Not a lot of commentary on this. I see mixed results with pretty...

Not a lot of commentary on this. I see mixed results with pretty good excuses.

• I was surprised the $16M free cash outflow was quite as much as it was
• Revenue growth of 10.4% (or 13.5% ARR growth)

That said: Omicron impacted the outlook for travel and for hoteliers, with things now looking better. You could be generous and say the IPO probably saw some disruption to usual operations and now it's back to work. And of course, there's 1 million hotels/bnbs etc out there and SDR only has 33,400 for now so the opportunity is being priced in no doubt.

The problem is it's priced for growth, competitor CloudBeds is being funded by Softbank (kiss of death or unlimited fuel to burn for growth, you decide), and CAC were high but LTC CAC ratio is ok, as the CEO mentioned to Eureka Report.

Quotes re SDR CAC from an interview by Alan Kohler:

Q: What does it cost to acquire a customer?

Right now we actually have around $5,000 roughly, pre-pandemic it was in the $4,000s – it’s actually jumped up during the pandemic because as you know we’ve actually been in a challenging position around the world, not us alone but the entire travel industry has been in a challenging position but still it’s been reasonable and as we scale up again we’d expect the cost of acquisition to moderate. The important part of it in our investment is do we actually have good unit economics, i.e. does the acquisition of every single hotel or property – are they valuable over the lifecycle of the property. That is a metric that we commonly use and which you would have come across, is lifetime value divided by the cost of acquisition.

Q: What is lifetime value?

Lifetime value pre-pandemic was nearly $20,000, $18 or $19 thousand. What we are really focussed on is that LTV CAC ratio has to be – top tier SAS companies, subscription as a software company, has an LTV CAC ratio of about 4x, and we were 4x pre-pandemic.

Q: What is it now?

It’s in the 2s right now, we have kept our head above water, we are in the process of recovery again during the pandemic and then you’d actually get real top tier SAS unit economics again.

and later, re shifting to digital acquisitions to lower costs:

The most recent one we launched a few months back is full digital acquisition, that’s been in trials in the US and the UK where a customer can jump onto the website and go through, get into the product and buy the program all online. We have actually complemented it with multi-channel distribution and in all parts of the world.

Q: The cost of acquisition on that would be virtually zero?

It’s pretty low, absolutely, that is one of the key reasons why we did that, to complement all the other channels.