Posted about them in my weekly newsletter. No comments on them yet from half-yearly so thought I would share here. Link here for those interested.

Airtasker impressed no one with their beautiful slides and 57% revenue growth. 

Because, if we were going to look at growth, then we would want organic growth that factors out the Oneflare acquisition. As you can see on the slide, this came in at 23%. This in itself is pretty good, but the price to achieve this seemed significant at a high-level. 

A loss of A$7.7M is scary in this environment, even for a company with A$23M in the bank. 

The acquisition of Oneflare means AirTasker’s cost base is now inflated given more staff increasing. 

The interesting commentary was on parts of the costs which aren’t expected to scale over the future:

• “The Oneflare staff investment accounted for 47.8% of the movement against pcp. 
• The balance of the increase was due to the lower rate of capitalisation of platform development expenditure which was down 62.7% on pcp. The reduction reflected a change in process and the fact that the engineering and product teams invested more time in non-capitalisable activities during the half-year, including the new Airtasker branding.”

It seems questionable to invest so much in branding in this current environment, but it is true that the new website feels more user friendly and easier to navigate. 

For airtasker, monitoring future growth will be key to understand if there is indeed an added network effect value that came from Oneflare. 

What I like about them is the transparency in the announcements; they didn’t shy away from saying that the growth was in part due to a weaker comparison given last year was impacted by Covid. 

I was also pleased to see the CEO pictured on slides with users. This means the company may well have the mentality of talking to their users and improving the product on the right direction. That’s bonus points for me.

So let’s see what these guys can accomplish in future reporting periods. If growth continues and operating leverage starts to cross the chasm, then this may become a different type of company.