Wishpond Technologies Ltd.

Thank you everyone for joining us today and welcome to Wishpond's 2024 fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results conference call. My name is Pavitra Sanga, investor relations, and joining me on the call today is Ali Tajskandar, chairman, founder, and CEO of Wishpond, and Adrian Lim, the company's CFO. This call is being recorded. We'll be having a question and answer session at the end of the call. I trust that everyone has received a copy of our financial results press release that was issued earlier today. Listeners are also encouraged to download a copy of our quarterly financial statements and management discussion and analysis from cedarplus.ca. Please note, portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws. Please refer to today's press release and in our management discussion and analysis for a disclosure of risks and uncertainties. We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. We do not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except if it is required by law. We use terms such as adjusted EBITDA, annualized revenue run rate, and monthly recurring revenue on this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definitions set out in our management discussion and analysis. And with that, let me turn the call over to Mr. Ali Tashkander, Chairman and CEO.

Thank you very much, Pavitra. Good day, everyone. We truly appreciate everyone for joining us today. Wishbone is a provider of AI-enabled marketing and sales solutions that are built for helping businesses with their customer acquisition and increasing sales. We currently serve thousands of businesses around the world, and it's been great to work with them and give them the sales and marketing tools they need to attract customers and grow their businesses. 2024 has been another remarkable year for WishBond, highlighted by our 10th consecutive quarter of generating positive adjusted EBITDA, as well as a 129% increase in annual adjusted EBITDA, reflecting our ability to deliver consistent profitability. I'm also thrilled to share that Wishbone achieved positive cash flow from operations of $519,000, a significant improvement from 2023, showcasing the effectiveness of our cost optimization efforts. This consistent improvement in adjusted EBITDA and cash flow has been a top priority in 2024, and we remain steadfast in this commitment as we look towards 2025. Furthermore, our annual revenue of $21.6 million reflects the continued demand for our software solutions and drives our ongoing efforts to build a fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales platform designed to streamline the entire customer journey. As we enter 2025, we are extremely excited about the prospects of Sales Closer AI, which we believe will be a key driver of growth moving forward. Sales Closer has quickly become Wishbone's fastest growing product ever, now generating approximately $800,000 in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, with a significant portion of this growth having occurred in the first few months of 2025. To continue accelerating Sales Closers adoption, we have been actively exploring new sales outreach initiatives and strategic channel partnerships. For example, we've seen great success with our recently launched Sales Closer White Label Reseller Program, which enables agencies and businesses to brand and resell Sales Closer as their own, driving new revenue streams and expanding our general market reach. Overall, with an expanding sales pipeline and an increasing demand for our AI solutions, the company is well positioned to capitalize on new opportunities, and we will continue to solidify Sales Closer as a key driver of growth for the business in 2025. On today's call, I would first like to pass the call over to our CFO, Adrian Lim, who will provide a financial summary of our results. I will then return to share some general commentary on where Wishbond is heading and our vision for a fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales platform. Finally, I will provide some commentary on our outlook for 2025. Adrian?

Thank you, Elie, and thanks to everyone for joining us on the call this morning. I am pleased to report that we had very strong annual and fourth quarter results for the year and three months ended December 31st, 2024. Wishpond achieved annual revenue of $21.6 million during fiscal 2024 compared to $23.1 million in fiscal 2023. The decrease reflects a strategic focus on prioritizing more profitable revenues, including a reduction in spending from the company's legacy email delivery services customer, a reduction in the sales team size as part of cost optimization efforts, and a transition to utilizing Sales Closer for executing outbound demos. Our revenues were also impacted by an algorithm update by Google that affected email deliverability across our outreach platforms, including PersistsIQ. The issue has since been largely resolved with email performance metrics stabilizing in Q1 2025. The other product lines are operating as we expected with consideration for reduction of our sales team and cost optimization efforts. Wishpond achieved gross profit of $14.8 million in fiscal 2024 compared to $15.2 million in fiscal 2023. The decrease is primarily attributable to decline in revenue from the company's legacy email delivery services customer who reduced their spending during the year. Wishpond achieved gross margin percentage of 68% during fiscal 2024 compared to 66% in fiscal 2023. The improvement in gross margin percentage is primarily attributed to a reduction in sales from the large legacy customer, which allowed for a shift towards more profitable business. During fiscal 2024, Wishpond achieved record adjusted EBITDA of $1.7 million compared to $759,000 in fiscal 2023, an increase of 129%. During fiscal 2024, Wishpond generated positive cash flow from operations of $519,000 compared to cash used in operations of $260,000 in 2023. Our commitment to cost reduction and operational efficiency has led to significant gains in both profitability and cash flow. We continue to have a clean and healthy balance sheet and as at December 31, 2024, Wishpond had $1.1 million in cash and had withdrawn $1.3 million from the credit facility compared to cash of $1.4 million and credit facility balance of $1 million as at December 31, 2023. The reduction in cash balances was caused in part by investment in R&D, investment in sales closer marketing activities, and changes in working capital. Wishpond successfully renewed its $6 million secured revolving operating credit facility with National Bank of Canada on August 1, 2024. As of the end of the fourth quarter on December 31, 2024, the company had 58,636,045 fully diluted securities issued and outstanding. Looking ahead to 2025, we anticipate an increase in the company's cash balance in the second half of the fiscal year as we continue to scale from Sales Closer and experience a return to growth across our core sales and marketing suite of products. The ramp-up in revenue from Sales Closer is expected to be a key driver with the platform's growing adoption and expanding customer base contributing to a significant rise in ARR. Additionally, we foresee a rebound to growth for other Wishpond products driven by increasing demand for AI powered sales and marketing solutions. Furthermore, with the uncertainty with global trade policies, I would like to highlight that Wishpond is a tariff resistant business. The company's ability to serve its customers is not impacted by US tariffs, as we are a software vendor that has no physical goods crossing the border. Additionally, as the buy Canadian sentiment grows, we are seeing favourable trends in the Canadian market, such as businesses showing increased interest in choosing Canadian software vendors like us, and a general increase in marketing campaigns launched to target Canadian audiences. Overall, Wishpond remains in a very strong financial position with a healthy balance sheet, solid monthly recurring revenue, and a very good visibility for revenue and cash flow. Wishpond is currently able to continue growing without the need for any additional equity or debt capital raises. I'm also excited to share some updates regarding our sales team performance, which has been a key area of focus for us. One of the most promising trends we're seeing is a consistent improvement in the effectiveness of our sales team, which has translated into higher productivity. We've seen a steady increase in revenue per account executive over the past several quarters. This metric is an important indicator of both the efficiency and productivity of our sales team. Notably, in Q4 2024, revenue per account executive was $187,000, a 30% increase from $144,000 in Q4 2023. Despite a reduction in account executive headcount each quarter since Q4 2023, from 42 AEs down to 25 in Q4 2024, we've been able to drive higher revenue per account executive. This trend speaks to the enhanced productivity and efficiency gains that we've been able to achieve through process optimization, better targeting, and leveraging our AI-driven sales tools like Sales Closer. This improvement also reflects the quality and focus of our sales team, which is now able to generate more revenue with fewer resources, allowing us to optimize our cost structure and improve overall margins. We've been able to streamline operations and increase the effectiveness of our sales efforts by providing our team with better tools, more targeted strategies, and the ability to engage customers more efficiently. Our focus on improving the effectiveness of our sales team is a core part of our broader strategy to scale efficiently, improve profitability, and maintain a lean, high-performing organization. We're encouraged by the progress we've made so far, and we're committed to ensuring that our sales team remains an engine of growth for the company. That concludes my financial update, and I will turn the call back over to Allie.

Thank you, Adrian, for that update. I would like to now spend a little bit of time on our vision for our future product suite, a fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales platform. Picture a business where every step of the buyer's journey is handled automatically and intelligently and no manual work is required. That's the vision driving us at Wishbond. Here at Wishbond, we're building a fully autonomous marketing and sales engine that takes a prospective customer from the moment they show interest all the way to a finalized deal. By freeing professionals from tedious tasks, we aim to empower them to spend their energy on strategic thinking, creative ideas, and building genuine relationships. This vision is more than just a technology roadmap. It's our commitment to helping businesses of all sizes grow faster, reduce costs, and achieve more consistent results. We believe that the best kind of technology doesn't replace people, it elevates them. When AI handles the routine, it gives humans the freedom to do what we do best, connect, innovate, and lead. The key benefits of our fully autonomous, fully automated platform are significant. One, it's fully automated. By eliminating manual work, our platform requires no human intervention. It operates seamlessly around the clock, 24-7, ensuring that businesses never miss an opportunity and that all processes run smoothly, regardless of time or location. Secondly, no expertise is required. Our AI driven system provides data driven recommendations and decision making without the need for expert input. The system is designed for ease of use and offers seamless integration by connecting and syncing marketing efforts across multiple tools and campaigns, enabling businesses to optimize their strategies effortlessly. Also, thirdly, it is scalable and cost-effective. As businesses grow, our platform can handle increasing demands without requiring additional resources. This scalability ensures that businesses can continue to thrive without the need to expand their teams or invest in costly agencies. What's more, Wishbone offers enterprise-level capabilities at a fraction of the cost, allowing companies to leverage advanced marketing and sales solutions with minimal overhead. In essence, Wishbone's platform offers businesses an unprecedented combination of efficiency, scalability, and cost effectiveness, giving them the tools they need to accelerate growth and achieve success in today's competitive landscape. These tools include our growing list of AI agents, which you can see listed in the blue box on the left. With our platform, businesses can also utilize virtual AI agents to deliver intelligent conversational experiences and can serve multiple purposes within an organization from sales support to customer service and more. Our AI virtual agents deliver measurable impact on business performance and provide a flexible solution tailored to companies' specific needs, whether speeding up sales cycles or ensuring that no opportunity is missed. For instance, Sales Closer is one of many agents that we have in our platform. Businesses can create their own sales closer virtual agent to deliver personalized round-the-clock sales calls and product demos 24-7 to engage leads, close deals. Businesses can also use their own AI call receptionist agent, which answers all inbound calls and general customer inquiries. Businesses can utilize Wishbone's virtual AI customer support agent, which can help customers 24-7 and in 10 different languages, ensuring that businesses can continue engaging with their customers and keep them happy and satisfied. Furthermore, our virtual AI agents are adaptable across a wide variety of industries, including software as a service, professional services, financial services, education, travel and hospitality, insurance and more. This broad industry applicability ensures that our clients can leverage AI to enhance their business operations regardless of their sector. In short, Wishbonds virtual AI agents are truly powerful and are at the forefront of transforming business operations, empowering companies to deliver superior customer experiences while achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness. Our AI agents are a key component of our fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales platform. I want to demonstrate how Wishpond can be involved with the entire customer acquisition journey from website creation to lead generation, closing the deal and delivering exceptional customer support. Our suite of AI marketing and sales tools can cover every stage of the process to streamline the customer journey. For example, a business needs to start by creating a website to attract customers. Wishbone is able to help businesses right from the beginning with our AI website builder, which can create dynamic, optimized websites that are designed to convert visitors into leads. No need for a team of designers. Our AI is able to do it all. Next, businesses may want to launch ad campaigns, which is where our Baxi AI ad management solution can take over the task of automating and optimizing digital advertising campaigns. This AI solution ensures that ads are served to the right audience at the right time, so that businesses can run campaigns without the usual headaches of manual management. Businesses can then use Wishbone to quickly build high-converting landing pages that align with their ad campaigns, ensuring a seamless experience for potential customers. To keep leads engaged, businesses also leverage our email marketing tools with personalized and automated email campaigns that speak directly to each customer's needs. And as inquiries come in, our AI email responder instantly delivers personalized replies, so no customer response goes unanswered. When it's time to convert the lead to a customer, Wishbone's calendar booking tool allows businesses to schedule appointments with their leads easily and effectively. Businesses can even use our calendar booking tool to schedule appointments with our Sales Closer virtual sales agent, which can take a prospective lead through a sales call or even a virtual product demo using the power of AI. Now, with payments integrated directly into the platform, businesses can process transactions smoothly, making it simple for customers to make a purchase. After the deal is closed, our AI customer support agent can step in to provide round-the-clock assistance, ensuring that customers are always satisfied. Lastly, our referral marketing solutions empower businesses to drive growth and expand their customer base. Our referral contest builder simplifies the creation and execution of referral promotions across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and different websites and more. Together, these tools create a cohesive AI-powered ecosystem that helps businesses automate, scale, and thrive, all while reducing operational costs. With Wishbone, businesses don't just manage the customer journey, they perfect it, creating smoother, faster, and more profitable experiences at every touchpoint. This fully integrated AI-driven platform enables businesses to engage with customers seamlessly, automate key processes, and ultimately improve conversion rates. By leveraging Wishbone's comprehensive suite of tools, companies are able to scale their marketing and sales efforts in an efficient, cost-effective manner. I would now like to share an update on some of the progress we've made with Sales Closer AI, our virtual sales agent that can deliver personalized round the clock sales calls and product demos 24 seven to engage leads, close deals, and deliver insights in 10 different languages. While it's still only in our first year, the feedback from our customers on Sales Closer has been incredibly encouraging. I'm extremely proud to announce that Sales Closer has quickly become Wishbone's fastest growing product ever, now generating approximately $800,000 in annual recurring revenue. I would also like to highlight that a significant portion of this growth occurred in the first few months of 2025, representing 2.5 times growth year-to-date. Sales Closer is an incredibly exciting product for us as we're seeing that the platform has broader appeal beyond the SME market, contributing to our growing sales pipeline. We are pricing Sales Closer between $250 to $2,000 USD per month for anywhere from 16 to 200 hours of virtual agent usage. As customers use more hours, the MRR, monthly recurring revenue, also increases. We believe Sales Closer will have a positive impact on our overall MRR in the future. Sales Closer also has a higher gross margin profile in comparison to our other Wishbone products, which we believe will positively contribute to improving our gross margins and overall profitability in the long term. To accelerate adoption, we are actively exploring new sales outreach initiatives and strategic channel partnerships that will enable us to access larger customer bases more efficiently and effectively. We recently announced the launch of our new Sales Closer white label reseller program, which enables businesses to brand and resell Sales Closer AI under their own name, a program that is actually very popular and very on demand. The program provides complete brand control, seamless integration, and creates new revenue opportunities for agencies, consultants, and sales teams. By enabling third-party businesses to resell the platform under their own brand, we are aiming to scale our distribution network without incurring the cost of direct customer acquisition. The white label reseller program is also anticipated to strengthen our customer retention by embedding Wishbond's technology into existing sales and marketing workflows, further solidifying our position in the AI-enabled sales automation market. We have announced two partnerships, one with RoomView Technologies, a real estate marketing platform with over 220,000 real estate agents, and the second with VenOps Inc., a leader in healthcare regulatory compliance and consulting services. RoomView will leverage Sales Closer to enhance lead follow-up and increase sales conversions. By integrating Sales Closer's advanced AI-driven follow-up technology, RoomView's real estate agents can efficiently engage with leads, schedule in-person meetings, and drive successful real estate transactions. Meanwhile, VenOps will market and sell Wishbone's Sales Closer platform white-labeled as Provences to clients in the medical industry. Such channel partnerships and collaborations underscore Wishmont's commitment to expanding sales closers reach into new verticals and delivering tailored AI solutions that transform sales processes and empower businesses of all industries to achieve their goals. Looking ahead to 2025, we are planning a broader rollout of Sales Closer by adding more partnerships and white label programs, which we expect will play a role in increasing adoption and driving new growth. One of the key areas we've also been focused on is developing a strategic patent portfolio around our Sales Closer AI technology, which will be essential in strengthening our competitive edge and ensuring long-term market leadership. In particular, we have been developing and filing a comprehensive set of patents around the conversational AI technology behind Sales Closer. Let me walk you through some of the critical patents that we have filed so far. One, we have filed a non-provisional utility patent entitled Virtual Artificial Intelligence AI Representative to protect the underlying technologies of our Sales Closer AI platform that can perform automated demos, calls, and presentations. The technology is a breakthrough in AI-powered presentation technology utilizing advanced large language models and deep learning techniques for voice synthesis. Second, we have filed a non-provisional utility patent entitled Enhanced State Manager in a virtual AI representative. This technology improves the ability of AI systems to manage complex, real-world conversations addressing challenges such as interruptions, tangential topics, and premature conversation endings. Third, we have filed a non-provisional utility patent application entitled Human Takeover in a Virtual AI Representative, which allows human operators to seamlessly assume control of a call from an automated AI call agent when necessary. This innovation bridges the gap between AI-driven interactions and human oversight, ensuring smooth and contextually rich customer experiences. Together, these technologies form the foundation of our advanced AI sales agent, which are designed to outperform traditional systems. As we continue to expand and refine our patent portfolio, we are confident that it will not only enhance our product offerings, but also increase the overall value of our company. These patents protect our innovations and ensure that we are well positioned to capitalize on the growing demands for AI-driven sales solutions. We are very optimistic about the company's growth prospects, and I'm pleased to share Wishbone's key goals for 2025. Number one is to accelerate organic revenue growth and increase monthly recurring revenue. Two, increase utilization of Sales Closer in internal sales processes to drive sales of Wishbone's own products. Three, accelerate revenue growth of Sales Closer and other virtual AI agents to external customers. Four, improve margins, decrease churn, and increase long-term customer value. We've had an exciting year of growth and innovation. And as we look forward to 2025, we're confident in our ability to return to historical growth levels while building on the strong foundation we've established. Our investments in technology, product development, and customer acquisition are all aligning to position us for a year of strong expansion. With the momentum we have built, we expect to see a return to growth compared to 2024, driven by the ramp in sales of Sales Closer AI and increasing sales of other Wishbone products. The demand for AI-driven sales automation is growing rapidly. And we believe that Wishbone is well positioned to capture a significant share of this market. We expect to see higher gross margins in 2025 as we scale our business, improving operational efficiencies and increase the value of our product offerings. We are also in a position where we can continue to fund our growth and new product launches without the need to raise additional equity or debt capital. We expect to continue funding strategic initiatives, including product innovation and expanding our sales efforts without diluting shareholder value or taking on additional debt. In summary, we are extremely excited about the prospects for 2025. Our strategy is focused on returning to historical growth levels, further improving our profitability, and ensuring that we can fund our growth internally. We are confident that these efforts will position us for continued success in the years ahead and deliver significant value for our shareholders. It is rare to find a software company of our size that has a strong recurring revenue model, maintains gross margins of over 65%, and is also adjusted EBITDA positive. Wishbone truly is a unique and profitable company, and we remain committed to delivering profitable growth in the future. Finally, I want to thank the entire team at Wishbone whose hard work continues to elevate the company to higher levels. We want to thank our customers who rely on us to help them with their digital marketing and sales needs. Also, I'd like to thank you all for joining us on this call today. We look forward to providing an update next quarter. I will now hand the call back to Pavitar for questions.

Thank you, Ali. And with that, we will now open the call to questions. Just a reminder that questions from analysts will be given priority. First question is from Gabriel Young of Beacon Securities. Please go ahead, Mr. Young.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple of things, Ali. Just on the sales closer revenues right now, the sort of 800K and ARR, can you talk a little bit about the breadth of the number of customers that are in that ARR and maybe some of the use cases that sales closer has been applied to so far?

Yeah, I think right now it's around 130 active paying clients. So average monthly revenue is about $600 roughly. So it is not a couple of active utilizations. It's quite broad and it's from a variety of different industries. And There's a few things that are really, really interesting about the demand that we're seeing. We see demand in areas that are sales and support, and we see demands even in areas where our AI agent can help that are not even purely sales. but they are a customer interaction, a receptionist, or a two-hour call replaced with AI. We're seeing a lot of the use cases where they're starting on, relatively speaking, smaller subscriptions of that $600. and growing usage over time. And we're seeing some of the conversations where they're significantly larger, where some of the individual conversations can be as big as the overall revenue of sales closer we see so far. And there's going to be ramp to that. But that is something that is quite exciting and we're working with them actively. Adrian, anything else you want to add to that?

I think you pretty much covered it. I think I'd just add in terms of a numbers perspective too, just within the last three and a half months, we've been able to pretty much 2.5x the amount of ARR since December 31st, 2024. So it's over 150% increase there. So we're seeing some very promising trends in that area.

And the other thing to also add to that, which I find quite interesting and encouraging, is that because we are a pioneer in this field and definitely one of the best products out there, when we launched, we didn't even know of any competitors. Now, obviously, there are competitions. But one of the things that is quite interesting with that first mover advantage and technological superiority is that, for example, if you search for AI sales agent, we're number one or number two on Google, which is really significant and important. And that will now push us into areas where we're getting very strong demand for the products that we have to figure out how to address.

Gotcha. And with your first couple of customers signed up, can you talk a little bit about what you experienced in terms of sales cycle timelines? I guess from the time that a customer might trial a product first and try it internally to the time they give you a purchase order for X number of users, how long do you expect that sales cycle to be on a go-forward basis?

It is a little bit longer than what we've seen in the past in terms of the SMB customers of Wishpond, where they just want to get started with a marketing campaign or marketing activities. In the case of Sales Closer, obviously, it involves some changes to their business processes or how they've done things in the past. But what we've seen is still there's so much excitement and so much potential that is still the sales cycles are generally around the one month mark. But the larger deals that we're working on, those are obviously taking longer, as you would expect, and they start smaller and grow. But overall, yeah, I think that around one month mark is what we've seen so far. So it's not a long sales cycle by any stretch of imagination.

Gotcha. And just one more thing. I know in your preamble, you talked about the business being sort of tear resistant, but have you seen, you know, over the last couple of months, any changes in terms of sort of lead gen activity or sales conversion rates or anything of that sort in the business?

Yeah, good question. So one of the things that Adrian alluded to is some of the changes in the way Gmail, Yahoo, and some of the other mail providers have the changes that they've made. And The changes were made beginning of 2024 and they impacted our ability to do cold outreach and cold email activities for our own sales as well as, and more importantly, for our customers in the PersistIQ business unit. So for the WishBond one, it meant that we were starting to have a dip in terms of how many conversations we can have and how many of our emails were being answered. And we quickly turned that around and improved that for our own outbound sales activities. And we're in a good place on that. But the more significant impact, negative impact was with Persist IQ business unit. Because that one was basically helping a lot of different clients with their cold outreach program. And that was a challenge that took longer. And around now is basically where I would say we mostly turned it around and improved that. But it did result in a decline in that revenue stream.

Got you. That's great. Appreciate the update. Thanks a lot. No problem. Thank you.

Last question is from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital. Please go ahead.

My first one is around the customer profile. So given kind of the early signs you're seeing the sales closer, are you thinking about your go-to-market differently, given some of the scale in the pipeline that you're seeing? Just curious, you know, contrasting that with your historical roots in small businesses.

Right. Yeah. So I'll pass it to Adrian as well, because Adrian, you have other thoughts. But some of the differences that we see are historically a lot of our sales and growth have been outbound focused, outreach, cold outreach, you know, email focused. And that is definitely part of the equation for Sales Closer. But in the case of Sales Closer, the bigger portion of the activity and interest actually is marketing driven, whether it's ads, but more importantly, organic marketing activities. So people who are actually coming to us on the website, finding us because of the marketing activities, because the blog post, because of, you know, are ranking on search engines. So that changes things and it changes things in a number of ways. One is that obviously there's a little bit of spending on ads, but also it means that the marketing is a bigger driver and the type of customers that you get are more sophisticated a lot of times. The ones that are in the market for this kind of solution, more early adopters, some of the larger, more established, Also, it means that with outreach, outbound outreach, cold outreach, you have more control over exactly who you're going after and what geographies you're going after. With marketing and inbound, you get a mix from, let's say, different geographies, different willingness to pay profiles. And so part of the change that we also see is that hybrid approach that we are now rolling out of, well, not everyone has to get on a call with a salesperson. Some of those people, especially with the lower profile in terms of willingness to pay regions, they can actually just sign up, put in their credit card, start with a free trial and go. So that's one of the differences. So the differences I mentioned so far are outbound versus inbound and marketing, self sign up versus sales driven. So product led growth versus sales led growth. And the other difference also is channel. With the rest of our business, channel partnerships historically have not played a major role in our sales and growth. With Sales Closer, it is actually quite significant for us. It is early days for that, but the interest is really, really significant. I would say what I'm hearing from our salespeople and from the calls that I watch, one out of every five or six demo calls that we have is someone who wants to resell Sales Closer to their own audience. So we're still at the early innings of that. And that's something that we have to support them and all of that. But I think that would be another difference that we've seen between this go-to market versus the rest of our products. Adrian?

Yeah, I think you pretty much covered it there, Ali. And I think the only thing I would add to that is that the interesting use case of Sales Closer too, even just internally, as we start to use that more, is that it expands the breadth of what we can tap into in terms of international markets as well. And we're seeing that we're starting to get more interest and able to book more demos in these different regions that we wouldn't have normally been able to. Let's say an example in Australia, where the time zone is so different that normally And our full-time AE wouldn't be able to tap into and we would be able to with sales closer. So I think there's going to be some increases in terms of customer profile of different international regions that we didn't have before. And we're going to see some better mixes there in terms of the diversification of our geographical revenues. And then as Ali mentioned, the reseller program there has taken off really, really well. We've signed up several resellers already just within a very short time span of us releasing the program. So that one is very promising as well.

Hey, good to hear. I was curious about the product roadmap. I mean, you outlined in your slides, you know, really a focus on AI and supercharging your core product set. But I'm curious what that means, practically speaking. Like for now, Sales Closer is its own business, especially when it comes for enterprise. How do you see that pulling forward your core business of marketing software and solutions?

Yeah, great question. So increasingly what you're going to see, and that's active development efforts actually going on right now, increasingly what you're going to see is the products come together more closely and sales closer be able to feed off of the rest of Wishbone and use that as an advantage and Wishbone be able to feed into sales closer. One example of it is that you have a call an agent of sales closer where it needs to send a text message as a result of that. Let's say, you know, it's a medical clinic and, you know, someone asks for a book and an appointment and you want to not book it on the call, even though that's one of the capabilities, but for demonstration purposes, you want to actually send them a text message with a link. that text message capability would come from Wishbone or you want to send them an email that would come from Wishbone or vice versa. Within Wishbone, you're tracking the activities of a lead and all of that profile is becoming available to Sales Closer. So Sales Closer is one part of the customer journey and the rest of the Wishbone cover a pretty wide area as well. And we're putting them together in a way that I would say it doesn't mean that anyone who's signing up to Sales Closer would have to use the rest of the platform, but it would be very easy and very natural for them to turn on the rest of the platforms. and benefit from them. And one of the things that we've seen that is very, very promising is a lot of the conversations that we have with customers about sales closer is people who actually have needs for the rest of what Wishbone does. That, hey, I actually need to generate more leads as well to use Sales Closer with that, right? Or people who are using WishBond, they're generating leads, but they're too busy to answer calls. One example, a customer who was paying $350 for the phone systems that they use for their pizza shop, And, you know, they have to have someone, even minimum wage, always manning that as opposed to helping in the kitchen. Instead of that, using sales closer, bring their existing phone bills down and free up that resource to use that. So now that's someone that then would also say, well, OK, now I also want this. more advertising help, more lead generation help as well. They go hand in hand and that's the future of it. And concretely speaking, if you want to imagine it, imagine any interaction that you have with the Wishbone products increasingly will be very easy for you to have a very natural human interaction with meaning, let's say you're creating a landing page and you have the drag and drop functionality, but if you want, you can pop up an AI agent on the side and chat with it and say, hey, I don't like that tagline. Can you change that? I don't like that image. Can you add another section where it has our contact us form on it as well? Okay. Or the other way would be not even inside one product, but across all the products that you're talking to an ai agent and saying you know uh there's i don't know easter is coming up or you know some some holidays coming up i need um some marketing help and then it answers you that hey here's some ideas and you select one of the ideas and then it goes and creates multiple components across all products. Here's the ad campaign. Here's the landing page that goes with that. Here's the email drip campaigns that go with that. And here's follow-up call activity, if that's relevant, sets that all up. And then you can continue talking to it for refinements, for insights. that's going to be increasingly what you're going to see. And in that world, you're not going to really need an agency anymore. You're not going to need to be a marketing expert yourself anymore. You don't need a designer per se. I mean, there are more sophisticated use cases where sure, we will hand you some help on that. But that's kind of that's the trajectory. And that's the setting level playing field that we're working towards.

And so when it comes to some of the optimism around growth, it sounds like the second half sales closer is contributing to that. But I think in your prepared remarks, you mentioned return to historical levels. Historical has, you know, that spans the gambit, I think, from, you know, moderate growth to 70% growth in 2020, I think.

some periods so i was wondering if you could just help set expectations a little bit or goalposts around what that means in the next year for sure i think um in the short term uh because of some of the optimizations we did and also decreases in number of account executives that we had even though it helped us In the short term, it helped us with cost optimizations. But still, you know, having fewer account executives to begin with, it did have a negative impact on the top line revenue. And we're going to see some of that weakness show up, especially in Q1. And Q1 historically is a weaker quarter for us as well. In the short term, we're going to see some of that and the reacceleration. You know, we expect that, you know, in Q2 and especially the second half of the year to happen. And when we talk about historic growth rates, I mean, I think the goalpost is kind of that 30, 40% annual growth rate. But in the more short-term focus, I think quarter over quarter growth is going to be the milestones that we want to hit first.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I'll pass the line. Thank you.

We have a couple of questions from the listeners here. So the first question is, you mentioned Sales Closer has launched partnerships in the real estate industry and also healthcare services industry. What other industries are you targeting next or have you seen some positive general trends in?

A good question. I mean, I would have to look at the list of some of the ones that are coming because some of them are coming daily that we're not necessarily myself. I'm not involved with. Right. But some of the ones that I've seen, for example, one who actually is a customer of Sales Closer was very impressed and said, you know, actually, the bigger opportunity I see is reselling this. They work with larger enterprise customers with their cloud needs, whether it's Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure or what have you. And they were very interested in being able to provide sales closer to that audience and expand with that. That's one of the examples. I see some in the financial industry. I see some marketing agencies who want to provide this to their clients. I think marketing agencies is a big part of it as well.

The next question is, are you only targeting new customers for Sales Closer in terms of inbound? Will you also look to cross-sell Sales Closer to your existing customer base?

It's really both. But I think the majority of the growth so far has been new logos.

There are no further questions. We now pass the call back to Ali Tashkander for closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Once again, I want to thank everyone for joining the call today. Thank you, the analysts, for your questions and the audience. Everyone, please stay safe and healthy, and we look forward to providing more updates this year. Thank you.