Bridgeline Digital, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLIN) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Roger Kahn: Right, right. Okay. Great. So as an expectation, it will be towards the end of this fiscal year, and it’s going to be driven by increases in gross profit, not decreases in expenses. It’s not going to be a huge positive cash flow, it’s going to be positive cash flow. We never expect to fall into less than $1 million in cash. And — but we don’t see any need to reduce expenses. We think that strategically continuing to invest in R&D and improve our market position, especially in artificial intelligence, generates the most long-term value for the company as well as, of course, investing in marketing and winning new customers. So look at gross profit increases. And the gross profit is primarily driven through subscription at a 73%, I think, GM this quarter versus services. And we expect that revenue mix between services and subscriptions to continue to be in the 80s.

Unidentified Analyst: Yes. So I thought — and the gross margins are quite nice. I mean, that’s well done. When we look at the increases in license sales, are we then projecting sort of a rapid increase or is it linear from this point out? What are we looking at?

Roger Kahn: No, it’s more linear, and that’s the nature of SaaS. So most of our new sales are in the $25,000 to $50,000 in annual recurring revenue for sales and generally in the HawkSearch. And often they are — have an initial engagement of 24 months to 36 months in that range. And we typically see 5-year total lifetime with HawkSearch customers. So they start with a 2-year or 3-year renewal, they renew several times in a row. Now because that initial deal is largely subscription, it gets recognized as revenue pro rata over the life of that initial contract. So we don’t get spikes. And our current quarter, which was outstanding and very excited about it, is not going to be able to just generate a big spike in our Q2, from a revenue perspective, even know that was from a booking.

Now an important component to revenue growth is net revenue retention, NRR. And Bridgeline’s products broadly fall into two categories. We’ve got our growth products, which is really HawkSearch. Our — when I talk about search, I talk about HawkSearch. But Celebros, which is our other search product and most of those customers are migrating over to the Hawk platform, is really kind of one effort. And that group of products have a net revenue retention in the high 90 percentiles. And when we look at some of our legacy products, they have lower revenue retention and large customers that have maybe $20,000, $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue, $300,000 in annual recurring revenue. And one of the reasons we don’t sell those anymore is that whole marketplace is so expensive.

It’s dominated by larger players like SAP or a Salesforce that can demand those products, and they have long sales cycles. But those types of products will bleed down, and they create a little clips of revenue because of just the size that they have, and those clips will be more apparent. Now that Hawksearch is — I think it’s over 56% of our subscription revenue and growing very rapidly, those clips become more and more buick [ph]. So this is the year, 2024, when we really started to join the domination of our search platforms, lots of smaller customers, steady growth, predictable growth and the ability for us to continue to make investments in marketing and [Indiscernible] predictable revenue streams and therefore, predictable cash flows.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Yes. I appreciate that, and thanks for providing that information. And with respect to the change of the product mix, I mean, that’s actually really great. So with respect to the new cost — excuse me, the new contracts, whatever the term is that where we reached a new benchmark in the time at least that you have been here, what was the comparable in the last quarter on that? Do we have any idea of that?

Roger Kahn: I’m sorry, I broke up a little bit there. The comparables in the last quarter on new customer wins?

Unidentified Analyst: Yes. So I believe that in the press release and also in the call, you referred to — I believe the number was $2.5 million in new something. And what was the…

Roger Kahn: So this most recent quarter was a little bit better than twice as big as our previous quarter and annual recurring revenue that was one. So we won about twice as much as we did in the previous quarter. And one of the most exciting things that we saw was that many of the sales that we had this quarter started in our first quarter and ended in our first quarter. So that speaks to the length of our sales cycle being less than 90 days for many of those sales. And then also, Smart Search was only pre-released in late October, and a lot of those sales happened in December. So we think that we’ve got something here that is going to allow us to grow at a different level. And we need to invest in sales and marketing, not just in innovation.

We need to — because they don’t feed back, and it will pay for R&D. So we need to balance those investments and continue to hit those markets. And being efficient in customer acquisition costs is a big focus, and that is why we specifically look for markets that are underserved, that we can win and try to become a dominant player in there like this niche market of electrical distributors that, frankly, wasn’t even on my radar 18 months ago, that now we just — today, we’re at the New York Build Conference at the Javits Center, talking to electrical distributors. So those narrow markets are an efficient way for us to win new customers.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay, thank you very much. That’s all I got. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to management for closing remarks.