I want to start by expressing gratitude and excitement to you for your continued support as we navigated through an unrecognizable year relative to that on which we based our plans. We’re thrilled about the progress we’ve made and I wanted to share some of the highlights.

Both in terms of conserving cash to extend our runway and adjusting strategic initiatives based on changes to the market and its needs, we’ve responded quickly and decisively to the pandemic. I've previously shared that we'd be prioritizing Marketplace Growth and User Stories. The progress we've made against both over the last year was dramatically accelerated and may have taken 5x as long under normal circumstances. We couldn't be more excited about the progress and what the future holds. 

Before sharing updates on these two initiatives, I want to announce some exciting changes to our team. The team size is more than 30 today, and we've made several notable additions which we're incredibly excited about. Laurence Levi, a founder of consumer private equity firm VO2 Partners and formerly the Chief Strategy Officer of Flowr Corp (TSXV: FLWR)  is now our Executive Chairman and has been working closely with me on key strategic initiatives, including leading our upcoming capital raise. Additionally, Claude Zoghzoghi, a Columbia Business School graduate with an MS in Business Analytics, has joined the team as our Director of Operations. He manages the company's overall operations, including hiring, partnerships, and systems & processes. And most recently, Stefanos Varotsis, who brings significant experience with digital brand marketing, has joined as Director of Digital and is managing and overseeing all of our Digital Marketing & User Acquisitions programs.

Marketplace

Given that we expect the vast majority of our marketplace revenue to be driven by design professionals, unlike consumer-focused home goods marketplaces, we focused on expanding the marketplace product offering itself rather than on our target market, which was largely on hold. In doing so, we have expanded brand acquisition to the tune of over 2 million products. As of today, only approximately 5% of those two million+ products are populated in our marketplace. This 5% is driving $1.5 million in annualized revenue. This week, we have finalized a partnership with a leading BPO firm that will manage the onboarding of the remaining 95% of products over the next ~ six months, effectively growing the size of our product offering by 20x. While we believe that revenue can grow in proportion to that expansion, we are conservatively projecting this will have a 10x direct revenue impact. With an end-to-end system in place for acquiring sellers and populating our marketplace with their products, we plan to expand the marketplace an additional 3x to more than 7 million products by 2023. 

User Stories

The results we have seen here have been exceptional. We have developed a proprietary user acquisition model that leveraged the systems we have used to build our community of design professionals to acquire end-users who would also share photos of their homes. We handled the early testing through the Moro brand. The results suggested that the success in terms of user acquisition and the content/experiences these users shared were not limited to those interested in sharing photos of inspiring interiors. These results were significant enough to warrant acceleration of an expanded version of the platform to include a broader range of users and content/experiences. We branded this Applaudable and developed its early stages in beta. The platform enables users to share meaningful personal experiences that can inspire and inform improvements in others' lives, much like photos of homes have been doing on Moro since our inception. This is something we are increasingly excited about. 

Early indications suggest that Applaudable could outpace Instagram and Clubhouse’s user growth over the first few months. We have delayed the opening of our Series A such that the early parts of the round will coincide with the expected start of that user growth. Such growth can substantially impact our valuation, and we reserve the right to amend the terms of the deal to reflect the increase in value. At such a point, we may also increase the minimum investment threshold. We will make an early allocation of our upcoming offering available at a minimum investment amount of $1,000. This minimum and the $36 million opening valuation are only guaranteed early in the offering for an undetermined time period.

For the time being, we are not accepting early investments; however, we are doing our best to ensure that existing investors will have access to the early allocation once we open it up. We expect to submit the offering circular for SEC review within 2 weeks and will follow up with further information shortly about participating in the offering. 

Best Regards,

Andrew Christodoulides

Founder & CEOw. moro.com / applaudable.com