Thinkific Labs Inc

TSX:THNC

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q4

[Operator]

Good afternoon. My name is JP and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to Thinkific's Fourth Quarter 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference call is being broadcast live on the Internet and recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time.I would now like to turn the conference call over to Janet Craig, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Janet Craig, executive]

Thank you, JP, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Thinkific earnings call for the fourth quarter and year-end 2022. 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 to similar key performance indicators used by the 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. Greg?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Thank you, Janet. Hello, and welcome to our earnings conference call. Thank you for joining us. In the fourth quarter, we continued to execute against our strategy and remain focused on helping creators succeed. We delivered revenue of $13.8 million, which was at the top end of our guidance range, and adjusted EBITDA was better than expected, coming in at a loss of $4.4 million.Underpinning these numbers was our year-over-year growth in average revenue per user, or ARPU, paying customers and the continued success of Thinkific Payments. We succeed when our customers succeed, and ensuring creators succeed is the heart of everything we do. So as you can imagine, we speak to our creators a lot. These conversations are always inspiring. Each one is making an impact sharing their unique Genius with the world.Recently, we connected with Ka Hale Hoaka, an organization working to reintegrate Hawaii's language, Olelo Hawai'i, an indigenous culture back into modern society through their own uniquely designed educational curriculum. When they first started, they really had no idea what the response would be, but with Thinkific enabling them to deliver their online courses to schools and groups across Hawaii, they have scaled this incredible business to meet ever-increasing demand from students across Hawaii and also internationally. And by doing that, helping to preserve their culture and support their community.Using our Thinkific communities product, more and more creators are putting community at the heart of their business and reaping the rewards. Ariane Cap, a hugely talented national-bass musician educator and author increased the number of students completing her course by over tenfold. For her, adding the community piece had a dramatic impact on the level of engagement and participation from students, which ultimately results in higher revenues.These are just a couple of the many stories we hear day in and day out. From a health and wellness company adding revenue streams via online courses, to young mother who turned art she created for her child's nursery into a 5-figure workshop business, each of these conversations leaves us incredibly motivated and proud of the financial and societal impact these creator educators are finding with Thinkific as their partner.How do we support their success? Simply put, we focused on providing the tools for new creators to launch and succeed quickly, enabling them to sell more through monetization of features like memberships and communities, as well as delivering results for highly successful creators and larger businesses with more complex needs.Innovation is also key to our business and developing products and features, including the recent launch of Thinkific Communities and the imminent launch of our mobile app. In Q3, we introduced Thinkific Communities as a stand-alone digital learning product that's now on-par with courses and can be created or offered independently or in combination with courses. Thinkific Communities allow creators to foster meaningful relationships to encourage participation and help students learn, share and collaborate with each other, all under the creator's own brand and on their own site. Creators can offer community access for free or sell access for onetime or even recurring membership fees.We've already seen creators taking advantage of communities to create additional revenue streams. Anyone can get started creating their own community even on the Thinkific free plan and higher price points unlock more features and volume. Thinkific Communities also creates an alternative starting point for creators, who can now start with the community instead of a course. It's an approach that's been building momentum, as it enables creators to monetize their audiences faster. This has been a purposeful expansion of Thinkific from an online course, focused to offering creators the ability to choose from and create multiple types of learning products, including courses, memberships and communities.With communities, we see creators launching faster, selling and earning more and having a bigger impact. We know the importance of mobile in digital learning, extending the reach of our learning products and allowing creators to meet students where they are. Earlier this year, we introduced Thinkific Mobile to a small group of trial creators, and it's been extremely well received. We're on track to deliver a mobile offering that will be available to all of our Thinkific customers in the next few months.For creators looking for a seamless brand experience across all of their Thinkific digital learning products, we plan to have a differentiated custom-branded mobile offering. We expect that this mobile app will encourage customer upgrades, support their own brand and allow us to drive ARPU. By continuing to innovate our product and feature set, including Thinkific Communities and our upcoming mobile app, as well as supporting the early success of our new creators to get up and running more quickly, we believe we are well positioned to continue to grow our business.As we pave the path ahead, we're focused on 3 things: our path to profitability, which is in sight, and we will exit 2023 at an adjusted EBITDA positive run rate, simplifying and focusing our execution to leverage fewer high ROI projects and recharging our go-to-market to drive more efficient growth, as well as acquire high-value customers to drive ARPU.Achieving profitability and maintaining financial strength and flexibility to be able to act on market opportunities is incredibly important to us. As a result, we made the difficult decision to restructure in mid-January. This step, among other decisive actions we have taken in the past 12 months, position us to exit 2023 with a profitable adjusted EBITDA run rate. We are pleased with our Q4 results, and we believe we are taking the right steps in terms of product innovation, operational efficiency to achieve profitability exiting 2023, while still growing the top line.The focus of the January restructuring was not only to drive costs down, but also to reshape the team to align our talent with the priorities of the organization and, in particular, align R&D to deliver on our highest return projects, so that we can maximize the benefit to customers as a result of our investments in innovation and new features and functionality.Before I turn to Corrine, I want to thank our incredible team. Both those that are here today and those that are no longer with the company. It is through their resilience, relentless focus on the customer and on doing the right thing, their adaptability and agility that we have been able to evolve, change and grow as a company and in turn, support the creators that use our platform to educate, collaborate and have a lasting global impact.Now to speak about our current results in more detail, I'm going to turn the call over to Corrine.

[Corinne Hua, executive]

Thanks, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to first speak to some key highlights for the year and then focus my remarks on the fourth quarter. In 2022, we continue to grow our top line while reducing our cost structure with a focus on our path to profitability. We did this while supporting the important growth initiatives that help our customers succeed, as they gain greater success, so do we. Our annual revenue grew 35% to $51.5 million, which was driven by year-over-year growth in ARPU and total paying customers. Our gross margin remained relatively stable, decreasing from 77% in 2021 to 76% in 2022 as efficiencies and customer support were offset by the increased adoption of Thinkific Payments, that has a lower gross margin profile.Our net loss for the year was $36.4 million. Our adjusted EBITDA loss came in at $26.4 million, which was an increase from the $19.5 million in 2021. It is important to note here, that while our loss grew in 2022 relative to 2021 levels, actions we took in 2022 to reduce our cost structure, saw us continuously improving our adjusted EBITDA loss throughout the year.ARPU grew significantly in 2022 and as expected, was a driver of our top line revenue growth. We also saw tremendous success in Thinkific Payments, which launched in November 2021, with gross payments volume of $66.7 million in 2022 relative to $9.2 million in 2021.Moving now to our fourth quarter results. As you are aware, on January 10, we affirmed our outlook for the fourth quarter. We are pleased to share with you that we not only met our outlook for the fourth quarter, but came in just over the top end of our revenue range, as well as significantly improved our adjusted EBITDA loss compared to guidance. Revenue growth was largely driven by the success of Thinkific Payments and new customers, specifically those joining Thinkific Plus, both resulting in growing ARPU year-over-year. The EBITDA beat was a result of us effectively continuing to bring down our cost structure, while still investing in key growth drivers, resulting in an improved EBITDA loss sequentially and year-over-year.In the fourth quarter, revenue came in at $13.8 million, a 28% increase compared to the previous year. This was driven both by an increase in customer count as well as increasing ARPU. As noted previously, our initiatives are focused around empowering customers to launch quickly and grow their businesses by selling more. Each of these results in improving ARPU. We continue to see the success of these initiatives in Q4 with our procurement over 20% year-over-year. Average revenue per user grew to $138 per month compared to $114 per month in Q4 of last year. Thinkific Payments revenue was the most significant driver in the quarter. ARR grew 18% to $51.5 million.During the year, we continued to attract new creators to our platform and saw growth with business customers on Thinkific Plus. We also continue to enhance our pricing strategy, focusing on aligning the value we create with the prices we charge. The most significant driver of ARR in the fourth quarter was the increase in ARPU.We ended the second quarter with 33,600 paying customers, an increase of 4% compared to last year, growing slightly quarter-over-quarter. We continue to believe that the near-term driver of our business will be ARPU growth, driven by our sales led upmarket motion and Thinkific Payments.Moving next to Thinkific Payments. Our Thinkific Payments future continues to be well received by creators, where our selling tools continue to drive results, gross payments volume, or GTV, which is the total value of gross merchandise volume or GMV processed using Thinkific Payments and was at $22.8 million for the quarter. We saw dramatic growth year-over-year with the launch of Thinkific Payments in North America in November 2021. Quarter-over-quarter, GPV grew by over $5 million. GMV processed on the platform in the fourth quarter was $106 million. The penetration rate of Thinkific Payments for Q4 was 22% of GMV.Moving now to our P&L. As mentioned earlier, our revenue grew 28% year-over-year to $13.8 million. Gross margin at 78% grew year-over-year from 74%. This improvement was driven by efficiency improvements and was partially offset by lower margin on Thinkific Payments revenue.Our focus on operational excellence continues. Sales and marketing expenses decreased year-over-year by almost $500,000 or 7% and was $6.1 million due to lower spending on advertising campaigns. Similarly, R&D expenses declined by almost $900,000 or 13% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021 and G&A declined by over $900,000 or 18% relative to last year, both due to lower employee costs.One item of note, is the current Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar exchange. We recognize revenue in U.S. dollars, while the majority of our employee-related expenses are in Canadian. The significant strengthening of the U.S. dollar in Q4 versus last year positively impacted our EBITDA loss by approximately 19 percentage points or $850,000.As we continue to focus on growing our top line, while making progress towards an adjusted EBITDA breakeven, we made a significant progress again this quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA loss in Q4 was $4.4 million, improving from a loss of $8.7 million in the same period last year, a 50% improvement year-over-year. You'll find a summary table of the calculation for adjusted EBITDA in our press release, MD&A and investor presentation on our website.Turning to our balance sheet; our cash and cash performance balance at December 31st was $94 million with no debt. By comparison for the quarter ended September 30th, it was $95 million. We believe the strength of our balance sheet, in combination with the modest cash requirements for operating needs is an asset that provides us with the stability and the flexibility to execute on our long-term strategy.In mid-January, we announced a restructuring to focus and refine our organization to accelerate growth, achieve profitability and drive customer success. The restructuring results in annual savings of approximately $9 million. Our relentless focus on managing cost structure and maintaining our past profitability should result in exiting 2023 with a profitable adjusted EBITDA run rate, benefiting from both top line growth and a continued reduction in our cost structure.For the first quarter of 2023, specifically, we expect revenue in the range of $13.8 million to $14 million and adjusted EBITDA loss in the range of $3.3 million to $3.9 million.And to wrap up the call, I'll now turn it back over to Greg.

[Greg Smith, executive]

Thank you, Corrine. In closing, Thinkific has had tremendous success and growth over the last few years. We are continuing to grow, and the market opportunity in front of us is large and growing. We have the financial flexibility and stability to attack this market. We have taken the decisive action necessary to reshape the company for operational efficiency and effectiveness, and we continue to relentlessly innovate and deliver for our course creators, features, tools and technologies that support their success.Before we take questions on behalf of myself personally and the whole team of Thinkers, I want to thank Miranda Lievers, who has recently moved from a COO position Thinkific to an advisory role. Her partnership and insight has been invaluable and the building of our unique culture and keeping the creator at the center of everything we do, are among many things that Miranda helped shape over her 8-year tenure at Thinkific, and that will remain at the heart of our business. We are grateful for the impact you've had, happy that you're still working with us in an advisory capacity, and excited about what is next for you.Happy to take questions now.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Robert Young from Canaccord.

[Robert Young, analyst]

First question for me would be around understanding the -- well just a broader, better understanding of the moving parts in the paid conversion. With the growth quarter-over-quarter, was that driven by retention or is it new wins? Any color you can provide there?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes. So, we're pleased with the growth in new customers in Q4, a small uptick. It's modest, but happy with that. We spent last -- grew that customer count more than we have in the past. And yes. So the -- to your question directly, it is an increase in the acquisition that drove that a little bit of an increase -- a slight increase in conversion for you to paid there, driven by some campaigns that we did in Q4.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Okay. That's great. And then, I guess, the second part of the question would just be on the churn. Is there any change positive or negative? Maybe if you could give us a sense of the cohort differences between paid and unpaid. That would be helpful. Any churn dynamic you can provide, or retention?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes. No significant changes overall in the trend in churn that we've seen. So really, that stays relatively consistent, and then what we saw that changed the total customer count number really, was just some of the campaigns and consistent -- it's really a series of adjustments that we're making across go-to-market combined with some campaigns there.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Okay. And last question, just maybe a clarification from what I think I heard Corrine say on the call, said that near-term growth was predominantly going to come out of ARPU growth. Is that correct? Maybe you can just expand on that, correct me if I'm wrong, and then I'll pass the line.

[Greg Smith, executive]

Sure. Yes, I can -- go ahead Corrine.

[Corinne Hua, executive]

So happy to talk a little bit about ARPU. That has been the driver for us in 2022 and expect that to continue in 2023. The priorities that we have -- that we're focused on for this current year is really around helping customers launch quickly, provide them tools to sell more and really driving results for businesses on Thinkific Plus, and all those things really help us move ARPU in a healthy way and so that's what we're quite excited about for this next year. The bulk of the Q4 growth was from Thinkific Payments, and we see that continuing to have a positive uptick in 2023.

[Robert Young, analyst]

Okay. And then would you view that new wins or paid conversion, would that be upside surprise in the way you're thinking of it or are you preparing investors for a more steady growth in new customer wins?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes. So I think on the customer acquisition side, I see what you're getting at now in terms of what's driving growth this year and how should we see this uptick in customers in Q4, is I think we still have lots to figure out there. There's a lot of macro factors at play. And so our confident growth going forward this year comes heavily on the ARPU front. And I'd say things will probably be a little bumpy as we go forward on the customer count. So there's still a number of things we can unpack there. I wouldn't say that the Q4 is a perfect trend setting for the future. It's one data point for us that we're hoping to continue to unlock more of, but I wouldn't say it's a consistent trend yet.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital Markets.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, analyst]

Greg, can you expand on some of the recent changes on the go-to-markets and the dynamic you're seeing there?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes. So on that front, a lot of the work we've been doing is historically, we spent more time heavily investing within a quarter -- on a quarter driving more expensive, more focused, high effort, high-energy, short-term win campaigns. And we've moved a lot of the effort to always on recurring value, more automation and process, which allows us to be more efficient with our spend and move to something that's more predictable and reliable going forward.Now we still do campaigns. They're just more efficient in terms of the investment of person hours and money into it. And so what we saw in Q4 was sort of the first step of that starting to come together, of having a solid baseline of our always-on recurring processes working well and then layering on some small campaigns on top of that.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, analyst]

And then in terms of new customer additions, any themes to call out, as far as geographies, verticals? Is it pretty consistent to what we've seen in the past or just any trends you recall in that regard?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes, it's always a good question, and we really have continued to see fairly consistent or consistency across that in terms of the new customers coming onboard. There's not a big shift in where they're coming from or what kind of customers they are.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, analyst]

Okay. And then finally, on OpEx, I mean, it was obviously the recent restructuring. And so just remind us should Q2 basically be kind of the full normalized OpEx run rate within subsequent quarters probably being pretty flat relative to that?

[Corinne Hua, executive]

Yes. As we look towards Q2, it's probably going to be an improvement over Q1, because we do have some of those additional costs, some priority restructuring in the quarter. But we do have a few of the restructuring elements taking place later in Q2. And so I think Q3 will be the full quarter -- in the first quarter, we'll see the full impact of the restructuring. And I think as we talk towards kind of a quarterly restructuring savings of about $2.3 million.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Todd Coupland from CIBC.

[Thomas Ingham, analyst]

I had a couple of questions, if I could. There's been some debate around the learning markets and Thinkific specifically, whether or not you should focus on enterprise. And I'm just wondering what your thinking is on that recommendation and whether or not that's a wide enough part of the market for the company?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes. It's an interesting discussion. And I think we do see in other areas of the e-learning industry, where you see more people having success, I think, in the corporate or enterprise space. They tend to have slightly different business models of more of the marketplace selling the training. And certainly -- so I think some of that sentiment applies to our customers, and we certainly see success amongst our customers, where some of them are adding to their business model, and we've done a lot to unlock a feature set that allows them to do this, where someone that used to sell courses B2C are now selling some of those B2B and doing that even with our new bulk selling opportunities.So that's an exciting opportunity for our customers to sell more into the enterprise space, where they create courses, sell them into enterprise clients and have larger licenses. For us, we do have Thinkific Plus, we do have those higher pricing tiers where we satisfy the more complex needs of larger clients. And that's definitely an exciting opportunity for us, but we are still at the core, very focused on serving the creator-educator that individual small business, very small business and seeing some good success, both in terms of them building and growing their businesses, and how it's working for us. So we're still very focused on that.

[Thomas Ingham, analyst]

Okay. And even on those marketplace platforms, I just made the observation, while this recommendation has been put forward to Thinkific, I mean, those companies are still growing well below their overall consolidated growth rate. So it's debatable whether or not it's enough by itself. My second question had to do with sort of post-pandemic learning market. Do you have any better insights, as to where this market is going to settle in post pandemic? We're obviously through the pandemic. People are starting to get back to normal. What are your thoughts on that, and will we start to see some more normal behavior typical to what you might have been experiencing pre-pandemic pre-IPO. I'd be interested in your observations on those market dynamics?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes. And actually, just to add on what you said to your prior question. As much as we are focused on the creator-educator, we are really excited to be serving now these complex needs of the larger businesses we are -- and they are forming a growing portion of our business and opportunity there. And it's really interesting to see a lot of the synergy and overlap between the 2 groups, and in some cases, even the graduation of our customers from that first group, up into the larger businesses and how they're able to grow into that space. So it works quite well together for us.And then in terms of the crystal ball question, yes, I wish I had one. I'm even more hesitant to call the future than I was 2 years ago, I guess, older wiser eyes makes me realize I'm not able to predict the future perfectly. I do think we are seeing things settle out a little bit, and we're positive on the signs that we're seeing and that we haven't seen a big retreat or a big retraction of any kind, in terms of people who were in it are now out of it, in that we haven't seen a spike in churn or people who joined us in the pandemic leaving.What we've seen is, maybe a return to more normalized growth rates and some of the exciting things, I think, is that we saw a slight increase in customers last quarter. We saw a slight increase in GMV, which represents the sales of our customers last quarter. So these are positive signs that may be things are returning to the way they were and in a good way.

[Thomas Ingham, analyst]

Yes. Okay. And then I wanted to dig in on the community point saying some customers are starting there. Is it a material part of the new customer count at this point? Or is it simply just anecdotal and you're encouraged to see it? Just a little color on that.

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes. I'd say on the new customer count, we're not yet seeing that communities drives a whole bunch of new paying customers, and we can call out, that that's what drove it. That being said, we're seeing a lot of new and existing customers adopting communities, whether it be a starting point for them or something alongside their courses. And so it's more than anecdotal and that we are seeing some pretty significant adoption of it, where lots of greater educators and businesses now are adding our communities alongside their courses, or in many cases, even just starting with the community and that may be the product they're offering on a recurring subscription basis and then potentially in the future, add something like courses to it.So it is something that before we started building, we knew there were -- most of the customers in our space had some form of a community and so unlocking the ability for them to do it under their own brand on their own site with all the controls and ability to charge for it that Thinkific now gives them, was going to unlock a lot of potential for our customers, and we're starting to see that.It is something that takes a bit of time to sort of grow and adopt, because you either have to build the community up by adding members or if you're switching over from some other solution or bringing it over from a Facebook group, you do -- there's work to bring it in, which is great in long run for us because it means it's a very sticky product that once they're using it, it becomes your home for your community, but it does take time for customers who've said, we love what you've built, we want to get on it. It's going to take a bit of time for us to bring our community over there.

[Thomas Ingham, analyst]

Yes. Last question for me. Just one return to the OpEx, once you get to the run rate baseline, how should we think about sort of sequential OpEx growth at low single digit, higher single digit, low double digit, just give us some parameters around how to think about that versus the top line, so we can get an idea on what operating leverage might look like?

[Corinne Hua, executive]

As we look at OpEx on kind of Q3 and forward, I would imagine that because they're relatively stable, we've got a lot of growth that we could handle with the size of our team that we have today. I think the opportunity for us should be to find places we want to invest, where we're seeing a high ROI and doing that kind of below our revenue growth rate. So we're putting out a healthy bottom line. But as we find opportunities, we want to be able to invest and double down on that. So while our current team is probably the right sizing [indiscernible] significant growth. I want to leave ourselves some flexibility to take on opportunities as they come.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Gavin Fairweather from Cormark.

[Gavin Fairweather, analyst]

Just on ARPU, are you thinking that near term that's mostly going to be driven by customers upgrading to a higher price plans or do you have any pricing actions or bundling actions that you're planning to undertake here in 2023?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Big drivers here are Payments, the existing higher price point, especially on Plus. And so those are -- and then the natural upgrade between plans, those really are the imminent, immediate and high confidence drivers. I think any health staff company is always looking at and understanding how their pricing works. And we want to constantly move towards something that really melds with and is synergistic with the success of our customers. But right now, in terms of what we're speaking about for ARPU growth, it's really coming from the growth of payments and the growth of our Plus business.

[Gavin Fairweather, analyst]

Just on maybe the competitive environment. I mean, previously, you talked about keeping an eye on competitors and market share. Have you noticed any changes or trends on the competitive side that you called out maybe previously compared to last year?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes, no shift in market share that we've seen there. So that stayed relatively consistent.

[Gavin Fairweather, analyst]

Okay. And then lastly, I mean, visibility on breakeven is improving here after the growth in the business and some of the cost actions that you've taken. I guess maybe it's a good time to get some thoughts on capital allocation. I mean, as we get closer to that point, with obviously a pretty big buffer on the balance sheet. How are you thinking about the different opportunities to allocate your capital, whether that be acquisitions or buybacks or maybe finding areas to reinvest in the existing business?

[Corinne Hua, executive]

You are right. We're very fortunate to have a strong balance sheet. And today, I think our head is really focused on our operations, achieving breakeven, I think looking beyond that and how we invest is probably how we want to look at, after we've got operations in hand, but something we're always looking at, in terms of even just like what's happening in the market and staying attuned of what customers are looking for, but nothing active on any of those fronts because we're quite focused on growing our business organically right now.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Richard Tse from National Bank Financial.

[Mihir Raul, analyst]

This is Mihir on for Richard. Just one on payments. So you doubled payment penetration from Q1 to Q4 in 2022. How should we think about the cadence of penetration in F '23?

[Corinne Hua, executive]

We've actually seen reasonably consistent growth quarter-over-quarter, and our current models have us kind of just continuing on the same path. There are a few things that we've got in terms of tools that help create or sell more that we're looking at future on our roadmap. But today, we're just predicting a pretty consistent tactic we've seen in historical quarters.

[Mihir Raul, analyst]

Okay. And then just one more. In terms of the churn, would you say that any churn from the price increases has basically now stabilized, or how should we think about that?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Yes, it's a good question. I don't think we've -- sorry, yes, I think the easy answer there is, is anything that we did see from that has stabilized.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Martin Toner from ATB Capital Markets.

[Martin Toner, analyst]

Thank you for taking my questions. Most of them have been answered, but I still have a couple. Can you remind me, are paying customers the only ones that can have access to communities or can any creator start a community?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Actually, just -- we've changed this a couple of times, so I'm pulling up our pricing page now to check. No, on our free plan, you can get one community. And then it's -- there's some sort of limits of feature set and volume and then you can move up to higher price points to unlock more. So part of that is -- and we may change that in the future, but for now seeing it as an entry point where people can try it out, see if it works for them, start to build it and then upgrade to future plans, which is kind of a product-led growth lever for us.

[Martin Toner, analyst]

And on payments, so you guys had a 20% payments penetration now. You talked about how it would improve the creators business and the customer experience. Any kind of like learnings thus far on what impacts having that integrated payment solution is having on the whole ecosystem?

[Greg Smith, executive]

Sure. I can speak a little more to that. Corrine, if you want to add on because you're definitely deep into our Payments business lately. In terms of Payments unlocking more for customers and having that integrated, I'd say one of the first things is that because it's integrated, it means they don't have to use 2 pieces of software or sign into 2 systems. So they can really -- it simplifies their efforts. They can do the things that we offer them around, say, issuing a refund or checking on some of the analytics all in one place. It also gives us the ability for us to provide them with more analytics and more integrated analytics, and connecting the dots between the financial analytics and the learning analytics for them. So those are 2 areas where we can add value by having it built in. And then there's a lot that we are investing in, in terms of helping them sell more and earn more, because we have integrated payments.

[Martin Toner, analyst]

Awesome. Last up, so you talked to competitor behavior fit. But just wondering, and I'm assuming most of your main competitors are -- because they are private, they are also likely EBITDA negative. Do you think there -- or do you have any idea if they're doing the same thing in terms of reducing their cost base? And if not, if they're actually spending more, any concerns that you will get out-innovated by some of these competitors and now have a negative impact?

[Greg Smith, executive]

I think early on, we saw a small change in one, but I don't think -- obviously, I can't speak to too much about what's going inside, especially private companies and they don't always press release changes they're making. So not certain on the answer to, have they made changes or to their cost base. However, on the out-innovation, pretty confident in our team's ability and the strength of it and the investments we're making here. The shifts we made around innovation really have been to focus our efforts on things that are driving success for our customers and have huge value for our customers, but also drive growth in our business.And so we've got some exciting things coming. I think the recent push on communities, the launch of our mobile apps, which is underway right now and in effectively a private beta with some people jumping on the wait list and then more coming soon. All of this is really exciting, and there's a lot more to come from our R&D innovation efforts.So I'm pretty confident we've got a lot coming that's going to add a lot of value for customers and continue to innovate for them.

[Operator]

There are no more questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Greg Smith for closing remarks.

[Greg Smith, executive]

Thank you. We're pleased with the results. Appreciate everyone who came on the call or is reading this after the [ fax ] and looking forward to a great year ahead.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect.