2019 Year-In-Review, Q1 2020 Progress, Our 2020 Focus, Token Unlock, & More
We built a great rewards product for both iOS and Android, hitting a record number of active users, reviews, and revenue in December.
Throughout 2019, we spent much of our efforts building and testing with a focus on growth towards the end of the year. There was a consistent upward trend in user growth month over month, much of which was attributed to organic growth. It’s no surprise that Q4 was our strongest quarter to date, having surpassed 250,000 Monthly Active Users in December. This translated into record-high revenues across the same period, which isn’t much of a surprise. December is usually the best month for any business earning revenues from any form of advertising and data, as advertisers deploy most of their budgets during the holiday months. However, we’ve continued the upward trend from both user growth and revenue perspectives, having surpassed December’s figures in January, which is notoriously the worst month for any business earning revenues from advertising.
Our gross margin ended the year much higher than forecast, suggesting the variables of our revenue model are dialed in for an increased scale.
As we began to scale in October, we were able to significantly increase Gross Margin (GM = 1-Cost of Redemptions/Revenues) through December, hitting well north of our goal of 20% for Q4 (Big improvement from when had a negative gross margin in Q1 & Q2 of 2019). Some of the variables where we’ve made improvements include adjustments to the points system, eliminating fraud, along with optimizing ad units shown per user. We remain confident for Q1 to continue the same trend as we’ve already surpassed these figures in January. While we believe this percentage may change over time, due to the seasonality of advertising revenues, we’re confident we can stay above our target. Further, achieving strong margins while maintaining healthy user retention demonstrates that our underlying business model is sustainable as we continue to scale.
Our engineering team’s ability to increase the frequency of deployments into production.
Through trial and error over the course of 2019, we have fine-tuned the way our engineering team delivers App updates. This small change has started to pay dividends and is a large reason as to why Q4 has been our strongest quarter across the board. This was accomplished simply through treating each segment of a release as it’s own release. Whereas beforehand, each segment would be added to a much larger release. This left the opportunity for unnecessary impediments if any there was an issue with one of the components.
Our iOS and Android products hit a record high app store ratings of 4.4 for Current.
Throughout 2019, our users have used the Google Play Store and Apple App Store reviews to both praises us when they love it and punish us when issues arise. We’ve monitored both of these very closely and sifted through all feedback from our users — good or bad, as they tend to leave a review before contacting us through support channels. Having the ability to prioritize and address the issues that arise from this feedback is the exact reason we’ve been able to increase our ratings across the board from a low of 3.2 at the beginning of October, to a high of 4.4 by the end of December. Additionally, both products surpassed major milestones of over 55,000 organic reviews on Android and 15,000 on iOS. We also brought down our reward processing time from up to 7 business days to 2 business days which greatly improved our rating.
We partnered with two leaders in the Digital Securities industry to ensure we met all requirements to compliantly distribute, and create a market for the $CRNC Token.
Back in July 2019, we formally announced a partnership with Securitize, the first SEC-registered transfer agent for digital assets. Securitize’s platform allows for Current to maintain real-time financial records of security token ownership, track account balances, and payout dividends among holders. While we are legally required to utilize the services of a transfer agent at this point, we feel that our partnership with Securitize truly demonstrates our commitment to compliance.
As secondary markets for security tokens are still developing, we are acutely aware that secondary markets are important to our ecosystem. In October 2019, we announced our token would be listed through Openfinance, the leading platform for the secondary market trading of digital alternative assets. As new distribution partners and exchanges become available for security tokens, we intend to evaluate all opportunities to expand the footprint of our token.
Published at Sat, 01 Feb 2020 03:40:50 +0000
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