Accounting for variability

June 3, 2024

When we created the financial plan for 2024, we sought to be as precise as possible, locking in which deals would rollover in which months to set the revenue targets, leading to an uneven but generally upward revenue growth month over month. 4 months into the year, we learned that borrowers tend to make business decisions on their own terms and that level of precision would be difficult to predict. With this in mind and coupled with the new take rate analysis we presented at an earlier all hands, we've adjusted our forecast for the rest of the year which we'll walk through in the all-hands this week. 

Despite this, we've still been quite good at managing to meet and exceed our revenue targets each month this year by finding ways to be creative and also making up for potential misses in the following month to bring us to our sizable beats on a quarterly basis. May, though, will be the first month that we slip ~$[ ]K off against our plan, although we're still tracking well ahead year to date. This was a clear case of us trying to be far too precise when we made this plan late last year while also dealing with a number of inaugural launches that were delayed into the following month. All of this is expected to be made up for and then some in what should be a fantastic June and another stellar quarter that extends our positive streak for this year.

We've learned from this and you will find that the new forecast takes all this unevenness into account which we’ll share in the all hands this week. Final May numbers actually had us ending with just a minor miss against these new projections. The remainder of the year should see more repeatable steady growth and it looks like we're well on our way to getting there.

There will inevitably be slip ups against plan month to month just from the nature of our business but it's been a trend of up and to the right all year and June is looking to keep that momentum going.