Darren Aftahi: Now, Michael to your point on synergy, can you just kind of talk high level strategically? So Credova has a big footprint in the firearms and outdoor recreational space. Layering that into your marketplace, I’m just trying to kind of understand big picture strategically, how does that impact the marketplace beyond just what they bring to the table? And then more broadly speaking, can you talk about the payments platform, not just from what Credova brings but actually all inclusive for all products, what that kind of look looks like once it’s fully integrated?
Michael Seifert: Our goal is to be the only marketplace in the country that you could actually buy a rifle and a pack of diapers in the same transaction. We want to be a marketplace that takes you back to a real classic Americana expression of your commerce freedom, where you could actually go and purchase goods at your local Walmart or other retailer that you know that you could actually buy a suite of household goods that you need and your groceries as well as exercise your second amendment right. There are no other marketplaces today where you can conduct those sorts of transactions. We will be the first and Credova is a massive step in that direction. So from the payments perspective, we are really targeting a goal of creating an uncancelable payment stack that not only can service our marketplace in the way I just described but can also then be given to our business vendors and we can actually earn revenue on as we’re servicing them.
Brad and I were at SHOT Show with Dusty, actually, in January and we were walking around SHOT Show. It’s the largest, gun show for industry insiders in the world, over 75,000 attendees. And we were walking around and talking to the different business vendors and we asked them, what are your two or three greatest pain points? And all of them said payments infrastructure, because I’m just frightened of cancellations and access to capital. Well, Credova helps us solve both of those problems. It gives us an ability to come to them confidently and say we have a payment solution for you to actually begin to sell online in a way that’s cancel proof. But it also allows for us, with their business financing capabilities to actually offer capital to businesses that are in desperate need of it that have often been turned away by traditional financial institutions even though these are great, lucrative, conservative, fiscally responsible businesses.
And so from a payments perspective, we’re very excited because Q2 will be a very significant payments quarter for us. This will be the quarter where we are able to actually sell guns and diapers and cleaning products all in the same shopping cart transaction. But it is also very exciting from the synergies of their business because we have the ability to service not just the checkout experience with greater efficiency and higher conversion potential. We also get to serve our business community in a way that is really unparalleled today. So, hope that’s helpful. Happy to offer more clarification, obviously, if that would be fruitful.
Darren Aftahi: Just last one for me. How fast was Credova or how fast did it, I guess, it grow in that that ’23 data point you gave about the $15.5 million?
Michael Seifert: How fast did they grow to that? Is that what you asked there?
Darren Aftahi: Yes. I guess, year-over-year. That’s a calendar year ’23 number, the $15.5 million. I’m just curious how fast that business was growing?
Michael Seifert: They had a strategic restructuring in the summer of 2023 that led them into the second half of 2023 being their best season of business ever. So the latter half of 2023, they experienced record originations, record traffic and record deal flow on the consumer and the business side. They launched in 2018 and have really heavily leaned into the second amendment community over the last two to three years. And so they are on track for a very fruitful 2024 coming off of a great second half of 2023. Originations actually grew year-over-year and under new contracts allowing for significantly improved profitability. So when we talk about restructuring, not only was it great because it upped their origination flow in a very exponential fashion heading into the second half of 2023, it really set them into a better margin profile moving forward. And now we’ll obviously get to experience the fruits of that together as a combined business in ’24.
Darren Aftahi: One last housekeeping for Brad maybe. I know you gave the ending share count. Could you just give what the average combined class shares were in the quarter for the fourth quarter?
Brad Searle: We didn’t see a big change from Q3 to Q4. If memory serves, the change was only 70,000 Class A shares, which all came online in November of 2023. So not a big change quarter-over-quarter, but we expect a little more movement, of course, this quarter with this Credova transaction.
Operator: We don’t have any questions in the conference side for now. I’d now like to hand back over to William Kent. Thank you.
William Kent : Thank you operator. We’ll now address some questions that we received through the say technologies platform before closing up the call. Tim B asked, how do you plan on marketing small and rural communities? As someone from a small town where the conservative ties and values are strong, very few people and businesses are aware of PublicSquare and we use Amazon and Temu overlooking the conflict and values. How will PublicSquare expand into these markets?