At Moment we believe in understanding our results. We want to build a profitable company that ignites the call to explore. And the only way to get there is to make small improvements every single day.
Rolling 12 Months | 2018 Results | 2016 Results | 2015 Results
In 2017 we continued our work to understanding if Moment can become a $B business. Over the last 12 months, we've made considerable progress towards answering the three questions we posed in raising our Series A (May '16).
1) How to profitably acquire customers?
Content to Commerce is working. Our cost to acquire new customers dropped to under $35 for the first time, reaching as low as $15 in Q4.
2) What happens when we grow our product catalog?
The more we make the more customers buy. It's led us to revise our development process to ship more products with lower upfront development costs while re-selling third party gear, enabling us to quickly grow our catalog.
3) What works to grow our audience?
Content to commerce is working, in particular, the combination of influencers, brands, content, and giveaways are working to substantially grow our audience. Email capture and YouTube subscribers are our fastest growing audiences.
2017 was our best year yet.
We served more new customers (48.6K) than in the three previous years combined. We improved NPS from 48 to 54. We hit 63% of our goals. We increased our total audience size to over 450K people. We reached $8.5M in revenue on 1.7x growth, while only increasing the team from 19 to 21 people. We became profitable and cash flow positive the second half of the year.
To the downside, gross margins dropped from 45 to 42% driven lower by free shipping, increased costs in supporting three warehouses, and more expensive product costs. Improving gross margins to over 50% is one of our top goals going into 2018.
We exit 2017 better understanding each other, our customers, and our business.
In 2017 we completed the first phase of the business, a consumer product company for camera lovers. Going into 2018 we enter the second phase of our business...a vertical e-commerce company for adventure seekers.
To date we have built a direct to consumer business, therefore we focus on four key metrics.
We added two new channels in 2017, an Amazon Marketplace and a handful of Retailers. These new channels are indirect customer relationships but we believe in total we added 48.6K new customers, doubling our cumulative customer base to 97K.
Our customer base is still highly concentrated in North America. Considering Instagram, YouTube, and Kickstarter are highly international we should expect to see big wins overseas if we can continue to make it easier and cheaper to buy our products.
Within the US our customers are highly concentrated around creative cities. This is helping us to better understand who they are, how they explore, and where they travel.
At a high level, our customer base is millennial adventure seekers. They sit at the intersections of travel, photography, and tech. In the first four years, we have gone very tech heavy. In the next four years, we'll go much deeper with Urban and Outdoor lifestyles.
Over time we have made Moment more affordable which has expanded our customer base while lowering our average order values. We've lowered our product pricing through selling used gear, offering a trade-in program, and closing out our Original products. We're constantly testing price and learning what incentivizes customers to buy more.
The biggest shift in our business in 2017 was from a lens attachment company to a phone accessories company. Cases have now become the core product line and by placing a case on the phone, customers are then likely to buy more. It's a fundamental shift in how we'll look at the customer going forward.
Our annual cohorts break out into three groups. 2014 was a limited number of products. 2015 and 2016 was our Original gear. and 2017 introduced our New gear. In 2017 we lowered our product pricing, used more discounts, and started providing free shipping. three things that brought our initial purchase price down.
On an annual basis cohorts from previous years accounted for 30% of sales in 2017. But if you look at the data on a quarterly basis, especially Q4 of 2017 when we recognized nearly half of our revenue....50.9% of Q4 revenue came from previous customers of which 19.3% were first-time buyers in Q1-Q3 of 2017. Despite not having a membership business yet, we're seeing a high percentage of repeat purchase.
>We saw a meaningful reduction in our cost to acquire a customer, bringing our annual average down to $34 per customer and $15 in Q4. On an average 'first-time' order value of $130, we are profitably acquiring new customers.
A lower CAC also dramatically improves our Life Time Revenue and Life Time Gross Margins as a ratio to how much we're spending to acquire customers. This means we can be even more aggressive acquiring customers, especially if we can keep them engaged buying additional gear, travel, and services.
To acquire customers we've reduced our formula to content and commerce. Out of everything we have experimented what has worked to acquire customers is content and e-commerce. With over 86% of our spend being focused on internal teams and resources to generate revenue.
Organic and paid go hand in hand, but over time we expect to grow advertising dollars faster than we grow team count. Based on our low CAC numbers we still have room to spend more on advertising to acquire customers at a faster rate.
We improved or NPS score by 12% from 48 to 54 for 2017. Generally, customer feedback comes down to two areas. The first is product quality, the better our products are the higher the score. The second is delivery from purchase through to their front door. Although we made improvements by moving to a new 3PL we had setbacks with worse international shipping in 2017. Continuing to improve our logistics is a big focus going into 2018.
The second way we measure customer sentiment is through customer service. Different from traditional models everyone in the company handles customer service which means we all touch customers every sing day. Collectively we handled over 90K messages (up 75 % from 2016) while still maintaining nearly the same happiness score. Improving our service and lowering the number of emails we receive per order continues to be a big focus as we go into 2018.
We broke all of our previous financials records in 2017, but the year is broken down into two halves.
1) Q1/Q2 - We re-invented the Moment product line from the ground up to support the latest mobile phones. From lenses to cases to the interfaces between them we spent the first half of the year investing heavily in product development. At the same time, we discounted our Original gear in the market as consumers knew we had New gear arriving. The first half resulted in $900K in losses.
2) Q3/Q4 - We spent the second half of the year proving our investment was worth every penny. The introduction of Moment 2.0 dramatically grew top line while returning us to profitability. The $560K we made in the back half of the year wasn't enough for what we lost in the first half.
Some additional highlights...
+ We added 48.6K new customers at a significantly cheaper average price of $34. That's a 26% year over year improvement and a 60% improvement Q4 to Q4.
+ We grew the top line by 1.7x to $8.5M for the year.
+ The cost of growing top line was a reduction in gross margins from 45% to 42%. This was driven by offering free shipping, more discounts, the opening of a third warehouse, and using airplanes over boats to move inventory. We expect 2018 to be significantly better with reduction in product cogs and improved shipping.
+ Despite higher margins, we dramatically improved inventory turns as our new gear sold faster than we could make it.
+ We ended the year with $1.45M in cash, but in a dramatically better position with Net 30 terms from suppliers by year end and without looming new product development costs ahead of us.
+ We have been profitable on a quarterly basis since Q2, reaching 12.6% in profits in Q4.
>Q3 was our first $2M quarter and Q4 was our first $4M quarter. We saw a dramatic rise in revenue with the introduction of Moment 2.0 products in Q3.
We grew our channels in 2017 to add our own Amazon Marketplace. This channel is fulfilled and controlled by us. Overall it's helping us learn how to better sell our products and service our customers. Travel revenue was a pilot in 2017 we'll be expanding in 2018.
Better managing COGS was our biggest lesson from 2017. Although we made shipping improvements within the US market we went backward on International and the costs associated with moving product from factories to warehouses.
We lost three points in 2017 from 45 to 42% a trend we expect to reverse in 2018. Initial batches of Moment 2.0 products had higher per unit costs and in order to hit holiday shipping deadlines, we had to put everything on airplanes. The impact was a negative year over year margin growth, especially in Q4.
We are constantly testing shipping prices at check out. In Q4 we moved to free ground shipping which improved conversion rates but it led to more orders in smaller quantities. We're planning to close our shipping losses in 2018 as moving back to free shipping over a certain order value.
We did make dramatically improve our gross margin efficiency the back half of 2017 as we brought Moment 2.0 to market. We continue to improve inventory efficiencies and expect this ratio to stabilize over 2018.
Inventory management was one of our strengths in 2017. We grew the business by 70% but only grew end of year inventories by 30%. To make inventory management easier we continue to collapse our supply chain down to single partners, enabling us to better manage re-ordering.
Inventory finally returned to over four a benchmark we want to continue to maintain. Moving from airplane to boat freight is something we're looking at for 2018 which could put pressure on our inventory turns as a boat can take five weeks to deliver stock.
We modified our product development process in 2017 from heavy technical projects to lighter, faster to market products. We're finally part of accessory programs created by the mobile phone makers, enabling us to come to market when they announce a new device. It has altered our trajectory by enabling us to spend less to ship more, better products.
Despite an increased volume of more products, we've maintained a tight team size, something that will be difficult to do as we move into more software-based products and services in 2018.
We ended the year at 21 people, up from 19 the previous year. The company is completely paperless and still runs without admin overhead. It's enabling us to put every dollar back into creating more products, content, and commerce.
Revenue per employee grew by 60% as we proceeded to drive more revenue without growing the team size. This is a testament to the team's efficiency and ability to execute bigger campaigns with fewer people.
We had one of our best years in managing cash from operations. In the three previous years, we raised capital in order to reach a cash flow breakeven point, which we finally crossed the back half of 2017. We continued to reduce our development costs while utilizing our cash to drive revenue and turn inventory.
We are now making money, both on a monthly and quarterly basis. In 2017 we lost 4% (-$340K) compared to 2016 where we lost 9% (-$426K). But if you look at profits on a quarterly basis we've turned the corner since Q3 turning in two profitable quarters. Our target going forward is to drive 2-7% to the bottom line as we continue re-investing in the business.
Most important is that we continue to cut our annual losses. We were hoping to be slightly profitable in 2017 but we couldn't quite make up our Q1/Q2 investments.
Thanks for reading, or at least skimming ahead to catch the financials. Regardless, we appreciate you caring enough to get this far in our analysis.