February 2021 Shareholders Update
Hello Shareholders,
Happy 2021 and I hope you had the opportunity to enjoy some downtime over the holiday season.
Development
MPP has a lot going on right now. On the development side of the business, Eligere v1.2 was just released earlier this week. This included several bug fixes and some additional enhancements, but most notably included a new pricing tier geared towards growing our user community faster. 2 weeks ago, we also hired a U of A computer science student on grant funding from ICTC to come and assist with the conversion of the web application to a mobile app. We expect to have the app launching in both the Apple Store and Play Store this summer. We are also courting two possible partners for paid custom development projects this year, which would open up another revenue stream for us and allow us to grow our development capacity in a co-funded manner.
Sales/Marketing
Marketing wise, 2021 has already been a significant year. Advertising has reached over 18,000 people year to date so far, and we’ve increased the system’s user count in January by over 40%. We have been featured in Ocean Home magazine, submitted an application to be on the upcoming season of Dragon’s Den, and have staff who will be appearing in upcoming podcast and webinar events over February and March. We have caught the eye of some bigger fish, with groups like Cashflow Canuck and Economic Development Calgary reaching out to us to get more involved in their subject matter experts' communities. As we continue through the year, we look to continue these trends and build on the positive momentum.
Eligere Estate Customers
Our biggest challenge currently is converting people who have set up accounts into subscribing users. With over 50 homeowners in the system, only about 20% of them have actively subscribed and invited friends or family to their properties so far. There are lots of very good reasons behind this behaviour (the most common being “I can’t have guests right now because of COVID”). It does mean we’re seeing a disconnect between users choosing our system and recognizing revenue from those users. For now, we’re well within our targeted numbers of users for our stage of growth, but we are falling short of the revenue expectations that went with those numbers.
To offset the cash flow impacts of this, we are pursuing several grant programs. We have already successfully received approval from the ITAC, ICTC, and Student Summer Work programs for funding of some of our younger employees through their programs. We are seeking larger investments through the SRED credit program and Canada’s IRAP grant system, both of which have sizable funding pools we are working to tap into. We have partnered with RDP and Associates, a grant specialist group that is working with us on these, and they advertise an over 80% success rate in both SRED and Grant applications.
Other Notes
I want to take a minute and highlight some positives in our company. We have 4 full-time employees currently – Colin, Trina, Paige and Scott. We are now up to 5 part-timers with the additions in January of Digital Media intern and voiceover king Dan Lapointe, ICTC funded development student and app master Kevin Li, and HR prodigy Annelize, whose been handling all the paperwork with the growing team. We are pleased that we have been able to continue creating jobs in a very cost-minimal way for the business while still contributing to Alberta's job creation and diversification. We are applying for over $900,000 in provincial and federal grants and credits this year, every dollar we qualify for, which will fuel additional jobs and innovation in our local economies. In January, we exceeded our user growth targets by nearly double, and we are optimistic this trend will continue through February.
How Can You Help?
Getting our name out there and getting our product in front of the right user pools is key to our ongoing growth. As shareholders, if you have the opportunity, please consider helping us in our current growth stage in one of the following ways:
Connect us with any media contacts (traditional or digital) that might be interested in sharing a Canadian tech success story.
Follow the product on Facebook and Like & Share our marketing messages.
Connect with any of us on LinkedIn and Like, Share, or join the discussion about our latest news.
Share our Indiegogo campaign on social media.
Tell your friends or family with vacation homes that we are ready for them now! Please send them our way to create an account and start adding their properties.
As much as we are actively marketing the solution every week, today's highest rate of user conversion is coming from referrals and personal networking. Contributing to that would help us speed our growth up further and raise the share value rapidly.
As always, thank you very much for all of your support, and we look forward to updating you again soon!
Colin Moreland, CEO, MPP Software