What now?

2015 - When Afterpay launched, they had less than 10 retailers and a couple of thousand customers. In 2016, Afterpay had revenues of only $220,000 and underlying merchant sales were about $3 million a month with 60,000 customers.

It now has almost 10 million customers and adds them at 10,000 to 20,000 a day and processes annualised sales through their platform of over $15b !! - BNPL is on fire right now.

We are different in that Afterpay is a B2C (Business to consumer) business and meetmagic.org is a B2B (Business to Business) business, BUT

I have spoken to VC's and know it's dangerous for "them" to get bowled over by "Here today, gone tomorrow, cancel culture".

Things change quickly. Covid showed that.

Part of the VC rationale to invest is to make sure that the cost structure of any business they want to invest in, is 'Structurally positive" and able to persevere past any short term hype.

People way smarter than I call these, "Ephemerally Negative Changes"

More in line with us, "Structurally Positive" means that something is 10x better, 1/10th the cost and has caught on—there’s no going back to the older, worse, more expensive way of doing things.

Is it unreasonable to look at this from a B2B meetmagic perspective?

We connect people in business and donate a significant portion of our revenues to charity. This year alone we have donated over $300,000 to Starlight Children's Foundation

We rose up during bushfires, droughts, and pandemics meaning it's not really hype.

Our costs are structurally 1/10 of the cost of standing at a conference and have produced more opportunities for our members than the old ways of doing things.

Afterpay has taken thousands of retail investors on a ride, few will experience again.

I'd like to think meetmagic can do the same.

In 2017 when meetmagic launched - we had a few customers and a dozen or so executives. Today, we have over 500, with 40 vendors reaping the benefits and will get close to $1m in revenue.

With HK, SNG, UK, USA, and NZ in our sights, like Afterpay,

Something is working.

When things return to normal, or whatever normal is, why would anyone go back to the older, worse, more expensive ways of doing business?

Nick (Afterpay) and Lucy (Airwallex) are very different commercial models than that of meetmagic, but we are very similar in vision and belief.

Have you given up on investing.....?

www.meetmagic.org

The AFR Article in the header