Thinkific Labs Inc
TSX:THNC
US |
Johnson & Johnson
NYSE:JNJ
|
Pharmaceuticals
|
|
US |
Berkshire Hathaway Inc
NYSE:BRK.A
|
Financial Services
|
|
US |
Bank of America Corp
NYSE:BAC
|
Banking
|
|
US |
Mastercard Inc
NYSE:MA
|
Technology
|
|
US |
UnitedHealth Group Inc
NYSE:UNH
|
Health Care
|
|
US |
Exxon Mobil Corp
NYSE:XOM
|
Energy
|
|
US |
Pfizer Inc
NYSE:PFE
|
Pharmaceuticals
|
|
US |
Palantir Technologies Inc
NYSE:PLTR
|
Technology
|
|
US |
Nike Inc
NYSE:NKE
|
Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods
|
|
US |
Visa Inc
NYSE:V
|
Technology
|
|
CN |
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd
NYSE:BABA
|
Retail
|
|
US |
3M Co
NYSE:MMM
|
Industrial Conglomerates
|
|
US |
JPMorgan Chase & Co
NYSE:JPM
|
Banking
|
|
US |
Coca-Cola Co
NYSE:KO
|
Beverages
|
|
US |
Walmart Inc
NYSE:WMT
|
Retail
|
|
US |
Verizon Communications Inc
NYSE:VZ
|
Telecommunication
|
Utilize notes to systematically review your investment decisions. By reflecting on past outcomes, you can discern effective strategies and identify those that underperformed. This continuous feedback loop enables you to adapt and refine your approach, optimizing for future success.
Each note serves as a learning point, offering insights into your decision-making processes. Over time, you'll accumulate a personalized database of knowledge, enhancing your ability to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.
With a comprehensive record of your investment history at your fingertips, you can compare current opportunities against past experiences. This not only bolsters your confidence but also ensures that each decision is grounded in a well-documented rationale.
Do you really want to delete this note?
This action cannot be undone.
52 Week Range |
2.47
4.28
|
Price Target |
|
We'll email you a reminder when the closing price reaches CAD.
Choose the stock you wish to monitor with a price alert.
Johnson & Johnson
NYSE:JNJ
|
US | |
Berkshire Hathaway Inc
NYSE:BRK.A
|
US | |
Bank of America Corp
NYSE:BAC
|
US | |
Mastercard Inc
NYSE:MA
|
US | |
UnitedHealth Group Inc
NYSE:UNH
|
US | |
Exxon Mobil Corp
NYSE:XOM
|
US | |
Pfizer Inc
NYSE:PFE
|
US | |
Palantir Technologies Inc
NYSE:PLTR
|
US | |
Nike Inc
NYSE:NKE
|
US | |
Visa Inc
NYSE:V
|
US | |
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd
NYSE:BABA
|
CN | |
3M Co
NYSE:MMM
|
US | |
JPMorgan Chase & Co
NYSE:JPM
|
US | |
Coca-Cola Co
NYSE:KO
|
US | |
Walmart Inc
NYSE:WMT
|
US | |
Verizon Communications Inc
NYSE:VZ
|
US |
This alert will be permanently deleted.
Good afternoon. My name is JP and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to Thinkific's First Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference call is being broadcast live on the Internet and recorded. [Operator Instructions]I would now like to turn the conference over to Janet Craig, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, JP, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Thinkific earnings call for the first quarter of 2023. Joining me today are Greg Smith, Co-Founder and CEO; and Corinne Hua, CFO. After the prepared remarks, we will open up the call to questions.During the call today, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions and, therefore, subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our regulatory filings that were filed earlier today.Our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures. They should be considered as a supplement to, and not a substitute for IFRS measures. Reconciliations between the 2 can be found in our regulatory documents, which are available on our website.In addition, our commentary today will include Key Performance Indicators that help us evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate business plans and make strategic decisions. Such key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different to similar key performance indicators, used by other companies.I should also note, we have a slide deck that supports our remarks available to download on the webcast interface or on our website. And finally, all dollar amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars, unless otherwise indicated.I will now turn the call over to Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific.
Thank you, Janet. Hello, and welcome to our earnings call. Thank you for joining us. In the first quarter, we continued to execute against our strategy and remain focused on helping creator educators succeed. We delivered revenue of $14.1 million, which was above the top end of our guidance range, and adjusted EBITDA was better than what we guided to, coming in at a loss of $3.1 million.Other notable results included total paying customers, which were 34,000, the second consecutive quarter of customer growth. Thinkific Payments continues to perform well, with a penetration rate exceeding 26% and GPV, that's the amount of payments processed on Thinkific Payments of $29 million. Earlier today, we also announced a significant milestone for our Thinkific Payments business, we have processed over $100 million in payments volume to date. As we bring on more creator educators and these creators find success on our platform, we expect the number to grow at an accelerated rate.Thinkific Payments was launched in November 2021, and the growth we have seen here has exceeded our expectations. We built it to improve the payments experience for our creators and simplify the administration they face, as well as helping them sell more. We will continue to focus on building features that deliver on that goal.A few quick facts. 78% of new creators to Thinkific in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada start with Thinkific Payments. Globally, that number is about 60%, and we expect that to increase, as we roll out new features and local payment methods in more countries. Customers adopting Thinkific Payments saw a 22% larger average transaction size, and for those utilizing our order bump feature, they enjoy an impressive 98% larger average transaction size, showcasing Thinkific Payments as a powerful driver of customer success.Our success and our strong partnership with Stripe will continue. Yesterday, we announced some exciting development at Stripe's annual conference. Namely, we announced that Thinkific is one of the world's first platforms to integrate Stripe apps. This increases the tools available to creators that help them reduce admin, and maximize time spent building remarkable businesses. Upcoming products from the partnership will help creators sell higher ticket education, by providing payment options, including Buy Now, Pay Later, currently in beta; a credit option that significantly reduces the administration required to offer student payment plans, and makes it easier to sell and to purchase higher-priced courses and education products.And we aren't stopping there, over the coming quarter, you can expect to see more feature announcements that benefit our creators coming to our payments platform. And one that I'm particularly excited about addresses one of the larger administrative [ burdens ] creator space. Thinkific Payments exemplifies our commitment to creating tools that help creators succeed and ultimately when they succeed, so do we.We see more and more larger creators and businesses moving to Thinkific Plus for the service and features it supports. Blisspot is a prime example of an organization that has harnessed the immense capabilities of Thinkific Plus to build and scale an incredible well-being platform. The Australian SaaS company, which is known to many as the Netflix of well-being, sells access to its platform to small and midsized companies, who are able to provide their employees with an exceptional array of resources to support their mental, physical and emotional health.At first, Blisspot experimented with live events, workshops and seminars, but they soon realized that online learning would allow them to have the largest impact and reach as many people as possible. That's when they found Thinkific Plus, which provided the integrated out-of-the-box solution they've been looking for. In the words of founder, Deborah Tyson, my vision was for a seamless, accessible, comprehensive well-being platform. Thinkific Plus has allowed me to fully realize that vision.Blisspot has Thinkific's enterprise strength platform fully integrated into their own, which Deborah says, is like a bespoke solution so customized that it feels like part of our product. Users sign into Blisspot, then seamlessly access all the content and courses through Thinkific Plus, and were hugely important to Deborah as a designer. I care about what things look like and about staying true to our brand, she said.Perfecting these user experiences for our customers and giving them the power to create seamless and expansive experiences for their own customers, is what is making Thinkific Plus such a growing force for organizations looking to leverage the power of online learning to fuel their growth.As we continue to innovate, we want to make sure we meet and exceed our creators' needs. A few weeks ago, we launched 2 mobile offerings that allow creators to reach their own audiences anywhere anytime. Thinkific Mobile is a dedicated app, that makes course content and communities more easily available to students on the device they use the most. This app available on both the iOS and Android platforms under the Thinkific brand, allows our creators and their students to leverage the power of a mobile app and is available to customers today. For creators who want to customize app under their own brand, our branded mobile offering is a solution that provides customers with just that, their own customizable apps for their online courses and communities. These branded apps enable creators to deliver incredible educational and community experiences, that meet their students exactly where and when they want to learn.As part of this offering, Thinkific Stick handles the process to get branded mobile apps accepted to the App Store. Customers also have the ability to fully customize the app listings in the Google Play and Apple App stores to reflect their unique brand identity and can tailor in-app experiences to their specific audiences and course design.Our mobile offerings include features like push notifications and activity feeds right in students' pockets. Students are able to stay engaged and connect to the content and their community at all times. By enabling students to control their learning experience, mobile apps have been shown to increase course completion rates and community engagement within mobile learning, helping creator educators build stronger, more successful businesses.Our branded mobile offering is available as an add-on for our creators, starting with Thinkific Plus customers and rolling out to additional plans later in the year. The reception so far has been strong, and we have a waiting list for creators who want our customized branded mobile solution, and we look forward to sharing with you some of the innovative ways our creator educators adapt their mobile offering to reflect the mobile environment.Looking forward to what is next, I wanted to touch on an area that holds great interest for almost everyone these days, AI. AI, artificial intelligence or machine learning represents immediate and exceptional value to creators and the entire creator economy, and Thinkific is committed to using this tool to unlock value for creator educators. The pace of innovation here is rapid and accelerating, and we're excited to be part of it and unlock new value for creators. We are already leveraging it to do our own jobs better and faster, as well as integrating it into Thinkific.For creator educators, one of the biggest challenges they face is the time and motivation to develop products and to make them -- take them to market. AI has the ability to accelerate this experience dramatically, which could not only help creator educators build and scale their businesses faster, but also widen the scope of who can be a successful creator educator.Before I turn the call over to Corinne, I want to reiterate that we are focused on our path to profitability, strong efficiency and execution across the business, and this includes a focus on return on investment and delivering value to our customers. We are pleased with the progress we've made in our key metrics, the successful launch of mobile, along with continued advancements in our core platform and payments offerings. Furthermore, our disciplined approach to our go-to-market programs are starting to yield results in the form of increased customer counts.We are executing on the path we laid out for ourselves late last year and are encouraged by the progress to date. We look forward to the sustained, consistent execution of our plan to deliver both growth and profit.Now to speak about our current results in more detail, I'm going to turn the call over to Corinne.
Thanks, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased with our first quarter results, not only because we exceeded our guidance range on revenue and improved our adjusted EBITDA better than expected, but also because we're starting to see a momentum shift in our business. The hard work and tough decisions we have made over the past year are having a material impact on our financial performance, and we are excited and energized by our strategic priorities and the opportunities to come.In the first quarter, revenue came in at $14.1 million, a 20% increase compared to the previous year. This was driven by creators adopting higher tier plans, including Thinkific Plus and the continued success of Thinkific Payments. Payments revenue growth is unique, because it increases both average revenue per user and the lifetime value of a customer without increasing our customer acquisition cost, and it continues to grow, as our customers sell more.Moving to ARPU or average revenue per user; I want to take a moment here to clarify a common misconception. When we talk about ARPU growth, it is sometimes assumed this means that we are increasing prices for our customers. And while we did make a pricing change last year, the current and near-term drivers of ARPU are Thinkific Payments and customers joining higher tiered plans, including Thinkific Plus, or as creator educators are achieving success, not through increasing prices. We believe this approach continues to align our success with those of our customers.ARPU grew to $138 per month in the first quarter, up 16% year-over-year. Thinkific Payments and Thinkific Plus were key factors here. We ended the first quarter with over 34,000 paying customers, an increase of 2% compared to last year, building on the increase in Q4. The combination of our ARPU growth and increasing paid customers resulted in ARR growth of 13% to $52.3 million. While we continue to believe the near-term drivers of our business will be ARPU growth, we are encouraged to see paying customers growing again. As Greg pointed out, our customer growth this quarter is driven by strong execution, with our broader focus on acquisitions and customer success.Moving next to Thinkific Payments. Clearly, customers continue to find success with our Thinkific Payment solution, surpassing $100 million in transactions processed to date and a penetration rate of 26% for Q1 reinforces our belief in the benefits Thinkific Payments accrues to our customers and to us. Gross payments volume, or GPV, which is the total value of GMV processed using Thinkific Payments, was $29 million for the quarter compared to $11.9 million in the prior year's quarter. Quarter-over-quarter, GPV grew by over $6 million. I want to note that we reached a new all-time high for total GMV processed at $113.3 million in the quarter.Moving now to our P&L; as mentioned earlier, our revenue grew 20% year-over-year to $14.1 million. Gross margin at 75% grew year-over-year from 73%. This improvement was driven by revenue growth and efficiency improvements, especially in our hosting infrastructure costs. Our focus on operational efficiency continues, as we focus on our goal of bringing down our expenses as a percentage of revenue, and we continue to see progress as the team focuses on highest return initiatives.Sales and marketing expenses decreased year-over-year by about $665,000 or 11% and was $5.5 million in Q1 or 39% of revenue. This decrease was due to lower compensation costs, as well as reduced spending on campaigns and promotional expenses, as we continue to become more efficient on our go-to-market strategies.R&D expenses declined materially to $5.3 million or 37% of revenue, a decrease of $2.7 million or 34%. This decline reflects the realignment of our R&D team to focus on the projects with the highest ROI and the resulting reduction in headcount.G&A expense decreased 14% to $4.5 million in the quarter or 32% of revenue, primarily due to the lower compensation costs, but also included some seasonal costs, including our in-person annual kickoff event held during the quarter.And lastly, the restructuring costs included in the quarter totaled $3.2 million net of stock-based compensation expense reversals. The restructuring will result in annualized savings of approximately $9.2 million.As we continue to focus on growing our top line, while making progress towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven, we made significant progress again this quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA loss in Q1 was $3.1 million, improving from a loss of $9.3 million in the same period last year, a 67% improvement year-over-year or less than 1/3 of the loss in the same quarter of 2022. You'll find a summary table of the calculations for adjusted EBITDA in our press release, MD&A and investor presentation on our website.Turning to our balance sheet. Our cash and cash equivalents balance on March 31st was $89 million with no debt. We believe the strength of our balance sheet, in combination with our declining cash requirements for operating needs, is an asset that provides with the stability and the flexibility to execute on our long-term strategy. Our relentless focus on managing our cost structure and maintaining our path to profitability should result in exiting 2023 with a profitable adjusted EBITDA run rate, benefiting from both top line growth and the continued reduction of our cost structure.For the second quarter of 2023, specifically, we expect revenue in the range of $14.1 million to $14.3 million and adjusted EBITDA loss in the range of $2 million to $2.6 million. While ARPU is a key driver of our top line growth in 2023, executing on our strategy to support creators earning their first dollar and enabling them to sell more on our platform than anywhere else and helping businesses find success with the features and services available on Thinkific Plus, position us well for long-term growth and sustainable profitability.And to wrap up the call, I'll now turn it back over to Greg.
Thank you, Corinne. We are pleased with the momentum shift we're seeing in our business, and we're seeing some concrete results. Our incredible performance in our payments platform to date, hitting the $100 million in payments processed milestone, as well as a strong partnership with Stripe are just 2 examples of this. We remain focused on the success of our customers, which in turn drives our growth. We are executing on our path to profitability, which is in sight. We will exit 2023 at an adjusted EBITDA positive run rate. The results this quarter clearly show our focus on driving growth, through high ROI projects. I'm proud of what our team has delivered for our customers.We'll now take questions. Thank you.
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Robert Young from Canaccord Genuity.
I wanted to dig into the 2 -- I guess, what I would say, the 2 positive pieces here, the return of growth in paying customers and then the return of growth and the incremental ARR you added in the quarter. So I was just trying to -- if you could dig into those a little bit, maybe, what are the drivers behind that? Are there any onetime items or is this -- the go-to-market adjustments? I mean, just -- if you could isolate those and give me a little better sense of -- we'll start on that.
Sure. Thanks, Rob. I can take the paying customers and then Corinne, you can jump on later if you want, on the paying customer count. And I think on neither of these, are there onetime, just to be clear, on the paying customers. It's a combination of just overall improvement of our execution in the go-to-market. So we've been talking for a while about making improvements there, it's starting to work and so we're seeing the return there.There's also been a slight improvement in retention. So it's a combination of the 2 factors that drive that retention and improves go-to-market for customer acquisition. I would also add on the total customer count there that we haven't had big one-off campaigns in Q1, which is great because this is what we've been moving towards for a while, which is sort of an always-on marketing approach, which makes it much more reliable, steady and consistent.
Well actually, a little bit color there, and then I'll hand it back to you. 13% year-over-year growth is a number that we're happy to see, because it's a combination of both total customers, which is what Greg just spoke about, but also ARPU. And we've been consistently been able to drive our ARPU growth up and things like our new branded mobile app, really helps that expansion. So I think there's a lot of opportunity and positivity here for the future.
Okay. And is there any seasonality in Q1 to understand, that might also be a factor here? I know you mentioned there's no onetime, but is there anything seasonal?
Because you asked that question of seasonality, I kind of want to jump to GMV because we did have a new all-time high there, which is quite exciting, but it does come from some seasonality. We do see Q1 as a great quarter for our customers to be able to sell their learning products into the market, as people are looking for fulfilling new year resolutions and learning a new skill tends to be a great quarter, and so that also drove some additional success with Thinkific Payments, the penetration rate being so high on a high GMV quarter, also speaks to the success our creators are finding on Thinkific Payments. But there's some quarterly seasonality there.
I'm not sure if I -- I'm [ sensing ] the call was dropped off there a bit at the end. Maybe my last question, and then I'll pass the line, if you can hear me. The payments attached grew quite a bit this quarter. I know that you were going to light up Australia and New Zealand, but the release -- you talked about reaching $100 million congratulations on that. But the -- is that ahead of Australia and New Zealand, or is the big jump this quarter driven by that? And then I'll pass the line.
We are still only available in beta in those 2 regions, and so not generally available. We're looking to be able to do some additional features that are required in those countries before we'll have it open to everyone. And so the growth we saw was primarily in North America, which is a [Technical Difficulty] ahead of plan. So it's really good.
Your next question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital Markets.
This is Stephen Machielsen on for Thanos. I just want to follow up on the payments penetration. Again, good to see the uptick. Would you say -- like what was the mix between, say, new customer attached versus conversion of the existing accounts?
That's a great question. The majority of the growth continues to come from new customers. And we've seen -- as we mentioned in the script, quite a significant uptake for customers processing their first payment using Thinkific Payments, and so that's quite exciting to see. We do continue to see people moving over who are our existing customers, but not at the same pace as those that are new.
Okay. And I guess moving over to ARPU. Good to see the year-over-year increases. But on a quarterly basis, it was kind of flat. Was there any seasonality in that? Or is there anything to call out there?
The increase was large due to Thinkific Payments in the quarter and then some additional sales on Plus plans, where we just see a larger average deal size. There is some seasonality, obviously, from Payments driving that up, but nothing specifically on the subscription side other than looking at some of the success we're having with the Thinkific Plus plans.
Okay. And as your go-to market moves away from these always-on campaigns, are you seeing any major changes in, say, free-to-paid conversion or sign-ups at higher price plans? Or is it -- I guess, what other kinds of qualitative changes have you seen in the new customers coming to Thinkific, as a result of the change in the go-to-market?
Yes. Good question. It actually remains fairly steady, similar type of customer free-to-pay conversion is staying steady, and so no significant shift in the customer makeup. I'd say the one thing to highlight is we're seeing -- and it sort of makes up a bit of that GMV growth there is, generally, our customer businesses are looking quite successful and getting to that first dollar faster and more of them doing that, which is exciting to see because that's good for the long-term health of their business as well as ours.
Okay. And I guess last question, as you guys get closer to profitability, your cash burn goes down a bit, but you're still sitting on quite a healthy balance of cash. I guess what's in your capital allocation wish list over the next 12 to 24 months?
That's a great question. So we're super fortunate to have USD8 billion to USD9 million of cash on hand, and do think of that as our best asset. We're also really pleased that our operational cash needs are coming down as we get closer to the profitability, so we should be able to maintain that cash. And today, we are very minimal capital required for our business. And so that gives us what opportunity to look at what's possible in the future. I don't have anything specific today that we could announce that would be capital intensive in terms of acquisition of that. Maybe the one thing I'd say is, well, we're always looking -- we won't want to do anything that got in the way of us seeing profitability, and so not looking to pick up any businesses that have significant losses.
Your next question comes from the line of Martin Toner from ATB Capital Markets.
Most of my questions have already been answered. I guess one question, the difference between adjusted EBITDA and cash flow from operations, is that mostly onetime restructuring?
Yes. Onetime restructuring was -- the cash component was $3.7 million in the quarter, so that's the main difference. And our adjusted EBITDA is usually a good proxy for our cash flow operations.
Perfect. And the drop in gross margin is mostly the mix of payments revenue?
Yes. Actually, and that's part of it. Our subscription business continues to have a healthy above 80% gross margin. So the payments mix brings it down a little bit. We had also had some onetime seasonal costs associated with just like payroll costs, [ EICPT ], that would have hit us in Q1, and so that had a little bit of an impact in the first quarter.
Can you give us any commentary on the community of free users? Is that group -- are they growing, is it changing? Just wondering, given that they are important to long-term growth? Just wondering if there's been any -- if there's anything newsworthy about that group?
Happy to say there's no real change there. It's just steady, consistent comparable to prior years.
[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Gavin Fairweather from Cormark Securities.
Thinking back to the Q4 call, when we saw the subs tick up by a few hundred. You said it was kind of hesitant or it was too early to call a turn in paid subs. Your commentary definitely sounds more confident this quarter. Curious whether you think we can build on this performance as the year goes along?
Thanks, Kevin. Yes, I am more confident. I'm glad you're hearing that. I'm generally very cautious on predicting the future. But I think we are seeing that things are working on the go-to-market and the fact that we're doing it in a more sustainable, consistent always-on way, gives me more confidence that we can continue to push this number up.
Okay, that's great. And then just on Thinkific Payments-based penetration, does the Stripe roadmap, the new functionality that you're [indiscernible] help you accelerate that further? And are you looking at any other kind of measures that you can take to [indiscernible] of your payments offering in the base?
We have seen good success with payments. I think there's still a lot of potential upside on this. The partnership with Stripe drives a lot of that success, because we're able to access all of the innovation that they build out through our open APIs. So it really is one of the great features of our open API structure, is that we're able to partner well with someone like Stripe, and be able to roll out features quite quickly to our creators without a lot of R&D time, so a very efficient growth process for us.And we continue to be impressed with Stripe as a partner. They have a lot of different things on their roadmap that we can easily provide to our creators, which is exciting. So I think there's a lot more to come here. I think there's lots of opportunity for growth, and can be done quite efficiently, which is especially important in today's market.
And then can you just touch on the performance of Plus in the quarter? I think previously, you said that it was kind of the fastest-growing piece of the business. How did it perform in Q1? And then as you start to think about transitioning towards breakeven, is that an area where you feel like you might increase your level of sales investment?
We have seen good success with Plus, and it meets the needs of midsized businesses, who are looking to expand both how they're educating customers or how they're generating revenue. And so a lot of opportunity here and continue to see it driving up the ARPU with larger deal sizes. So it's a good growth mechanism for us as we look forward. I do think that we have to be looking at all of our revenue streams as we grow, [indiscernible] most efficient way to invest sales and marketing dollars. We don't have a large sales team, but they're great at what they do and really proud of the results they put up on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis. And so as long as we're finding success there, I'm sure we'll continue to invest in it. But we're careful on where we invest our dollars, and make sure it's the highest ROI part of the business.
Your next question comes from the line of Todd Coupland from CIBC.
I also wanted to ask about the market. I get your confidence on the go-to-market being tighter. I'm just wondering if we're also starting to emerge from sort of the post pandemic world, where online learning went up, and then it rolled over. Is there overall market recovery and people are starting to return to living that lifelong learning in their daily lives. Is there anything to say on that?
Yes. I think it may be some of that. Certainly, when I look at the metrics of the success of our creators, it looks strong. They're seeing more visitors to their sites, which is probably a good indication of that. They're doing well as we saw in the GMV we're seeing. And that GMV, sometimes we see an uptick in GMV and it could be concentrated in a smaller group of creators. In this case, it was actually spread well over a larger and growing group, bigger than it's ever been before in terms of more creators monetizing.So all of that shows -- points to good signs of people looking for finding and consuming education online. There may also be a trend that's powering this as well on the AI front that I think creator educators in particular, have been quick to adopt tools to make their businesses more efficient go-to-market faster. And that may be a factor in allowing them to get up and running more quickly -- go to market more quickly and see more success in their business, especially considering many of them are solopreneurs, so having these tools at hand just allows them to do 2x or 3x as much in a day, as they maybe were doing before. Certainly, we haven't seen the adoption across everyone in the industry, but that may also be a factor as well.
And if those are actually trends, they're still pretty modest, right? Like a few hundred here and there. But this is not, I guess, an accelerated trend. It's still single digit. So is that the right way to think about it? Just starting to perk up, but encouraging, and there's still obviously that massive TAM out there?
Yes. Yes. I think I still see a huge TAM potentially AI even unlocks the kind of people who can be a part of it and the volume of people within that TAM who can be successful. So I think that the TAM is still there and growing. And you're right, this is just a modest uptick, so we're hoping to continue to unlock even more.
And sorry, last question on this, where are these customers coming from? Are they on TikTok or YouTube and they want to monetize better, or is it just pure greenfield, I want an online learning business?
It's -- I mean, certainly, as always, for us, our customers come from all kind of walks of life, different verticals, different backgrounds and different sources of success. Certainly, we see more success with -- or we see customers succeed faster, when they're coming with some level of audience, business and expertise. Those that say, show up with, I'm not sure what I'm an expert in at all, and I don't have any kind of audience or any kind of business, it can be a little harder to get started with. Although I'm seeing that -- even that getting easier and easier, especially with AI tools, but also social platforms being easier.So we do see some coming from across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, building an audience there, at the same time as they're building their learning products. But we also see people still coming from offline businesses, where they've got some expertise offline and then they're bringing it online. So it really is still quite a mix.
I wanted to ask you about Payments. I mean that order bump of upselling by, I don't know, 80% or 78% and then just general 22% higher conversion on payments. What is that doing to either adding new customers or having you win versus competitors? Can you just talk a little bit more about how significant that is? Because that upsell seems quite material on the surface?
Yes. And on the -- we don't have everyone using order bumps. So there is some correlation there as well as some causation. But yes, exactly, thanks for mentioning it, the more people who hear about that. I think the more we can do to get out there and market the fact that Thinkific Payments is helping people earn more, sell more, sell faster. And then, of course, with the partnership with Stripe and some of the tools that unlocks, I think it will do more of that. So yes, it's really exciting for us to see the success of that. I think it is starting to drive the adoption. The more we get the word out of people even being aware that it is helping them build their business, I think we'll see that help with the adoption as well.
But Greg, on that point, like why wouldn't you go out to every customer and say, look at this conversion from order bump? I mean, you would think that, that would accelerate payments adoption even quicker than it has been? I mean, is that the right way to read that, or is it still going to be a gradual improvement in that payments attached?
Well, we're seeing really good attach when they are new and geographically able to adopt Thinkific Payments. So that is really strong already, where people -- where we don't support the service, obviously, that's a block and we're unlocking that country by country. And then, of course, on the existing customers moving over, we are out there, and I'll check in actually with the payments team again today to see how much we're talking about that message. Because you're right, I think it's really good to get that out there, where people are -- already have a solution in place. Sometimes there's just a time or a structural thing to shifting over. This is a great way to incentivize them to do it, to see that it can actually positively impact their business and even reduce the admin side as well.But sometimes when you have to act and do things to make a change, it still takes a while. So I don't think it's a massive fundamental shift in adoption rate for existing customers just yet, but it's certainly a great story to tell for them.
Yes. I mean it sounds like Prime conversion, right, from Amazon, like those kinds of numbers. So pretty interesting.
There are no more questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Greg Smith for closing remarks.
Thank you, everyone, and for your great questions. Really appreciate it and thank you for coming on the call today. I know there were a lot of calls today, so we appreciate your attention. And if we can answer more questions in the future, we will talk then. Very pleased with our results this quarter and looking forward to further growth. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.