FVRR - Fiverr International Ltd. (FVRR) Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference (Transcript)
2023-09-05 20:28:09 ET
Fiverr International Ltd. (FVRR)
Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference Call
September 5, 2023 13:50 ET
Company Participants
Micha Kaufman - Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Ofer Katz - President & Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Eric Sheridan - Goldman Sachs
Presentation
Eric Sheridan
In the interest of time just because these things going. We'll keep going. Next is the team from Fiverr. It's my pleasure to introduce Micha Kaufman, Founder and CEO; Ofer Katz, President and CFO. Guys, thanks for being here and being part of the conference this year.
Micha Kaufman
Thanks for having us.
Eric Sheridan
Why don't we take a step back first. And for those who are either less familiar with the platform or where you sit inside the broader freelancer economy, talk a little bit about the company you've built and how you see the platform evolving in the years ahead?
Micha Kaufman
Sure. So Fiverr was launched in 2010. So it's been almost 14 years. And, during that period of time, freelancing in general is a portion of the workforce has been changing dramatically. In 2010, freelancers were about 20 or low 20 percentage of the workforce in the U.S. They are now close to 50%. The defining moment was 2010 because millennials joined the workforce. And then Gen Z by the way, by 2030, millennials are going to be 75% of the workers which means that all of us are going to work for them and work by their rules.
So, essentially, a lot more of the younger generation is opting in for freelancing. So that has been dramatically changing. But what hasn't changed that radically is where freelancing actually happens. The majority of freelancing in 2010 and also today happens offline. It's mostly through agencies and freelancers that are being introduced by your network, by our friends with which you work. So less platforms as a solution. When we launched Fiverr, the idea was that we wanted to make the experience of finding and engaging with the talent with either a freelancer or an agency is easy as shopping on Amazon, right?
That was the idea. That was the premise. The average time that it takes to find a higher financer offline is about 30 days. We've reduced our process to about 5 minutes which was a radical change. And so that was the approach. When we started historically, the way we penetrated the market was, we started with micro services for micro businesses. So mostly micro businesses and small businesses and over the years, we've been growing into the more mature businesses, midsized businesses and obviously, all the way up to enterprise. A lot of it we've been discussing in recent quarters with the introduction of new products. But all in all, it's a high-growth company that has been growing 40% to 50% for over a decade during COVID growing given 70% or 100% went public in 2019.
So 4 years, the company that we took public 4 years ago was 1/3 of the company in the size and it was burning money and now we have a company more than 3x larger that is printing money which we're very happy with. Now in this [indiscernible] recessionary environment with macro with high inflation, high interest rate. Obviously, it's harder for smaller businesses which impacts our ability to continue growing very fast which has been translating into just building a much more efficient and much more profitable business. And obviously, as the economy rebounds and as our investment into the higher segment matures, we're going to be back into high growth but already is a very profitable company. So that's kind of a...
Eric Sheridan
Yes. That's great to set the table. Maybe going back into some of the demand comments you made in there because there's been a fair bit of volatility in the macro environment over the last 12, 18 months. What's your current view on what you're seeing from the demand side of the equation? Driving client growth, client spend, all those elements. And you sit in a unique spot in that you talk to very large customers and very small customers. You have a pretty good read on sort of the broader macro environment and what you're seeing right now?
Micha Kaufman
Yes. So we were one of the first companies to call out the macro impact or the headwind and we were asked at the earnings that we reported this and what are you guys seeing? We said, wait a quarter, you'll see it as well. Fiverr is extremely sensitive because it has such a high percentage of smaller micro businesses. These guys don't need a committee to decide that spend strategy should change. All they need is the wrong headline on the newspaper to start playing defense. So we're super sensitive. By the way, when it rebounds, we're going to see it probably first, right? Because of the size of the business and the amount of businesses that engage with it. What we're seeing is in that sense, what we're seeing is a pretty much of a steady-state situation right now. So the market doesn't deteriorate. It doesn't continue to go down. It's pretty steady. It's not becoming much better for the smaller micro businesses. The reason is pretty obvious. I mean the cost of borrow is extremely high right now. And there's not as much consumption we had 2 years ago.
So essentially, when smaller businesses are thinking, they don't have a lot of free cash, right? So everything they invest, they need to take from somewhere. Right now, investing in growth where growth for them is really hard, doesn't make sense. So they're playing it a little bit more safe. On the midsized businesses and larger businesses, we see a slightly different approach. They still have free cash. They have -- they want to continue investing throughout this period, not to lose their brand equity. So we're seeing, obviously, that part of the business is doing better and then those customers who belong to these cohorts spend a few orders of magnitude more than smaller businesses. But obviously, this is one of the reasons why we're investing a lot into that segment because segment that needs our solution and have the capacity to spend.
Eric Sheridan
Got it. But even on the last earnings call, calling out stable, I felt like was a rate of change to the positive versus what you had seen 6, 9 months ago? Where you were early in?
Micha Kaufman
That is very true. And there was a period in which I think businesses were also trying to measure the impact of the macro economy on their business and so we've seen instability in activity or response to macro. And what we've seen in the recent quarter or 2 is really stabilizing it. So it's kind of a new temporary normal and few things take a change, whether that is inflation, dimension or interest rates starting to go down.
Eric Sheridan
And maybe just one follow-up on this area and then we'll move into some of the longer-term initiatives. But just how that all translates back to what you're seeing from cohorts as they age? You guys are talk a fair bit about it on every earnings call. And I think there's a lot of good interesting data in there in terms of how some of your cohorts age. While it just translate back into client growth and client spend as cohorts age on your platform?
Micha Kaufman
So essentially, I mean and we report this every end of the year, we provide a cohort graph that showcase how cohort retention our revenue retention over cohorts behave every year. And we've been seeing a very stable, the beauty of the business in many senses, the fact that when the majority of customers that we acquire get to us organically. They come to us organically. And we complement on that by investing money into brand marketing and performance marketing and other investments. But the idea is that we don't reinvest in reacquiring and reengaging customers.
And even though that is the case and we're not a subscription business, guys. We're pair in need an on-demand platform. And when you look at the behavior of our cohorts, they're very stable, meaning that once they get acquired either organically or through paid, they continue spending over many, many years as much as the years of existence of the company which means that when you look at the LTV of a customer, it depends on how long would you take it?
And we've been talking about this every quarter but essentially with a very quick payback in high spend over many, many years. The business is extremely efficient from a unit economy standpoint. Now cohort behavior, I mean, the majority of our revenues every year are coming from repeat business. So it's like a layered cake, where we have those cohorts piling up and they continue spending and the entire revenue is growing but the majority is coming from repeat business.
And what we've been doing in the past few quarters is that we've really zoomed in on acquiring what we call high-value buyers, those who have more spend capacity and more spend tendency and therefore, we've seen cohorts. In recent cohorts that are spending even in their first purchase, 15% more than older cohorts in their first purchase. So the focus and the quality of the customers that we acquire is very important to the overall cohort behavior. And I think that we've been doing in the past few quarters have been extremely successful from our standpoint.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Going from that view to something much more big picture, over the last 6, 7 months, I think investors have really struggled with how to think about AI and your company. Is it a positive? Is it a negative? What will it do to the freelancer economy more broadly? Give us your perspectives as a team on what AI is doing for your platform? And what do you think the opportunity set is within the broader economy you're playing in?
Micha Kaufman
Yes. I'm smiling because it's -- just the amount of stress and fear that comes with investing, I think, drives this mentality of really focusing on the net negative but AI for us is a net positive from every aspect that you can imagine. So first of all, we're a product company. We're an innovative company, the platform and the innovation that we can drive through it determines the success of the marketplace. That's what we have. And AI for us, as a company presents incredible opportunities to make our products better, make our team better, make ourselves more efficient, drive more output from the same size of team which means efficiency on all fronts of the business itself. But more than that, it allows us to build a better product experience and provide, use AI for things like search and matching and I can go into details. But essentially, from the catalog perspective, it opens up so many new professions in the year.
If you're asking, are there categories that are going to be obsolete in a year or 2 or 3? Sure, some of them are. But if I look at the 14 years of operations of Fiverr, so many categories disappeared. And so many more appeared. It's just the natural course of things. AI is incredible but making the most out of it requires a lot of human talent. And document talent could be found on Fiverr and is being searched on Fiverr. And this is why we're not concerned. For us, it's net positive. Even if some categories are going to disappear, this, again, is the natural course of running a horizontal marketplace.
We used to -- we started from 6 categories. We now have about 700 categories. We're probably going to have thousands of categories in the future where we keep adding categories. And sometimes, we close categories. It's not a big deal. And so when this idea or hypothesis that this could be a negative, we said that we're not seeing impact. And if anything, we were the first market base to open up tens of categories that relate to AI-specific services which have been booming and becoming more successful as we speak. So, so essentially, net positive, that's the bottom line. And I mean time will tell and we'll provide confidence for everyone. We're excited.
Eric Sheridan
Yes. Understood. No, completely clear. Let's shift back to some of the product and strategy things you talked about in the overview. Can you talk about the launch of Fiverr Business Solutions? You talked about that growth recently on the earnings call. What are you trying to build there? How should we think about that evolving in the years ahead?
Micha Kaufman
I'll take this. So essentially, we've been talking about the movement up market and being able to build tools and services for the more mature businesses, the midsized businesses, the larger businesses. The first one which we've introduced was Fiverr Business and this was a 1.5 years ago or 2 years ago. And this was our first investment and that investment started maturing and paying dividends over time. And what we realize is that the very wide spectrum of businesses already exist within our cohorts. It's just identifying them, segmenting them and ensuring that they have the right product to go to.
Recently, what we've been doing based on, or building on the success of Fiverr Business, is we relaunched Fiverr Businesses -- Fiverr Pro to much more professional, much more extensive product. And now it belongs to a suite of solutions that we call the Fiverr Business Solutions that include different tiers of solutions for different types of businesses and it's, they can self-select themselves into the right platform based on their needs. We have Fiverr Pro which has a unique pre-vetted top 1 percentage of the best talent that we hand it that are more suitable to work on more sophisticated types of projects with more sophisticated types of customers.
In that platform, we also have the right tools for businesses, team accounts, the ability to work as a team to onboard your team to work on projects on our platform. Different payment terms that businesses expect not just credit cards but also bank transfers and working with things like Net 30 [ph] and things like that. And finally, having the customer success concierge, white glove service that they require. So this is Fiverr Pro. But we also introduced 2 new products. One is Fiverr Enterprise. Fiverr Enterprise is our enterprise-grade product. That product not only allows you to find talent and bring this talent to work with the organization but also allows you to manage your existing relationship with freelancers or outsourcing talent in your organization, what's really funny, it's 2023 and still companies at the size of Google manage their freelancers through Excel sheets.
It's really broken. I mean they invest hundreds of millions into HR software but they neglect tens of percentages of their talent by just managing them in spreadsheets. So essentially, this software allows you to manage and avoid issues of work mix specification, making sure that you follow governance and compliance and deal with everything from budgeting to, signing talent to different teams. So we have this spectrum. And then we also introduced Fiverr Certified. And Fiverr Certified is a solution that allows large brands to make a dedicated co-branded version of a market base for their customers.
So we've announced partnerships with companies like Amazon or Stripe, TikTok or other companies where these companies can have a market-based dedicated for customers that require assistance in working with their tools. So this all belongs to this suite of solutions. And we're obviously seeing success Fiverr Business was just a couple of quarters ago, 5% of our business, the Business Solutions is now about 10% of our business and is growing very nicely. We're just starting. We're just getting into that market. And bear in mind that we, the size of our sales team is about the 10 fingers on my hand right now. And most of it is a result of an acquisition that we've done of another business that came with a small sales force.
So essentially, we're very early into that game but very efficient because we're using most of our existing channels to bring and convert and push the customers to the right product which also results in them spending multiple times with an average customer on Fiverr spend.
Eric Sheridan
So there's a couple of things in there and maybe just want to double click on. In terms of the push to garner more enterprise clients over time, how much of what's ahead of you is things that need to be built and deployed? Versus elements of just looking at your marketplace today and re-architecting and executing against it. So elements of what the investment cycle looks like to win in enterprise? Versus just the execution cycle looks like to win in the enterprise?
Micha Kaufman
I would say that it's probably more execution and it's learning how to do that in a very efficient manner. And bear in mind that enterprise by itself is the goal of Fiverr Enterprise. But all in all, we think that the midsized businesses which in numbers are far larger than enterprise businesses is a largely untapped market. And the opportunity to grow into that market is enormous. And their spend capacity is already multiple, many multiple times the spend capacity of smaller businesses. So in that perspective that segment of the market is extremely interesting for us.
Eric Sheridan
So just to put a final point on this, if you were to think about the opportunity set, there's obviously going upmarket in the enterprise. But if we think about what still is offline that can move into online, the -- almost bigger pool of opportunity set is just simply the small, medium-sized business space and capturing as much of that as you can.
Micha Kaufman
Correct. And definitely number wise. I mean SMBs are 99.9% of businesses in the U.S. And they're 99.7% in Europe. I mean this is the largest definitely in numbers and I think that for us, it's more moving from the of the S of the SMB into the M. It's just getting into the more mature. When you move from a solopreneur or a small team of 5 people into teams of 20 or 30 people, their spend capacity goes up exponentially, right? And when you get to enterprise, it's much, much larger. But I mean, the opportunity there and the fact that it's untapped is really incredible.
And again, I mean we're getting, asked about competition and things like that. And I want to stress and give the same answer that I've been giving for forever, when I started speaking with the market which is the huge opportunity ahead of us is the offline market. It's not going into competition with any existing platform online. Who cares? I mean we're all so small as platforms. Even if you eat someone else's lunch, you're not going to -- it's not going to make you that much more larger. So it's just a waste of time in terms of strategy. We're so focused on just the transitioning of this inefficient off-line activity of working with freelancers into the online. And we think that we have the perfect platform for it.
Eric Sheridan
So maybe just one more question in this area before we pivot. We've talked broadly your team and Ben Miller and I on my team about some of the analogies to how cloud computing grew up and how some of the freelance economy might grow up. When you look at something like Certified, is that really the way to think about it from an analogy standpoint, almost like private computing and private marketplaces could build up and there could be elements where there's bespoke solutions between the platform and the client that open up pools of opportunity for growth? Is that sort of the way we should be thinking about it?
Micha Kaufman
I think, it's an interesting. So just to explain the analogy between cloud computing and how we think about outsourcing or financing talent. Essentially, the point that I was making as we were talking about this, that there's a lot of similarities into, I remember how I started my first company when I was still coding and we hosted our computers on location. We had rock space, raw competing in our office and we had to buy new ones because they got outdated so fast and had to deal with their security and uptime and energy and everything.
And 20 years ago, 16 years ago, cloud computing became a thing and longer think about this, right? It's two lines of code and you get tapped into the best most up-to-date computers most powerful computers. Think about that in the context of just building a team, right? You build the team on location, right? You need to retain them. You need to make sure that they're up-to-date with the latest and greatest of technology and knowledge and everything. Or sometimes, if that team is not necessarily your core competence but they're complementary, that could be graphic design that could be marketing. It could be anything that is not core to your business, you can just tap the greatest talent that is available now and you can turn off later, is very flexible. It's always up-to-date which is kind of how we're thinking about this idea of like think about this in the sense of like a talent cloud or whatever it is and so I think that in that regard, this analogy makes sense.
A lot of the challenges that larger organizations have, even if you're an Amazon when you think about working with customers, your largest customers are being built by integrators, by partners, by -- they have solutions for that. But as you go down the market, there is very few to none ways of actually having or supporting SMBs in usage. So this opportunity of tapping into freelancing solutions as a way to offset the fact that you don't have a platform solution for SMBs. Just means that these companies can actually now entertain a huge cohort of companies that couldn't use their product before. Which I think for companies at those sizes is extremely strategic. And we're happy to be enablers for them.
Eric Sheridan
So great. And earlier this year, you also talked about elements of driving better discovery, catalog experience, improved engagement. Talk about how something like Fiverr Neo feeds into lowering friction and improving the experience around those themes on the platform longer term?
Micha Kaufman
Yes. What we're doing with Fiverr Neo is just incredible. Essentially, when you think about an E-commerce platform where there's supply demand, or whatever inventory and customers. The single largest challenge is matching. And don't confuse match with search. It's not the same thing. Search answers for very specific recall between a few keywords and something that answers or addresses these keywords, match is something very different. Matching requires understanding of context, right? Not just what those 2 or 3 keywords mean but who are you? And what are you trying to do? Because the type of match that you do for a solopreneur or a, I don't know, someone from the senior team of an enterprise business, even though they're kind of looking for the same service is not going to be the same match. And what we're doing with Fiverr Neo is really understanding context which is very, very hard to get from search.
People are pretty vague in how they use search. Because this is how we've been trained use it. But when you have a conversation with the customer and that conversation is delightful and surprising and funny. But most of all, it's very effective. It not only allows us to create an incredible math that we couldn't do before but it also allows us to learn so much about this customer. In that -- this idea of having this verified authenticated profile of a customer that we can use to then understand how we do cross-category pollination and how do we work with that customer over time to make sure that they make the most out of our platform is incredibly powerful.
And this would technologically, this was impossible before. It was just impossible. And so what we're doing with Fiverr Neo is hybrid of internal and external AI technologies that we're putting together, meshing together in a super ambitious way that provides a type of experience that is very different than speaking to ChatGPT. For example, it's probably more, it feels more like the experience of speaking with a super knowledgeable and friendly concierge or a partner. And it results with, I mean, we just started opening up to a few thousands of people and we're, it should be said and everybody should know this.
It should be said AI in GPT or LLM technology is incredibly powerful. It's not exactly production ready; it's slow. And it's just, we're seeing just the early innings of embracing this technology. So the amount of energy and talent that we need to put into making this work in a reasonable performance. That by itself was a huge undertaking which is exactly what the Fiverr team is all about.
It's solving for these types of problems. So I'm extremely excited that customers are excited. And I think that this will change E-commerce forever. I think that in a year time or in 2 years, you're going to look at Amazon the way it looks right down, you're, this is the '90s. It's like who uses that? Like who wants to see 200 different options for, they need to know who I am and what my preference is. And this is going to happen. It's no doubt. And we're enjoying the opportunity to pioneer in this space a little bit.
So this is a lot of fun. And I'm, it got me to go back to coding myself and doing super interesting product work with the team. So we're excited. We'll be happy to share more towards the next...
Eric Sheridan
Going forward. So Ofer, let's try to bring you into the conversation. We just talked a little bit about investing against long term. I feel like I ask you at least 2 or 3 times a year about margins on the public earnings call. So you've made pretty demonstrable progress on margins in over the last year. You've been through things like restructuring but you've also scaled the business in a way that looks very different than a year ago.
Talk about the margin path that the company is on? And striking the right balance between getting those investments right versus expanding your margins and meeting some of those medium to long-term goals?
Ofer Katz
Yes. I will start by saying that we manage a pretty lean team. With a high level of discipline that allow us to expand when there is an opportunity and slow down when the market is softer. And I think that's what we've been doing over the last few years, whoever knows us when we went public, we promised 25% margin in the long term. We tested 15% last quarter and there is a way to go but it's not too long. It's not long anymore. So I think not every quarter will be a step function in terms of change or improving EBITDA, like Q2, we expect the second half to improve but significantly slower. We are catching up within -- mainly on the R&D. And I think that the way we manage the investment and the expansion and performance marketing spend is sometimes a little bit opportunistic. And I think, again, the spike of the COVID is an excellent example where we doubled down when the market opened, price were reasonable, demand was rocket high for E-Commerce expansion and transition.
And it was a perfect place for us to grow faster and invest much more. So we didn't sacrifice EBITDA or free cash flow which sometimes or in most cases, is even better than EBITDA. We grow faster, we spend more. And I think that's what we anticipate to happen when macro turn around. I think that it's soft today. It won't be soft forever. Where the market allows us, when we see SMBs setting into the market with the appetite that we are used to, we are ready to invest more and grow fast. That's kind of what we anticipate in the next few quarters. We anticipate EBITDA. There is a new baseline which is where we are, it's going to be only better. But it depends, this growth of 55%, depends on the growth of the company. And I think there will be some balance between the two.
Eric Sheridan
Great. And then just bring Kaufam in the last minute, some of the key investments you feel the platform needs to make over the next 24 months against your broader long-term growth goals?
Micha Kaufman
Essentially, it's been very consistent with the investment that we've been making since we pitched on the road show for the IPO. It's going upmarket, it's extending the catalog. It's going more international. And recently, with the investment in the in the Fiverr Business Solutions, we think that this is going to be, this is going to play a key role down the road.
Eric Sheridan
Great. Well, please help me and join thanking the Fiverr team for being part of the conference.
Question-and-Answer Session
End of Q&A
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Fiverr International Ltd. (FVRR) Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference (Transcript)