PSQ - Q3 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Welcome to PublicSquare's third quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, William Kent, VP of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

William Kent (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to PublicSquare's third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Hosting today's call are Michael Seifert, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, and Brad Searle, Chief Financial Officer of PublicSquare. The information discussed today is qualified in its entirety by the Form 8-K that has been filed today by PublicSquare, which may be accessed on the SEC's website and PublicSquare's website. Today's call is also being webcast, and a replay will be posted to PublicSquare's Investor Relations website. Please note that statements made during this call, including financial projections or other statements that are not historical in nature, may constitute forward-looking statements.

Such statements are made on the basis of PublicSquare's views and assumptions regarding future events and business performance at the time they're made, and we do not undertake any obligation to update these statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, which could cause PublicSquare's actual results to differ from its historical results and forecasts, including those risks set forth in PublicSquare's filings with the SEC, and you should refer to and carefully consider those for more information. This cautionary statement applies to all forward-looking statements made during this call. Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. In addition, during this call, we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including EBITDA, which is referred to as Adjusted EBITDA. These measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in the company's quarterly filing today with the SEC and the press release filed on Form 8-K. I will now open the call to Michael Seifert. Michael, please go ahead.

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Thank you, Will, and thank you to everyone for joining this call. We really appreciate it. It has been an incredible journey thus far as a public company, and we're delighted to share with you all the new and exciting updates to our business as we seek to change the country through the power of commerce. We are grateful to be a company by the people, for the people, and owned by we, the people, and we're certainly grateful that we get to grow with all the businesses and consumers that are a part of this wonderful platform. Today, what I'd love to do is start off by reviewing some financial highlights. I'm gonna give a 30,000-foot view of the company as a whole, and then we'll dive into the specific verticals like Marketplace, EveryLife, et cetera.

So to start, let's review the metrics and some key financial highlights for the quarter, and you can find a more detailed discussion of these topics in our 10-Q filed with the SEC today, as well as in our press release, as Will mentioned. To kick off, we saw quarter three, third quarter gross consolidated revenues of $2.2 million. This equates to growth of 327% compared to the second quarter of this year, which is a 1,529% increase from Q3 of last year. We increased our marketplace revenue specifically, meaning advertising, by 65% compared to Q2 of this year to $0.9 million, which equates to 602% growth from the third quarter of last year, 2022.

We saw net revenue of over $1 million from EveryLife, our wholly owned baby care brand that was launched in mid-July, July thirteenth, specifically. And it's really important to note, by the way, that 71% of this net revenue from EveryLife was subscription-based, which is a great positive sign for the recurring revenue potential of this vertical. Also, related to costs and expenses, as a reminder, due to the transaction that took place this quarter, we did go public this quarter, Q3 of this year, as well as outsized research and development expenses associated with the launch of e-commerce, our going forward costs will diminish significantly compared to what was seen in Q3. On the growth side, in terms of consumers and businesses, the growth of these consumers and businesses joining the platform continues at a rapid pace.

Over 1.6 million consumer members and over 71,000 small businesses are now using the platform as of the end of the third quarter. As the feature functionality of our platform continues to advance, so too does our usage. For example, we launched e-commerce on November 1, just about 2 weeks ago, and we saw an average traffic increase of 3x over the norm during the first 2 weeks of November because of the increased accessibility of our platform, increased functionality of our platform. These enhancements we're very grateful for and have been working very hard to achieve. While our business is certainly nascent, we've developed a strong track record in less than 18 months since our national launch on July 4, 2022, that proves our model for growth and diversified revenue is evident and successful.

As a reminder, our business exists primarily as a marketplace. This marketplace provides proprietary data about what solutions our consumers are looking for. We can then cross-reference that data with market data to discover opportunities for product creation or acquisition in order to fulfill the needs of our consumers at greater scale. Once we create or acquire our own products, we sell them back into our marketplace with attractive margins and the revenue flywheel spins. EveryLife is a perfect example of this. We launched EveryLife July 13, and I can say confidently that PublicSquare, the platform itself, which you can find at publicsquare.com or on the App Store or Google Play, was 5x more successful at driving new traffic to EveryLife as a brand than any other marketing endeavors we pursued.

In fact, we ran a video on X that saw over 3 million views in its first week, and even still, PublicSquare was even more successful in driving new traffic, which is affirming to the core business plan that I'm describing with this flywheel here. Obviously, our big milestone that we're tracking towards is profitability. We're very excited to achieve that significant milestone at a quicker rate than it took some of our competitors. There's a few notes that I want to point out here. Profitability for us is not binary, meaning we have multiple paths to get there.

Because of the asset-light nature of our business, we actually could achieve profitability this quarter if we were to desire to, but we're actually strategically investing in growth for the future so that we're better suited for the long haul of our business with a solid foundation of businesses, members, and technical infrastructure to maintain the traffic we expect to see into the future. As we look at profitability, we're investing heavily in the developments of these technical features that provide that firm foundation. Like I mentioned, e-commerce was the big one. We've been working all year at that set of features that we launched November 1, and as we move forward into the next year, the focus is more businesses, more members, and more money. Revenue is king heading into 2024. We've built the movement, now we get to monetize it.

When we get to be the brokers at the center of this parallel economy and monetize the transactions taking place between values-aligned businesses and consumers, we know that that is not only a liberating endeavor, it's a highly lucrative one. Also, it's important to note we are public at a much earlier point in our life cycle than other businesses, which we see as a real strategic advantage, that we get to grow with our consumers and businesses and investors alike. We have no debt, we have a clean balance sheet, and we are off to the races, and we are proud to reiterate on this call today that we expect our first profitable quarter in 2024. To break it down further, I wanna talk about the marketplace specifically.

Our e-commerce launch fundamentally changed the game for our company from a user experience, business experience, and revenue potential perspective. While our advertising revenue continues to grow at a healthy rate, it is great to see that we now have the opportunity to profit off of the brokering of these transactions taking place within our marketplace. This launch, we talk a lot about e-commerce, but it, it included far more than that as well. It included things like guest browsing, where you can actually access the platform now without needing an account or needing to sign in. It included a new and improved search functionality that hyper-targets exactly what you're looking for, with a greater level of intelligence and predictive analysis, and a brand revamp. So you might notice we, on our last earnings call, we're PublicSquare.

There were a lot of strategic reasons we chose that brand at the beginning of our company's journey, but we have embarked upon a strategic brand revamp over the course of the last few weeks and have moved the brand to Public Square. We also acquired publicsquare.com as a domain, and so we are really excited for this next chapter as a company titled Public Square. You can find out more at publicsquare.com. We plan to continue to add features to the marketplace into 2024, such as user rewards, more business automation and controls for a business to have over their own experience, and payment system upgrades, which will further insulate us from any sort of cancellation pressure, and it will also provide an opportunity for us to further realize our revenue potential as we net more of the transactions.

Speaking of EveryLife, our baby care brand we launched on July 13th. This is a premium line of products that has a simple yet profound message: no matter where you're from, who you are, the color of your skin, your socioeconomic background, every life is a miracle, and we're proud to support those precious babies with premium baby care products. Today, that looks like diapers and wipes, and we are seeing growth that is unheard of in this industry. As I mentioned earlier, 71% of our revenue from Q3 was from subscription sales, meaning month-over-month sales, where the diapers and wipes arrive at the consumer's door. This obviously is a great sign for recurring revenue moving forward, and we're not stopping at diapers and wipes. We'll soon be rolling out soaps and baby lotions, as well as pull-ups, in order to further diversify our product line.

We had a significant investment in Q3 for inventory, which has us covered for the foreseeable future. Now we get to go sell products to great consumers that are excited not only about the values we espouse, but the quality of the baby care that they are receiving. We've initiated special partnerships with pregnancy resource centers, faith-based nonprofits, and various churches, which we believe will ultimately continue to provide bulk sales in a way that is rare in the world of direct-to-consumer products. Just to be more specific, there are over 3,000 pro-life, pro-family, pregnancy care resource centers in the United States, and it's an entirely untapped market for values-aligned baby care products. That's our opportunity, just with that one vertical.

Finally, we actually launched our own sales platform in mid-October called PSQ Link, primarily for our own outbound usage within our sales department, but also for our small business vendors to take advantage of. It's a white label tool with a few of our own custom features built into the mix, specific to the small business' needs. The engagement of this tool has been tremendous so far, and while we won't be sharing exact numbers until the Q4 earnings, PSQ Link is meeting expectations and has proven helpful, and as a viable solution for small businesses looking for a technological advantage. This is a subscription-based service priced at $200 per month, and you can learn more at psqlink.com. As I mentioned, our theme for 2024 is more members, more merchants, more money.

2024 is focused on growth, and we are excited to lean into targeted advertising, partnership deals, like with Tucker Carlson. We're proud to be his first partner in his new media endeavor, which we announced a few weeks ago, and strategic events and outreach endeavors, such as the PublicSquare Town Hall Series, which we launched a few weeks ago, in order to capitalize on the energy around the election season in 2024. Finally, before passing it off to Brad, our wonderful CFO, I want to share a few testimonies about the success of our platform in its early stages. One cool data point that I wanted to share with everyone is that our TAM is truly being realized, and it is larger, we believe, than many people currently realize.

In fact, the New York Post ran an article last week that talked about how the anti-woke marketplace, PublicSquare, has seen a surge in traffic from Democrats. So we are finding that the message of PublicSquare, a love for country, Constitution, and the values that it protects, a rejection of woke ideology and an embrace of excellence and meritocracy, is being met from people across the political spectrum. To be more specific, some internal research has shown recently that 26% of our new members over the course of the past month are actually registered Democrats. 52% are registered Republicans, and the rest are either independent or no party preference. This again speaks to the TAM potential here, and that Americans broadly are ready for the solution that PublicSquare can provide.

We had a small business reach out recently and say, "I want to thank you and your team for carefully considering your transaction commission. I used to sell on Amazon, and the fees were so high, a small business like mine could just not compete at all. So thank you for enabling small business owners to thrive again on this platform." We had a consumer reach out and say that they ordered all of their Christmas gifts from this platform, and he said, "I'm proud to give my money to the types of small businesses I find on PublicSquare." We had a consumer reach out and share about the wide variety of products and services like you can find on the platform. They said, "I've purchased diapers, hired a pest control company, bought many pastries, and hired an appliance repair company all on PublicSquare.

I actually enjoy spending my money on top-tier products and services, and I've seen an explosion of companies join the platform recently. Finally, to sum it all up, there was a small business that actually serves toiletries, reached out and said, "We love," in all caps, "having our products on PublicSquare. It has made a huge difference on our family-owned and operated company." When people ask who we're doing this for, it's businesses like that. So before we go to questions at the conclusion of this call, I would like to hand it over to Brad Searle to discuss a few items on the financial side of things. Brad?

Brad Searle (CFO)

Thank you, Michael. Those are awesome stories. Glad to hear them. I'm thrilled to be with you here today to dive a bit deeper into our third quarter 2023 results. As Michael mentioned, we successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange in July. This transaction led to multiple unique items in the financial statements. You'll see that the Q3 2023 net loss includes $3.3 million in one-time transaction-related costs and $7.3 million in non-cash expenses related to earn-outs and warrants. Please note that we had $7 million in year-to-date transaction-related costs that we do not expect to be recurring. Our continued revenue stream of advertising contracts saw substantial growth of over 600% year-over-year, while nascent subsidiary, EveryLife Sales, totaled more than $1 million in less than a full quarter of sales.

As Michael mentioned, the highest referral source for EveryLife Sales was the PublicSquare platform, which affirms our flywheel proposition. I want to turn now to Adjusted EBITDA, which was negative $7.7 million in Q3, and negative $15.5 million year to date, Q3. We believe this metric is indicative of the operations of this business, as it excludes transaction-related costs, share-based compensation, depreciation, amortization, and other non-cash items. Moving over to our balance sheet, we saw a share count as of 9/30 of 24,340,075 Class A common shares outstanding, and 3,213,678 Class C common shares outstanding.

We ended the quarter with $25.3 million of cash and cash equivalents, $27.1 million in working capital, and $30.3 million in total current assets on the balance sheet. Now let's shift to how we're looking at the future. We expect cash outflow to decrease in Q4 and again in Q1 of 2024. We expect elevated e-commerce research and development expenses to continue through the fourth quarter of 2023, and then step down and stabilize at a lower rate as we enter 2024. We also expect G&A expenses to decrease going forward simply based on the completion of the business combination in July. Lastly, as Michael mentioned, we reiterate our expectation of achieving our first profitable quarter in 2024.

Now, let's move on to Q&A. The operator will open the queue for live questions, and after that, we will address some of the inbound questions we received prior to the call. Operator?

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the live question-and-answer session. Your first question comes from the line of Darren Aftahi with Roth MKM. Please go ahead.

Darren Aftahi (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah. Hi, Mike. Hi, Brad. Congrats on the progress you guys made. A few questions, if I may. First, I know it's kinda early days with the relaunch of the commerce marketplace, but can you just kinda talk about some of the activity you've seen, both on the business side and on the consumer interaction with the new features, the browsing ability to curate things to people's data, and then kinda the increased level of product on the marketplace?

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Happy to. Good to hear from you, Darren. We have been really thrilled to witness the early traction of our e-commerce launch. Obviously, as you mentioned, it is early. We've only been at this new, feature release for 2 weeks now. But what I can say is that the surge in traffic has been fairly monumental for the business, frankly. We've seen a 3x average surge in traffic from the norm before commerce, which speaks to the excitement of the consumers, and we're seeing that excitement convert, which is a big plus for us. We've heard from many businesses reaching out, saying that the transaction is happening seamlessly, and given the transaction rate, that's very competitive.

Small businesses are feeling like this is kinda exactly what they were looking for, especially when, to date, they've been reliant upon companies like Amazon or Etsy. On the consumer side, we've heard specific gratification with the multi-vendor approach to the transaction. So there's a lot that our consumers are excited about, but most notably, it's been the fact that you can now lump multiple vendors into one shopping cart. For example, last week, we had a vendor check out with from 20 different merchants in one shopping cart. The ability for consumers to do that, really, increases conversion potential we see moving forward. The other thing that I would mention is that we're really excited about heading into the Christmas shopping season.

We're intentionally pursuing a lot of discounts, promotions as we head into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but even more than those two dates that are traditionally thought of, we're excited about Small Business Saturday, and we feel like we have a unique advantage to speak to that audience there. You asked about the product specifically. You know, we launched the e-commerce functionality with over 400,000 products. We plan to double that, conservatively by the end of the year. So we've had a real influx of businesses wanting to link their products to the platform. Most of those businesses were vendors previously in the directory format, and now they're wanting to convert, which was also sort of an unknown when we launched this, and that has met or exceeded expectations.

I'll give you kind of one more anecdote to call that out. As we prepped for November 1, we were having to do a lot of outbound, targeting the businesses, asking them if they'd like to link their products. We're grateful for the early traction we had. Now, on the other side of November 1, we do not have to do any more outbound. The businesses are actually filling our calendars, linking, asking questions, wanting to learn more, which we see as a great sign moving forward. So, you know, while we're excited to share more numbers, when we report Q4 earnings, the e-commerce launch has certainly met our expectations, and both the team internally and our consumers externally are excited about how it's gone thus far.

Darren Aftahi (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

That's helpful. Thanks. Just two more, if I may. So, you've got a lot of sort of organic word-of-mouth sign-ups to date. Can you just talk a little bit about marketing strategy going forward, or you guys kind of plan to spend money, if any, and can we expect more partnerships like the one you guys signed with Tucker Carlson's company going forward?

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Tucker is certainly the most significant partnership we plan to embark upon in the near term. We, as I mentioned, we're super grateful to be his first official partner. We believe Tucker's has a real unique voice to be able to speak to our audience intentionally and has an ability, especially with his reach, just the sheer size of it, to attract a great amount of our TAM to the platform. He's the most significant we'll embark upon in the near future. As we move into 2024, though, we're going to become very targeted in our marketing, meaning we've understood with far more clarity who our consumers are and where we can reach them, where what podcasts they're listening to, what radio stations they're tuned into.

We understand the potential for even marketing things that, given our TAM, might be other folks would maybe see as old-fashioned or antiquated, but we actually see as very strategically advantageous. For example, mailers, you know, they're very commonly used in political campaigns, and we have seen a real ability to target older communities on our platform that still have a great conversion rate with mailers. So we're taking steps towards some of these tools in 2024. We expect spend to not actually increase. It just becomes more intentional and less large-scale event-based. For example, Q3, we had a large deal of sales and marketing spend that was purely allocated to marketing the new milestone as a public company, so a lot of traction build-up around that transaction itself. The spend will normalize moving forward.

It will become more targeted, and one other point that I would mention is that we have a real opportunity with our diversified revenue strategy to, yes, market through each of the verticals, but we really want to intentionally prioritize the platform itself, because as I mentioned earlier in the call, the more that we can drive consumers into our marketplace, the more that that will help not only increase our members on the platform, but actually increase consumers to EveryLife and to PSQ Link. Given that that customer acquisition channel is our best resource, we plan to utilize it heavily in 2024 and drive more traffic there.

The last thing I'll mention is that the election season is coming up in 2024, and given that our platform certainly has a values component to it, and customers are well aware of the cultural conversation related to values in election years, we're looking forward to doing more like what we've recently launched, which is the Public Square Town Hall series, where we represent the voices of America's small business community in a town hall format with various political and cultural leaders around the country. So just two weeks ago, we launched our first Public Square Town Hall in Indianapolis with Congressman Jim Banks, who's also running for the Senate there in Indiana, and then Donald Trump Jr. who joined us as well.

We had a great turnout and got to hear from numerous businesses on the PublicSquare platform share their questions about the economy and the future. What was really advantageous about this from a marketing perspective is after that night happened, we had five different news pieces related to that town hall shared the next day. Many were actually local news outlets, which is a hard nut to crack for a company like ours. We see this as a real tool to do that. So the more that we can build this grassroots energy around the country heading into a very big year for our country, we believe that 2024 is going to be a year of, as I mentioned, more members, more merchants, and more money.

Darren Aftahi (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. And then this last one for me, you know, with momentum in your business, I'm just sort of curious from a scalability perspective, not only with human capital, but also with the necessary infrastructure for something like a marketplace or some of these direct consumer products and platforms you have, do you feel like you have the right resources in place today if this was to, you know, exponentially take off even further? Or is this kind of a just a kind of build as you get, you'll monitor the situation almost on a dynamic basis? Thanks.

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, great question. I'll break down the resources question into sort of two different categories. Number one, I'll speak to... You know what? I'll even give a third. I'll speak to human resources, I'll speak to monetary resources, and then I'll speak to technology resources. First, on the human resources side, we really have the team that we need to achieve our goals over the course of the next 12 to 18 months. You will not see our company going on a hiring spree. We've brought the right people into the mix, and they've really been able to run as a close-knit team with an airtight culture. So on the human resources side, we feel a great deal of confidence in the people on board to produce great quality work heading into this next year.

On the monetary resources side, we believe that with this transaction, we are well capitalized to achieve profitability, but not just profitability with no cash left over, profitability with a yet fortified balance sheet. That is our plan and intention heading into 2024, and we believe confidently that we have the capital to get there. And then finally, on the technological side of things, we've stress-tested our platform and our systems to achieve tens of millions of more member traffic than we have experienced to date. And to be more specific, you know, we share often that we believe our TAM is 100 million-plus Americans. We've broken down that TAM into three different segments.

We view this 100 million Americans broken into early adopters, mid adopters, and late adopters that we plan to achieve over the course of the coming years and acquire to the platform. We believe that if all of our even late adopters came to us tomorrow and surged the platform with traffic, that we have the right resources and tools in place to be able to handle that size of traffic. We've invested heavily, by the way, in Q3 toward that aim. If you would have asked me that question in Q1, I would have said, "Yeah, I'm not so sure. We haven't made the necessary investments in our technology yet." But I can say confidently, after the last three months and after the team we've brought in and after the capital we've accessed, there's not much we can't handle at this point.

Darren Aftahi (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

That's great to hear. I'll pass it on. Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The live Q&A is now complete. I'm going to hand the call over to Ashley DeSimone from ICR for additional questions. Ashley?

Ashley DeSimone (Managing Director)

Thank you. Thank you, operator. We'll now address some questions that we got inbound, submitted by shareholders through Say Technologies. The first question relates to profitability. Today, you reiterated that you expect to report your first profitable quarter in 2024. Please help us understand the drivers of achieving that and give us any other considerations you want us to know as it relates to profitability.

Brad Searle (CFO)

Yeah, thanks for the question, Ashley. This is Brad. As I mentioned on our Q2 earnings call, our primary focus here at PublicSquare on the financial side is ensuring that the growth of our revenues are outpacing any growth in our expenses. And so we're still early on in our journey. We only launched nationwide in July of last year. We've already learned a lot of the channels that, on the revenue side, the streams and the channels that maximize our top-line potential. And then on the cost side, we know a lot of the costs that accelerate our ROI. And so as we look at Q3 specifically, I noted a lot of the one-time G&A costs related to the business combination.

And now that the dust has settled from that, we have a clear view of what it looks like from a financial standpoint to run and to operate as a public company. So you pair that with the expected decrease in future R&D spend and increasing revenue across the board, and then any future revenue opportunities, whether that's in-house, like EveryLife, or potential acquisitions down the road, and we believe our financial future is bright here at PublicSquare. So with that said, based off the current business today, where we stand today with internal growth projections on current revenue streams and not including any acquisitions, we do reiterate our belief that our company will achieve its first profitable quarter next year in 2024. Michael, do you have anything to add here?

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

No, I thought that was great. I would just simply say and remind folks that the nature of our business is very asset-light. As I reiterated earlier, we are a people company. We are as strong as our personnel, and that really is the large line item expense for us, comparatively. We do not have long-term capital commitments. We have no debt. The balance sheet is clean. And so, I would remind folks that our path to profitability is not binary. We have multiple levers we pull to get there. It's all a decision for us as to what makes the most strategic growth sense heading into next year and making sure at the heart of it all, that the profits are following the solution that we're providing for consumers.

We believe that the more we're able to attract consumers and convert them to regular shoppers of all of the products within the PublicSquare portfolio, the more our profits will continue to increase.

Ashley DeSimone (Managing Director)

Thanks, guys. Next question. We got a lot of questions on e-com. So beyond what you touched on with Darren, maybe we can get a little more granular as it relates to the app becoming more user-friendly, one-stop shopping, maybe discuss a potential affiliate program, and specifically, any additional enhancements you want to call out.

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Happy to. Yeah, we covered a good bit of this earlier in the call, so I'll keep this section brief. But you know, one of the specific questions was, how has this made the app more user-friendly? It's important for folks to know that when we started this company, we started it as a directory. There were a lot of strategic reasons as to why we did this. We wanted to figure out how we could have a local and online marketplace function as one and the same, where consumers would tell us what they're looking for, and we show them local and online options. And because of that strategic decision, it didn't make sense to, right out the gate, invest heavily in e-commerce.

We wanted to make sure that businesses across the board felt like this was a one-stop exposure shop for them, and at the same time, that consumers had a wide variety of purchasing options to choose from. We then learned a lot about where our consumers were finding the most value, and we wanted to build the plane in flight with our consumers from the early days. So we thought, "Hey, this directory will give us a lot of insights." We built upon it and then discovered that one of the things our consumers were hungering most for was the ability to seamlessly transact.

So in the early days, you found the businesses, products, services you were looking for, either locally or online, but then the transaction happens with the business itself, adding a step to the consumer experience and the likelihood of drop-off, which nobody wants to see, of course. Now, with this e-commerce integration, we've taken that next step to truly move our competitive landscape away from a Yelp and more toward an Etsy or an Amazon. We are looking to be the one-stop shopping experience for this network of unheard Americans, but it only works if it's a seamless checkout experience. Thankfully, with this multi-vendor, one-cart option, it is increasingly becoming more so that way. There was also a question about will we ever have an affiliate program like Amazon?

As I mentioned earlier in the call, user rewards and the entire world of heightening user engagement and giving super consumers the ability to receive monetary reward for sharing the platform and the associated products, at a greater measure, that's definitely a priority for us heading into next year. We want to be creative about how we do that as well. Our consumers need something different than the average Amazon consumer often, and so we want to make sure that we're hearing our customers' needs about what will best maximize their experience as a super consumer, and we've begun that deep dive already. We also have additional enhancements, as I mentioned earlier. Guest browsing is a big one. In the early days, we required customers to have an account in order to browse. That was a strategic decision. We wanted to do two things.

We wanted to court early adopters. We knew that if we were building the plane in flight and the work was very much in progress, that the folks that were willing to convert and jump into the experience with us, even the, amidst the nascent stage of the business, those would really be our early adopter people, and we wanted to court them intentionally, and, truly use their information to reach out to them and hear what they were loving about the platform. We tried to take advantage of focus groups and surveys very often. That early stage, lack of guest browsing allowed for us to do that. The other thing that it did is it protected the platform as we scaled our systems. Darren asked a great question about, are our, systems truly ready for scale?

A year ago, they weren't, and us having the account wall helped protect some of our systems from millions of people trying to hit them at once. Now, we're ready for that traffic. We're ready for showtime, and because of that, we felt very confident lifting the account wall, changing that account creation process to happen at checkout, and allowing our customers to browse before creating that account. I'll probably stop there with e-commerce enhancements, but of course, if you have any further questions or ideas of things that you'd love to see on the platform, we'd love for you to reach out to us at publicsquare.com.

Ashley DeSimone (Managing Director)

Thanks, Michael. For the last topic, let's revisit marketing, as we know that's top of mind to shareholders. How will you bring exposure to the company? And please elaborate on your advertising strategy or other marketing initiatives that you wanna let us know about today?

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

So we're really grateful for the virality we've experienced. You know, every week we seek to go viral, quote, unquote, for some reason on social media, in the news, et cetera. We do this through capitalizing on current events. We do this through brand partnerships. We do this through having a very frequent and significant social media presence, and we certainly expect that to continue heading into 2024. We also have come up with a lot of creative ideas for scaling our message. For example, we've recently, back in July, launched the Freedom Economy Index. This is a survey of our over 70,000 businesses that we conduct in partnership with another great parallel economy company called RedBalloon, which is the largest non-woke job board and hiring service in the country.

Every month, we send out a survey in partnership to our business members on PublicSquare and ask them various questions about their thoughts on the economy and where the country is going. We then report those results, and it's picked up by media outlets, giving a great deal of new traffic to the platform. People wanna understand how the economy is doing. They read our survey and the associated results through outlets like Fox Business or Bloomberg. The hook at the end of it is, if you want to learn more and shop from businesses like this, come and join us at publicsquare.com. We've seen things like that severely increase our traffic, and we're grateful for them. Finally, what I'll say, just to elaborate on my point from earlier, we break down our TAM into three parts: early adopters, mid adopters, and late adopters.

We believe that we have not yet even achieved 10% of our early adopter community. So as we look at 2024, we're really still speaking to early adopters, and we believe that we know where they're at. We know what message is most likely to lead to conversions to a new member and to frequent purchases, and we know how we can best solve the problems they're facing in their communities with this economic solution. So just so people understand kind of the life cycle of our business and where we stand today, when we say we're nascent, to quantify that further, we don't believe we've even achieved 10% yet of our early adopter community.

So, 2024 is gonna be a fun year for the platform, and we have multiple marketing initiatives planned that will help us achieve that goal.

Ashley DeSimone (Managing Director)

Thanks, Michael, and thanks to everyone for sending in questions. Michael, do you have any closing remarks before we close the call?

Michael Seifert (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Ashley, thanks so much. I would just say that I'm grateful, grateful for everyone that's joined us on this endeavor. Whether you are a business, a consumer, an investor, or just an interested bystander, we're really grateful that folks are excited about the parallel economy that is truly burgeoning. We believe that we are at the tip of the spear of this movement, and we're especially thankful to be a company by the people, for the people, and owned by we, the people. So we hope everyone has a fantastic remainder of the year, and we are excited to speak to you in 2024.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.