Fiverr International Stock

Fiverr International Ltd. (Fiverr) operates a worldwide online marketplace for sellers to sell their services and buyers to buy them.

The company’s platform includes various categories across ten verticals, including Graphics and Design, Digital Marketing, Writing and Translation, Video and Animation, Music and Audio, Programming and Tech, Business, Data, Lifestyle and Photography.

The company’s platform also includes a variety of value-added products, including subscription-based content marketing platform, back-office platform, learning and development offerings, creative talent platform and freelancer management platform.

The company designed its platform to make it easy for its buyers to find and purchase the digital services they are looking for without time-consuming negotiations or uncertainty of pricing, while offering them the best value for their money. At the same time, the company enables its sellers to reach a large buyer universe, allowing them to spend more time on doing what they love and are best at, rather than on demand generation, contract negotiation, payment collection and other requirements of running a digital services business.

The company generates revenue primarily through transaction fees and service fees on its core marketplace. The company also offers an ecosystem of value added products that empowers its sellers to build a successful freelancing career and enables businesses of all sizes to implement an effective and efficient strategy to utilize freelancing workforce. For freelancers, Promoted Gigs and Seller Plus provide advertising capabilities and advanced tools to help them succeed on the company’s marketplace. Fiverr Workspace provides freelancers software solution to manage invoicing, contracts, time tracking and organizing workflow with their clients. The company also provides comprehensive learning and development offerings through Fiverr Learn and CreativeLive that help freelancers grow professionally. On the demand side, ClearVoice offers a subscription based content marketing solution, WorkingNotWorking provides paid access to high-end vetted creative talent, and Stoke Talent provides a freelancer management system to help businesses manage freelancers across channels, all of which cater to medium to larger sized businesses.

The company is focused on constant innovation and has designed its platform such that it can continuously enhance the value it delivers to its buyers and sellers. Geographically, the substantial majority of the company’s revenue is generated from buyers in English speaking countries. As the company expands its platform to include additional languages, it expects to deepen its penetration into Western Europe, the Asia Pacific and Latin America, and the geographic mix of its revenue could therefore change over time.

Platform

The key elements of the company’s core platform include:

Service-as-a-Product Model: The company operates a differentiated SaaP platform that allows sellers to offer services embedded with features that can be standardized and cataloged. The company’s core platform enables digital services to be bought and sold in the same fashion as physical goods on an e-commerce platform, with predictable pricing, easy searches, standardized contracts, easy payment processes and streamlined delivery of the service. Upon purchasing a Gig on Fiverr, a buyer knows the scope, duration and price.

Comprehensive and Diverse Catalog: At the foundation of the company’s core platform is an expansive catalog of Gigs that spans over 600 digital service categories. The company’s catalog coverage is broader than many of its competitors, and it is focused on continuously growing this catalog. Buyers can purchase Gigs, such as logo design, video creation or website development with prices ranging from $5 to thousands of dollars, all easily and with just a few clicks. This approach is fundamentally different from either traditional offline or online long-term temporary employment solutions. Unlike such traditional solutions, each Gig on Fiverr is listed with a clearly defined scope and timeline and is sold for a fixed price rather than on an hourly basis.

Technology and Data Assets: The company is a technology company. Its platform is powered by its machine learning technology and expansive data assets. Using the company’s extensive data assets and its AI tools, it is able to continuously optimize its product search capabilities, personalize its user experience, refine its matching algorithm and monitor its service quality. For example, Fiverr Logo Maker leverages its AI technology to allow graphic designers on its platform to monetize their existing designs, deliver their work faster and serve more customers, while allowing buyers to rapidly personalize and customize original, handmade designs created by sellers. By better predicting a buyer’s future needs, its algorithms improve user satisfaction, which in turn increases repeat or cross category buying activities.

Tools and Infrastructure: The company builds a comprehensive suite of communication and collaboration functions that its buyers and sellers utilize to communicate throughout the entire transaction lifecycle. The company also provides a robust end to end technology infrastructure and tools to help its sellers manage key functions of their online and offline business on its platform, such as proposals and contracts, invoicing and payments, project management and marketing. The company also invests in building an infrastructure for international expansion that allows it to roll out six non English websites and provide multilingual support to its users. The company has also launched Fiverr Business, a dedicated environment for teams and business buyers to transact and collaborate on Fiverr in a more seamless fashion.

Expansion of Core Platform: The company has expanded its core platform to offer an ecosystem of value-added products that empowers its sellers to build a successful freelancing career and enables businesses of all sizes to implement an effective and efficient strategy to utilize freelancing workforce. For freelancers, Promoted Gigs and Seller Plus provide advertising capabilities and advanced tools to help them succeed on the company’s marketplace. Fiverr Workspace provides freelancers a software solution to manage invoicing, contracts, time tracking and organizing workflow with their clients. The company also provides comprehensive learning and development offerings through Fiverr Learn and CreativeLive that help freelancers grow professionally. On the demand side, ClearVoice offers a subscription based content marketing solution, Working Not Working provides paid access to high-end vetted creative talent, and Stoke Talent provides a freelancer management system to help businesses manage freelancers across channels, all of which cater to medium to larger sized businesses.

Buyers

The company’s buyers include individuals and businesses of all sizes and from various industries. It engages and grows its buyer base organically and through thoughtful performance and brand marketing, all without a direct sales force.

In the year ended December 31, 2022, the company served 4.3 million active buyers from over 160 countries across the globe.

The company’s value proposition to buyers:

The company provides the best value for money for its buyers by alleviating frictions and inefficiencies in the value chain. The company’s digital services catalog enables it to offer sophisticated browsing and filtering functions.

The company’s catalog of digital services has over 600 categories and continues to grow and evolve. The company continues to develop both the breadth and depth of its catalog in order to provide its buyers with access to the services they need.

The company provides instant access to hundreds of thousands of freelancers with a broad set of skills. Using Fiverr, buyers can easily connect with these freelancers and get a broad range of digitally delivered services executed quickly and efficiently.

The company’s SaaP model enables transparency and certainty when it comes to cost, duration and scope. The company’s buyer-driven rating system provides a transparent quality rating mechanism for every Gig, helping buyers make informed purchasing decisions. This system ensures that the company’s buyers have added peace of mind with every purchase.

The company is relentlessly focused on providing quality customer service as it seeks to drive repeat purchase behavior. The company’s dispute resolution technology enables it to flag issues in a timely manner and to guide users to a solution, whether that solution is the company’s self-service support portal or intervention by its customer support team.

Sellers

The company’s value proposition to sellers:

Sellers on the company’s core platform do not need to bid to win a project. Instead, they list the service on the company’s core platform with a well-defined scope, duration and price, and its proprietary technology directly matches them with buyers who are looking for the service they provide. As a result, sellers can list their Gigs on the company’s core platform and focus on the work they love doing while maximizing their earning potential.

The company’s core platform embraces habitual changes in the workforce and provides freelancers with the ability to find work and offer their services from anywhere in the world at any point in time.

Getting paid on time after project completion has historically been an uncertain and time-consuming process for sellers. The company eliminates this friction by working with third-party agents to collect the funds from the buyer at the time of purchase and timely release them to the seller upon project completion.

The company enables its sellers to professionally showcase their services to buyers, establish a track record, develop a buyer base and build a professional reputation on its core platform. The company’s online seller forum, offline community events and Fiverr Learn, its e-learning platform, provide additional channels for its sellers to further enhance their skills and build their personal brand and digital storefront with it.

The company provides access to a robust set of technology tools for its sellers that enable them to manage all of the administrative aspects of their business, such as providing standardized contracts, invoicing and payment, financial reporting, marketing and real-time performance feedback. This infrastructure allows the company’s sellers to track their performance and manage their business efficiently.

The company provides its sellers with a comprehensive suite of onboarding resources, and its online help desk and offline customer care team provide 24/7 support to ensure sellers succeed in all stages of their freelance journey. The company takes care of the entire buyer engagement, business development and marketing process for its sellers so they simply need to list their Gigs on its core platform and focus on the work they love to maximize their earning potential. For those sellers new to the business, it helps them gain access to buyers so that they can quickly start developing their reputation. For the more experienced and professional sellers, the company enrolls them into the Fiverr Pro program to allow them to build a premium business and gain access to buyers who may be prioritizing a higher quality work product.

Products

Buyer Experience

The company presents its buyers with an e-commerce experience that is designed for streamlined browsing, searching and purchasing.

Search and Discovery: The company’s SaaP model provides buyers access to an extensive catalog of Gigs that they can compare and filter across parameters, including Gig details, reviews and price. Each Gig includes the details of the service provided, the price, delivery timeframe and reviews from previous buyers of that Gig, allowing buyers to make informed decisions based on their needs, budgets and tastes. Leveraging the company’s end-to-end transaction platform and the depth of transaction data, it launched Fiverr Inspire, an innovative way to browse and shop for digital services based on sellers and their portfolio. The company’s search, browse and recommendation algorithms are designed to match each buyer’s search with the most relevant Gig and seller results. With each buyer interaction, the company’s platform and machine learning algorithms enable it to offer more personalized recommendation carousels that are presented in relevant places along the buyer journey.

Personalizable Options: On the company’s marketplace, buyers enjoy a personalized experience and direct interactions with its sellers. As part of the company’s Gig concept, buyers purchase ‘Packages’ associated with each Gig. Packages are tiered as Basic, Standard and Premium, each with different levels of service, such as different word counts for a translation, video lengths for a video edit or number of revisions for a logo design. The company facilitates further customization through brief and match and custom orders. A buyer can request a custom order through the company’s platform with his or her unique requirements. Sellers, in turn, can respond to the order request with custom offers, which are exclusive proposals, with the exact description of the service, price and time expected to deliver the service. For certain categories and gigs, the company also allows buyers to make recurring purchases through the Subscriptions feature, or to break down a large project into multiple purchases through the Milestones feature.

Communication and Collaboration: Communication between buyers and sellers is essential to the success of the company’s marketplace. The company’s messenger tool enables buyers to easily communicate with sellers. Buyers are able to describe their requirements and preferences during the pre-order process and the communication channels for process management and coordination remain open over the lifecycle of the Gig. As part of deliverable acceptance, buyers may utilize the company’s ‘Request Revisions’ feature to further refine the deliverable, if desired. With Fiverr Business, larger teams can collaborate and transact in a seamless fashion on the company’s platform. Fiverr Business provides larger teams a curated experience with collaboration and administrative tools and to easily integrate freelancers into their workflows.

Support and Intervention: The company’s user support function is available throughout the buyer journey to provide clarification, help, education and support. The company’s resolution center helps buyers to resolve disputes online, and its 24/7 ticketing system is available should a buyer encounter a more complex problem. In addition to the on-demand help and support, the company has developed a set of intervention algorithms, which leverage its data and knowledge, to automatically flag potential issues to its customer support team so they can intervene and offer guidance, education and support to its buyers.

Quality Control: The company has developed several quality assurance policies to enhance the reliability and integrity of its marketplace. The company’s algorithms assess each freelancer and Gig on its platform and assign a quality score based on a number of factors, such as buyer rating, cancellation rates and response time. The quality score is considered in the company’s matching algorithms and is integral to the positioning of a seller’s Gig on its website. In addition, help tools are available for both buyers and sellers alike for when issues need to be raised to the company’s customer support team. The company constantly monitors activity on its platform to ensure compliance with its terms of service, as it seeks to create a consistent and reliable user experience for its buyers.

Seller Experience

The company offers a set of tools for sellers to build their Gigs, develop their brand, establish a reputation and create their work portfolio. Sellers can manage their business from any browser or from its mobile apps.

Seller Onboarding: The company has developed an automated onboarding process designed to educate and guide new sellers through the creation of their seller profile (their storefront), Gigs (the services they sell) and portfolio (a collection of their work samples). Once a seller is onboarded, each Gig they offer becomes a part of the Fiverr catalog.

Business Management: To allow sellers to focus on doing what they love, the company provides a comprehensive suite of tools that help them manage administrative aspects of their business, such as workflow prioritization, invoicing and payment processing. Additional communication tools further enhance a seller’s ability to communicate with buyers, as well as to collaborate on Gigs with other sellers. The company’s seller dashboard provides a unified work management interface that consolidates key information from its seller tools and performance metrics, allowing sellers to more effectively manage their business.

Analytics: The company’s suite of tools provides sellers with detailed analytics on their operations, facilitating greater transparency and insight into business and performance indicators, including Gig revenue, order pipeline and ratings. Gig specific analytics allow sellers to better understand their past performance in order to improve their future performance. Sellers are also provided with real-time feedback on their performance in timeliness of delivery, responsiveness and completion rates via the company’s seller dashboard. In addition, Seller Plus subscribers get access to advanced analytics features, such as traffic and keyword analytics. As such, the company’s analytics capabilities give sellers increased visibility into their performance and a better understanding of what is important to buyers so that they have the feedback to continuously improve.

Advertising: To help sellers increase visibility and grow their business on Fiverr, the company launched an advertising tool, Promoted Gigs, that allows sellers to bid and win prime locations on its website through an auction mechanism. Promoted Gigs are cost-per-click, so sellers are charged only when their ads are viewed and clicked by the buyer. Sellers decide a daily budget and the maximum bid per click, and the company also provides automatic bidding tools to help sellers optimize their bid price and maximize their exposure with minimum efforts on their part.

Learning and Education: On its proprietary learning platform, the company provides sellers access to an education center with comprehensive information on how to grow as a freelancer, as well as become a more effective seller on Fiverr. The company offers tutorials and materials on the use of Fiverr infrastructure tools, allowing sellers to get the most out of their experience on its core platform. This is supplemented by the company’s Seller Help Center, which allows sellers to open tickets with customer support, as well as access a comprehensive set of FAQs and how-to videos. The company also provides access to a library of high quality educational content through Fiverr Learn and CreativeLive to help freelancers improve their skills and grow professionally.

Intellectual Property

The company holds numerous registered trademarks in the United States and in foreign jurisdictions, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil and Israel, that it considers material to the marketing of its products, including the trademarks Fiverr and Gig.

Research and development

The company’s research and development costs included $92.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2022.

Regulation

As a ‘database owner’ pursuant to the Israeli Privacy Protection Law, 1981 (the Israeli Privacy Law), the company is subject to certain obligations and restrictions, such as the requirement to properly notify the data subjects regarding the nature of the collection and use of their personal data prior to their collection, the requirement to obtain valid informed consents from the data subjects prior to using their personal data, conditions with respect to transfer of personal data outside Israeli borders, conditions and restrictions regarding the use of any personal data for direct mailing, obligations to meet certain data subject rights (such as access, rectification and deletion rights), registering databases containing personal data with Israeli Privacy Protection Authority, as well as data security obligations.

In addition, to the extent that the Israeli Privacy Protection Authority initiates any administrative supervision procedure that reveals irregularities with respect to the company’s compliance with the Israeli Privacy Law.

The company is defined as a ‘Data Controller’ with respect to the personal data of its users that it collects and is therefore subject to a number of key legal obligations under the GDPR.

As of January 1, 2021, because of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU, the company also had to comply with the UK GDPR, which, together with the amended UK Data Protection Act 2018, retains the GDPR in UK national law. The UK data protection regime mirrors the fines under the GDPR.

History

Fiverr International Ltd. was founded in 2010. The company was incorporated under the laws of Israel in 2010.