Fiverr International Ltd (FVRR) 2020 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the Fiverr Second Quarter Fiscal 2020 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jinjin Qian. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us on Fiverr's earnings conference call for the second quarter ended June 30, 2020. Please note that this call is being webcast on the Investor Relations section of the company's website. Full details of our results and additional management commentary are available in our shareholder letter, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.fiverr.com.

Joining me today on the call are Micha Kaufman, Founder and CEO; and Ofer Katz, CFO.

Before we start, I'd like to remind you that certain matters discussed today are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to future events and/or the future financial performance of Fiverr. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in those forward-looking statements. Additional information that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in Fiverr's periodic public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including those factors discussed under the Risk Factors section in Fiverr's 20-F filed with the SEC. The forward-looking statements in this conference call are based on the current expectations as of today, and Fiverr assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise.

And now I will turn the call over to Micha.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call today. We hope that you are all keeping safe and healthy. The past few months have been one of the most productive and rewarding times in our company's history. The strategies that we have put in place and our strong execution during the global pandemic is what has allowed us to achieve such an outstanding quarterly performance, with revenue growing 82% year-over-year to reach $47.1 million. This is the strongest quarterly growth we have had since 2012, and over $10 million or nearly 30% above the top end of our guidance. With this stronger-than-anticipated top line growth, we also achieved EBITDA profitability 3 years ahead of our expectation at the IPO and many quarters ahead of our expectations as communicated just a few months ago. While it is incredibly satisfying to see our business accelerate, it is equally rewarding to know that our success is a direct result of the success of our community. More and more businesses are transforming to digital-first using Fiverr and more and more freelancers are provided with opportunities to generate income. It is an incredible privilege to be able to be there for our community in these challenging times.

During the second quarter, inclusion and diversity were brought to the forefront of discussions worldwide. At Fiverr, age, gender, ethnicity or visibility do not play a role in determining your success. You are judged only on the quality of your work. We take special pride in being one of the most inclusive and diverse communities online. We lead by these principle 365 days a year, and we are proud of the positive social impact our business is making on the lives of so many. The outstanding Q2 results benefited from several strategies we have put in place. We stepped up the localization efforts at the beginning of the year. And since then, have launched 5 non-English speaking websites and started to ramp local PR and performance marketing investments. We also streamlined internal operations of supply management in terms of catalog expansion, seller onboarding as well as quality management. These investments turned out to be timely when the COVID-19 hit as we were able to respond to the global trends and remote work and digital transformation much more effectively. These efforts also resulted in a significant increase in brand searches, Fiverr's share of voice and strong uplift in Fiverr's brand awareness, which led to an 80% year-over-year increase in overall organic traffic. When COVID-19 hit, we quickly responded in several ways. We leaned in on performance marketing opportunities, investing more dollars with better tROI and marketing efficiency and acquiring higher lifetime value buyers. Strong trends on both organic and pay channels resulting in a record level of net add of active buyers on the marketplace. We've also seen existing cohorts spending more during the past few months. On average, existing cohorts grew monthly GMV levels by 10% from January to June this year. And we expect the elevated spend level to continue into the third quarter.

We are super happy with the Q2 execution, and I'm incredibly proud of the team for their focus, dedication and amazing creativity. That said, I'm even more excited about what's ahead of us. The inflection point on the adoption of remote work, which many of you have asked us about in the past is within sight. The awareness, openness and emphasis on remote work and digital transformation has taken a multiyear leap for the entire business community. And for us, what will Fiverr look like 5 years down the road, another question we often hear is now clearer than ever. There are 3 key components when we envision making Fiverr to the next level. First, a path to going upmarket for both supply and demand in our marketplace. On the buyers side, not only is Fiverr relevant for entrepreneurs, individual contributors and office heroes, but we will become a working hub for teams inside companies and businesses to collaborate with external resources integrated into their day-to-day workflow.

On the seller side, not only is Fiverr an important channel for freelancers and individual talent, but we will also become partners and distribution channel for agencies, consultancies and other service providers. With that in mind, we launched Fiverr Business in beta, a dedicated environment for businesses and teams to transact and collaborate on Fiverr. This is going to be a long-term investment for us, and we are just at the very beginning. We also acquired a boutique digital marketing agency recently, and with that, onboarded Ms. Sharon Lee to help us drive the agency upmarket initiatives on the supply side. Not only is Sharon a domain expert in our target agency market, she is also a heavy Fiverr user and an avid Fiverr community leader. Many of you may have seen her picture on the New York marketing campaign last year.

Second, we are building a global brand with a global footprint, global share of voice and a global business. Our investments in localization and into non-English websites have proved to be very timely. It is more apparent than ever that the needs for remote work and digital transformation is global and that the potential market outside of English-speaking countries is huge. We believe international expansion will continue to be a key strategy for Fiverr going forward. Third, we are building Fiverr, not only as a transaction platform, but an ecosystem for businesses and freelancers to grow and thrive. You have seen us launch Fiverr Learn, an e-learning module on Fiverr. You've seen us acquire and expand and.co, a back office tool for freelancers to manage their contracting and invoicing. You've seen us introduce Promoted Gigs, an advertising tools that allows sellers to step up their marketing. You've also seen us integrate collaboration tools such as Zoom into our marketplace. We are also building financial tools to help freelancers get early payouts on their earnings. These are just a few examples of the value-added services that we started to work on and there are many more in the pipeline.

While the development of COVID-19 and the global macro conditions remain highly uncertain, the data we have seen on our marketplace across cohorts, verticals and geographies over the past few months indicate that the elevated spending trend on digital transformation are going to stay for months, if not for years. What has also become clearer over the past few months is that the global pandemic has fundamentally changed how businesses reach their customers and how work takes place. And these changes will last far beyond the pandemic itself. We have built our business from day 1 to promote remote work, to enable digital transformation and to create a leveled playing built for every talent. And these opportunities have been pushed forward and are now more relevant than ever. We believe we are well positioned to take advantage of these opportunities with our vision, strategy and strong execution ability. And now, with becoming profitable, also more resources to put in place to drive towards these opportunities.

On that note, I'm going to turn it over to Ofer, who will share a few Q2 highlights as well as some color for the rest of the year. Ofer?

Thank you, Micha, and good morning, everyone. The past few months have been very exciting for our business. In Q2, revenue grew 82% year-over-year to $47.1 million. The revenue growth is the strongest we have ever seen since 2012. We benefited from the global trend towards remote work and digital transformation, but more importantly, the strategies that we put in place and the strong execution of those strategies is what allowed us to capitalize on the tailwind. During the quarter, active buyer achieved a record level of net adds, reaching a total of 2.8 million, driven by a strong trend on both organic and paid channels, as Micha highlighted earlier. tROI for the quarter was slightly above 1x, an improvement from Q1. We were able to remain highly efficient in our use of marketing dollars, and at the same time, expanding our sales and marketing expenses by about $5 million from Q1. Spend per buyer was $184, an increase of 18% year-over-year, driven by both new and existing cohorts. As businesses accelerated their pace in investing in digital transformation, we have seen older cohorts grow their monthly GMV level on average by 10% since the beginning of the year. We expect their spend to remain at this elevated level going forward.

On the other hand, we continue to expand the lifetime value of our new cohorts as we target buyers with bigger budgets and bigger businesses.

Take rate for Q2 was 27%, improving 60 basis points year over year, driven by an increased revenue mix from value-added services such as Fiverr Learn and.co and ClearVoice. When compared sequentially with Q1, take rate was down modestly by 10 basis points. This is mainly due to the exceptional growth of our core marketplace compared to these value-added services. Note that the core marketplace take rate remains stable at 25%, and our fee structure for buyers and sellers continues to be uniform across transaction size, geography and categories. As the mix of core versus noncore services on our platform fluctuates, the blended take rate may also modestly fluctuate.

We continued our global expansion efforts, non-English speaking markets continued to increase contribution to our marketplace, led by Germany, Austria and France with 3-digit growth rates during the quarter. We've also seen strong trends across all verticals, led by Programming & Tech with 3-digit growth rate driven by strength around e-commerce and website development. We are also pleased to see our existing cohorts expand their spend level over the past few months as they turn to our marketplace when they need digitizing their business and more services through remote arrangement. This speaks to the strength and loyalty of our cohort base. Not only does it generate a consistent stream of revenue for a very long time, but it also has potential to grow with the overall market trends.

We achieved an important milestone in reaching EBITDA profitable in Q2, significantly ahead of our expectations. Q2 EBITDA was $3.1 million, representing EBITDA margin of 6.7%. While we believe we will remain profitable at this revenue level, our priority continues to be driving revenue growth. Therefore, we intend to continue to invest in our product development road map and marketing initiatives, and by being profitable, we can make those investments on a more aggressive time line.

During the quarter, we became more aggressive in buyer acquisition as we saw attractive opportunities in performance marketing, not only did we invest more, we were able to do so with better efficiency. We noticed that the investments we made in localization was timely, and the pandemic was driving countries around the world to come to Fiverr, so we doubled down during the quarter, accelerating the pace of opening new countries and adding Italy and Netherlands to our portfolio. We also saw a surging amount of sellers coming to the platform as we became one of their primary sources of income that include individual freelancers as well as boutique agencies.

As a result, we decided to push forward the agency investments on our road map, made a strategic acquisition, and began building out a dedicated team and a concrete road map for the agency initiatives.

These are just a few examples, and we have many more in the pipeline but they are too early to talk about at this point.

All these efforts took place in just short few months as our business accelerated from a 40% grower to an 80% grower and reached profitability, and as we saw the fundamental changes that COVID-19 has brought to the overall business community. The speed at which we are responding to the change of our business profile and to the inflection point of our industry, speaks to the clear vision and strong execution ability of the company. As we said many times before, the majority of our growth is still ahead of us, and we will continue to invest our incremental dollars into product and marketing to drive growth of the business.

Looking forward, while the long-term impact of COVID-19 remains highly uncertain, we are confident to provide strong Q3 guidance and also significantly raise our full year guidance. The strength of our existing cohorts and the confidence of these cohorts sustaining at an elevated level of spending, sets a strong baseline for our guidance. In addition, we expect the attractive window of investing in performance marketing to remain open and we expect to continue investing with high efficiency. We also expect to invest aggressively in products and marketing to drive long-term initiatives, as I mentioned before. With all of that in mind, we expect Q3 revenue to be in the range of $48 million to $49 million, representing year over year growth of 72% to 76%. Adjusted EBITDA for Q3 is expected to be $2 million to $3 million, representing 5.2% of revenue at midpoint. We are raising full year revenue guidance to $177.5 million to $179.5 million or 66% to 68% year over year growth, up from prior guidance of $145.5 million to $147.5 million or

36% to 38% year over year growth. We are increasing full year EBITDA guidance to positive $4.5 million to $6.5 million, up from prior guidance of negative $9 million to negative $7 million.

With that, I will now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions)

And the first question will come from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan.

Great quarter, guys. A couple of questions. First Micha, just hoping you could talk more about the strategy to go upmarket on the Fiverr Business. Just curious more kind of the target size of businesses that you're focused on, some of the key investments that might be required there? And then if you could just talk about how the agencies fit in and the importance there on the distribution side? And then just second, maybe for Ofer, you talked about leaning in on higher LTV buyers. Hoping you could give us some more color just around active -- recent active Fiverr behavior versus existing cohorts? And how you expect that to play out going forward?

Doug, so thanks for the question. The first one, in terms of going upmarket. So it is important to understand that as you look at the diversity of our customers, we have customers ranging from solopreneurs and micro businesses up to small, medium and large businesses. Now as you go higher into the larger businesses or medium-sized businesses, oftentimes, these businesses interact is having multiple accounts.

Sometimes it's complete teams that interact on the platform. And what we realized was that in order to maximize the potential of their usage, we need to accommodate by building a more advanced product that will allow them to have team accounts, that will have some benefits of being able to share their trusted sellers between themselves as a team and work on projects together. And obviously, things like having account permissions and having a paid source with permissions of purchasing, these are all functionalities that we wanted to add into the product.

And these are the types of features that we're now releasing in beta and will officially release later into the quarter in September. So essentially, these are the types of functions. And we think that it's important to facilitate the natural movement up market that we have been seeing in -- for many quarters. Now the part of the -- or the part the agencies are playing here is -- and again, when you look at the diversity of our supply, not all of our sellers are individuals.

Some of them are boutique shops or studios or agencies. And we would like to ensure that agencies can operate on the platform in a very efficient manner. And again, these are oftentimes multiple accounts that are operating and need to work on a specific project. And so we decided to invest in that because this allows us to tackle more complex types of projects and also deal with load of work that oftentimes is easier for an agency to deal with. So around that, we have acquired a small boutique agency. And we are going to use the learnings from that agency and incorporate them into the types of features that we would like to take into the agency accounts on the platform.

(inaudible) of the question, Doug. Leaning into performance marketing and higher lifetime value, what we have experienced during Q2 is a windows of opportunity for us to double down on performance marketing, investing approximately $5 million above Q1, while keeping and even improving the tROI, which end up to be more than 1x return on investment for the quarter. Now this is driven by a syndicate of a factors. I think I will start by saying that the organic traffic has been very strong over the quarter. It happened soon after the outbreak of the COVID at the end of the last quarter and will continue a lot of way to July. So that by having continuance by our very strong buyer traffic, we were able to increase the investment while keeping a very efficient cost structure, that's one factor. The second is that existing [pool], we're able to increase the spend on the marketplace during the quarter comparing previous period. So that what we've seen is that not only that recent cohort enjoy a high lifetime value, as that existing cohorts -- all cohorts from previous year has increased their investment and spend on the marketplace on an average of 10%. So that we are focused on lifetime value and highlight the value for a long period. We've been able to increase lifetime value by focus on business buyer and by product initiatives. And I think that this quarter is nothing exceptional of the contrary. I think that the fact that categories are following the tax experienced a triple-digit growth enable us to increase the overall spend per buyer all the way to $184, 18% growth year over year, and this is coming despite the fact of record-breaking number of new buyers. And bear in mind that when we see a record-breaking number of new buyers that are active in the marketplace for considerably short period of 3 months while the spend per buyer has been calculated on our post (inaudible) period. So that that's kind of indication for the trend. We see a lifetime value and [resend] the new cohort.

And the next question will come from Ron Josey with JMP Securities.

I had two really quickly. Just on categories, it's pretty amazing quarter, Micha and Ofer, across buyers and the strength across some of the categories. You talked about e-commerce tripling and gaining up 9x. Can you talk about the supply side, particularly from a freelancer perspective as brand improves, but also as demand goes up? And what you're doing to just -- if you need to amp up the supply side on freelancers. And then second question is just on Promoted Listings. I know the plan has always been relatively slow rollout of the product. You're now in 15 categories, 2 ad slots. Can you just talk a little bit more about the rollout plans here? What you've learned since the April launch? And maybe what percentage of the freelancers actually qualify to actually have Promoted Gigs? And lastly, Ofer, that's included in guidance now or still in the testing phase. Great quarter.

So for the first question, in terms of supply. So we are seeing elevated levels of supply coming in. And obviously, we are investing a lot in making sure that, that supply enjoys access to our demand. In terms of categories, indeed, anything related to taking businesses online, website, e-commerce development, website development, social media marketing, content creation and so forth have seen tremendous growth.

Actually, the largest was programming that grew triple digit. But that said, all of our verticals, without exception, grew between very high double digits to triple digits. So we've seen that growth across the board. In terms of performance marketing -- sorry, in terms of Promoted Gigs, it is scaling as planned. We did say that, I mean, I think just a few months ago, we were just launching it in 5 categories. It's now up in 15.

We've extended the areas in which we put Promoted Gigs in. We've increased the number of slots, and we've opened it up to more sellers. But we are doing it gradually. And we've explained that the reason for doing that is that it's very important, as you launch such a product, that both the relevancy of those Promoted Gigs and the quality of those gigs are going to be very high. And indeed, seeing that these numbers actually follow these guidelines for the first 5 categories, we started increasing that across other categories. We're not giving the exact -- we're not providing the exact percentages of sellers that can qualify to it, but the guidelines for which services are exposed or can qualify are outlined in our website, and we're going to be happy to share that with you after the call. But essentially, we are extending it. It's not just the amount of categories and the amount of sellers, it's the placements within the website. It is adding -- opening an ad engine in an e-commerce website is very complex. And it's a task that we need to do carefully. But we are expanding as planned. And we'll continue providing more color on that in the upcoming calls. It is going as planned. It is being expanded as we speak.

And the next question is from Brad Erickson with Needham & Company.

Just a couple. So on the upmarket initiatives, I guess a couple of questions there. One, I know the beta is just rolling out or it sounds like the beta is just rolling out based on your commentary. But just curious what you kind of expect to find and definitely curious if there's any sort of view that you can sort of aggregate demand with that product versus the sum of the parts, or is that too ambitious? And second, is it fair to assume that the up market initiative and sort of the halo effects that you can drive here? Can that serve as an additional organic customer acquisition tool that might be a tailwind for you here as you roll it out later this fall? Any thoughts there?

Thanks for the questions. So as we think about these larger types of customers, obviously, this allows us to cater to customers that have a much larger wallet. And we want to make sure that we gain a larger wallet share. And so by opening up these features that allow these businesses to actually invite their teams to use the platform in a way that integrates with their workflows is extremely important in making sure that we optimize for this experience. And so we definitely think that this would allow us to capture more of these business activity as they work with freelancers. And actually, even more now when the awareness is elevated to the opportunity of working with freelancers and definitely working with them online through the efficiency of our marketplace.

Now as a reminder, Fiverr does not have a sales force, and we don't intend to put one in place anytime soon. So as we think about onboarding more of these types of customers, a lot of what we're doing right now is optimizing the funnel. The onboarding funnels that would allow us to use our existing marketing methods that are a combination of brand marketing and performance marketing to onboard these types of customers into the platform very efficiently without having a sales cycle involved. So we're very excited about that because we think that this has tremendous opportunity, not to say that we are anywhere near consuming the small-sized businesses opportunity worldwide. We feel that we're just starting, and we're -- what we're seeing with the growth that we've been able to demonstrate this quarter is that the road ahead or the opportunity ahead to capture more of that market is huge. But we think that as we do that, it's important that we also tackle the slightly larger types of businesses and make sure that we build the right products for them to efficiently interact with our marketplace.

(Operator Instructions)

The next question will come from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

I'll ask about take rates. Trailing 12 months take rates were down quarter-to-quarter. Just maybe expand upon that, how you're thinking about that? Was there any impacts, kind of onetime impacts that could have brought that down sequentially? And how are you thinking about

(technical difficulty)

And then a second follow up. Gross margins improved to 84%, is this rate sustainable or more onetime in nature?

Thanks for the questions. So you're right to point. Take rate, if you look quarter after quarter, have been going down from 27.1% to 27%, so it's a very, very small decrease. And we've actually explained that in our letter to shareholders. The reason why it is decreasing, as a reminder, the way take rate is being built is we have the core business, the transactional business that represents 25% out of that 27%, and the rest are added-value products and services. The reality is that the core business has grown slightly faster, slightly higher than the added value services. So if our core business has grown by 80 plus percent, the added value services have grown in the high 70s percent. So if you combine that together, you lose that 0.1%. And we've explained that, that type of fluctuation, especially in months when there is such a -- in quarters where there is such a tremendous growth in the core business, might happen. If you think how to model this going forward, we don't expect this to go down. The same trends that you've seen throughout the quarter as the company was -- has gone public, is going to remain in the same trend. We don't expect it to go down.

And then on the second part of the question on the gross margin. I think that 84% gross margin is a higher accrual for us. And it is substantial, [substantiable] yet to be said. We enjoy a very strong quarter, and we are investing further in recruitment field to support and to invest in future initiatives. We don't expect the gross margin to stay at 84% in the long run. We did mention in the past that we feel very comfortable north of 80%, but we do expect the 84% to decline a little bit in the next 12 months or so.

Our next question will then come from Eric Sheridan with UBS.

Maybe I'll go back to Ron's and just think out over maybe a longer-term horizon. How should we think about the possibility to scale and grow the marketing side of the platform so that sellers are getting the distribution they want? You're gaining increased unit economics from sellers as they work to promote themselves more and drive more conversion on the platform. What tools still need to be invested in against your longer-term goals for that part of the business? And is there sort of a long-term goal we should be thinking about either in terms of what you think you could grow that part of the business into? Or how much you can amplify the margin contribution over the medium to long term?

I think that what we've demonstrated in the past few quarters is that wherever we see an opportunity to scale up our marketing efforts, we are capturing that opportunity. And we do it in a very efficient manner while also improving the overall efficiency of marketing as a percentage of our revenues. But we have scaled up our marketing significantly. And we've done it in many ways from our work in brand marketing to our work on the affiliation front. What we do with influencer marketing and social marketing to performance marketing on many channels. And side-by-side with that, we are providing our sellers with the ability to promote themselves within the platform and outside of the platform to ensure that they maximize the exposure that they receive. On top of that, what we are doing on the supply side is developing tools that allows sellers to get enough exposure to have the flywheel effect of supply and demand kick in. And these are areas where we invest a lot. We do that by providing the right algorithms for that and by providing the right vertical structure of our catalog to ensure that our sellers have the right area, the right category in which they compete for our buyers' demand.

And your last question will come from Nat Schindler with Bank of America.

I'll be redundant and say great quarter because that's pretty obvious. But can you talk a little bit about what you saw in the change in seller cohorts? Or if there has been a -- specifically, as the change in the dynamic and whether or not sellers are people with other jobs that happen to be working at home and filling that -- filling excess time that they, I don't know, might have been commuting with gigs on Fiverr? Or are they just more people because people are not able to work.

Thanks for the question. So we're definitely seeing a mixture of everything. I think that as lockdowns actually change, you see change in those trends as well. And the same goes with unemployment. I think that what we're seeing is a mixture of, obviously, the same types of cohorts that we use to get on the supply side, accompanied by people that either lost their jobs or just, as you said, spending more time at home and thinking about what to do with their time or their career. The quality of the supply that we're seeing is definitely elevated. We started speaking about that in the previous earnings, and we mentioned that. And those levels are keeping the same into Q2 and as far as we can see into the current quarter as well. So we are definitely seeing more qualified sellers that we believe -- freelancers, that we believe used to do most of their work off-line by meeting clients in person, and because of the limitations right now, are getting more open to the options of doing things online. And I think they love it. They find it to be extremely efficient. They can do it from the comfort of where ever they are, and they can do work on much higher scale because of the efficiency that marketplace introduces. So we're definitely happy that the point that we always made about the fact that the majority of freelancing is happening off-line is starting to get a different trend, a change in trends. And we're very happy that we're there to capture that opportunity.

And just going off on that point, is -- are some of these kind of more professional freelancers and agency groups that are using it? Are they pushing back at all? I mean the earlier example of maybe a graphic designer in Eastern Europe getting a customer in New York City, that person does not care what the take rate is because that's new business. But these professional agency types that are using the business now, are they having any pushback on the 25%?

Yes. So not as far as we can see right now. And I think what's really interesting here is the fact that the more sophisticated they become -- if you look at agencies, agencies appreciate how hard it is to source clients. They appreciate how hard it is to do the technicalities that have to do with the work that have nothing to do with the work itself. And because of that, I think that by onboarding Fiverr, they understand the benefits of just sitting there and waiting for us to bring them the customers, qualified customers that already paid, so they understand us. So we're not getting any pushback.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question-and-answer session, and thus concludes today's call. Thank you for joining Fiverr's Second Quarter Fiscal 2020 Earnings Call. You may now disconnect your lines. Take care.