SMTP (SHSP) Q1 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

SMTP (SHSP)
Q1 2021 Earnings Call
May 13, 2021, 4:30 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good afternoon. Welcome to SharpSpring's first-quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining us today are SharpSpring's CEO, Rick Carlson; and CFO, Aaron Jackson. Following their remarks, we will open the call for your questions.

Then before we conclude, I'll provide the necessary cautions regarding the forward-looking statements made by management during this call. I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at investors.sharpspring.com. Now, I would like to turn the call over to SharpSpring's CEO, Rick Carlson. Sir, please proceed.

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. After the market closed, we issued a press release announcing our results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021. A copy of the press release is available in the Investor Relations section of our website. I encourage all listeners to view our release for additional information on what we'll be discussing today.

And with that, we'll get started. Today, I'd like to focus my comments on five key areas of the business and the progress on our path toward $100 million in revenues. Specifically, I'll cover two important short-term indications of our health: the velocity of our new sales and the behavior of our existing cohorts. After that, I'll discuss how we are positioning the company over the long-term from three specific perspectives: product, pricing, and management.

In each of these areas, we saw very positive signs and took some huge steps forward as Q1 progressed. And I look forward to talking to you about each in detail today. Before we get there, though, and before I turn the call over to Aaron for his financial overview, I want to let you know about two key product milestones that we believe will lead to greater customer satisfaction, lower attrition, and increased revenues. First, after a year of development, in Q1, we successfully launched and integrated SharpSpring Ads into our platform.

This represents the fully realized product vision associated with our acquisition of Perfect Audience in Q4 of 2019. While we could not have anticipated the pandemic at the time and the short-term effects it would have on the digital advertising space, we're happy to have achieved this important milestone of offering a first-of-its-kind automated advertising option for our customers and having it available right inside the platform for a seamless customer experience. As a reminder, SharpSpring Ads can do things that aren't possible with stand-alone ad platforms like Criteo or AdRoll, including automatically targeting individual leads as part of an automation workflow, automatic campaign attribution, end-to-end ROI reporting, and super simple look-alike audience and list targeting. Second, after a nearly two-year delay that was the result of Facebook limiting access to their developer API, I'm equally delighted to announce that we have launched Instagram social media management into our platform.

This is huge for us as Instagram represents the No. 1 customer request and the No. 1 barrier to adoption of our social media management feature. As a Facebook marketing partner, we were granted access to their new Instagram API in Q1, and our product was approved and released this month.

We're excited about what this means for our customers because it represents significantly more value to them. And we're excited about what this means for SharpSpring because we know that greater adoption of features means lower attrition and higher lifetime value. Obviously, we've got a lot of exciting updates to share. So before I go any further, I'm going to turn the call over to our CFO, Aaron Jackson, to discuss our financial results for the quarter.

Aaron?

Aaron Jackson -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Rick. Turning now to our financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021. Our total revenue in the first quarter increased 13% to a record $8 million, up from $7.1 million in the first quarter of last year. Our gross margin for the first quarter of 2021 increased to 76%, up from 66% last year.

In dollar terms, gross profit increased 30% to a record $6.1 million from $4.7 million in the first quarter of last year. Turning to our operating expenses. For the first quarter of 2021, our operating expenses increased 23% to $8.9 million from $7.2 million in Q1 of last year. Our GAAP net loss for the first quarter totaled $2.6 million or $0.20 per share compared to GAAP net loss of $988,000 or $0.09 per share in Q1 of 2020.

On the balance sheet, we had $26.9 million in cash at the end of the quarter compared to $28.3 million at December 31, 2020. Going forward, we remain confident in our cash position to support our growth needs for the foreseeable future. Looking at our non-GAAP measures, our adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter, which we reconcile in our earnings release, totaled $1.8 million. This was relatively unchanged from our adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.8 million in the same period last year.

Our core net loss for the first quarter, which is also reconciled in our earnings release, totaled $1.9 million or $0.14 core net loss per share, compared to a core net loss of $785,000 or $0.07 core net loss per share in Q1 of last year. Again, for more details on our adjusted EBITDA and core net loss metrics, please see the full reconciliation to GAAP terms included in the supplementary tables of today's earnings release. Shifting to our outlook for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021, we are reiterating our previously issued guidance. We expect total revenues to range between $34 million and $36 million.

This guidance is based on recurring revenue from our current customer base and performance results tracked through April of this year. This completes my financial summary. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Rick for additional insights into our operational progress during the quarter and to provide outlook for the rest of 2021. Rick?

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Aaron. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, I've organized my comments today to focus on several key areas of the company, and I'd like to start by discussing our new sales velocity and what we expect over the coming quarters and beyond. As those of you who follow the company know, we've had a goal to reach $100 million in revenue over the next several years. More than a goal, though, we have a plan.

And the success of that plan revolves around just two key factors: our future customers behaving just as well as our historical customers or better and the rate at which we add these new customers to our user base. It really is that simple. Looking at our new sales performance. The results for the quarter were largely in line with the expectations that we laid out on our last update call in March, and we remain confident that we'll see acceleration that we discussed as the year progresses.

As you may recall, I spent some extended time in our last call speaking about the steps we took to preserve cash during 2020 due to the uncertain pandemic-induced economic conditions and at a time when our balance sheet was not as strong as it is today. I explained that as a result of our pullback on several marketing channels, new sales would remain lower in Q1. But I also indicated that after our successful capital raise at the very end of last year, we would begin implementing increased sales and marketing initiatives in Q1, which would ultimately lead to a healthy new sales growth in later quarters. I'm happy to report that those plans have now begun to take shape, and we'll continue to build as we move our expanded prospect pull through our pipeline.

In fact, early indicators have been very positive thus far. Even during Q1, sales climbed sequentially each month with sales in March more than doubling the sales we saw in January. We believe this improved performance as the quarter progressed is both a sign that the economy is improving to a point where customers are increasing their willingness to invest in new platforms. And just as important, that we're beginning to see the results of restarting the marketing channels we paused in 2020.

In short, sales were in line with the lower sales levels that we predicted, and the solid progress we made in each month within the quarter gives us confidence that the new customer adds will return to pre-pandemic levels as the year progresses and our spending begins to take full effect. With those positive data points about new sales velocity covered, I'd like to move on to our second big topic: the behavior of our current customer cohorts. As many of you listening will remember, we hosted an update call in November where I discussed how SharpSpring is a business that can achieve high growth rates and put ourselves on a path to $100 million in recurring revenue. The takeaway from that review was that we have a clear runway to growth by simply layering on customer cohorts that behave just like the ones who we've been layering on for upwards of seven years now without much, if any, improvement to the way these cohorts behave.

Let me give you a relatively stunning data point as evidence of this claim. Today, the cohort that we sold in 2014 is still generating 78% of its original MRR. That's a seven-year-old cohort that is still paying us 78% of the original MRR. Needless to say, the rate at which we're able to add customers to these cohorts will ultimately dictate the rate at which we're able to grow, but the overall process is both highly predictable and highly repeatable.

That performance speaks to the power of our business model and demonstrates that we don't have to bet on big improvements to our customer behavior in terms of attrition or expansion in order to be very successful over the long term. It's now been six months since we laid out that case, so I want to make it clear that we're right on track and that our current customers are behaving as we need them to in order to achieve our long-term objective of reaching $100 million in revenue. As further evidence of this point, we introduced both a price increase of $50 per license and an annual client license option at the beginning of the year. Despite this price increase, we saw no material negative impact to our attrition rates.

In fact, in April, we recorded a 2.18% logo attrition request month. That number represents the best monthly attrition month we have had in our entire history. Not surprisingly, our continually improving logo attrition performance has affected our net revenue retention as well. More specifically, during the first quarter of the year, we achieved a 94.4% year-over-year net revenue retention, which compares to a 91.7% year-over-year net revenue retention in the first quarter of 2020.

We believe this strong performance, immediately following a price increase at the beginning of the year, is based on the overall value that customers see in the platform and the long-term effects of our customers adopting stickier features like chatbot, which incidentally is the fastest adopted major new feature that we've ever released. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, we believe the newly released features like Instagram will allow more customers to standardize on our integrated social media management as their go-to tool, and that SharpSpring Ads will add further value and represent an additional revenue stream for us. Features like these will continue to ensure that customers stick with and standardize on our platform, just as they have done through this last pandemic-pressured year, and this will fuel our long-term growth and stable high-margin revenues. With the strong performance of our existing customer base and early signs that our new sales funnel is beginning to grow again, I want to be clear that our No.

1 priority remains increasing our new sales each month. And both our team and our capital are committed to making this happen. From a high level, we're now seeing -- spending twice as much money on marketing programs compared to last year. Ramping up new sales velocity will remain our focus over the next several quarters and, for that matter, for years to come.

Having covered the early signs of success we're seeing with our expanded sales channel and the solid performance we're seeing from our existing customers and our dedication to increasing our new customer wins to meet our long-term growth potential, now it seems like a good time to speak to you about some of the key hires we've made to our board and management team. In April, we appointed Jason Costi to our board of directors. Jason is a senior finance executive and capital markets veteran who's more than -- who has more than 20 years of experience in scaling companies and bringing products to market that will be a welcome addition to our team over the coming years. As we continue to expand our addressable market through new technologies and pricing strategies, we'll be looking to leverage Jason's extensive background in various industries to maximize our potential, optimize our cost structures and improve our go-to-market motions.

On the operational side, I'm extremely pleased to announce that this month, we brought on Suaad Sait as the company's first president. Suaad is a super-seasoned SaaS veteran, serving as CMO at Rackspace, executive vice president of products and markets at SolarWinds, and was a co-founder of reach for -- ReachForce, a market -- a martech SaaS business acquired in 2019 by Leadspace. While we plan on having Suaad heavily involved in all aspects of the business, we'll be looking especially to leverage his expertise in sales and marketing given our current focus in this high-value creation area. Long term, we see him taking a hands-on role in helping to shape our customer acquisition strategy and leveraging his vast inside sales experience to optimize our overall go-to-market strategy.

Having another operation-centric executive on the team will also allow the rest of the senior leadership, including myself, to be able to focus on more high-level, companywide R&D and growth initiatives than we could previously. As I've said consistently, we are building a business with a view of the long term, and Suaad's addition to our management team and Jason's addition to our board further strengthens us and our ability to execute on that vision. Moving on to product and pricing. We've long known that our customers aren't uniform, and neither are their needs.

To address this fact, we will be rolling out multi-tiered pricing later this year, which will allow our customers to select the feature set that is right for their business. By offering multi-tiered pricing, it will allow us to capture more value from larger customers and customers that are using the whole app while allowing us to capture and retain smaller customers who may only be focused on a subset of the application right now. At the same time, we'll be able to work with those customers on expanding their use and seeing the full value of the platform over time. This is not a small thing for SharpSpring, and we're working tirelessly to get this pricing model completed.

We see our competitors to the North offering multi-tier pricing to great effect because it allows customers to sign up at lower price points and then adopt features and pay incrementally more as time moves on and they see more value in the platform. The net result is businesses like SharpSpring can capture far more economic value from customers while simultaneously lowering the barriers to adoption for new customers to sign on to the platform at the start. And a final HR update before we close. As of today's call, I'm happy to report that we've begun the process of a phased return to the office beginning in June.

As a cloud-first organization, managing our team of engineers, salespeople, and support staff remotely has been potentially easier than for others, and it's also had some advantages. But in-person collaboration is a fundamental part of SharpSpring's culture. Still, we're approaching this situation with a great deal of thoughtfulness about both the needs of our business and the needs of the people that make our business work. As a next step, we plan a hybrid approach where we'll have the majority of employees spending at least two days a week in the office.

I know many have grown accustomed to remote work, but we believe that in-person close collaboration is necessary for a business as dynamic as SharpSpring. And so we're looking forward to getting back into the office in this new hybrid capacity. In summary, during the first quarter, we took a number of solid steps forward along the road map we laid out at the end of last year and are paving the way for a meaningful revenue ramp beginning in the second half. Overall cohort performance continues to track according to plan.

And with the key investments we've made and will continue to make in product, sales, and marketing, our business remains on the path to achieving our long-term $100 million ARR target. And with that, we're ready to open the call for your questions. Operator, please provide the appropriate instructions.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. [Operator instructions] We'll take our first question from DJ Hynes with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead, sir.

DJ Hynes -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

OK. Thanks, guys. Maybe I want to start on the price increase. Maybe this is for Aaron, I'm not sure.

Can you just help me understand how much the price increase that you guys levered in January is going to impact growth this year?

Aaron Jackson -- Chief Financial Officer

Yes. So I would say it's going to have the strongest impact in the first quarter as people are hitting their annual price increase, generally happens in the first quarter. In terms of the total impact, I would say it –

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

It's going to -- I'm going to step in because it's actually a complicated question this year. As I mentioned, we introduced both a price increase and an annual client license. What we're seeing right now, and we're modeling this out, and we talked about this at length in our last earnings call, as I recall, we will get the benefit either way. And in fact, we're hoping that people will take the annual license increase.

Right now, at about 18% of our agency partners have at least one annual client license in their set of clients. And the strategy there is to lower attrition. And as I mentioned, we just had the best attrition month we've ever seen at 2.18%. So that muddies the water a little bit in terms of providing the answer to your question because the revenues come in in one of two ways: either through a higher price in the monthly license if they choose to take that and -- or through reduced attrition if they choose to take the lower-cost annual license.

I think we've calculated our range of somewhere in the 4% to 6% range this year. But again, it's sort of -- in terms of an overall impact to try to give you a roundabout answer, DJ, but it is based on the take rate of annual licenses versus the higher monthly license that we introduced.

DJ Hynes -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

Yeah. And maybe -- I guess maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing through Q1 and through the middle of May here in terms of annual versus monthly. I think what we're all trying to figure out is, we're coming off of two kind of squishy bookings quarters in a row. How much cushion is there coming through price that gives you confidence we're going to be able to get to these full-year targets?

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Understood. Well, we've got a number of things we're looking at there. We think, first off, again, we're seeing -- we couldn't have done better with that price increase is how I would say that.

We saw no material impact on logo attrition and have had our best month in terms of logo attrition that we've had in, I think, our history. And we pulled off the price increase at the same time. We're also seeing -- with SharpSpring Ads coming into play, we're excited about the potential for cross-selling and up-selling of SharpSpring Ads. Again, we just launched that this quarter.

We're seeing sales acceleration. As I mentioned in Q1, March's sales were literally more than double what we saw in January. So that recovery in quarter is strong and happening. And so these are the reasons why I think it's the incremental effect of all of those that give us confidence that we're going to see a solid year here.

DJ Hynes -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

OK. Got it. Thanks. Appreciate it.

Operator

We'll take our next question from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead, sir.

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

Yeah. I want to start on the product side. Congrats on getting those two initiatives kicked off, both the SharpSpring Ads and the Instagram social marketing tracking. Curious to know on the lack of an Instagram integration, was that more about -- did you have people actually leaving SharpSpring because you didn't have it? Or did you find it difficult to attract new because you didn't have it?

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Good question. I think it was -- I don't think we saw people leaving. I think none of these are absolutes, right? I'm sure we lost some customers because we didn't have Instagram, to be clear.

But what I think the most pronounced impact was either people who were looking to adopt our platform, and we weren't able to say that we had Instagram built in, or people who were on our platform but were not adopting what is otherwise a super-capable social media platform built directly into SharpSpring. So they were sort of forced to stay with other platforms to fill in the gap. And now, they don't have to do that. And so they can adopt our platform.

And as I said in my comments, the exciting thing about that for us is we know that as users use these types of features and standardize on our platform for, really, all of their go-to-market needs, from a digital marketing perspective and a sales perspective, that leads to stickier customers with higher lifetime value. So I wouldn't say that we were shedding many customers because we didn't have Instagram, but we're excited about what it means for us moving forward for the reasons I just outlined.

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

OK. Then a couple of questions on the model. The revenue for SharpSpring is highly predictable. You guys were up a little over $300,000 sequentially.

As I look out to where consensus is, I see another incremental $300,000 step-up from where you just prior to Q1. But I think you talked pretty loudly vocally about investing in the sales and marketing. So kind of Part A, are you comfortable with that sequential step-up on the revs? And then, Part B, what should we be looking for as far as the EBITDA loss, the magnitude of the step-down as you get fully invested in these new sales and marketing initiatives?

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Sure. So the short answer to your question is yes, we are. We're seeing the quarter -- we're seeing really solid signs, which is early, right? As those of you who've been following the business know, when you spend the dollars in one quarter, it really is affecting the sales in subsequent quarters, the next quarter, and the quarter after that, and I would even, say, three quarters out. And so seeing the buildup that we saw in Q1, even though we were just ramping up our spend in Q1, I think we did our raise in December, the middle of December, like December 15, and we just started to put that money to work.

And so that -- we talked about this last earnings call that Q1 would be similar to Q4. But seeing the actual ramp-up in the quarter was exciting for us and gave us confidence. And we're also seeing ourselves build pipeline and lead flow. We're also focusing on higher-quality customers as well.

So we're excited about that. On the EBITDA side, we're spending roughly double on program spend. We're putting that money to work right now this year. And so I think I'm going to let Aaron answer maybe because I rambled on here, you might want to repeat the question for Aaron, but I'm going to let Aaron answer on the cost side.

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

Yes, on the expense side.

Aaron Jackson -- Chief Financial Officer

Yes. On the EBITDA side there, as Rick mentioned, we were really ramping up costs in Q1. So we weren't that full spend, specifically on the marketing side. So I would expect to see some incremental expenses there as we kind of settle into our steady-state on the sales and marketing side, and that's going to kind of trend into Q2.

And then we should start seeing the fruits of that on the revenue side in the latter half of the year to kind of offset that as we go.

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Did that answer your question, Eric?

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

I wanted to try to get a little bit more granular. You had $8.9 million of opex in Q1. I'm expecting that to be higher in Q2. Just trying to put some guardrails around it.

Is it up $300,000? Or is it up $600,000? That's what I'm looking for.

Aaron Jackson -- Chief Financial Officer

Right. Yeah. I think you're going to be in the right ballpark with the $300,000.

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

OK. All right. And then shifting over to the -- I just kind of want to take a step back in time and go back to the second quarter of 2020 and maybe the third quarter of 2020. Curious to know, Rick, if you've done any analysis on those cohorts.

So these would be cohorts that, believe it or not, were new customers during the time of COVID. How they have behaved as far as their retention, their adoption of the platform over the last six, nine months. Do you have any color there?

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. I haven't done that. I haven't looked specifically. I certainly didn't know you were going to ask that particular question, so I can't speak to those two cohorts with specific knowledge.

What I can tell you is we look at every monthly cohort. This is how we run the business. And what we're seeing is remarkably consistent behavior. I think in those early -- as we've talked about, you know, your first 12 to 18 months are what we refer to as our -- they really are high-attrition, low-expansion periods where -- with a customer where customers who are in a serious shakeout.

And at the same time, they're working through an initial three-pack of licenses. So we don't see a lot of expansion revenue from them. So these customers are relatively new to us. But we've not seen anything that would indicate that they're anything but the same kinds of cohorts that we've historically added.

My theory would be that people who bought during those times are the -- are actually stronger customers in better positions. And that I would -- and this is simply conjecture, but I would imagine they would perform marginally better than an average customer if you ask me to bet on it. Again, I --

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

Why am I not finding it surprising from the CEO of SharpSpring?

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

No, no. Well, that's a fair comment, for sure. But just logically, right, these are customers, they're probably harder to sell. We're selling fewer but hopefully ones that behave really well.

But I would say that the cohorts are remarkably consistent in their pattern. And to have a cohort that's seven years old continuing to pay roughly 80% of the original MRR to us is, I think, fairly remarkable. And so we expect these cohorts to perform equally as well or better, said the CEO of Sharpspring.

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

Nice job on the net revenue retention. That's an impressive stat. I'll let go of the microphone now. Thanks.

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Eric.

Operator

We'll take our next question from Scott Berg with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question.

Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

Thanks for taking my questions. I have -- yeah, I have two of them. Let's start with the multi-tiered pricing changes that are going to come later this year. Given that you sell predominantly through partners, how does that affect or impact maybe the pricing arrangement that you have with them? How does it get pushed down? Maybe a high-level kind of viewpoint, that would be helpful.

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Well, you know, I appreciate the question. When it comes to partners, I want to make sure that we're deferential to partners and that they don't hear about things that affect them and their business through our earnings calls and not us communicating with them. So I'd rather -- what I can tell you is our partners have actually been asking for this.

And so they -- I think this is a winning strategy. And I mentioned that we see our competitors implementing this strategy, and this is something that's been on our road map for a while. Just for those of you who aren't product people or developers, there's a significant amount of work to pulling this off. You have to put in paywalls and gates throughout your application in order to differentiate between the good, better, best options and the small, medium, and large installs from, say, in our case, it's dependent on the number of contacts that are in the system.

So there's a significant amount of work on this, and this is something that we've wanted to do, and I believe I even covered this in my investor letter in November. So we're busy at work on it. Our partners are going to like it because it means they can better -- for the same reasons that end customers like it, it means they can better match value with -- the pricing with value. And at the same time, somewhat ironically, it allows a business like SharpSpring to actually capture more economic value from the customer base while giving them that flexibility.

So as I said in my comments, it's not a small thing. I think I said it's a huge thing. And we're excited about -- we're on track. Just to be more exact, we're on track to launch that in Q3, and we're excited about it.

Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

Got it. Quite helpful. And then I guess from a -- a follow-up question, you're bringing on a new president. You kind of get a high level of, obviously, his background on what he's going to do.

But do you expect Suaad to bring in many changes necessarily to your go-to-market strategy? Or is there something in his experience and background that you thought would augment what you're currently trying to accomplish?

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Well, I mean, look, I'm super impressed with Suaad. I'm really happy that he's joined in the team. As all of you know, we built our business in Gainesville. It has been a wonderful place to start a business, and it's been a key to our success.

We have a couple of hundred dedicated employees. It's a college town. The people that come to work at SharpSpring are accomplished and highly motivated to make a difference. What we don't have in Gainesville is a wealth of senior management.

And I can't, as I put it before, like a place like Austin, throw a rock and hit another technology company with a senior manager that's got 15, 20 years of experience. Suaad is that person. And as the CMO of Rackspace and his experience in SolarWinds and also companies -- smaller like Sharpspring, with a lot of SMB SaaS focus, I've been working with him now for four months, and I'm sure he's going to bring a lot to the table. But I would characterize his hire as an extension of our management team's capability.

So more operational leadership to help us move the company forward more quickly. And so I'm certain he has his own ideas, and he's not just going to be bringing my ideas to the table. But I also think he will work as an extension of the senior management team and help us execute more quickly and efficiently toward the goals that we've set for ourselves.

Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

Great. That's all I have. Thanks for taking the question.

Operator

At this time, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Carlson for his closing remarks.

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

As always, I want to thank each one of you, investors, our employees and staff, our customers and wish you all -- it's fun to be coming out of the pandemic, and looking forward to a great rest of the year and a healthy one. So thank you all for your continued support. Take care.

Operator

Before we conclude today's call, I would like to provide SharpSpring's safe harbor statement that includes important cautions regarding forward-looking statements made during this call. During today's call, there were forward-looking statements made regarding future events, including SharpSpring's future financial performance. These statements reflect the company's current views with respect to future events. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including those discussed under the heading Risk Factors and elsewhere in the company's latest annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performances or achievements anticipated or implied by these forward-looking statements.

The company does not undertake any responsibility to revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. Also note that during this conference call, we may make reference to adjusted EBITDA, core net income or loss, and core net income or loss per share, which are non-GAAP financial measures presented as supplemental measures of the company's performance. A reconciliation of net income or loss to non-GAAP measures is included for your reference in the financial section of the earnings press release and made available on the company's website. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that a recording of today's call will be available for replay via a link available in the Investors section of the company's website.

Thank you for joining us today for SharpSpring's first-quarter 2021 earnings conference call. [Operator signoff]

Duration: 40 minutes

Call participants:

Rick Carlson -- Chief Executive Officer

Aaron Jackson -- Chief Financial Officer

DJ Hynes -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

Eric Martinuzzi -- Lake Street Capital Markets -- Analyst

Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

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