April 2021 Shareholders Update
Hello Shareholders,
I write to you today as many different things are coming together at once. This is a bit of an involved update but I’ll do my best to keep it brief.
Development
Eligere Estate v1.3 is coming out at the end of April, which will be followed by a brief hiatus on main product development while we prepare for Eligere Mobile and Eligere Corporate releases.
We have secured grant funding for 4 co-op students and 1 intern for the summer. 2 developers will be working on bug fixes and UI enhancements, a marketing co-op student will be joining us for a year to assist with our international marketing efforts, and a support resource will be preparing technical documentation for us. Our new intern will be replacing graduated intern Dan Lapointe as our video marketing creator. Kevin Li from UofA continues into his second Co-op term as a developer of our app.
Eligere Estate Customers
We doubled our active property listings in the system in March and onboarded a number of guests who have the potential to become homeowners down the line. We are excited to see this spike of activity even as lockdowns are increasing in intensity across the country. Along with this spike, we exceeded 100 active users in Eligere Estate, which is a milestone for us! We had actually not expected to reach this milestone until our second year of operations, but it comes at 11 months into our first year.
Revenue Diversification
SR&ED Credits are being submitted in 3 weeks and we are expected around $150,000 in federal tax credits in mid-May. This will be a sizeable boost to our current operating account!
We are excited to share that as of Thursday, April 8th, we received signed contracts with a Calgary software company to be the strategic development partner of their new solution for Oil and Gas land asset management. We can’t go into specifics at this time, but this new startup has some big ideas and is targeting clients in a largely un-serviced silo of the oil and gas value chain. A press release with more information will come out later in April including information about how to join their Round A financing offer if anyone is interested.
This contract comes with a $1.3MM project spanning 2 years which MPP will be working to deliver. Suffice to say this is a game-changer for MPP Software to land such a sizeable agreement, and to have the opportunity to partner with another local software company to diversify our own business and drive revenues. This brings with it an upward revenue projection for our second operating year to just over $1MM and year 3 to $1.3MM and pushes us cash flow positive in both years.
Also, we have made good progress on our negotiations with a local Lethbridge resort to be our first corporate client.
Other Notes
May 11th will be our first anniversary. This is a milestone for us as 20% of new businesses in Canada fail in their first year. We’ve survived and are about to turn a corner that will break us away from the pack.
We continue to wait to hear back from Dragon’s Den, however, they were still accepting new auditions for this season up until earlier this week. It’s anyone’s guess how the Ontario “emergency brake” from last week is going to impact this as well. As of today we wait and see.
Lastly, we are courting marketing firms for potential partnerships starting this summer to outsource the Eligere brand strategy in an attempt to reduce our costs while also increasing our user acquisition rate.
In Closing
For shareholders who opted into the internal share offering in March, all requests have now been settled and transactions completed. The Right of First Refusal requirement for the share offering has been fulfilled, so the balance of the private shares on offer will be made available to new investors starting next week. If anyone wants in before third parties jump on board, please contact me ASAP.
Thank you for your continued support of MPP Software’s journey,
Colin Moreland, CEO, MPP Software