Fiverr shares rocketed ahead by roughly 30% on Wednesday morning (Oct. 30) after third-quarter results highlighted that programs geared toward encouraging buyers to spend more — as they seek freelancers for “complex” projects — are bearing fruit.
And, as been seen with past earnings reports, ongoing and upcoming artificial intelligence (AI)-driven initiatives to efficiently match buyers and workers remain front and center.
The company’s earnings release and related materials noted that revenues were above guided range for the quarter, up 8% year on year to $99.6 million.
Though active buyers were down 9% to 3.8 million, the company noted that spend per buyer was $296, up 9%.
CEO Micha Kaufman said in his remarks that buyers are coming to the company to meet the needs of “larger and more complex” projects. The recently rolled out Business Rewards Program on Fiverr Pro is showing what he said were “encouraging signs” to boost spending from its larger customers. The company’s Dynamic Matching, an AI-powered tool to bring buyers and talent together, along with Professions Catalog and Hourly-Based Contracts, said the CEO, are enabling what he termed an “end to end experience” for those client firms.
“We have seen promising signals that indicate buyers with bigger and longer projects naturally gravitate towards the new Professions Catalog, converting better, getting matched with better quality sellers, and are more likely to return for another project,” he said.
The growth has come, he said, despite the fact that “the entire professional staffing industry is down double digit year over year, and overall SMB sentiment still lingers around historically low levels.”
As he added during the call, “with the emergence of GenAI and the promise of AGI, the next generation of products we build must empower our community to fully leverage artificial intelligence. It also became clear to me that in the future, the best work will be done by humans and AI technology together, not humans alone or AI alone.” He contended that “every business that comes to Fiverr will have a world class AI assistant to help them get things done from ideation scoping and briefing to product management and workflow automation.”
CFO Ofer Katz said on the call that the company is seeing “some level of stabilization [in the market] since the volatility we experienced in June and July.”
During the question-and-answer session, Kaufman stated that though, as evidenced in September and October, “there has been some improvement at the top of funnel, [there’s] nothing we can call a trend at this point. And just as a reminder, we’re just a few days away from election. There’s a lot of seasonality coming in — and things that that might create fluctuations in in trend.”
In terms of the longer-term strategy, he said, the company is “moving up market and we’re entertaining larger customers with higher budgets for freelancing.” Dynamic Mapping, said Kaufman, “allows customers to be more nuanced specific and detailed about the types of projects that they need … [matching them] with very specific type of talent which saves them the trouble of going through and filtering talent — and get tailored proposals.”
With discussion of AutoDS, which manages over 150 million products and serves tens of thousands of subscribers, management noted that the business has contributed positively to the “take rate” for the company, defined as the percentage of the total purchase value that Fiverr charges as it matches buyers and sellers.
“It’s still a small business,” said Kaufman, adding that “we’re happy with the performance and it’s a great addition to the in-house tools that we’ve built.”
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