Fiverr International Ltd. (NYSE:FVRR) Q1 2020 Earnings Call Summary Highlights
Micha Kaufman, CEO
“….For buyers, Fiverr is a place to build and expand their online presence even if they don’t have the skills or tools to do so themselves. It is a place to find the team and collaborate even when hiring an employee becomes impossible.
And it is a place for businesses to get more things done with more efficient budgets and resources. For sellers, Fiverr is an increasingly important source of income as we enable them to find remote work opportunities, engage with their clients and deliver digital services all without leaving their homes. In our COVID-19 update to shareholders in early April, we mentioned how our business experienced a brief period of volatility in mid-March and quickly rebounded and resumed strong growth within a couple of weeks. Since then, we have continued to gain significant momentum every week across all cohorts, all verticals and all geographies.
Weekly GMV on our core marketplace has accelerated on a year-over-year basis for every week in April for a total of six consecutive weeks since mid-March. We hit all-time daily revenue records four times in April, despite the fact that April typically is not a seasonally strong month with Easter holidays. All of our existing cohorts have rebounded strongly from March volatility, not only back to their historical pattern of contributing a consistent stream of revenue, but also beyond those levels with increasing revenues. We believe this resiliency underscores the loyalty of our existing buyer base.
We are also experiencing a strong uplift on new buyer acquisition, driven by an unprecedented jump in organic awareness and attractive opportunities in performance marketing. All verticals have rebounded with similar trends to the overall market pace. And we have seen particular strength in categories related to moving businesses from off-line to online as well as digital content-related categories such as gaming, social media, online lessons and e-books. Last but not least, we are seeing the strength of our business, not only in the U.S.
But across the world, especially in several European countries where our timely investment in local expansion was in place right around the time when global stay at home orders intensified. Both new sellers’ and new buyers’ registration have been particularly strong in Spain and France in recent weeks. I’m incredibly grateful and proud of the resilience, adaptability and dedication of our team across the world. Circumstances evolved rapidly.
And not only did our team rise to the occasion in terms of executing numerous initiatives to help our buyers and sellers navigate through COVID-19, but they also succeeded in executing our existing road map, often ahead of schedule. Complex and groundbreaking products such as promoted gigs and machine translation to localize our user-generated content were successfully rolled out. Beautiful marketing campaigns were created and executed even when everything in the original plan had to be scrapped due to the global travel bans. A record number of community events with a record number of global participants were hosted virtually during the quarter at the time when social distancing has cut down our human interaction everywhere.
To ensure that we leave enough time to take your questions, we have included a detailed account of our extensive list of initiatives following the COVID-19 outbreak in our letter to shareholders. Our team has demonstrated the strength of our culture by moving smoothly to the stay at home reality and embracing the responsibility we have to our community in these testing times. I will be happy to take questions regarding our approach to helping our community. While the future is in many ways still uncertain, when we take a step back and look at the ways COVID-19 has touched Fiverr, our buyers, our sellers and the way we enable work, we have never been more confident about our mission, our business model and our growth path forward.
Fiverr’s mission of connecting businesses and freelancers around the world and enabling remote work to be done digitally through our platform has never been more critical. As the crisis reinforces and accelerates the trends toward adopting remote work and moving businesses online, we believe our marketplace is well positioned to both address current needs and to be a key resource when the economy reaccelerates. We run a horizontal marketplace with one of the largest service catalogs in the world. Our revenue diversification across all the categories and our ability to identify market trends and expand our catalog to meet those trends quickly provide us with a tremendous amount of defensibility and growth ammunition given the constantly evolving user preference and macro environment.
We enjoy an expansive and well-diversified global buyer base that stays active with us and contributes to the continuous and durable revenue streams for a very long time. Our bottom-up approach of our go-to-market strategy is highly viral, and we enjoy increasing word-of-mouth benefits as we scale. Our agile data-driven and efficient marketing strategy also allows us to find, target and acquire relevant buyers without the need of a sales force or a long sales cycle. Talent is global, and so is the demand for talent.
Our recent progress on international expansion and the encouraging results in those countries continues to reaffirm this belief and signals the huge market opportunity globally. We are taking a disciplined approach and developing a repeatable playbook in order to drive long-term and sustainable growth in those countries. Fiverr celebrated its 10th anniversary in February, and there was much to celebrate. But we have barely scratched the surface of the large opportunity ahead of us.”