Hey everyone! Super excited to share this update with you.

Growth: 

In Q1 we hit an all-time high of 430,000 active users which we sustained through the quarter. And we did US $124,227 in sales in Q1, which came from marketplace and SaaS subscriptions, and a research study about plant-based meat consumption in Singapore and Australia that we helped the Singapore government with. Our last 3 SaaS clients have come from Italy, and the abillion logo will soon be debuting on product packaging for the Unconventional Burger, Europe’s #1 plant-based burger!

By the end of March we reached 4,964 brands on board with our SaaS product. The team has been working to broaden the top of the funnel (brands that we're in touch with from the 217,000 brands that our community has reviewed on abillion) and we are continually learning and improving our comms for automated outreach. The awards continue to be a nice attraction for brands we want to monetize. We spoke to the CMO of one of the largest plant-based dairy companies worldwide last week. They're interested in using us to prospect 20k restaurants on our platform in the US. This is exactly how we use our data to create impact, create a more vegan world, and do better business. Deals like this can create much bigger monetization opportunities!

Our goals for 2023 are to hit 1 million active users and $150k in monthly revenue by year-end.

Product:

Best way to see what’s happening is download the latest release of the abillion app and take it for a spin. Things that are in the pipeline:

• onboarding - one tap sign up, automated usernames, ability to surf and engage without creating an account
• personalized feed - progressive learning model that trains based on actions users are taking in the app and then delivers appropriate content to users
• robust feed - currently only reviews, social posts and marketplace listings are displayed in feed. Soon, products, restaurants, lists, impact events, will also be visible in the feed
• marketplace seller landing pages - seller storefronts that tell the story of each seller alongside displaying items for sale
• Sell from product pages (we have over 550k products on the platform and we want to enable anyone anywhere in the world to sell them through abillion)
• impact - creating a more emotional, less transactional impact experience, getting people to record their daily consumption / which also creates more datapoints to support monetization with brands. And the ability for anyone on abillion to gift impact credits to other members on the app.
• brand rankings - showing the rankings of every product, every dish, every restaurant, every brand across the app and web. This creates a strong pull factor for the brands to get involved.
• SEO - we continue to improve the rendering, speed and reliability of our pages on web. The more we improve, the higher a brand or product page ranks on Google search, the more likely a brand becomes our customer.
• engagement at scale - we’re working to give our impact partners and select influencers access to our entire user base. Many of them have 100k - 1m followers on other social platforms. Giving them access to the entire abillion community would make abillion their biggest social platform and drive bigger engagement.

One of the most inspiring things about our community is the altruism of its members. We began onboarding non-profits to our marketplace and now people are putting up their own money in addition to what they’re earning on abillion. Very quickly, donations via credit cards have become the biggest part of marketplace sales every month. Just open the app and head to marketplace to check out all the non-profits running campaigns on abillion.

Another example, we have over 12k members that have earned community equity in abillion, and the most requested feature by them is to donate their equity to non-profits.

It’s so inspiring how altruistic this community is.

Team:

We are a small agile team of 18. The biggest mistakes we’ve made as a company have been in hiring to grow and compromising on our values. It’s hard to build a company of people that have the skills we need, the tenacity for start-up life, are hardworking and also mission aligned. The team today is a group of smart, hungry people happy to work hard and abillion means more to them than a job. We’re more focused today than when the team was 2x the size, we’re using a lot more automation which is resulting in more business and growth, and we’re more deliberate about what we build and how to move the numbers.

Funding:

We want enough funding to get through Q2 2024, where we have the metrics and product good enough for Series B and the macro environment has also improved. The good news is we have been cutting our burn since mid last year and its down 60% from a year ago. This has brought focus to what we’re doing and the team, product, community and numbers are in a better place. We have $2 million left to raise, which will give us the firepower to get to the next stage.

Buzz:

https://www.foodheroes20.com/ - I was honored as one of 20 food heroes globally by V-Label, the international vegan certification label.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7036237544941846528/ - Woolworths, South Africa’s largest grocer, shared about their abillion award. They came in 3rd in our most loved brands globally for 2023.

Podcasts we were on in Q1 (you can find most of these on Spotify):

Good Business with Chris Edwards

Mission Driven with Rich Brubaker

Vegan Visibility with Kathleen Gage

Rise and Thrive with Ella Magers

No Meat Athlete with Matt Tullman

Webinar:

A very big thank you to our investors, Nicholas Cator at Venturi Partners and Khailee Ng at 500 Global, and Jenny Stojkovic from the Vegan Women Summit, who joined me for this webinar. Please watch!

https://www.linkedin.com/events/abillioncrowdfunderwebinar7047148971424706560/comments/

Events:

We are the presenting sponsor for the Vegan Women Summit, from May 18-20 in NYC. It's opening with a reception with NYC Mayor Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion the evening of May 18th, followed by the big event on May 19th in Brooklyn and a networking day / career fair at the World Trade Center on the 20th.

If you're here hopefully it means you've bought into our mission, our vision for our product and our execution. The product, the team and our business is on the best footing it's ever been. This round on Wefunder is open until April 30th, and we'd be delighted if you'd like to invest more or make your first investment in the company. The investment now is going to give us the support we need to make 2023 a great year and reach the next big milestones for the business.

Thank you.

Wishing you all the very best,

Vikas