You’ve just announced 2024 was Readly’s first year of profit. Do you feel like it’s a milestone that’s been a long time in the making?

It’s definitely a significant moment for us. We started in 2014, with the ambition of creating a totally new market of aggregated, all-you-can-consume editorial content. Although we’ve had isolated pockets of quarterly profitability during the last two years, the overall picture is that we’ve been loss-making every full-year since we started. But now, we’ve turned this around, hitting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 8.7%, with positive free cash flow of SEK 58.4 million. This time last cash flow was negative by around the same amount, so it’s been a real turnaround.

What’s been the path to your turnaround in fortunes? Has the market suddenly grown or have other factors intervened?

We reached a point in 2022/23 when it started to be felt that we couldn’t withstand any future losses, and a vision was needed to turn this around. As such, our people journey has almost been in two phases: the first was during the early years where investors were very accepting of us being loss making – this was almost part of the model – and our people were largely unconcerned by it. Phase two – the last two years – has been a period characterised by a change of reality. It’s been a post-Covid change, where investor sentiment altered, and where there was suddenly far less tolerance financing loss-making companies. Something needed to be done to make us a sustainable and robust business.

The loss of staff – around a third of the company – was a significant moment, because that really was a wake-up call for colleagues

What was the immediate impact on employees?

We knew we needed a strategy of our own making for reaching profitability, and to do this we realised we needed to embrace a faster pace of product development. We also knew that we needed to review our pricing and to reorganise. This latter element necessarily involved reducing headcount, from around 150 to closer to 100. The loss of staff – around a third of the company – was a significant moment, because that really was a wake-up call for colleagues. It was the point at which being a loss-making company was now causing concern. At the same time, we needed to be very strategic about deploying to talent we did have. Part of the strategy was to really ramp up our targeted marketing, so we needed those people onboard with us.