Learnings from a SaaS IPO - Expensify

Expensify is a software company that went public in 2021.?Below are some of the highlights and learnings from their prospectus.?

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What they do.?“Expensify is a cloud-based expense management software platform that helps the smallest to the largest businesses simplify the way they manage money. Every day, people from all walks of life in organizations around the world use Expensify to scan and reimburse receipts from flights, hotels, coffee shops, office supplies and ride shares.”

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Expensify runs differently.?“Our greatest innovation isn't our product, it's the company itself. People are often surprised to learn we have only 140 employees, with no dedicated managers, compensation decided by universal vote, and everyone deciding their own personal career path.”

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They have a charity internally.?“Every swipe of the Expensify Card makes a small donation to our Expensify.org charity wing, which has dozens of active campaigns addressing homelessness, recidivism, climate change, youth issues, and—the inspiration for it all—hunger.”

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They are SMB focused.?“For the quarter ended June 30, 2021, an average of 639,000 paid members across 53,000 companies and over 200 countries and territories used Expensify to make money easy.?Companies subscribe and pay for the majority of our paid members.”

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Self service and freemium.?“we enable a self-service, low-friction model that makes it simple for anyone to try and use our platform and then easily share it with others. Anyone can easily download our application or go to our website and sign up for free on their own, and later upgrade to a paid subscription for advanced features. The adoption of Expensify within an organization typically starts with the individual employee, who downloads our mobile application for free and uses it to easily submit expenses to their manager with a few taps. After the employee realizes the benefits of our platform, they become a champion of Expensify and spread it internally to other employees – as well as to their friends in other companies. With multiple employees using Expensify, and valuable features simplifying the manager’s job, the decision maker often purchases a subscription to Expensify and becomes a paying customer with a few members.”

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Sell from the bottom up.?“For the six months ended June 30, 2021, 60% of our revenue can be attributed to an instance where an employee used our application before the purchaser, and recommended it to their manager. Most of the remaining 40% of our revenue is attributed to instances where the decision maker institutes Expensify within the organization after learning about it through word-of-mouth, brand recognition, or referral from their accountant”

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Self support model with data collection for the roadmap.?“our members and customers generally prefer to take advantage of our self-service options. We have developed Concierge, our customer support engine, to make handling customer support inquiries much more efficient. Concierge is powered by AI-assisted customer support agents, with different levels of skill and training, spread out across the world. Our product managers use the information we gather from Concierge to remain closely in tune with customer needs and guide our future platform roadmap.”

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Annual subscriptions, per user pricing.?“We primarily generate revenue from annual subscriptions to our cloud-based platform, driven by the number of paid members active on a monthly basis.?To lower the barrier for companies to adopt Expensify, we offer customers free trials, and lower subscription rates to customers who commit to an annual subscription and/or adopt the Expensify Card.”

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Product first.?“Relative to other software companies, we invest more in product development and less in sales. This investment in product allows us to develop easy-to-use but powerful features that encourage adoption of our platform. Our ability to grow our paid members depends on our viral, “bottom-up” adoption cycle that starts with an individual employee. After downloading our free app to submit expenses and realizing the benefits of Expensify, our enthusiastic members champion our platform internally, spread it via word-of-mouth or invites to other employees and often convince decision makers to adopt Expensify company-wide.”

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Brand marketing works for them.?“Our viral and word-of-mouth adoption model is effective in part because we have established ourselves as a recognized leader in expense management for SMBs. We deploy large scale brand advertising to promote our platform superiority and create market consensus that Expensify is the category leader for expense management software. We believe this enables us to focus on creating great viral features for our members rather than relying on low-margin, unscalable activities of traditional sales and marketing to drive customer acquisition.”

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Integrations drive stickiness.?“To provide a seamless experience for our customers, we integrate with accounting, ERP and travel software used by SMBs and their employees every day. We also have frictionless integrations with many of the technology providers that generate the most receipts for our members, such as Uber and Lyft. Expensify delivers an expense management platform that we believe customers like, and that embeds us within organizations. Because of these two factors, we have historically enjoyed high customer retention rates that often outperform enterprise retention rates.”

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SMB’s are loyal.?“We believe an additional factor that drives our retention rates is that SMBs generally re-evaluate their technology solutions less frequently, and as such, there is rarely a conscious choice to choose to continue using Expensify for another year.”

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Great retention, but covid stung.?“In 2019 and 2020, our annual gross logo retention was 88% and 86%, respectively. We calculate our net seat retention rate as of the end of a period by using (a) the number of paid member seats from companies who have ever had 5 or more paid members paying for a subscription during the period ending one year prior as the denominator and (b) the number of paid member seats at those same companies during the more recent period as the numerator. In 2019 and 2020, our net seat retention was 119% and 98%, respectively. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted our retention as our customers ceased (or paused) operations, and scaled.”

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The covid punch.?“After a steady increase in paid members over multiple years (see figure below), the average number of paid members on our platform declined 15% from 742,000 in the quarter ended March 31, 2020 to 630,000 in the quarter ended June 30, 2020 and we have rebounded to 639,000 paid members in the quarter ended June 30, 2021.”

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Contract structure saved them a bit.?“While activity decreased and remains at lower levels than pre-pandemic, our revenue only declined until the quarter ended June 30, 2020. This initial adverse impact on revenue was mitigated by the prevalence of our annual contracts and minimum user requirements in those contracts as well as a price change that became effective in May 2020.?In May 2020, we updated our terms of service whereby annual contracts became non-cancelable.”

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Contracts are not custom.?“Virtually all of our customers have a standard terms of service contract, with the few exceptions on bespoke service contracts.”

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Big market.?“We estimate our total addressable market (“TAM”) was approximately $16.0 billion in the United States and $21.5 billion in our core geographies in 2020, which consisted of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.”

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