2021 letter to our stakeholders

To our Stakeholders:

The last four years have been exciting. We’ve closed 2021 with over $300 million in transaction volume, launched our digital wallet, our virtual Visa card, our in-app social experiences, and our leadership council. We predict the next four years to be even more exciting. We are just getting started, and if we execute well, the scale of our impact will reach further than we can imagine.

Given what we’ve already accomplished, it may be difficult to believe, but we feel the opportunities and challenges ahead of us are even greater than those behind us. We will be faced with many tough decisions, most of which will be unconventional and bold. Hopefully, some will turn out to be winners. We know not all will.

Staying laser-focused on our customers allowed us to make substantial progress this year. A recap of some of those accomplishments:

• Our product transformed. We shifted our focus from being just a rewards company to building the world’s first money+ business.
• Customers doubled. Revenues grew five-fold.
• Repeat transactions increased. Despite strong new customer growth, the percentage of transactions by repeat customers grew from 18.5% in 2020 to 66.45% in 2021.
• The team grew. We expanded from 26 to 82 people. I refuse to round up or down—each person is highly valued.
• The company became cash flow positive & profitable.

The Money Movement.

One of our big initiatives this year was to clearly define who we are building products for. Not surprisingly, we ended up with an extensive list of vastly different customer profiles. What unifies them all is the goal for everyone to maximize their money. No matter how much money you start with, Fluz helps you earn more.

This mission is bigger than the individual transactions we facilitate. It is about the community forming around the movement. Over the past year, we’ve focused on delivering best-in-class products and experiences that enable our customers to earn more together.

But there is no time to applaud our achievements. I constantly remind our team to maintain a sense of extreme urgency. We must go to sleep every night worried—not about our competition, but about our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is; for that, we have a great responsibility. We consider them loyal to us—right up until someone else offers them something better.

Lasting Company.

Because of our emphasis on the long term, we make decisions and evaluate success differently than others in the market. We will continue to make investments in light of long-term goals of becoming a market leader rather than short-term milestones.

Almost daily, we are confronted with temptations to focus our efforts on building for the short term at the expense of losing focus on the larger mission. We often forfeit smaller product initiatives so we can focus on the long-term development of our money+ business. Building a lasting company requires the foresight to see beyond quarterly profits and short-term growth.

People Shaping History.

We are mavericks. It’s a good thing, too. We’ll need that passion to succeed at shaking things up. We’re proud of the unique business we’ve built and our brutally honest approach to creating an amazing customer experience. We believe our initiatives in 2021 reflect it.

It would be impossible to produce results without the exceptional group we have assembled. Working to create a little bit of history isn’t supposed to be easy. We have begun to build a team of intelligent, persistent, passionate people who put customers first.

When new members join the team, they are met with a culture of high standards across the entire company. The new people absorb those same high standards and then pass them on to the ones who come after them. Maintaining high standards in our approach will continue to be the single most important element of our success.

Goals for 2022.

The elements of our 2022 plan may not surprise you:

• Brand promise. Fluz is still a small new business relative to major competitors. We must develop a clear, compelling commitment to our customers, then back it up with strong relationships, products, messaging, and service every time.
• More capacity. We are expanding our systems to support similar growth levels in the coming years. We must always focus on ways to increase operational excellence and efficiency. The team has a significant task: continue to support short-term growth while developing new features and business units.
• Scalable processes. We’ve complicated our business dramatically with new innovations around our core business. We continue to invest in people, systems, and communication practices. Scaling this is one of the most challenging requirements for our expansion.

Fluz made a number of strides forward in the past year, but there is still an enormous amount to do. While we are optimistic, we still maintain a strong sense of urgency. We face many challenges, among them well-funded, capable competition, execution risk associated with our business model, and the need for large, ongoing investments (time, energy, and financial) to address the growing market potential.

I extend humble gratitude to our customers, vendors, shareholders, and the courageous ones working passionately every day to build an important and lasting company. Again, I attach a copy of our original 2018 letter and encourage you to read it. Given how much we’ve expanded, it’s notable that the fundamental principles remain the same.

I thank you for the opportunity.