IZEA - NASDAQ

Greetings. Welcome to I

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for I

Thank you, Ryan, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll review our operating results, provide additional context for the fourth quarter of 2022 and highlight our full year performance. Revenue has hit an all-time record level of $41.1 million in 2022, growing 37% over 2021 and representing the third straight year of top line improvement for I

Thanks, Peter, and hello again, everyone. In taking inventory of the year in full, 2022 was quite the paradox for I

Thank you, Ryan. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, I set forth a growth plan with our team and Board to achieve an average of 30% revenue growth each year, with a target of reaching $38 million in revenue in 2023. I am very proud of this team for beating our third year revenue goal and delivering $41 million in revenue in 2022, a full year ahead of schedule. However, there is no doubt that we are operating in a different environment than we were in the early days of 2022. On 1 hand, the unpredictable and turbulent macroeconomic environment presents a variety of challenges relative to sales activity near term. But on the other, it creates a variety of opportunities to optimize and reallocate resources during a lull in economic activity. I

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Jon Hickman with Ladenburg. Please proceed.

So can you -- didn't you add a number of sales guys last year?

We added some salespeople and we also made some changes with some existing salespeople. So the net is actually a smaller sales team.

Oh, really? Okay. So can you like -- can you quantify at all your thoughts around the next 6 months, like year-over-year changes? I know like I've been reading that advertising across the board is down about 8% to 10% from last year. Can you provide any more clarity to your 6-month outlook?

Yes. I don't think that we're in a position to provide any sort of specific guidance there. I mean, we are definitely going to be impacted from parting ways with that large client who made up a significant portion of the bookings last year. And our focus is really on replacing that business the best that we can, but it was a large chunk of our bookings and revenue in 2022.

Then Ryan mentioned some about inorganic growth. Can you -- like is the target audience getting bigger or more desperate or any comments there?

Right. Do you want to add some additional context there, Ryan?

Yes. Sure. Jon, we're seeing, like I said, the fact that pretty much the entire creator economy being venture-backed is having a reconciliation moment, quite frankly. And there are some great companies that just aren't able to secure additional rounds and they may be forced to consider options. In that situation where there's a good complementary and accretive effect, like I said in my remarks, I think that we look at ourselves as a prudent and disciplined evaluator of those opportunities as a path towards inorganic growth. And what's nice about our business today is that we have the 3 lines between Marketplace, SaaS and managed services that can go a number of different directions in terms of the types of targets that we can look at and that would benefit shareholders.

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for closing comments.

Thanks, Sherry, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. As a reminder, all of I