Q4 2023 Grindr Inc Earnings Call

Paul.

Speaker Change: All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question. During this time simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question Press Star two.

Speaker Change: I would now like to turn the conference over to MS totally add Yafei grinders head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead ma'am.

Speaker Change: Thank you moderator Hello, and welcome to the Grinder earnings call for the fourth quarter and full year 2023.

Speaker Change: Today's call will be led by grinder, CEO, George Harrison and CFO Vanna cramps.

Speaker Change: They will make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up for questions.

Speaker Change: Please note grinder released its shareholder letter. This afternoon and this is available on the Sec's website, and grinders investor page at investors Duck Grinder Dot com.

Speaker Change: Before we begin I will remind everyone that during this call we may discuss our outlook and future performance.

Speaker Change: These forward looking statements may be preceded by words, such as we expect we believe we anticipate or similar such statements.

Speaker Change: These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today.

Speaker Change: Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release, and our periodic reports filed with the SEC.

Speaker Change: During today's call. We will also present, both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures additional disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures are included in the earnings release, we issued today, which has been posted on the Investor Relations page of grinders website, and grinders filings with the SEC.

George Harrison: With that I'll turn it over to George.

George Harrison: Thank you Tony and thank you everyone for joining us today.

George Harrison: 2023, our first year as a public company.

George Harrison: Success by every measure.

George Harrison: We made significant improvements in our product.

George Harrison: Chris monetization throughout weekly subscription and boost our cart and exceeded our financial guidance.

George Harrison: We continue to welcome mortgage lender with average MAU growth, 8% for the year.

George Harrison: The engagement has remained best in class with more than 121 billion checks and between users.

George Harrison: These strong results speak to the hard work of our team and also took one isn't doing relationship with the gateway and we helped users all of the world find connected without enough.

George Harrison: We also embrace a deep commitment to service and the global community.

George Harrison: Notably the work lined up for the quality initiatives, including connecting users to more than 235000, HIV test kits in the U S and that's what we are striving to bring to many more countries.

George Harrison: In 2023, we also laid a strong foundation for long term growth such as developing a robust political AD map, which includes some great work, we're doing on AI and any outstanding highly accomplished leaders to our team.

George Harrison: In November we completed a landmark step for <unk> with the refinancing of our debt closing, a new 350 million facility with some of the world's leading financial institutions.

George Harrison: We're finding through the core routinely in the business world, but when the first public company, serving the LGBTQ community can execute this type of a transaction.

George Harrison: Partnering with Alice institutions.

George Harrison: In a tough interest rate environment highlights not only the strength in what I believe our business, but it also signals that we can help drive a more open and welcoming financial ecosystem.

George Harrison: This is very important to our mission and I want to thank Diana her team and our banking partners for their work and support in making it happen.

George Harrison: Further details about our performance and 2023 focus areas can be found in our shareholder letter, which I encourage you to read.

George Harrison: Next I'd like to outline our three key priorities for 2024.

George Harrison: Given the robust nature of our free offering to increase monetization over the long term and to provide new value added features to our users that they are willing to pay for.

George Harrison: To do this we need to build features and products with a better understanding of our user intent.

George Harrison: Know that the vast majority of users use it for actual abating, but we also know that these same users use it for much more as a primary place to find long term relationships as source for networking.

George Harrison: We're finding information about what's going on in the community with a safe places are to go in different countries and much more.

Speaker Change: Moving features that better serve us a specific intent will allow us to cater to the needs of our customers, creating value for them and opportunities for monetization for Brian drab.

Speaker Change: Our second priority focuses on our brand and ensuring that we proudly tell the story of partners, great legacy of serving and positively impacting millions of people use the community around the world.

Speaker Change: Legacy perception grinder rooted in societal cultural and historical prejudice.

Speaker Change: <unk> been shame.

Prostate lung suits resolved issues inaccuracies about our product are still present, all around us and living our audiences.

Speaker Change: Left unaddressed. These inaccurate perceptions can have a negative long term effects on our business, we recognize that creating value for our users and shareholders and is taking these issues at all.

Speaker Change: In 2024, we're focused on amplifying the crucial and impactful work that is at our core by telling the true story of kindness program culture, and a real relevance and success of our product both within and outside of the community.

Speaker Change: And our third priority is to build a performance driven culture of excellence and innovation.

Speaker Change: Burnt out with a return to office initiative last summer.

Speaker Change: We believe strongly that the combination of an important social mission with a workforce playing to win is what creates great companies with a focus on building out our team and key functions with high performance and we believe that the strong performance driven culture will help drive strong long term growth for grinder.

Speaker Change: With the 2024 guidance, we're providing today.

Speaker Change: I'm excited to share more on all of these initiatives and much more about quanta and our first Investor day, which will be held on June 26, 2024, New York City.

Speaker Change: The event will be a fantastic opportunity to gain deeper insight into our company and engage with leadership registration details will be shared soon.

Speaker Change: With that I'll hand, it over to Atlanta to discuss our financial performance.

Speaker Change: Thank you George and Hello, everyone I'll start by summing up the year and then dive into the fourth quarter.

Speaker Change: <unk> delivered outstanding results in 2023 with revenue growing 33% to $260 million for the full year.

Speaker Change: And our adjusted EBIT margin came in at 42% of revenue for a total of $110 million.

Speaker Change: Both revenue and adjusted EBITDA margin were well ahead of our original guidance for the year and our revenue increased further from our guidance update in November.

Overall, our performance was driven by a combination of paying user growth and increased average revenue per paying user as we benefited from the success of the launch of the extra weekly subscription and a full year contribution from our popular boost Ala carte offering.

Speaker Change: In fact, our direct revenue grew by 38% in 2023.

Speaker Change: We continue to see strong engagement in our app throughout the year as average monthly active users increased 8% in 2023 over the prior year.

Speaker Change: And our average paying users increased 19% to a record 937000.

Speaker Change: Our average direct revenue per paying user grew 16% year over year to $20 and five.

Speaker Change: Primarily driven by the extra weekly subscription.

Speaker Change: Turning now to the fourth quarter revenue was $72 million up 32% year over year from $55 million. This includes $62 million of direct revenue, which was up 39% year over year and $10 million of indirect revenue, which was up 1% year over year operating expenses, excluding cost of red.

Speaker Change: For the fourth quarter of 2023 were $37 million down <unk>, 3% versus last year.

Speaker Change: An increase in people costs was largely offset by a decline in depreciation and amortization.

Speaker Change: Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue for the full year of 2023 or $137 million up 5% year over year versus 2022.

Speaker Change: $131 million.

Speaker Change: This $6 million year over year increase reflects higher people costs, which includes a $9 million severance expense driven by a return to office program. This was offset by lower depreciation and amortization costs.

Speaker Change: Net loss for the fourth quarter was $45 million compared with net income of $5 million in Q4 of 2022.

Speaker Change: For the full year and fourth quarter of 2023, we incurred $61 million and $50 million, respectively, and expenses related to warrants and our debt refinancing.

Speaker Change: Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $29 million equating to a 40% adjusted EBITDA margin.

Speaker Change: Turning to our balance sheet the headline for Q4 and the year was the new $350 million credit facility announced in November.

Speaker Change: The facility consists of a new 300 million dollar term loan a and a $50 million revolver.

Speaker Change: This new facility was a key objective for us in our first year as a public company as we focus on replacing the much higher cost of debt, we carried for almost a year.

The new facility results in about $17 million in annual interest savings.

Inclusive of the new term loan our net debt position was 341 million at December 31 2023.

Speaker Change: We ended the year with approximately 28 million in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents.

Speaker Change: Combined with our strong cash generation profile, we have ample liquidity to run the business and execute on our growth priorities.

Speaker Change: Let me now turn to our outlook for 2024.

Speaker Change: We have set guidance for this year of revenue growth greater than 23% and adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 40%.

Speaker Change: Our guidance reflects our expectation of another year of strong growth and profitability driven by continued paying user growth.

Speaker Change: A full year contribution from our weekly subscription offering which was rolled out globally in may of 2023 and contributions from existing and new offerings expected later in the year.

George Harrison: Our adjusted EBIT margin guide reflects investments in our strategic priorities that George highlighted including product roadmap talent acquisition and modest brand spending.

George Harrison: I also want to briefly touch on how we're thinking about international opportunities.

George Harrison: We continue to see fairly consistent and healthy MAU growth around the world and we have been pleasantly surprised but pace of monetization.

George Harrison: International markets contribute more than 40% of total revenue in 2023, responding well to the weeklies and boost product launches despite us not having yet focused on our end market localization and price optimization efforts.

George Harrison: As a result, we will be prioritizing go to market optimizations in key countries with the goal of further accelerating paying user growth over time.

This effort is in the early stages. So we have not factored any uplift into our outlook for this year.

George Harrison: With that I'll ask the operator to open up the line for questions.

Speaker Change: Very much Ms cramps, ladies and gentlemen at this time, if you do have any questions simply press star one on your telephone keypad and you can't remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two against our one please for questions and we'll pause for just one moment to allow questions to queue.

Speaker Change: We'll go first this afternoon to Andrew Merrick at Raymond James.

Andrew Merrick: Hi, Thank you for taking my questions.

Speaker Change: Wanted to talk a little bit about younger users. So can you talk a bit about your level of satisfaction in the top of funnel with younger users can been hearing anecdotal reports of Bernau with dating apps and some of the mass market comps I guess, how are you tuning your product and AI to position grinder, well for changing consumer tastes too to the.

Andrew Merrick: That you see them and maybe you don't.

Andrew Merrick: So thank you Andrew it's a great question.

Andrew Merrick: Joining the call. So we believe that <unk> has a lot of room to grow ahead in terms of acquiring new users both in the U S and abroad, and we're seeing that happen in general in our product. We saw 8% My world last year, and we expect that to continue in the future. The reasons I think threefold and bear with me as I walk through.

Speaker Change: That one is that gay people have been connecting digitally for a very long time.

Speaker Change: That was actually took before the internet dating to cover a lot of people would use up phone dating services to connect.

Speaker Change: And then shifting to the web when I finish, causing 2000, everybody that would meet in Washington D C or New York with already on dating product like gay Dot com and in Manhattan, and others and so this has been part of the fabric of the of the user base for a very long time and all the research that we see out there suggest that this is going to continue.

Speaker Change: The reason this is true because.

Speaker Change: The community is not as big as the state population likely a subset of the population and so you want to be around people, who are more like <unk>, who have something in common with Ya and digital channels like Ryan there are a great way to connect to people like you, especially with younger users who are still trying to figure themselves out.

Speaker Change: 2018, they became adults when they came out potentially or just finished college figuring out what life would be like.

Speaker Change: As someone who is.

Speaker Change: Different than majority of the population.

Speaker Change: How do you do that better if you're around people, who are like you know until that benefits in being a part of like vendor that has the puts us at all.

Speaker Change: People in that.

Speaker Change: And then lastly, even in real life.

Speaker Change: People oftentimes moving to large cities they go into Gayborhood and.

Speaker Change: Living Gayborhood blade every luxury the neighborhood and grinder gayborhood on their digital device. It is in the neighborhood on the phone and so we're able to recreate that in real life experience, putting those already in.

Speaker Change: And Thats actually why are you that you signed up for so many other ways than just data on all the other kind of ways in which they connect with each other so that's kind of on what we're seeing so far and what we think will continue to happen in future product are concerned.

Speaker Change: Very true that Brian has a ton of room and opportunity to build new products to address the need that you have.

Speaker Change: Our product development is done through understanding what users want and then trying to meet them in those needs through new features and new products. We have built a really robust product strategy over the last year that we're really excited about and I think a lot of it is addressing their needs.

Speaker Change: So we're pretty excited about giving me a chance to kind of see more of that and hear more about it at the June investor day that would be helpful.

Speaker Change: Great really appreciate the color there very helpful. And then maybe one more if I could.

Speaker Change: It sounds like Youre still working on scaling your team back up after the return to office mandate how has the progress been against your goals to date any significant learnings there and maybe any specific areas that had been easier or harder to add head count in than you had thought.

Speaker Change: In total yes.

Speaker Change: You can see from our financials that we had about 100 people at the end of last year 18, much smaller than.

Speaker Change: We had inherited when we joined.

Speaker Change: That's about $2 five or so.

Speaker Change: It's very important for us to be able to higher will be right talent that is really committed to both the mission of the business and to working away at that.

Speaker Change: Business went to work we are really committed to a performance driven culture in which what matters. We're doing really big thing that goes out Asia, and we want people, who want to work with those goals by working really hard and so I do not expect us to be able to get back to the numbers. We're at year 10.

Speaker Change: Hi that many people in the year, absolutely, but you won't be able to maintain your bar as well and you won't be able to integrate people into the company as well and so we don't want to go there.

Speaker Change: We are fortunate that we can supplement any need that we have in hiring with contractors would have a really strong set of Congress are supporting us in engineering and product and in some of the other areas. They are fully integrated with our team. So our pause in engineering for example, combined.

Speaker Change: What kind of plays together and so it's a very integrated model is working and that's been going really well now that said we've had absolutely incredible success in hiring I won't share any specific numbers, but I was really pleasantly surprised over the last three months for example at the speed of being able to hire engineers and bringing folks on board.

Speaker Change: Been really awesome I think it speaks to the fact that we have a really amazing, but not common to find businesses that are growing as well as binder is growing and they have a higher EBITDA margin at the weekend before a lot of people who want to be in a nimble environment, where they can have really big impact.

Speaker Change: There will be a prudent place to work and so we've seen really great progress and bring on board a great engineering talent into blender over the last few months.

Speaker Change: I appreciate the detail. Thank you.

Speaker Change: Thank you. We'll go next now to Rohit Kulkarni at Roth and Cam.

Rohit Kulkarni: Well, hey, Thank you hey, congrats on a good quoting and a good 20.

Speaker Change: 23 first question George on the post clarity that you outlined.

Speaker Change: Your order, but they understand user intent.

Speaker Change: Double click on that but.

Speaker Change: But let's talk about how.

Speaker Change: How are you thinking about new products incremental investments.

Speaker Change: The <unk> it seems as though.

Speaker Change: <unk> is going to come in 'twenty, five and more than 24. So just maybe talk about what is it that you wanted to what you then come to.

Speaker Change: Learning user intent.

Speaker Change: Yeah, absolutely. So we believe that grind or have you seen a lot of different ways. That's based on data we shared some data publicly.

Speaker Change: 90% of people are using ground up or.

Speaker Change: Core casual dating by about 50% to 60% of people want to use it for a long term relationships. For example, and then we also know that they use it for travel to kind of figure out what they should be doing when they travel to new places and kind of use travel a lot I got really frequent the kind of thing to do for our health information and public health information in particular for social connections.

Speaker Change: Each other for friendship so that's it.

Speaker Change: Broad set of use cases that people already use the product for which is really fantastic, we love that and that's it.

Speaker Change: And why would have as much engagement as they deal with.

Speaker Change: 121 billion, Chad I'm sure last year, and so what we want to do with the product as we extend the product functionality to support all these different uses.

Speaker Change: Right now a lot of this happened through chatting with each other which is great. We want to encourage that but imagine a world where with a click of a button you could go into a part of the product where everyone is engaged in the desire to have a long term relationship I'd say, it's a subset of our users, but they all want to get maybe a profile there was a little bit different maybe slightly.

<unk> different type of a profile then.

Speaker Change: Then you might have for your more tangible dating experience.

Speaker Change: You say different things in it because people arent and different information maybe your photos are different as well so that would actually be would it be appealing to our users because we've heard that from them. They want that and we believe it will create actually a better engagement with users to be able to kind of understand what their desires are and so the product that we're envisioning are all built around.

Speaker Change: What do you need what do we hear from users and how can we satisfy those needs as far as ROI on those things we tend to think of the upfront development and where it's kind of drive revenue.

Speaker Change: Very interconnected way, both along our cards and construction some of the products that we're building and testing such as pellet court or conversion as our card products. So it will be on a per use basis people will pay for them and then some of the other products like dating which is a combination of many many features we probably envision as a new subscription tier.

Speaker Change: Where people will pay for that because it's a big value out in general.

Speaker Change: Experienced in building.

Speaker Change: Technology now for nearly 20 years. It when you create a value for people. They are very excited to pay for it because they see a lot of benefits from that until as long as we build products that create value.

Speaker Change: Very confident that we'll be able to drive good financial stuff on that.

Rohit Kulkarni: And Rohit just to add a little bit to that.

Rohit Kulkarni: When you think about ROI, we're really thinking about just increasing the number of paying users and as you saw we increased it by 19% in 2023, and so as we put out more use cases that we've already done research on to recognize that yes. Our users are looking for teleport. They are looking for things like right now.

Rohit Kulkarni: And dating there's like a lot of research that we've put into play before we designed the product to make sure. It's pretty successful that being said you usually our products take a V one or two to actually it really hit perfection and that's what you saw with boost this year.

Rohit Kulkarni: At a very nice job in our Ala Carte performing nicely for US we did tweak it at the beginning of 2023 to really develop that kind of incremental gain so.

Rohit Kulkarni: Yes, we think about the ROI, but we recognize that it could be at the one RV to end before we do it we certainly do user research to make sure we actually prioritized the products that they want.

Rohit Kulkarni: Okay. Thank you and one of them.

Rohit Kulkarni: 24 guidance to the extra week and provide more color on the drivers behind the revenue growth both on a building users and <unk>.

Who is little Directionally even.

Rohit Kulkarni: Also obviously margins so you're guiding to a slight step down in margins, although all of a.

Rohit Kulkarni: And then there needs to be about 20 P levels, maybe just just on.

Rohit Kulkarni: <unk> gone back to whats your hiring outlook as well as well or how should we think about the cadence of margins as the year progresses.

Rohit Kulkarni: So certainly we're really excited about another strong year in 2024, and I would say that our guidance is still extremely excellence.

Rohit Kulkarni: Certainly with respect to 2024, we're really thinking about the weeklies in the first half of the year as you know.

Rohit Kulkarni: It really fully launched midyear in 2023, so we'll get the full year benefit of that.

Rohit Kulkarni: <unk> has.

Rohit Kulkarni: A few new products that we've alluded to that will be rolling out that are already in test again, it could be one kind of version. So right now you see our guidance at 23% for revenue growth remember last year, we showed a 25% and we actually ended the year with 33, so there'll be more to come as the year.

George Harrison: Progresses, I think you probably have recognized our philosophy is certainly to be more prudent at the beginning of the year as we still continued to test before the full rollout goes out with respect to our investments like George said, we have three real investments product brand head count I would suggest.

George Harrison: Really from a EBIT perspective, youre not going to see too much movement, there because a lot of our consultants that are onboard now.

George Harrison: We're going to flip into FTE. So I don't think youre seeing like any big bumps in terms of head count spend again, putting that in our guidance at the beginning of the year to confirm that we will absolutely hit our numbers.

George Harrison: Did I get all those.

George Harrison: Yeah, absolutely roadside and thanks, and congrats again thanks. Thank.

George Harrison: Thank you.

John Blackledge: Thank you well go next now to John Blackledge at TD Cowen.

John Blackledge: Great. Thanks, two questions Firstly, you mentioned.

John Blackledge: That you plan to amplify the brand story.

John Blackledge: As part of your 2024 priorities.

John Blackledge: Plan to adjust marketing efforts are launching a brand new campaign to help with this story just kind of curious around color. There and then the second question would be around payer conversion took a step up in 2023.

John Blackledge: Just curious about the drivers of the improvement there and then kind of can we expect further.

John Blackledge: Conversion uptick.

John Blackledge: Part of the 24 outlook. Thank you.

Speaker Change: Great. Thank you very much for those questions I'll take the first one and then I will take the second one so on marketing just from a spend perspective any increase in marketing spend is fairly limited.

Speaker Change: And that the market is very small, but we do think that the work that we will be doing in marketing. It is very important and critical for the future.

Speaker Change: Grinder has done amazing things historically in the community and frankly for the world.

Speaker Change: For people, who need our products.

Speaker Change: We are in a 190 countries.

Speaker Change: About 60 of those utility vehicle and the only way.

Speaker Change: Connect and in many of those places.

Speaker Change: <unk>.

Speaker Change: And but at the same time.

Speaker Change: Lot of assumptions about the product and keep in mind that even not true or maybe where true a decade ago and have long been addressed and we approached it differently now and so what our objective with marketing is on the one hand is to correct. Some of the assumptions and to really amplify the awesome things I pointed out to talk about the fact that before.

Speaker Change: For example, last year 235000 people in the U S ordered an HIV test buchbinder, we're able to get better at home and about a third of those people had never had an HIV test before those are the kinds of stories that we don't talk about a lot, but we need to so that people have in better appreciation of what grinder is.

Speaker Change: It does and the role that it plays in this assignment and then secondly, with our users themselves they come to our social media channels to enjoy really fun kind of content that can be really powerful creating engagement with our users.

Speaker Change: Outside of the product as well as keeping us top of mind with new users in the future and that's really effectively a really powerful social channels out there and so investing in content.

Speaker Change: Social channel.

Speaker Change: Really valuable for us and so we just recently brought on board a new leader for brand marketing, we actually moved them from the UK because he's so uniquely qualified to be effective for us and already we are seeing really positive impact of the work that he and his team are doing for example, recently they launched a new partner.

It's taken off.

Speaker Change: It really incredible way with hundreds of thousands of people engaging with that pocket content across different social media channels. We think that's really powerful and can it continue to do that will be really fun.

Speaker Change: So nothing in terms of user acquisition focus from cost.

Speaker Change: Not something we need to do I would like to do but in terms of telling our story better across broader channels as well as social channels I can't get where you want it.

Speaker Change: And then the second question.

Speaker Change: Thank you for the question. So you saw that we grew our paying users by 19% in 2023 and really we can attribute that to our new product offerings. So yes, we put out the weekly subscription tier which was really the statements the extra but a lower price point, we were extremely pleased with how little cannibalization.

Speaker Change: We had how we converted more and more users and in fact, we had a double benefit because often the weeklies ended up renewing and therefore that actually also impacted our <unk>.

Speaker Change: In terms of conversion Youre, absolutely right, we had a very nice lift in 2023 for conversion what I would suggest is we certainly see continued MAU growth and.

Speaker Change: You should imagine that our conversion rates like there's no real.

Speaker Change: No real expectation in our guidance so far of changes in conversion, we had a nice uplift in 2023.

Speaker Change: That's great. Thanks for the color if I can if I could just do one quick follow up.

Speaker Change: Georges just curious about your your view of the competitive environment.

Speaker Change: You know match launched Archer loss last year of last year, and so just curious just general competitive environment in the U S and outside the U S for granted.

Speaker Change: Absolutely. So we know that our users are going to be using more than one out that's very common in the dating space where people can have more than one out.

Speaker Change: And that's perfectly okay, what we do want to make sure that our users are looking at client or it is kind of first in wallet products.

Speaker Change: Think of the credit card analysis, meaning they want to come to us often and for all the things that they want to accomplish in the product and it's really important for us to be serving them correctly, it's sort of like features and services to meet their needs. I think if you look at our engagement numbers are there.

Speaker Change: For themselves in terms of how active users with the bonds and so that's going really well and we haven't seen any concerns on that front in the last year and don't expect to see it in the future.

Speaker Change: So from that perspective competition. We're obviously are we welcome competition and keeps us on our toes, but it's not something that we are in any way concerned about as far as auto specifically I think that has not been a lot of conversation about that in the community because it hasn't really taken off in so.

Speaker Change: So on that one specifically, we're not in any way concerned, but obviously, we're always looking at competition and ensuring that we are focused on the right things.

Speaker Change: But I think in general for a business like ours. The best thing you can do is listen to the user and try to follow the direction that you are the ones who go to them that way you can put a illiquid products to satisfy.

Speaker Change: Thank you so much.

Speaker Change: Thank you and just a quick reminder, ladies and gentlemen star one please for any questions. This afternoon well go next now to Emily strikes at New Street research.

Emily: Hi, Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. So a theme across a lot of dating apps right now is that they seem to be struggling to provide the gen Z audience, specifically with an experience that meets their expectations do you feel like grinder cases, similar challenge and if so what is the plan to help cater to that.

Speaker Change: Specific audience.

Speaker Change: Hey, there so actually we are not finding that at all in fact.

Speaker Change: We continue to enjoy an influx of users beginning at the age of 18. It really is a place where they discovered themselves and they become part of the community and a chat with other folks in the community and really I think Lincoln connect and so we aren't seeing any of those trends in fact.

Speaker Change: You can see from our results the paying users continue to go up are now continues to grow by 8% I mean this is a very very healthy environment remember that grinder.

<unk> was launched 15 years ago with the primary goal of connecting the community and it has done so in 190 countries. We're number one in over 180 of those and our metrics in terms of chat remember time spent is 60 minutes on the App that has not dropped at all.

Speaker Change: Really suggests to us that we remain a vital fabric of the community.

Speaker Change: Great. Thank you.

Speaker Change: Yeah.

Speaker Change: And ladies and gentlemen, just a final reminder, star one please for any further questions today.

Speaker Change: And it appears we have no further questions. This afternoon, Mr. Erickson I'd like to turn things back to you Sir for any closing comments.

Speaker Change: Great well. Thank you very much for to everyone, who joined the call and for taking the time has been a way to do this.

Speaker Change: Our next quarter first year as a public company and I'm really well and so we're excited to be sharing.

Speaker Change: I, just think of a closeout buyer financing.

Speaker Change: Of course, we are obviously very proud of the performance decline the team delivered in 2023 it was in <unk>.

Speaker Change: Despite the challenging year coming with respect of our departure and whatnot and so given that in that environment. The team performed as well.

Speaker Change: Really exciting and we're also really excited about what we can do in 2024.

Speaker Change: Uh huh.

Speaker Change: How come you spoke into our guidance, we have really great momentum in the business with both user and the products that we have today, that's what I was really great momentum, both domestically and internationally and what are the things that we want to do over the near and medium term.

Speaker Change: There's a lot of potential to offer new offerings to our users some of which are already in test for us and some are being built this year to go into test late this year or next year and I think that's gonna have a really.

Speaker Change: Fantastic impact on the on the business both from a user engagement perspective, and the financial sector.

We've seen many times, we're really early as we've said many times, we're really early in our.

Speaker Change: The journey and the like.

Speaker Change: Company, that's focused on financial growth. In addition to user engagement and so that really has positioned us well to show great growth in the future [noise] Glenda has built a really incredible assets over the last 15 years and we're just coming up on our 15 year anniversary and so its quite exciting and our team realizes how important it is to nurture.

Speaker Change: I saw it in the future and to grow it at a durable profitable and highly test generating business.

Speaker Change: We also recognize that we have work to do to help investors understand our story better and appreciate the great business and part of the Grand Rapids.

Speaker Change: And to help make it easier for you to invest and so we are excited for when they're supposed to come on on the journey. We look forward to sharing a lot more about our story and what we intend to do in the future at our Investor Day in June and really look forward to seeing you there and introducing you to more members of our team. So thank you for joining us today and hope everybody has a great day.

Speaker Change: Thank you Mr. Erickson again, ladies and gentlemen that will conclude the grinder fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call again, we'd like to thank you all so much for joining us today and wish you all a great day Goodbye.

Operator: For 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star two. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Tolu Adeofe, Grindr's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Tolu Adeofe: Thank you, moderator. Hello, welcome to the Grindr earnings call for Q4 and full year of 2023. Today's call will be led by Grindr CEO, George Arison, and CFO, Vanna Krantz. They will make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up for questions. Please note, Grindr released its shareholder letter this afternoon, and this is available on the SEC's website and Grindr's investor page at investors.grindr.com. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate, or similar such statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today.

Tolu Adeofe: Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC. During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, are included in the earnings release we issued today, which has been posted on the investor relations page of Grindr's website and in Grindr's filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to George.

George Arison: Thank you, Tolu, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. 2023, our first year as a public company, was a success by every measure. We made significant improvements in our product, increased monetization through our weekly subscription and Boost à la carte, and exceeded our financial guidance. We continue to welcome more users to Grindr with average MAU growth of 8% for the year. The engagement has remained best-in-class, with more than 121 billion chats sent between users. These strong results speak to the hard work of our team and also to Grindr's enduring relationship with the gay community, as we help users all over the world finally connect with one another.

George Arison: We also embrace a deep commitment to service in the global gay community, most notably through our Grindr for Equality initiatives, including connecting users to more than 235,000 HIV test kits in the US, an effort we are striving to bring to many more countries. In 2023, we also laid a strong foundation for long-term growth, such as developing a robust product roadmap, which includes some great work we are doing on AI and adding outstanding, highly accomplished leaders to our team. In November, we completed a landmark step for Grindr with the refinancing of our debt, closing a new $350 million facility with some of the world's leading financial institutions.

George Arison: Debt refinancing is a core routine in the business world, but when the first public company serving the LGBTQ community can execute this type of transaction, partnering with A-list institutions in a tough interest rate environment, it highlights not only the strength and credibility of our business but also signals that we can help drive a more open and welcoming financial ecosystem. This is very important to our mission, and I want to thank Vanna, her team, and our banking partners for their work and support in making it happen. Further details about our performance and 2023 focus areas can be found in our shareholder letter, which I encourage you to read. Next, I'd like to outline our three key priorities for 2024.

George Arison: Given the robust nature of our free offering, to increase monetization over the long term, we need to provide new value-added features to our users that they're willing to pay for. To do this, we need to build features and products with a better understanding of our user intent. We know that the vast majority of Grindr users use it for casual dating, but we also know that these same users use it for much more, as a primary place to find long-term relationships, a source for networking, for finding information about what's going on in the community, where the safe places are to go in different countries, and much more. Building features that better serve users' specific intent will allow us to cater to the needs of our customers, creating value for them and opportunities for monetization for Grindr.

George Arison: Our second priority focuses on our brand and ensuring that we proudly tell the story of Grindr's great legacy of serving and positively impacting millions of people in our user community around the world. Legacy perception of Grindr rooted in societal, cultural, and historical prejudice, sensationalism, shame, reinforced by long-since resolved issues and inaccuracies about our product are still present all around us and live in our audience's heads. Left unaddressed, these inaccurate perceptions can have negative long-term effects on our business. In 2024, we're focused on amplifying the crucial and impactful work that is at our core by telling the true story of Grindr's role and culture and the real relevance and success of our product both within and outside of the community.

George Arison: Our third priority is to build a performance-driven culture of excellence and innovation. This started out with our return to office initiative last summer. We believe strongly that the combination of an important social mission with a workforce playing to win is what creates great companies. We are focused on building out our team in key functions with high performers, and we believe that the strong performance-driven culture will help drive strong long-term growth for Grindr, starting with the 2024 guidance we are providing today.

George Arison: I'm excited to share more on all of these initiatives and much more about Grindr at our first Investor Day, which will be held on 26 June 2024, in New York City. The event will be a fantastic opportunity to gain deeper insight into our company and engage with leadership. Registration details will be shared soon. With that, I'll hand it over to Vanna to discuss our financial performance.

Vanna Krantz: Thank you, George, and hello, everyone. I'll start by summing up the year and then dive into Q4. Grindr delivered outstanding results in 2023, with revenue growing 33% to $260 million for the full year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 42% of revenue for a total of $110 million. Both revenue and adjusted EBITDA margin were well ahead of our original guidance for the year, and our revenue increased further from our guidance update in November. Overall, our performance was driven by a combination of paying user growth and increased average revenue per paying user as we benefited from the success of the launch of the XTRA weekly subscription and a full year contribution from our popular Boost à la carte offering. In fact, our direct revenue grew by 38% in 2023.

Vanna Krantz: We continued to see strong engagement in our app throughout the year as average monthly active users increased 8% in 2023 over the prior year, and our average paying users increased 19% to a record 937,000. Our average direct revenue per paying user grew 16% year over year to $20.05, primarily driven by the extra weekly subscription. Turning now to Q4, revenue was $72 million, up 32% year over year from $55 million. This includes $62 million of direct revenue, which was up 39% year over year, and $10 million of indirect revenue, which was up 1% year over year. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue for Q4 of 2023, were $37 million, down 0.3% versus last year. An increase in people cost was largely offset by a decline in depreciation and amortization.

Vanna Krantz: Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue for the full year of 2023, were $137 million, up 5% year over year versus 2022 of $131 million. This $6 million year over year increase reflects higher people costs, which includes a $9 million severance expense driven by a return to office program. This was offset by lower depreciation and amortization costs. Net loss for Q4 was $45 million, compared with net income of $5 million in Q4 2022. For the full year and Q4 2023, we incurred $61 million and $50 million, respectively, in expenses related to warrants and our debt refinancing. Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $29 million, equating to a 40% adjusted EBITDA margin. Turning to our balance sheet, the headline for Q4 and the year was the new $350 million credit facility announced in November.

Vanna Krantz: The facility consists of a new $300 million Term Loan A and a $50 million revolver. This new facility was a key objective for us in our first year as a public company, as we focus on replacing the much higher cost of debt we carried for almost a year. The new facility results in about $17 million in annual interest savings. Inclusive of the new Term Loan, our net debt position was $341 million at 31 December 2023. We ended the year with approximately $28 million in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents. Combined with our strong cash generation profile, we have ample liquidity to run the business and execute on our growth priorities. Let me now turn to our outlook for 2024. We have set guidance for this year of revenue growth greater than 23% and adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 40%.

Vanna Krantz: Our guidance reflects our expectation of another year of strong growth and profitability driven by continued paying user growth, a full year contribution from our weekly subscription offering, which was rolled out globally in May 2023, and contributions from existing and new offerings expected later in the year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin guide reflects investments in our strategic priorities that George highlighted, including product roadmap, talent acquisition, and modest brand spending. I also want to briefly touch on how we're thinking about international opportunities. We continue to see fairly consistent and healthy MAU growth around the world, we have been pleasantly surprised by the pace of monetization. International markets contribute more than 40% of total revenue in 2023, responding well to the weeklies and Boost product launches, despite us not having yet focused on our in-market localization and price optimization efforts.

Vanna Krantz: As a result, we will be prioritizing go-to-market optimizations in key countries with the goal of further accelerating paying user growth over time. We have not factored any uplift into our outlook for this year. With that, I'll ask the operator to open up the line for questions.

Operator: Very much, Ms. Krantz. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you do have any questions, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. You can remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Again, star one please for questions. We'll pause for just one moment to allow questions to queue. We'll go first this afternoon to Andrew Marok at Raymond James.

Andrew Marok: Hi, thank you for taking my questions. Wanted to talk a little bit about younger users. Can you talk a bit about your level of satisfaction in the top of funnel with younger users? Because I've been hearing anecdotal reports of burnout with dating apps and some of the mass market comps. I guess how are you tuning your product and AI to position Grindr well for changing consumer tastes to the extent that you see them and maybe you don't?

George Arison: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. That's a great question. Really appreciate you joining the call. We believe that Grindr has a lot of room to grow ahead in terms of acquiring new users, both in the US and abroad. We're seeing that happen in general in our product. We saw 8% month-over-month last year, and we expect that to continue in the future. The reasons I think threefold, and bear with me as I walk through that. One is that gay people have been connecting digitally for a very long time. That was actually true before the internet dating took over. A lot of people would use phone dating services to connect, and then they shifted on to the web. When I finished college in 2000, everybody I would meet in Washington, DC or New York was already on dating products like Gay.com and Manhunt and others.

George Arison: This has been part of the fabric of the user base for a very long time. All the research that we see out there suggests that this is going to continue. Secondly, the reason this is true is because the community is not as big as the straight population. We're a subset of the population, and so you want to be around people who are more like you, who have something in common with you. The digital channels like Grindr are a great way to connect to people who are like you, especially with younger users who are still trying to figure themselves out. They just turned 18, they became adults, they came out potentially or just finished college.

George Arison: Figuring out what life would be like as someone who is different than majority of the population allows you to do that better if you're around people who are like you. That benefits you being in a product like Grindr that has the full subset of the people in that community. Lastly, even in real life, people oftentimes move into large cities. They go into gayborhoods and live in gayborhoods. Every large city has a gayborhood. Grindr is a gayborhood on your digital device. It is a gayborhood on the phone. We are able to recreate that in real-life experience for users already. That's actually why our users use Grindr in so many other ways than just dating on all the other ways in which they connect with each other.

George Arison: That's on what we are seeing so far and what we think will continue to happen in the future. As far as products are concerned, it's very true that Grindr has a ton of room and opportunity to build new products to address the needs that users have. Our product development is done through understanding what users want and then trying to meet them in those needs through new features and new products. We've built a really robust product strategy over the last year that we are really excited about, and I think a lot of it is addressing their needs. We're pretty excited about giving you a chance to see more of that and hear more about it at the June Investor Day that we'll be hosting.

Andrew Marok: Great. Really appreciate the color there. Very helpful. Then maybe one more, if I could. It sounds like you're still working on scaling your team back up after the return to office mandate. How has the progress been against your goals to date? Any significant learnings there, and maybe any specific areas that have been easier or harder to add headcount in than you had thought?

George Arison: Totally. As you can see from our financials, we had about 100 people at the end of last year, so definitely a team much smaller than we had inherited when we joined, and we peaked that at about 225 or so. It's really important for us to be able to hire really right talent that is really committed to both the mission of the business and to working the way we as a business want to work. We are really committed to a performance-driven culture in which work matters. We're doing really big things. The goals are audacious, and we want people who want to go after those goals by working really hard. I do not expect us to be able to get back to the numbers we're at in a year. Can you hire that many people in a year? Absolutely.

George Arison: You won't be able to maintain your bar as well, and you won't be able to integrate people into the company as well. We don't want to grow that quickly. We are fortunate that we can supplement any needs that we have in hiring contractors. We have a really strong set of contractors that's supporting us in engineering, product, and in some of the other areas. They're fully integrated with our team. So our pods in engineering, for example, combine contractors and full-time employees together. It's a very integrated model of working, and that's been going really well. Now, that said, we've had actually incredible success in hiring. I won't share any specific numbers, but I was really pleasantly surprised over the last three months, for example, at the speed of being able to hire engineers and bring folks on board.

George Arison: It's been really awesome. I think it speaks to the fact that we have a really amazing business. It's not common to find businesses that are growing as well as Grindr is growing and that have as high of an EBITDA margin as we do. For a lot of people who want to be in a nimble environment where they can have really big impact, Grindr is a really appealing place to work. We've seen really great progress in bringing on board a great engineering talent into Grindr over the last few months.

Andrew Marok: Appreciate the detail. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We go next now to Rohit Kulkarni at ROTH MKM.

Rohit Kulkarni: Hey, thank you. Hey, congrats on a great quarter and a good 2023. First question to you, George. On this first priority that you outlined, you want to better understand user intent. If you could double click on that, perhaps talk about how are you thinking about new products, incremental investments, and the ROI. It seems as if ROI is going to come in in 2025 and not in 2024. Just maybe talk about what is it that you want to achieve when it comes to learning user intent.

George Arison: Yeah, absolutely. We believe that Grindr is used in a lot of different ways. That's based on data. We've even shared some data publicly. 90% of people are using Grindr for casual dating, but about 50% to 60% of people want to use it for long-term relationships, for example. We also know that they use it for travel to figure out what they should be doing when they travel to new places, and Grindr users travel a lot. It's a really frequent thing to do. For health information and public health information in particular, for social connections with each other, for friendships. There's this broad set of use cases that people already use the product for, which is really fantastic. We love that, and that's a big reason why we have as much engagement as we do with, say, 121 billion chats shared last year.

George Arison: What we want to do with the product is to extend the product functionality to support all these different use cases. Right now, a lot of this happens through chatting with each other, which is great. We want to encourage that. Imagine a world where, with a click of a button, you could go into a part of the product where everyone is engaged in a desire to have a long-term relationship, right? It's a subset of our users, but they all want to date. Maybe your profile there is a little bit different, maybe slightly different type of a profile than you might have for your more casual dating experience. Maybe you say different things in it because people are interested in different information. Maybe your photos are different as well.

George Arison: That would actually be really appealing to our users because we've heard that from them. They want that. We believe that it'll create actually better engagement with users to be able to understand what the desires are. The products that we are envisioning are all built around what do users need, what do we hear from users, and how can we satisfy those needs. As far as ROI on those things, we tend to think of our product development and where it kind of drives revenue in a very interconnected way, both along à la cartes and in subscriptions. Some of the products that we're building and are testing, such as Teleport, are envisioned as à la carte products, so those will be on a per-use basis. People will pay for them.

George Arison: Some of the other products, like Dating, which is a combination of many specific features, we probably envision as a new subscription tier, where people will pay for that because it is a big value add. In general, my experience in building technology now for nearly 20 years is when you create value for people, they are very excited to pay for it because they see a lot of benefit from that. As long as we build products that create value, I am very confident that we will be able to drive good financial performance.

Vanna Krantz: Rohit, just to add a little bit to that. When you think about ROI, we're really thinking about just increasing the number of paying users. As you saw, we increased it by 19% in 2023. As we put out more use cases that we've already done research on to recognize that, yes, our users are looking for Teleport, they are looking for things like Right Now and Dating. There's a lot of research that we put into play before we design the product and make sure it's pretty successful. That being said, usually our products take a V1 or a V2 to actually really hit perfection, and that's what you saw with Boost this year. Boost did a very nice job in our à la carte, performing nicely for us.

Vanna Krantz: We did tweak it at the beginning of 2023 to really develop that kind of incremental gain. Yes, we think about the ROI, but we recognize that it could be a V1 or a V2. Before we do it, we certainly do user research to make sure we actually prioritize the products that they want.

Rohit Kulkarni: Okay. Thank you, guys. One on 2024 guidance. To the extent you can provide more color on the drivers behind the revenue growth, both on paying users and kind of ARPU as well, directionally even. Also, obviously margins, your guiding to slight step down in margins, although when all's said and done, they may still be above 2023 levels. Maybe just a double-click on that, too. What's your hiring outlook, as well as how should we think about the cadence of margins as the year progresses?

Vanna Krantz: Certainly we're really excited about another strong year in 2024, and I would say that our guidance is still extremely excellent. Certainly with respect to 2024, we're really thinking about the weeklies in H1 of the year. As you know, it really fully launched mid-year in 2023, so we'll get the full year benefit of that. We also have a few new products that we've alluded to that we'll be rolling out that are already in test. Again, it could be a V1 kind of version. Right now you see our guidance at 23% for revenue growth. Remember last year we showed 25% and we actually ended the year with 33%. There'll be more to come as the year progresses.

Vanna Krantz: I think you probably have recognized our philosophy is certainly to be more prudent at the beginning of the year as we still continue to test before the full rollout goes out. With respect to our investments, like George said, we have three real investments, product, brand, headcount. I would suggest that really from an EBITDA perspective, you're not going to see too much movement there because a lot of our consultants that are on board now, we're going to flip into FTEs. I don't think you're seeing any big bumps in terms of headcount spend. Again, prudent on our guidance at the beginning of the year to confirm that we will absolutely hit our numbers. Did I get all those questions, Rohit?

Rohit Kulkarni: Yeah, absolutely. Well said, and thanks and congrats again.

Vanna Krantz: Thanks.

George Arison: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We go next now to John Blackledge at TD Cowen.

John Blackledge: Great. Thanks. Two questions. First, you mentioned that you plan to amplify the brand story as part of your 2024 priorities. Do you plan to adjust marketing efforts or launch a branding campaign to help with this story? Just curious around color there. The second question would be around payer conversion. It took a step up in 2023. Just curious about the drivers of the improvement there, and then can we expect further conversion uptick as part of the 2024 outlook? Thank you.

George Arison: Great. Thank you very much for those questions. I'll take the first one. Vandana will take the second one. On marketing, just from the spend perspective, any increase in marketing spend is fairly limited, so its impact on margins is very small. We do think that the work that we will be doing in marketing is very important and critical for the future. Grindr has done amazing things historically in the community and frankly, for the world, and for people who need our product. We are in 190 countries, and about 60 of those, it's illegal to be gay, and Grindr is the only way for people to be able to connect in many of those places.

George Arison: At the same time, there are a lot of assumptions about the product in people's minds that are just either not true or maybe were true a decade ago and have long been addressed, and we approach this very differently now. What our objective with marketing is, on the one hand, is to correct some of the assumptions and to really amplify the awesome things that Grindr does. To talk about the fact that, for example, last year, 235,000 people in the US ordered an HIV test through Grindr, were able to get that at their home, and about a third of those people had never had an HIV test before.

George Arison: Those are the kinds of stories that we don't talk about a lot, but we need to so that people have a better appreciation of what Grindr is, it does, and the role that it plays in the society. Then secondly, with our users themselves, they come to our social media channels to enjoy really fun content that can be really powerful in creating engagement with our users outside of the product, as well as keeping us top of mind with new users in the future. That's really effective. We have really powerful social channels out there. So investing in content at those social channels is really valuable for us. So we just recently brought on board a new leader for brand marketing. We actually moved him from the UK because he's so uniquely qualified to be effective for us.

George Arison: Already we are seeing really positive impact of the work that he and his team are doing. For example, recently they launched a new podcast, and it's just taken off in a really incredible way with hundreds of thousands of people engaging with that podcast content across different social media channels. We think that's really powerful, going to continue to do that will be really valuable. Nothing in terms of user acquisition focus from cost perspective, so that's not something we need to do or would like to do. In terms of telling our story better across broader channels as well as social channels, that can be really valuable. Vanna, for the second question, over to you.

Vanna Krantz: Thank you for the question. You saw that we grew our paying users by 19% in 2023, and really, we can attribute that to our new product offerings. Yes, we put out the weekly subscription tier, which was really the same as the XTRA but a lower price point. We were extremely pleased with how little cannibalization we had, how we converted more and more users, and in fact, we had a double benefit because often the weeklies ended up renewing, and therefore, that actually also impacted our ARPU. In terms of conversion, you're absolutely right. We had a very nice lift in 2023 for conversion. What I would suggest is we certainly see continued MAU growth, and you should imagine that our conversion rates, there's no real expectation in our guidance so far of changes in conversion. We had a nice uplift in 2023.

John Blackledge: That's great. Thanks for the color. If I could just do one quick follow-up. George, just curious about your view of the competitive environment. Match launched Archer last year, last June. Just curious, just general competitive environment in the US and outside the US for Grindr.

George Arison: Absolutely. We know that our users are going to be using more than one app. That's very common in the dating space for people to have more than one app, and that's perfectly okay. What we do want to make sure is that our users are looking at Grindr as kind of first in wallet product, if you think of the credit card analogies, meaning they want to come to us often and for all the things that they want to accomplish in the product. It's really important for us to be serving them correctly through the right features and services to meet their needs.

George Arison: I think if you look at our engagement numbers, they kind of speak for themselves in terms of how active users are with the product, that's going really well, and we haven't seen any concerns on that front in the last year and don't expect to see anything in the future. From the perspective of competition, we welcome competition and keeps us on our toes, but it's not something that we are in any way concerned about. As far as Archer specifically, I think there has not been a lot of conversation about that in the community because it hasn't really taken off. On that one specifically, we're not in any way concerned. Obviously, we're always looking at competition and ensuring that we are focused on the right things in that product.

George Arison: I think in general, for a business like ours, the best thing you can do is listen to the user and try to follow in the direction that the user wants to go to, and that way you can build a really great product with that as well. Thank you. Thanks so much.

Operator: Thank you. Just a quick reminder, ladies and gentlemen, star one, please, for any questions this afternoon. We will go next now to Emily Stykes at New Street Research.

Emily Stykes: Hi. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. A theme across a lot of dating apps right now is that they seem to be struggling to provide the Gen Z audience specifically, with an experience that meets their expectations. Do you feel like Grindr faces a similar challenge? If so, what is the plan to help cater to this specific audience?

Vanna Krantz: Hey there. Actually, we are not finding that at all. In fact, we continue to enjoy an influx of users, beginning at the age of 18. It really is a place where they discover themselves, and they become part of the community, and they chat with other folks in the community, and really, I think, link and connect. We aren't seeing any of those trends. In fact, you can see from our results, the paying users continue to go up. Our MAU continues to grow by 8%. This is a very healthy environment. Remember that Grindr was launched 15 years ago with the primary goal of connecting the community, and it has done so in 190 countries. We're number one in over 180 of those.

Vanna Krantz: Our metrics in terms of chat, remember, time spent is 60 minutes on the app, that has not dropped at all, really suggests to us that we remain a vital fabric of the community.

Emily Stykes: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, just a final reminder, star one, please, for any further questions today. It appears we have no further questions this afternoon. Mr. Arison, I'd like to turn things back to you, sir, for any closing comments.

George Arison: Well, thank you very much to everyone who joined the call and for taking the time. It has been great to do this earnings call. It's our first year as a public company, and it's done really well, and so we're excited to be sharing these results. I'd just like to close out by emphasizing a few points. First, we are obviously very proud of the performance that Grindr team delivered in 2023. It was, in some respects, a challenging year from the perspective of some departures and whatnot. Given that in that environment, the team performed as well as it did is really exciting. We're also really excited about what we can do in 2024, as we have spoken to through our guidance.

George Arison: We have really great momentum in the business with both users and the products that we have today, as well as really great momentum both domestically and internationally and with the things that we're going to do over the near and medium term. There's a lot of potential to offer new offerings to our users, some of which are already in test for us, and some are being built this year to go into test late this year or next year. I think that's going to have a really fantastic impact on the business, both from the user engagement perspective and the financial perspective. As we've said many times, we're really early in our journey as a company that's focused on financial growth in addition to user engagement. That really has positioned us really well to show great growth in the future.

George Arison: Grindr has built a really incredible asset over the last 15 years. We're just coming up on our 15-year anniversary, and so it's quite exciting. Our team realizes how important it is to nurture this asset in the future and to grow it as a durable, profitable, and highly cash-generating business. We also recognize that we have work to do to help investors understand our storyline better and appreciate the great business and product that Grindr is, and to help make it easier for you to invest. We are excited for investors to come on the journey. We look forward to sharing a lot more about our story and what we intend to do in the future at our Investor Day in June, and really look forward to seeing you there and introducing you to more members of our team.

George Arison: Thank you for joining us today, and hope everybody has a great day.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Arison. Again, ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude the Grindr Q4 2023 earnings conference call. Again, we'd like to thank you all so much for joining us and wish you all a great day. Goodbye.