-ground and field marketing presence by 3x and have a weekly cadence of client events. We're also rolling out changes to aid our clients on the marketplace. We launched the new listing redesign that allows our clients to add more hero imagery to engage new users along with order status push notifications to give more ways for our clients to communicate with users placing orders. We've only just begun these efforts in Q1. and have more in flight during this quarter, which arguably is the most important for the industry with 420 setting the tone for the year. I'll touch briefly on this year's 420 holiday. We always have a number of initiatives around this celebration of cannabis reform, but I'm particularly proud of how our teams rallied to drive value for our clients. We kicked off an integrated marketing campaign called the 20 Days of Deals to support many of our strategic clients with promotions for our users. We couple that with regional event activations and what I call Retailer Appreciation Day dispensary tours that span markets from Boston to Kansas City to Albuquerque and to our backyard here in SoCal. The 420 event itself resulted in our largest ever order volume on a single day, surpassing the volume that we've seen in each of the 420 events over the last five years. Finally, on driving profitable and sustainable growth, I said back in March that we'll focus on what we can control. We control how we invest and the mindset we're operating with. And Q1 bore fruit of that commitment. Our adjusted OpEx for the quarter was back to levels that we were operating under when we closed our GoPublic transaction in 2021. Our teams are showing discipline in where we're hiring and how we're achieving productivity to fund investments. Our net headcount declined during the quarter, despite us making strategic hires as our managers are finding ways to operate more leanly. And as I said at the start of the call, We are free cash flow positive before termination payments from the headcount reductions we did back in December. Taking a step back, yes, license and markets continue to be challenged in a way that we haven't seen since the onset of legalization. And yes, our clients are still struggling to bring consumer demand back to license channels while dealing with crippling taxes and a lack of federal regulatory help. But I continue to see tremendous opportunities in our regions and the focus approach we are taking on marketplace and our clients. Our clients are seeing the impact of us bringing back cannabis culture and feeling the strength of our marketplace in the streets of their hometowns, which itself is bringing more opportunity. Now I'll turn it over to Arden.