Blackbird (LSE:BIRD) — Investor Presentation

0:01 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the BLACKBIRD PLC Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet company platform. Before we begin, we would just like to

0:32 submit the following poll. And if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from BLACKBIRD PLC. Ian, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, Jake. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to the presentation of Project Hoxton. Today, we're going to take you through what we've just achieved in terms of our fundraise of £2,000,000, for the development of elevate.io. But before I start, I'd just like to introduce the team around me. We've got, Summit Rai, who's our chief product officer. We've got Steven Streeter, who's our founder and r and d director. Cal Lewinsky, who's our head of marketing, and Steven White, who's our CFO, COO. So we're gonna on with the show. Just as before we start, we just like to frame what we are doing here and what we are building and what we've built.

1:23 We are we are building and rolling out the Figma for video editing. I think most people on this call are familiar with Figma because we talk about it a reasonable amount. Figma is a collaborative design platform all based in a browser. Figma is a very large company. It is a $10,000,000,000 company. And it really does land, the analogy well for what we're doing with with Elevate because it's not just collaborative within the browser, but it's also it's also for a design professional. It is also for someone who's got a basic or more than a basic skill set of of design, and that is where we're ending up with with Elevate too. Secondly, we are in the product market fit phase of the Elevate rollout. That means that we have the the product, we designed the product, we built the product, we have started charging for the product, and now we are in a product market fit phase where we are adding functionality and features almost on a weekly basis to to to fit into into the market that we're we're learning into.

2:20 And it is really a very exciting phase before we get to scale up phase. So we are we have actually just now executed a £2,000,000 raise, a fully subscribed raise to take us to the scale up phase, and we're opening up this this raise to our to our retail investors as I I know that you're all very keen to be a part of the the journey and to take advantage of this this opportunity. So who are who are we and what do we do? Well, we are an aim listed business, and we have two different products in two different markets. The first is BLACKBIRD. BLACKBIRD is an enterprise product. It is a it is a cloud video editing product that works particularly well in the the high end news and sports area. And we have some very prestigious marquee customers, including CBS Sports, FIFA, Blocks, where we have 80 news news stations across The US, the US state department.

3:11 We're also working very closely with the world's largest financial news service and indeed have been involved in the the the largest sporting events in the summer and winter over the last few years, and we'll be working on the big winter games coming up in 2026. But we're not here to talk about, Blackbird particularly. We're here to talk about Elevate and what we're doing to to to drive the scale up there. So we are, Elevate is a SaaS product. It is a premium product. It's a it is a end to end collaborative browser based video editing product, and it is we're selling it direct to customers. We have a vast addressable market, not only in the creator economy, but also in the in the in the SME market, in the enterprise market eventually. And this is this is a product that is complete unique in the sense that there is no other product out there that can can offer the professional tools in a browser that Elevate does.

4:00 We charged we started charging for our product in February this this year, and I'll talk you through some of the numbers that we've achieved since then and the direction that's going in. And as I mentioned before, this is this is the product market fit phase where lots of things are being built and and and improving the product on a weekly basis, and we're learning from our markets as well. What is the what is the the raison d'etre behind going into the greater economy? Well, really, the greater economy touches all of our lives now many, many times a day. Whether that's our our children or whether it's ourselves being involved with with influencers or being influencers on social media, whether it's in businesses where what used to be text conversations are now conducted through through through video, whether it be education where almost every school kid across the across the Western world and beyond, and university students are asked to to create video as part of their ongoing education, or indeed whether we're outsourcing our our video storytelling to to to freelancers.

4:54 It really is, all pervasive, how how content video content is affecting our lives. But really interestingly, there is no Figma for video. There is no Canva for video. There is no one overall platform that brings all these this this seamless experience together in a in an in an easy to use platform. When you look at the the some of the the the verticals here on this slide, yeah, we've got design. We've also got content sorry, document creation. We've also got accountancy and other other platforms, messaging platforms. But why is there no why is there no Figma for video? The reason is because video is a very, very difficult medium to work with. It is heavy. It is slow. It is expensive and cumbersome to to work with. But the beauty of where we are is that we bring with us our technology from from from our our Blackbird genius here sitting behind beside me That really helps give us a give us a really helping start and a big head start to getting that developed.

5:52 So why can we do this and no one else can? Well, as I said, we've got this technology at the core of our platform. It is patented. It allows for instant response whether whatever the bandwidth, whatever the the the the hardware you're using. And it allows for frame accurate editing in a browser to a very high technical degree. But we've had this technology for a long time. And, of course, we've we've we've released it into into the world, and it's used in the Olympics, etcetera. Oops. Shinta. We used it in the summer games, winter games, etcetera. But we've also now brought on since we've raised the money for what is now known as Elevate 2021, brought on a world class team through the through the 2022 or 2023 area, the years where we've they're experienced. They know how to build a modern product in a modern world that could be completely scalable. And Summit was was instrumental in in in a platform called Vegas Pro before he joined here. Vegas Pro is the fourth largest video editing platform in the world.

6:47 He joined Elevate because it was a downloaded piece of software at Vegas Pro. Elevate is a cloud first experience. Summit is also an extremely competent competent business head as well. He's he's also exited his own business for an 8 figure sum to a NASDAQ listed company. We've also got Kalowinski who is who really brings authenticity to to our team. He's probably our our our most our biggest customer internally because he's been a YouTuber. He's been a corporate video video creator. He's also been a university student where we've had to to build out where he's had built video as part of his ongoing education too. So he really has a cross section of video experience right from a young age. And thirdly, the timing is really with us now. As I said before, everybody is touching video, feeling video, experiencing video many, many times a day, whether we're watching it on our our phones, on our TVs, our connected TVs, on our laptops, where we're we're interacting with video many, many times a day.

7:44 And that results in the fact that this is a huge market. So Goldman Sachs have talked about this market being a $250,000,000,000 market. That was back in 2023. Growing to a $500,000,000,000 market by 2027. And I think we can all feel that around us. Almost every American school kid wants to be

8:00 a video creator or an influencer at some point. I know I can I know we're not living in The States, but I know I can feel that from my own home home surroundings as well? My kids are making video all the time. But the bit of the market that we are really going for with Elevate, we've we've drilled down and we've done our own research. Back in '22, that is the creators, the SMEs, the freelancers, corporate teams. That is that is estimated to be around a $7,000,000,000 a year market. So it is a huge market, far far larger actually than the than the Figma and Canva markets that we know of developed companies into, you know, multi billion dollar companies. So we have a huge opportunity and it's fast growing. But where are we in in our particular process? Well, obviously, BLACKBIRD's been around some time and that's why we have this head start. But Elevate is a is a startup within a within an established company.

8:47 So we raised the money in 2021, and we went through an exploration phase when Summit first joined back in 2022. We've also gone through a problem solution fit phase. So I say we ideated, we designed, we launched the the product. And the problem solution fit phase was really establishing whether we had demand. And we can quite safely say that we've got a huge demand. So we we started advertising this product back in September last year, and we've since brought on tens of thousands of users onto the platform, which really shows that there is a problem in the market currently that Elevate is is helping to solve. Then then we're moving into this third phase called the product market fit phase. So this is we've now established that there is a willingness to pay for the product. We've launched the payment gateway, the creator tier, and we're now launching features and functionality into the product each and every day. But we're also doing marketing. So we've started marketing in a small way, but Kel will explain through this presentation how we're gonna expand that marketing over the next few months, especially with this new funding.

9:47 And this will take us into the scale up phase. The scale up phase is gonna happen, we think mid sorry, early to mid twenty twenty six where we really pushed the gas on marketing as the product is really fit for scale. So since we launched the the the payment gateway that created here back in February, we can see from this chart that this that that we are accelerating the number of of customers, paid customers every month. This is a compounding effect of the improvement of the marketing and the improvement of the of the product each and every month, and this is the beginning of an exponential curve. So you can see this this this green line being the the steepening of that curve as as months go by up until the end of May. We are now, you know, starting to see that special curve, and that is, as far as Silicon Valley goes, that is the start of a gold mine. That is the start of a classic SaaS curve.

10:35 I'm now gonna pass over to Summit, who's gonna give you an updated demo of where we are with the product in Elevate. Thank you, Ian. So some of you have already seen the product recently at the AGM. But for those who haven't, and it's just as a gentle reminder, as you know, Elevate is an online browser based editor. It's absolutely frame accurate, and that's a big difference because most of the online products aren't even close to being frame accurate. It can also cope with very long form factors. So you can have, you know, a a a whole two hour edit sitting in the system as you please. Now we've obviously aimed this as a professional tool. It's easy to get into, but it really is up to a professional standard. So it can be used day in, day out as a everyday driver for for the users who use it. Now even though it's browser based and, obviously, all of the work that we do in the way of transcoding the videos and processing the videos is all done by us in the cloud, The end user experience is not only great from a frame accuracy point of view, but we've also been

11:38 building out things like effects. So the ability for you to easily drop on visual effects, and only recently, we've just added looks as well, which essentially let's go to it. This video also looks good with LUTs with looks. So this enables you to actually stylize with predetermined visual treatments taking you so a little bit further on. So you could go, okay. Well, I'll drop that on there. Now you can always dial this this back a little bit if you want, and you can always tweak the colors individually within the sliders here as well. You'll notice that the whole experience is very, very intuitive, but not at all any less powerful than than any of the desktop tools will be. So we've made great progress there. And of the things that we always decided from the beginning of Elevate was to make it a collaborative tool. This is one thing that the desktop products cannot do because of the nature of the way that they've been built.

12:35 And so for us, we're already in the cloud, so we already have all of the infrastructure in place, but we've actually just gotta build this out. Now here's an example of it's actually Kel, but he's on Steve's laptop at the moment. So it says Steve, but it is Kel. And so he's joined this presentation, and you can see he can go around, make changes to the video. I'm not doing anything. He can change the edit as he wants. I can actually also choose to follow him, which means that when he moves his play head around if you move your play head. Yeah. Then I I without me actually even touching the video or the control, I can see what he's doing, and he could be talking me through the video, for example, on the end of the phone call or something like that. So collaboration is is is key for us.

13:20 We're expanding that soon to cope with a view only users so that people who can just jump in and approve something rather than actually being able to partake in the edits because you obviously don't always want people to be able to change things that you're working on. But another feature that we've added recently, it doesn't have to just be in real time. It can be offline. So I can leave comments over here. So if I leave one for Steve saying this shot needs more color, for example, that will pop up as a notification at his. And even though we're sat opposite each other right now, all of this is being brokered by The USA. So all of this is pure cloud, and anyone who tries the product across borders as we have, obviously, in lots of the trial sessions, it works really, really, very, really, very nicely.

14:13 One last thing I'd like to show you from a product point of view is something that we've been working on for a while, which is the introduction of generators, and generators are tools that enable you to create content within the platform itself rather than just uploading something. And they've taken the form of things like text very easily. But we're we're getting, you know, very ready shortly to release text to speech. So text to speech enables you to jump a generator onto the timeline. And then if, for example, I create a let's go go to oh, it's taking Safari, the web browser. Let's take this, and I can put this text in here. I may actually remove the pronunciation because it's not really relevant.

15:03 And I can hit generate. And what happens is that we actually work with third party providers. In this case, it happens to be OpenAI, and they're able to go go off process this audio for us and bring it back to us. And as you can see, the whole thing sits seamlessly within our interface. So this is what it sounds like. A safari is an overland journey to observe or hunt wild animals, especially in East Africa. And you as you can see, I could drop that underneath the edit like this, maybe turn down the volume of the actual edit and play that back. The Fari is an overland journey to observe or hunt wild animals, especially in East Africa. One, two. And you should be able to hear that nice and clearly. So these are some of the features that we're working on. We continue to add features all the time. We've got some really exciting new additions which will be coming out in the next few months.

15:54 But just to take you back to the presentation and just to walk through things. As you mentioned, there are traditional tools that are in the market. These tools have been around for a long time. They are very good. If you're making a Hollywood movie, they're absolutely the right thing for you to do for you to use, but they've been built for the highest end in mind. Now, obviously, video in the last few years has expanded so much that it's incorporating social media, video the use of video within education has exploded, the use of video within organizations exploded, and why should they have to learn the tools which are capable of making Hollywood movies? There's no need for that. And that's where we really see that massive, massive middle market opportunity for us. So the the high end tools, again, the traditional tools, they're great, but they do come with steep learning curves. They also require pretty expensive computers to run. So you tend to run these products on workstations that can cost many thousands of pounds. Whereas one of the great things about Elevate, Elevate will run on a $150 Chromebook.

16:50 So it will run on the thinnest of computers, which is great for education and organizations. And then you have the online tools that also exist similar to Elevate where they're browser based video editing solutions. Now they have all been focused very much at the lowest end of the market, and that's not the end of the market that we're particularly interested in. We're much more interested in the people producing things of value. And what that means is that for us, we have a distinct advantage. We're the only ones who are doing true real time multiplayer collaboration, and we'll be building in all of the approvals and and and and review stages and things like that. We also have do have AI integrations. Now others are working on this stuff as well, but we are going to be releasing that as a marketplace, and we are working with lots of exciting companies in this space to bring treatments to those videos to speed up your workflow, things like that.

17:40 And because we're in the cloud, we're natively already a digital asset management solution. Now those who produce video on the desktop tools will know how the process works. You end up with a series of hard drives. No one can ever find. Once the project's ended, you almost very never go back to the project because restoring it is complicated. For us, we've got access to the largest hard drive in the world in Amazon, which is what we use to store our content, And we're able to provide that digital asset management, let's say, capability to our end users, and this is particularly useful for organizations where maybe there's a marketing department using Elevate amongst 10 of them. They all have access to everything that they've ever done going back to when they started, and that is something that doesn't exist easily with the traditional tools right now.

18:28 For the product evolution, the first phase that we went through was to do the problem the the problem solution fit. That took us all the way through to actually monetizing. It introduces, like, vertical video, four k exports, and all of the basic editing tools that you need. We're now in this phase, which is the product market fit, where we're adding now serious features, which should entice the higher end users and make the plat product just more capable in general. And this will take us all the way through towards the end of next year where we then believe we'll be in a position to absolutely do the scale up because we'll have a product that suits that that satisfies a large amount of that middle market. I mentioned earlier the AI integrations. These are some of the companies that we're working with at the moment that we've been testing out the care their capabilities, And we will, as I mentioned, be making this available to our users through a tokenized system. So there will be a slight uplift to the cost because, obviously, there's a there's a huge cost to us at times. It varies.

19:25 So certain things like text to speech that I showed you is very cost effective, but video generation can can be quite expensive. So we we obviously have to meet with that, and we will be introducing that to our users. So just handing over to Kel who will take you through some of the marketing steps. Hi, everybody. So a little bit of context about myself before I take you through these slides. So I'm a lifelong video editor. Started at age 13 as a hobby, then edited ever since, essentially, to this day as a student and

20:02 eventually as a YouTuber. I built a channel of over 200,000 followers and got millions of views on my videos. And ever since, I've been working in the corporate space after that. So, yeah, I've been a potential Elevate customer essentially in in every stage of my life, if only it had been there at that time. So, yeah, the first time I saw Elevate a year ago, immediately, you could see that it was a total game changer. I've seen the impact that Figma has had with my friends in design, and to have something like that for video for myself is is just really, really exciting. So and it's why I'm an investor myself previously and and also in this round. So I'm gonna take you through the marketing and product journey of the user, and you will see this holistic approach between marketing and product that have driven these improvements that you're about to see.

21:00 So on this slide, you see the very top of the funnel, so where the user journey starts. From first visit to when they verify and become a user of Elevate a free user of Elevate. We can see here that more than one in two people sign up on their first visit to our website, which is an a very, you know, very exciting rate and really a proof of this problem solution fit that we that we have that you saw on on a previous slide. And it's getting better month over month as we are improving the product and the marketing, honing the ad algorithm of our Google search ad, which is primarily which has been primarily focused on The US, and and expanding the marketing website as more product features are added, giving us more ammunition essentially and increasing the the total addressable market of Elevate.

22:01 So on this line, this green line right here, you can see our marketing spend of from February to May, and you can see that it has been held very constant at about £18,000 per month. And on these blue bars, you can see the new free users that we are we have been bringing in each month. So this is not cumulative. These are new free users in each of these months. And this is really because we've been adding features at pace and seeing this market go up. Like, we can reach more people because there's there's there's there's something there's something more for anybody as we add these features. And we've been increasing our organic presence as well by by building out the website, leveraging, like, the new features to create content around, learning resources, feature pages, and and those types of pages. So, yeah, we we've doubled the number of free users we we're bringing in between February and May.

23:01 Almost doubled. Almost doubled.

23:06 So here, we're seeing the user land in Elevate. So they are now a verified user, and these are the different steps of the new user journey. So from from becoming a verified user to exporting that first video and so getting full benefit out of Elevate because they were looking for a a way to make their video, and they ended up doing that.

23:29 And we're seeing significant improvement here in the useful end of the funnel. So exports are up 31% between February and May. And really just to shows this this product velocity that we have been that we've had in the last, like, half year or so where the editor is just, like, transforming, really. And every update is showing this immediate impact in this funnel. And and and to the point where us, ourselves, as a marketing team, are really using Elevate now. A year ago, that was not the case because we were missing features, but now we are. If you're following our socials, you'll see videos being posted quite frequently. We're using Elevate for all of those. We're using review and approve and comments and all those things that some Summit showed just earlier.

24:18 So here we get to the, paid part of the story. So we can see the conversion rate here month over month. So these are the percentage of new users that are converting to paid in a particular month. And we've between February and May, we improved this from 1.4% to 1.9%, which, again, is a testament to this velocity of of updates and it becoming just more enticing for people to to to spend and become paying paying users. So the exciting thing about this chart is that there are way more features and way more triggers coming, and we've seen some that that Summit showed just earlier with the the AI tool, for instance.

25:04 And we have the looks and effects that Summit showed earlier as well. Those went in in June. So those are not reflected on this chart, and those are also additional triggers because free users don't get access to all of these. They only get access to a small part of them, and they have to upgrade to get access to all of them. Yeah. So we're we're really using this holistic approach to remarketing and product to drive up this number. And here is the outcome of the previous slide of this conversion rate going up. So we've halved the acquisition cost for a paid user from from £250 in February to about £115 in May, which is down 55%. And, again, this is that marketing and product are working together to drive up these conversion rates and drive down the cap.

25:52 And we haven't even opened up product led growth yet. So we have other features coming that are really gonna open that up, like view only link sharing, for instance. Being able to just send over a link and get somebody to review your content without needing to sign up without having needed to be already an existing member. And then we will prompt them to become a full member further down the line. And we have affiliate and referrals, for instance, where we reward people for bringing people into the platform.

26:25 So on this slide, I'm gonna give you an insight into who our users are. So we have an onboarding survey. Every new user has the opportunity to tell us a bit about themselves when they sign up. And we can see here that we're being used by a very wide variety of people, which is like a testament to this versatile tool that we're building, general purpose tool. From students to influencers, hobbyists, some businesses. Hobbyists, they might not have money for very powerful hardware like like the top top end MacBooks, but they can they can pay, you know, £15 a month to get access to a great video editor that runs smoothly native like in the browser. Then we have students that also appreciate its accessibility.

27:13 As we all know, Chromebook is extremely popular with students, and we're seeing a lot of people come in because they're looking for a Chromebook video editor because there's just not many of those around. And they're also our most avid collaborators. We're seeing them come in and invite others for group projects and school assignments that they're working on. Then we have influencers that are loving the digital asset management side and the outsourcing, like being able to leverage another editor to to kind of, like, outsource that just via link share, not needing to transfer any big files or do any rendering or any backwards and forth forwards.

27:51 And we have businesses like ourselves who are collaborating using review and approve, and having the shared workspace for the entire team. You can just log in and everything is accessible instantly. And then on this pie chart right here, we see the subscriber distribution. So we can see that monetized creators are really choosing to sign up to the creator plan, especially if you look at the business the business slice that's that's just increased so much and is so much more represented in the subscriber numbers. So all of this has been achieved while we're really only scratching the surface with marketing. We've only really been using two out of seven marketing engines, which is search ads and and some organic activity on social media and our Discord community.

28:47 With this additional funding, we want to add other channels gradually and in a controlled manner, and we'll be very data driven. So we want to add social ads to reach content creators who are living their lives on social media platforms. Then we want to we want to add influencer marketing to reach young people and students who make up these loyal audiences. We have media and events where we can reach businesses, and we've seen this great initial interest and reception at South by Southwest that Ian has participated both in The US and in London. Then we have the affiliate and referral part of the story, which obviously ties into this product led growth where we will reward people for bringing in subscribers. And we are look we're working on partnerships.

29:35 And for this, I will go over to Ian. So we're very conscious about acceleration and speed about in in penetrating the adoption and and growing our our base within greater economy. And the greater economy, although it's emerging and it's growing fast, there are some really established already some established networks of engaged communities that we can talk to and and proliferate, elevate through. One of the key key areas there, of course, are education, as we mentioned several times today, but also gaming, also businesses, and and also the the creator of networks themselves. So we are talking to these networks. We've started conversations, but we're not gonna really really execute on this until the product is a little bit further down the line, which is really you know, it's around the corner. We wanna make sure that when we do execute on these on these partnerships, that the product's in the right state to to to grow very fast. So watch this space. Some of these platforms are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and, of course, some are millions of of of of people strong. So really exciting news next phase for us.

30:35 So what are we gonna be doing with with with our funds? Well, it's really about these two guys. It's really about making sure that we can continue to improve our product. As I said, we're in a pro our product market fit phase, but also adding to those to those marketing engines to accelerate our go to market with with the other half of the of the sum. So it's 1,000,000 to to product development and 1,000,000 to market fit sorry, market acceleration.

30:58 So in conclusion, we are well, we we we brought this to to you guys and spoken to you to you about this guys when it was just a PowerPoint document. You know? Now now it is a product. It is it is it is derisked. It is in the market. We are paying customers. We are adding to that sort of product all the time. The velocity is now really intense, and and it's on a on a on a almost a week by week basis that we're adding adding features functionality. And we have really had strong early traction. We know it's early. And and these these numbers are, you know, are are are still you know, it's it's it's a it's a it's a small flame that we're we're nurturing and growing, but it is really strong and it is really going in the right direction. So we'd love to take some questions from you all. If I think there are some presubmitted, we could start start with that. And I will be the chair of these. Okay. So first question. How are you defining the free user sign ups, and how does this differ from the AGM statement which referred to verified users? It's it's the same. So there's just just in in in summary there.

32:00 We're saying first time sign ups and verified user, it's the same. Verified in the sense that they had to verify that email address in order to become a free sign up. Second question. Why are the nonexecs not investing at this point even if it's only 5 k? I really can't speak on behalf of them. Everybody has their own reasons for for investing at particular times. What I would say is that that that there are well, Son, Kel, myself, Steve are all investing in this round and other members of the management are as well. So we really are nailing our colors to master, and I think that's a really fantastic

32:31 achievement to be doing that at this stage. We're all really, really proud of the the participation. Next question, Dan. You seek support to take Elevate through the product market fit phase, yet shareholders do not know what all the things are that that you're working on. So this is a product question, first of all. We'll come back to that. And will it be finished by the time it ends the product market fit phase? So that's the first one, Sam. I'll pass over to you if that's okay. Will it be Will it will the product be finished by the time of the the product market fit phase? So the product will never be finished because it's going to evolve. If Salesforce in its first three years, it's nothing like it does today. It's been out for a long time. So the product will never end, but what it will do is it will unlock at the end of the solution fit. It will will will have unlocked all of the opportunities that we know sort of are broader, and it will give us those beachheads that we can go in and become popular within certain parts, certain demographics.

33:30 And once we've achieved that there, then we will look for where there are still gaps

33:35 and opportunities, and new things will happen as well. You know, no one could have predicted the video would take the direction it did twenty years ago. It's obviously gone on to it's gone online. It's gone on phone. It's gone on all these places. It it was only fifteen years ago when famous film directors were laughing at the idea of video on a phone. They thought it was a ridiculous idea. Now most video is consumed on mobile phones. So we've gotta move with those times. It means that we'll never have a complete product. We'll just have opportunities that we now need to focus on. And, obviously, scale up for us is about getting to the point where we're confident that we have a very sustainable business. That's the point behind the scale up phase. But in terms of product development, that doesn't end. Yeah. And I think that we can all see from the AI world that the things are just changing, you know, so rapidly and evolving is that we are an open architect platform. We can make sure that whether we are future proof in the sense that any AI, whether it exists today or doesn't or or tomorrow can integrate with the platform. So it's really it's really an exciting position and we we love the idea of that that new functionality opening up the world of of of the of new creators all the time. The second part of this question is, how do shareholders measure the board performance in terms of reaching targets if we don't know what the targets are? Well, we're not releasing any forecast at this stage, but we will, at at the interim, just be talking more about that as we go forward and and giving you some ideas about where we are heading in terms of the numbers of subscribers and other metrics.

34:58 Yeah. But we are looking at thousands of of users, yeah, hopefully in not too distant future. Can you confirm that you would never do what CapCut has done with their new terms and conditions? I think if you're referring to a unequivocal rights over all creators' content forever and a day, you can rest assured that we will not be implementing those kind of terms at all. No. Can you please indicate when the ramp up in marketing starts? Is it in weeks or months? How about we start with you, Ken, on that one? Yeah. So we're already we're already starting on this. So we we we already had we're already doing work on the affiliate side of things. We're doing work on the on the video ads. So so, yeah, we are we are gradually starting the ramp up already. It's it's not gonna it's not gonna wait. It's starting right now.

35:50 Okay. Thank you. It appears to me that the only way this will succeed and indeed not go under is the team to team up with or be bought out by a big player. If you agree with me, how easy or hard would it be to go down that path? Well, I think we've we've answered this question a number of times before in the sense that that a big partnership with that really happens when you've got trajectory and you've got you've got scale. So that is really what we're what we're building through the product market fit phase. How easy would it be today? I would say it wouldn't be palatable. How easy would it be when we've got scale and and and a trajectory? What do I be easier if that's the the path that choose to go down? But, yeah, at this at this stage, we're really focusing on on building our our scale and trajectory. Other competitor sites are using a credit system in terms of their AI tools. Is that something Elevate will do for users having fewer credits per month, etcetera? Correct. We will be using, as I mentioned earlier, tokens which users will get the amount of, and then they can obviously purchase more.

36:47 Is this likely to be the last fundraise? Well, I think we've stated that this is the fundraiser that gets us through the product market fit phase. If we're talking about scale up and our ambitions are are on the Sigma scale, then undoubtedly we would we would look for more funds at that stage to to scale up. But that is that is gonna be done on a different a different base of of users, etcetera. If you need another 2,000,000 for fit out stage, how much scale up phase will phase cost? We're not gonna give out those numbers at this stage. It really depends on on on our ambitions, but we do still have some ideas about that, which we will we'll talk to you about in due course. Ian, a poster on ADVFN claims you and Steve O took him a lot of friends with drinks after the AGM. It's a yes. We did. Yes. We did take some people drinks after the AGM. If he comes to the AGM next year, I I would love to be able to to treat you to drinks too.

37:42 How do you plan to capitalize on what's happening with CapCut and get them signing up to Elevate? Cal, do you wanna comment on CapCut at all? I know it's it's I think I think it's probably something we wanna think about a little bit more. Yeah. I think I think at this stage, we're really focusing on getting the Elevate message out there. Elevate is is we want more visibility for our product. We want more visibility for the the the positive attributes of our product without dissing competitors at this stage. But, yeah, thanks for the the tip. Do you still seriously believe that you'll be a tech unicorn? 11,000,000,000 market cap and a 30% fall today suggests there are some skeptics. Yeah. I do. I just invested. So, I I I'm a big believer in the in the the company, the technology, the team, and the product, and indeed the market. So I absolutely do.

38:32 Yes. What percent of conversion to paid users, currently 1.9%, do you aim for? Can I do it all? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So we we are aiming for 2.5 in terms of, like like, that that that scale up phase to reach that scale up phase throughout this this product market fifth stage. But but we we are very confident that that we can go way way beyond that as as well because it is early days, and there's just so many great new things that are still coming and that are still gonna be added. So, yeah, we're very confident in that. Question. Why aren't you including June in your data presentation? I presume you would fit. You would have continued the trend month on month improvement in KPIs.

39:17 We can't include June because this this this this happened within the the period of June. We actually went out to the to the institutions and the market as a whole in June. So we've gotta be strict with what we can release to different people at different times that we are we are releasing what we had to release we release to them, which didn't include June data because of the timing of the of the of the road show, etcetera. So if you have about a 100,000 active free users now and growing, why don't you explore selling ads in the platform for nonpaying users only? Not now, of course, but down the line. Because it's not the product we're building. We wouldn't we we wouldn't use that funding within the editor itself because it's not that type of product. We want those users to have a great experience. We try out our product and then actually subscribe and become part of it, or at least, as a minimum, become a contributor for free on another person's team. But that's not the product that we're building.

40:15 And and to to to add to that, in a way, we kind of have ads, but we have ads for ourselves. So we have ads to upgrade to the creator plan. We have these triggers. We have these locks, and that that basically tells people, look. If you want access to all these amazing looks to design your videos, then click on it and and subscribe to the creator plan. This question for Cal and Summit together, I think. Who are your main competitors, and how does your pricing compare to theirs? Cal, do wanna start? Yeah. So I think that's that that's like oh, it's obvious, like, Veed. It would be like Adobe Express and and some of the other ones that you saw on on Summit slide earlier. I think in terms of our pricing, even with the the early bird having having ended, I think we we went into this with very competitive pricing because, obviously, we are at at at at a growth stage right now where we want to we want to to to get market share. So it's it's a very kind of competitive price for what we're what we're offering and also what product will be in just, you know, as these new features that are coming.

41:16 Join the product. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Asked him. So so, obviously, Kel's covering the online editors there. Of course, some of our competitors are the installed products, certainly at the higher end, where our total cost of ownership is a lot lower. It's a lot easier to pay us for for the monthly subscription than it is to invest in and pay the license fees for those products. But in terms of do we actually compete with the with the products? It depends on what you're building because to take the example earlier of the terms and conditions in Veed, and that's not just for them. It's with several platforms that are there. We we, of course, would never do that. That's absolutely not the product that we're building. We're building a product that you could use to edit a piece of sensitive financial information that's, you know, before you put it out there. And a lot of people who'll be creating content in our platform will be creating it for private audiences. We could never possibly build something that was more of a public facing tool, like which which is understandable. I know it's not against what they've done in their terms and conditions. It's what YouTube does because it's a very public forum. We're building a private a professional tool.

42:22 And so competitively, we do, you know, obviously see the installed software as competition, you know, going down the line. Okay. Steve, question for you. More or less, what is the number of monthly paying users needed for elevator breakeven? Yeah. We're not gonna give out forecast, as Ian mentioned earlier. But what I would say, reiterate what I gave at the AGM, is that we see ARPU increasing over time. So, you know, as as people add to their content, you know, we can upsell them on storage. We'll have other we'll have other seats being added to the existing teams. There'll be a marketplace, as Sumit indicated, where they can purchase services, etcetera. So all of this would depend on the average ARPU per user. It's very early stages at this stage, but, yeah, it's in the tens of thousands that we need to get to.

43:10 Question on why such a low price for the fundraising considering the classic beginning of an exponential curve chart that you showed us. Well, this is really is a judgment on dilution versus the amount of money we want to raise from the shareholders and investors that we have, you know, available to us. So, yeah, not an easy decision to make, but a decision we think has has been the right one to get the right level of investment into the company to take us through product market fit without overly diluting ourselves. Have PremierMitan invested in this pricing? Yes. They did. What is the price paid for what is the price for paying customers, and is it and is it cancelable anytime? The price for paying customers is $15.15 euro, £15.

43:56 And is it cancelable anytime? Yes. At the moment, it it is. Of course, we we offer just one monthly subscription at the moment. However, we'll be offering a different option very soon, which will be an annual subscription, which will obviously lock customers in for longer with a with an advantage on payments. Okay. Are you sending out questionnaires to get feedback from users? How much feedback are you still getting, Kala? I'll do a bit of you. Yep. So we we we we do that. So we do send questionnaires out to users. And in in fact, we we send even very targeted ones out. As as you saw, we have this onboarding survey, so we get information on on on a lot of users, and we can send very specific surveys to these specific groups.

44:43 And we also have a a cancellation survey in the in the in the case of of people choosing to cancel. We we want to know why they do that. So so we, you know, we we want to be on top of all these things so we so we we know, you know, how the product is is going for everybody in each and one of these groups. Does the paid users metric include additional seats as additional paid users? No. No. The the additional seats any of the seats is counted within the same team. So that just help helps the ARPU obviously improve if there's additional seats, but they're all counted as the same user. Guys, I've said this before. Elevate is the bizo. Can you please outfeed from the market the bug riddled buffering specialist tool? Absolutely.

45:31 Thank you very much. I'm glad you recognize the qualities of what we've got and its and its bug free nature. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we think we think we are we think we're a good tool to disrupt that market. I would say that to some of his earlier words, we also think that the big Kahunas in the market, the Premier Pros and the DaVinci Resolves and the Apple Final Cut are absolutely disruptable as well. Not for the entirety of their base, but for so much of their base, whether a sledgehammer to crack a nut, we absolutely think we've got a great shot at disrupting them as well. So, yeah, thank you for that question. What percentage of customers that sign up as paying customers have been retained? Do you disclose this? We're not disclosing those that information at this time. I would say it's a healthy it's a very healthy amount, but it's at this stage, we're not disclosing all those metrics. But stay tuned. We will be talking to to you about different kinds of metrics and and and and a deeper dive at the interims.

46:28 What paid customer churn have you seen in the first few months? Well, similar similar answer to that. I'd say we're it's we're obviously in a decreasing amount of churn over over the months, but it's yeah. We're not releasing the details of that at this stage. I don't have any more questions at the moment, Jake. Absolutely. Ian, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time and addressing every single question that came in for investors this afternoon. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you after the presentation. But, Ian, perhaps before really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that would be great.

47:16 Yeah. I'd love to I'd love to to close by saying we are delighted to have executed this this round of funding. It really gives us that springboard now to take us through this product market fit phase where we've we've built the product, we've launched the product, we've paying customers, and we're look we're we're a massive product velocity, very, very impressive product velocity to take us through the stage and then and then take us to the scale of next year. It's a super exciting time to to join on the on the shareholder base or to to to improve your or increase your investment. And we hope you are encouraged to do so. Thank you very much. Perfect, Ian. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations.

48:04 This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of management team of BLACKBIRD PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.