8/3/2022

speaker
Operator

Good afternoon, and thank you for attending today's Skills second quarter 2022 earnings call. My name is Jason, and I will be the moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call, an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your cell phone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Charlotte Edelman with Skills.

speaker
Jason

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Skills second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I will proceed shortly by reading our forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures, immediately followed by brief introductory remarks and then a question and answer session. Hosting the question and answer session today, we have Andrew Paraday, Chief Executive Officer, Casey Chaskin, Chief Revenue Officer, and Ian Lee, Chief Financial Officer of the company. We hope you've had a chance to read our press release, which we published earlier today and which is also available on our investor relations website. Some of management's comments today will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by the use of words such as will, expect, should, or other similar phrases, are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Therefore, you should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on them. We refer you to the company's SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact future operating results and financial conditions. During the call, management will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our second quarter 2022 earnings release. With that, I'll turn the call over to Andrew for some brief opening remarks. Andrew?

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Thank you, Charlotte. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter 2022 results. Before we begin taking your questions, I'd like to share a few thoughts. We entered 2022 with a change in strategy to focus on profitable growth, improving our efficiency, and driving greater impact on our player and developer experience through product-led initiatives. I'd like to share my thoughts on what's going well so far, what is not, and what we're going to do about it. Let me start with where it went well. In Q2, we continued to make progress on reaching profitability. We reduced our net loss by almost $90 million, while reducing RAIM, or revenue after engagement marketing, by only about $8 million. We lowered our user acquisition marketing spend by 49% quarter over quarter, and we also made progress in improving the efficiency of our user acquisition. This is a business that was running six-month payback periods at the precipice of our IPO. And we plan to systematically march our paybacks back towards those levels. As such, in Q2, we continue to reduce low return engagement marketing initiatives that aren't yielding or do not have indicative data that they will yield. And we executed a restructuring of our workforce to better align our resources for their changes and strategic priorities. Overall, we reduced our net loss and adjusted EBITDA burn rate. We improved the quality of our revenue by increasing revenue after engagement marketing as a ratio against revenue. Over these last three months, we didn't make the progress we wanted to see in product development, but we still had a few wins, which I mentioned here more for the sake of balance, as opposed to anyone thinking we're pleased with the progress this past quarter. We launched a public beta of our cloud gaming technology initiative, as we discussed we would in Q1. We launched a public beta of the refreshed core user experience. Okay, let me go into what didn't go well. Repositioning the company for profitability had a real cost. Revenue after engagement marketing, paying monthly active users, all fell sequentially quarter over quarter. We also have areas where we can and will get better. Several that I want to highlight here include our H1 product initiatives did not achieve our desired results yet. In fact, we've had slower product development velocity than we would have liked or anticipated. We've had too many new product features that aren't driving LTV and sometimes are even detrimental. We've had too many new experiments split tested that didn't yield LTV growth and also have sometimes been detrimental. On the marketing side, we still have more work to do on improving user acquisition efficiency. Moreover, we have more work to do on reducing low return engagement marketing initiatives. We're raising the bar across the board on any and all experiments in marketing and product to grow our business. It's a systematic decline in quality of work that I'll personally address in product development. The primary causes of the sequential decline in revenue and revenue after engagement marketing was really lower retention from some of the mature cohorts of users on our system. And we think we've now root caused that The main drivers of this are a mix of instances of users cheating us on our platform and past product modifications that shouldn't have rolled from our test phase to full rollout. So when I speak of cheating, let me give you an example. We've seen instances of users cheating on the platform, including abusing system discounts and incentives in other countries, such as the Philippines. where users are abusing our friend referral program to get financial incentives without delivering real user referrals. So here's what we're going to do next and why. We remain confident about the potential for product-led initiatives to drive a better experience for players and developers. It's frustrating, especially the progress in product lately with so many opportunities to improve consumer and developer experiences on our platform. As I mentioned earlier, when we approached IPO, we had a six month payback. I plan to get us back there. And the first step to fixing our paybacks is I'm returning to our product development to fix our products, to help build superior paybacks and a superior LTV to CAC profile. This work has already started. There is a lot more coming in the days ahead as we fix and write skills business. Repositioning the company for profitability is far from easy from where we were ending last year. And as such, we need to lower our full year 2022 revenue guidance to $275 million. We're going to share more detail on all the things that are happening in our business in our Q2 stockholder letter, which will be published tonight. While the scope of our ambitions and the drive of our team, as always, leaves us wishing we had accomplished more, we did make some progress towards our long-term goals this past quarter by rationalizing our cost structure. There's still much more work ahead to do, and I'm more determined now than ever to do it. Our focus remains on a path of durable growth and efficiency in the years ahead. This means we're going to continue to reduce costs, we're going to continue to drive improvement in marketing efficiency, and we're going to increase the velocity of new product development. It's incredibly exciting to think about the long-term opportunity for this business ahead to transform the existing $92 billion mobile gaming market through competition. It's truly a huge opportunity. And we're steadfast in our belief that through competition, we can enable everyone to achieve their greatest potential, both the player and the developer alike. I wish I had better news to deliver today. I can only tell you that we are pushing very hard to execute the transition strategy that we've outlined last quarter and we will outline again this quarter. And I thank you for your support, your patience, and your understanding now more than ever as we continue on this journey and this path. With that, let me open up for questions.

speaker
Operator

If you would like to ask a question, it is star 1 on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you'd like to remove that question, please press star 2. Once again, to ask a question, press star 1. As a reminder, if you're using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking a question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered.

speaker
spk08

Our first question comes from Jason Tilchen with Canaccord Genuity.

speaker
Operator

Your line is now open.

speaker
Jason

Yeah, thanks. Just going back to the guidance and thinking through, obviously, you laid out some of the reasons why the results came short. But just thinking back to a quarter ago, reiterating the revenue guide of $400 million, and then just three months later, reducing it by nearly one-third. Just wondering if you can maybe provide some additional color on what maybe is different now versus three months ago, and what gives you confidence that, as you laid out in the press release, you expect for the users after they decline the next two quarters to resume growth next year. Just wondering if you could maybe touch on that as well. Thanks.

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Absolutely. First of all, thank you, Jason, for the question. We're lowering the guidance because of the user retention trends we've seen on the system, the slower the anticipated velocity of new product development, and the delay in achieving the expected results from the recent product launches. We're also assuming that the macroeconomic environment is going to be challenging throughout the rest of the year.

speaker
Jason

Just going back again to next year, you know, obviously, you know, expecting a resumption of growth there with a much lower base of marketing spend. Just curious if there's anything specifically you can call out in the product pipeline, you know, that would maybe give you confidence that you're going to be able to achieve that resumption of growth as we head into fiscal 23?

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Yeah. The primary driver from lower retention from the mature cohorts, first part is With going public, I don't think we quite anticipate the level of attention the company would get. That attention has also landed on the cheating and fraud community, and we've seen a lot more bad behavior and bad actors entering the ecosystem. So users cheating on the platform, I think I mentioned one in my overview, but our front referral program, seeing a lot of abuse, particularly from countries outside the U.S. attempting spoofing and or actually executing in their home country to literally try to steal money out of the system. We've remediated the issue in countries like the Philippines. We're continuing to identify and address other instances of users of spikes in cheating and fraud. The second piece, I think I mentioned past product changes over the last 18 months that really have not been landing the level of LTV that we anticipated. We have multiple different initiatives there that we're modifying that I think give us confidence that we'll get back on track both on retention, engagement, and monetization. If you think about skills as a platform, trust is a very important part of our platform's promise. I think trust and safety in almost any marketplace-type business is really important to how it operates. And you have to look at the cheating and fraudulent behavior as damaging not only because that revenue is not real. But even beyond it, the people that are being defrauded and cheated, it's damaging their retention engagement in the platform. So I think to summarize, I'd say it's very top of mind for us to get this under control immediately.

speaker
spk08

Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from Drew Crum with Stifel.

speaker
Operator

Your line is now open.

speaker
Andrew

Okay, thanks. Hey, guys. Good afternoon. So your outlook commentary assumes further declines for paying mouths through the balance of the year. What type of decline are you anticipating? Should it be similar to what you experienced in 2Q or something different? And, Andrew, is there a catalyst you have in mind to reaccelerate this metric next year? And then I have a follow-up.

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Okay, great. Thank you, Drew, for the question. I'm going to turn it over to Casey to talk about marketing and female growth.

speaker
Drew

Thanks, Andrew. Jason, sorry, Drew, the way to think about this is as we extract some of the discounts from the system, we have a smaller number of people who are depositing low amounts of money or playing with system incentives who have deposited in the past. And so as we pull those incentives out, that becomes the largest contributor to the decline in paying monthly active users. And we're not quite done reducing our engagement marketing spend. So, ostensibly, what we're doing is becoming more profitable on a user-by-user level across the business. And so the way to think about that and the confidence in the re-acceleration of growth is after those incentives have been completely pulled back, the retention profile of our cohort, each cohort never actually dies. We don't see cohorts that cease playing at all on the platform. They decline and then level out. As we pull out some of those incentives, we're pulling out low or no value users who are still counted and are paying MAU calculation And so the way to think about that is continuing to decline at a reducing rate over the back half of the year. And then as those incentives are completely pulled out, just adding new cohorts will drive the user growth in the future.

speaker
Andrew

Got it. Very helpful. And then my follow-up pertains to the adjusted EBITDA margin that's implied in your guidance. It looks to be the same in the second half as the first half and with the planned reduction to engagement marketing spend and presumably some savings from your reorg what prevents you from showing margin improvement in the second half ian uh would you like to jump in on that question yeah thanks um drew i think the

speaker
Ian

focus here is really as we mentioned here we uh really focus on continuing to optimize around the marketing spend uh we took the restructuring action uh this quarter i think continue to just focus on overall operating expense reduction in the second half so they expect that to continue obviously with the declines in um the top line and revenue and revenue after engagement marketing that is um i think going to be uh i think where that nets out so i think we'll see what happens um In the second half, again, with the reduction in offering expenses very clearly that's focused on, again, that may be netted out against the declines in the top lines. I think that's where that guidance came out, Drew.

speaker
spk08

Okay. Thanks, guys. Our next question comes from Jason Baziet with Citi.

speaker
Operator

Jason, your line is now open.

speaker
Jason

Thanks. I just had a quick question on those six-month paybacks you talked about sort of at the time of the IPO. Is it fair to say that it's easier to get a six-month payback if you're running a business that does $50 million of revenue or $100 million than if you're doing $400 million of revenue? And the reason I ask is even if some of the initiatives don't work, Is there some natural improvement in your paybacks that should occur just as the revenue gets smaller?

speaker
Andrew Paraday

I think in many businesses that can potentially be true. First of all, sorry, I don't mean to be rude. Thank you for the question. I appreciate it. I appreciate the engagement. I think that can be true in many smaller markets, and I think that question kind of leads to the consideration, is the TAM effective? being dried up, if you will, and that's why you're seeing worse paybacks. You know, I'd point out we were, I believe, 230 million of revenue, net revenue at IPO. And so, you know, not that small scale. And as we scaled upwards, you know, we would not say that is what we've been seeing, you know, basically tapping out the market, driving up prices. I think, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it, we have been tripping over our own feet on scaling human capital in COVID. And it has resulted in underperformance in a variety of roles across the company where we are working very hard on getting the right people in the right roles and a strong understanding of how the system works so that they are accreting value against LTV as opposed to detrimenting it. And I wish there was a better way a better reason for this. I guess the one good piece here, I think, is that we have no reason to believe from everything we're seeing that the TAM has been consumed. Casey, do you want to talk a little bit about marketing and where we see TAM? Yeah, absolutely.

speaker
Drew

And Jason, I think that the behavior that you're talking about is is not uncommon in many businesses, though in the case of our business and particularly when Andrew was running product for us in the lead up to our initial public offering, what we saw was that our cohorts were becoming sequentially more and more valuable, which is the opposite of what you see in many businesses and is evidence of the real network effects that are observable in this space. The challenge in the last year to year and a half is that we haven't seen that, and we don't believe that that's an endemic weakness in the system itself so much as operational opportunities that we can and will correct, as Andrew has mentioned. I think Andrew called it tripping over our own feet, but I think getting people together for in-person collaboration is improving the analytical rigor behind the new product and feature rollouts that we bring to market. These become operational opportunities for us. And so I think it was, I believe it was actually another Jason who asked the question about confidence in the future. The confidence comes from seeing as we make those changes, we can see the data signatures of the new cohorts that we're bringing on board.

speaker
Andrew Paraday

If I can add, you know, I think one of the things, Jason, with our business is we were an entirely in-person culture, a more than nine to five, five days a week in office culture as COVID approached. And we scaled from 190 people to 750 over these last two years to support the revenue growth and to be able to grow from, you know, 384 million revenue year last year on to a billion. I think what's happened is we've really seen the difficulty of scaling 5X or 4X, call it people, in culture as we've guided on a lot of people remotely. And it has not been smooth scaling in COVID. And to that end, the immediate action we've taken is an RTO plan and execution of getting all of our people back in offices five days a week. I wish I could tell you that everyone on our team agreed with that. We've had a fair amount of turnover and dissatisfaction with getting people back in person to work. It's been challenging. And I talked to a lot of other CEOs of other companies, and I am hearing similar statements across the board about the transition from a work-from-home environment to an in-office environment. But I really do believe that for our level of creativity and our type of company, to generate the kind of results that led to our IPO. We need to get people back together. It's just too difficult to teach people about a novel system and a novel business area that we're building remotely. We can't achieve it fast enough or at a quality level that works for our business. So we've really taken what might be considered dramatic action of going immediately to RTOing at five days a week in office.

speaker
Jason

Okay.

speaker
spk07

Thank you. Super helpful.

speaker
spk08

Our next question comes from Clark Lampin with BTIG.

speaker
Operator

The line is now open.

speaker
spk10

Thanks. Thanks very much. Good evening, everyone. I had a couple of questions. First, I wanted to go back, Andrew, maybe, I guess, to the point around cheating. You mentioned that you wanted to sort of address the issue and and instill, I guess, confidence amongst the, I guess, if you will, cleaner player cohort on platform. And I wanted to see if you could elaborate on maybe the ways in which you might be able to do that moving forward. And then there was a comment in the release about sort of growing profitably in 23 and I wanted to see if you could be a little bit more specific on whether that means, you know, we should expect one quarter of profitability, maybe sort of improving incremental margins, put a finer point around that if possible. And also, you know, as we think about skills returning to a place where you are growing at the rates, you know, you hope to and seeing the payback periods, you'd hope to, what sort of capital investments need to be made in the short run? You know, I think you talked about in the prepared marks, one of the hiccups you know shorter term being product development I guess sort of efficiency and also the quality of product that was coming out of the development team what I guess can you guys do or what do you need to do to get that back to a viable level going forward thanks a lot sure so I think first we're trying to recap that a little bit for everyone who's listening first cheating

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Can we elaborate on what we're doing to mitigate? Second is profitability, what to expect in 2023 and beyond. And third is capital investment to build the products that we need to be successful. So let me hit cheating first. There are a number of different techniques. to increase the level of identity around a user to ensure that it's more difficult to duplicate accounts and defraud the system, which is actually one of the primary ways we've seen cheating and fraud is some level of duplicate account, trying to reset your player ratings on a given game, handing your device off to another person on a duplicate account, But kind of think about multi-account fraud as one of the top things. So we've built out an identity team that is implementing a number of things, but everything as kind of industry standard, like a two-factor SMS authentication. So forcing that we know it's a real phone number, not a spoofed account on a laptop. I can go on and on, but there are a lot of ways that we are forcing identity down to a single actual person as opposed to someone being able to more easily pretend to be multiple people. That's one way that we are enforcing and changing cheating and fraud capabilities on the system. There are many others. In the interest of time, I'd be happy to chat more offline on things we're working on if there's interest. Maybe second, I can hit profitability and what to expect quarter by quarter. And let me ask Ian if he'd like to talk about the numbers and where we're looking for 2023 and 2024.

speaker
Ian

Yeah, thanks, Andrew. I think the key is here that we continue to look and focus and improve to reduce costs and improve efficiency across all the OPEX lines, you know, beyond 2022, obviously into 2023. We obviously haven't given a specific guide to that yet, but the goal is still, as we've discussed previously, to reach break-even by the end of 2024. So obviously that means continued improvement to the course of next year. But we haven't, again, provided more specifics on the particular margins yet in 2023.

speaker
Andrew Paraday

And then third, on capital investment that we need in the short run, already represented in the financials that we put out. You know, I think we are very determined to get our business on a meter beat culture in terms of our financials. One of the most disappointing things for us, I think, has been moving off of that and, you know, missing revenue forecasts. I will point out that one of the things we did for the first half of the year is we outperformed on cost and what we said we would spend for the first half. And I think the first steps that we're looking at is we can control our costs. We can't always control if our investments into product development and experiments yield. I can tell you that the capital investment that we are making into product development, I am personally going back in to oversee at a much closer level. And we'll be outlining more details on that in the coming days. But with the level of investment we're making into product development, And my background in building new products, I feel like it's definitely one of the best uses of my capabilities for the business. Anything you would like to add, Casey?

speaker
Drew

Just, Clark, on the question about cheating, I think it's a helpful clarification that Andrew was bringing up. I think people often think of cheating as things like hacking or hacking the game to gain an unfair advantage, whereas what we're talking about in this case is is something that we believe is much more controllable in the payments industry. It would be referred to as friendly fraud. But this is people abusing discount codes, incentive marketing programs, things like the friend referral programs. And so creating geographic restrictions on those programs, making those programs more targeted. These are things that we're already doing. to reduce the expenditure in what ultimately becomes unprofitable revenue streams. And likewise, the kind of cheating that we're talking about, the most common form of cheating is people trying to gain more player matching system and identity and ensuring that you are truly at one user per device, per account, and one account per person. is something that we can very much control, and that will improve both the quality of our revenue and the quality of our cohorts on a go-forward basis.

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Thanks for the comment. I appreciate it. I was just going to add on to what Casey said, which is I would point out that the per-account cheating and fraud technologies that we built are actually working quite well, but multi-account and spoofing is a different type of attack. And clearly our defenses are not strong enough, which of course we're rectifying immediately.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brad Erickson with RBC Capital Markets. Brad, your line is now open.

speaker
Brad Erickson

Hi there. Thanks. I guess first just on the, you know, path to profitability, maybe setting aside the cheating commentary and all that. Can you just talk about some of the new products or maybe characteristics even of new products you're working on where you think you can drive this better retention over time?

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Sure. Thank you for the question, Brad. So in terms of how we're changing and improving retention, I think actually one of the things we're doing first is we're reverting and removing experiments and product features that the data does not support their broader rollout. So it's not actually building new products. It's product features and experiments that were rolled out that were really not supported by a deep data analysis. So rolling those back actually is already showing improvements in LTV. I hate to say we're paying to undo work that we paid to have done, but that is the reality of what we're seeing and what we're doing first. I think when I left a very direct engagement on product development to really focus much more on taking the company public as CEO, we have not been able to invest our dollars into product development as efficiently as we used to. New features that we've been working on, such as social, such as improving our leagues technology given the scale we're at now, such as refreshing our core loop of our product experience. The execution of each of these things is as critical to improving LTV as actually building these things. It's, I hate to say, such a detail-oriented problem but it is a devil in the details problem with product development where I think we are missing some of the key product needs in each of these features and they need to be revised carefully to generate the level of LTV that we'd expect from these features and I am in there and doing it with the teams and we are solving the problems on on I'd say somewhat back to the basics product development that needs to happen right now in our company. And I think the best way to think about that is our plan right now is to return our cohort strength to where we were pre-IPO, March 2020. And I'm, you know, pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic pre-IPO cohort strength is what I am moving us towards. And I think that is a, that's an achievable goal in the next, uh, the next 12 months. Um, but it's a, it's a quite a lift from where the product has evolved to.

speaker
Brad Erickson

Yup. Yup. Got it. And then maybe a question for Ian. Uh, and I think, you know, the filing isn't out yet, but I guess you guys end every quarter with maybe four or $5 million on the balance sheet of customer funds. And then I think it's something like 80% or so of the GMB comes from existing customer accounts. So I guess that implies the customer balances turnover, like something like a hundred plus times a quarter. Can you explain sort of how that works, how that math works, anything we may have wrong in there? Thanks.

speaker
Ian

No, I think that's, I think you are firstly question, um, appreciate the question on that one. So I think we discussed a little bit before, that people are playing obviously with new funds. They're playing with funds that are already in the system as well and prior winnings and entering into more games, continuation from that. So the funds, as you mentioned, there's a fairly limited balance on the balance sheet, as you mentioned, about $4 or $5 million because people tend to deposit but then actually use that funds to go play games. So again, they're using that plus prior winnings on the platform to enter and continue playing games, but I'll open up again for Casey, Andrew, given what you want to add on that.

speaker
Drew

Yeah. So Brad, the way to think about it, it's not so much of the turnover of funds multiple times. So much as the fact that, uh, players today are not using skills as a long-term stored value account. So players aren't, aren't putting a lot of money into their skills account and then leaving it there for a long period of time. they're adding money to their account and then consuming that through the competitions they play in. So then adding more money to their account, consuming that through the competitions that they play in. And it's something that people have actually highlighted and we believe is one of many long-term opportunities for the business is having people hold on to a larger account balance inside their accounts over time. Because of course, then we could make money off of that money in the same way that insurance companies do. But the way to think about it is that people are depositing money with their credit cards and playing through it in real time.

speaker
Brad Erickson

Got it. That's helpful. And then maybe one follow-up, and I apologize, I jumped on the call late. I missed some of Andrew's opening comments. But on this cheating issue, I guess, can we take the any part of the guidance reduction as a proxy for how much of the business that represented and and i guess maybe percentage-wise you know sort of how far are we do you think through this call it a cleansing process um and when you think that might be complete thanks i'm sure if i can thank you for the question and uh and a great question um i think we are not done with cleaning

speaker
Andrew Paraday

I do think we have a very good idea of the size of the problem and how to deal with it. And I think the first step we always engage in is size and understand the problem before we try to solve. And as such, I think in the guidance we're giving out, the revised guidance, we are accounting for removing everything back down to a normal level of, you know, there's always some level in any business of bad actors. And you just need to be managing it below a certain threshold. And our threshold is far too high. And I think if you take a retail business, for example, if shrink in retail goes over 1%, you may bankrupt a store. And I think we are looking at our business right now, and there are a number of bad actors. And not only that, they're disrupting the experience of the good ones, of the good paying customers. So I think you have two effects. in solving this problem of duplicate account fraud and cheating, which is you can both remove what is unprofitable revenue and simultaneously you can improve the retention and engagement of your good customers who are actually just trying to shop in your store, to use the analogy. And so, you know, I think It would have been great if we could have caught this faster, and certainly the next step after solving this problem is improving our systems for faster detection of this kind of issue as we scale upwards and onwards after we finish cleaning.

speaker
spk08

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Once again, if you would like to ask a question, it is star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Ed Alter with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

speaker
Ed Alter

Hi, everyone. Thanks for the question. I wanted to dive in a bit deeper on the payback period, kind of where exactly that's coming from. Is it on the CPI side, where I know that's been challenging over the last few years, or is it more on moving the spending itself back to the payback capacity?

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Hi, Ed. Thanks for the question. I think I heard you. It's a little bit challenging to hear you, but I think you said your questions were on the payback period and where exactly is the opportunity. Is it lowering CAC or improving LTV, if I'm stating it correctly? Exactly. Okay. Actually, we think both. So we've been cutting back inefficient user acquisition programs. We are now actually at the best CAC we've seen in years. And I think we will continue to get to better and better CAC. The LTV decay has primarily been from a disruption in retention. And I think we've talked a fair amount about cheating. We've also been talking about product features that have led actually, unfortunately, to lower LTV as opposed to higher, where there was data integrity around the testing of the product features that led to a test feature being rolled out. And so what we're doing is we're looking at any feature, any program that was rolled out as we've seen the decay in LTV, and we're basically rerunning the data and verifying whether or not it is a valid feature good change to our products. And that's, you know, that's enabling us to quickly move our LTV back to where, to levels that we were very proud of as a company, as we were approaching our IPO. So I think there's opportunities on both sides. So I'd really appreciate that question. And Casey, if you'd like to comment on either, particularly on CAC, I think, as that's your business.

speaker
Drew

Yeah, I was, I was actually going to say just that, That's what is particularly exciting for us at this moment in time, Ed, is that our CAC is around our local low point that we haven't really seen since the beginning of COVID. And we still think there's a big opportunity to drive it lower through app store optimization, through investment into organic channel development and continued media optimization. we think we can bring our customer acquisition cap even lower. And on the LPV side, while the development of new features such as leagues, continued investment in social, as the things that Andrew's been talking about, represent attractive upside that we still very much believe in, simply getting back to the user programs that we were running about 12 months ago, will give us an increase in LTV and move that return on investment calculation and pay back in.

speaker
Operator

There are no further questions waiting at this time, so I'll pass the call back over to the management team for closing remarks.

speaker
Andrew Paraday

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining our Q2 2022 earnings call. We very much appreciate your support. And as always, we will be vigilant on building towards the future of competition. We'll talk to you next at our Q3 earnings call. Until then, thank you.

speaker
Operator

That concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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