Fiverr IPO’s at $700M valuation | Hacker News Reader

Fiverr IPO’s at $700M valuation

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120 pointstwmahna91 comments

Fiverr is effectively a spam factory. I would be curious to see the breakdown of its most popular offerings. How many of them are legitimately creative tasks, and how many are "I will post your link to fifty web 2.0 sites?" More importantly, how much revenue can Fiverr attribute to these "gigs" that are borderline legal? Their F-1 filing does not mention it as a risk factor. [0]

This website has its roots in the gray-hat side of the SEO and affiliate marketing industries. It's shocking to see it valued at $700M. Surely we are in a bubble?

[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1762301/000104746919...

I spent $500 usd on Fiverr in the last month getting design done, getting studio musicians and rappers recording parts for music. Previously had full animated videos made there. It's pretty great.

How do you ensure quality? I usually find 4-5 people for the same tasks and 1 or 2 are in the end to my expectations.

Aren't the prices usually low enough that you can have the work done multiple times and choose the best one?

Yep, it's pretty much the way you do discovery of quality work in this sort of market.

I've commissioned vector artwork from 3-4 people and just picked the best one, and then kept working with that person going forward.

That's my approach. Want a logo for a project? Get it done by five different people instead of having one person do a few iterations. Over time of course you find people you'll go back to for specific types of work.

That's usually how it normally works with creative agencies in the industry. You brief them and they come up with a creative work, but there's always several rounds of back-and-forth to get refine it to the point you want it at.

Do you pay all the prices, then I don't know that it would be cheap. Do you not pay the ones you don't choose, then I'm not sure it's ethical.

At some point, I needed a logo for my hobby website. Nothing fancy, just better than what I could cook up with my non-existent creative skills.

I asked 5 different people on Fiver to create one for $5 each and chose the best one.

This is obviously an example on the low end, but you could expand this to the $500 dollar range per designer for a full website template and still end up with a decent looking thing for $2500.

I do but having to weed out the obvious template modifiers first is very annoying. In particular for design tasks (logos, infographics, etc) you have to look through at least 20 profiles before getting an idea on who is having original ideas and who is just modifying the same 50 templates over and over again.

I review their portfolio and create a sample task to see how communication goes along and then if I am satisfied I place real order. It is not expensive so I can try few people before commiting to some more work. I find this website extremely helpful. I also like that this website enables artists from impoverished countries make living.

Like you said, it’s uncertain what % of the gigs are of the spammy variety. That said, we’ve used it for a lot of design work and manual processes.

There are some interesting videos showcasing what you can get from fiverr. I enjoyed these two: search for "samuraiguitarist fiverr" and "draw with jazza fiverr".

This guy hired some people of fiverr to do a CSGO highlight video, I thought it was fairly interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDIA87zLN_Y

May be but it does offer value to many of us. My wife used it extensively to help her proofreading her academic work, design better quality graphs and so on.

I used it to hire folks to record weird happy birthday wishes for my friends.

I am not surprised they are valued at 700M, I expect them to be in this business for a long time.

I've used it to hire editors, but most used it for lead generation. They would agree to do a very small job for $5 to comply with fiverr's requirements but anything over that generated referrals to an offsite rate card.

I get spam emails all the time with links to shady fiverr gigs. Usually goes something like:

Hi, I wanted to let you know that your site has a lot of porn and gambling spam. Please get in touch to me to have removed. If you dont contact, there will be more porn spam and your site will be dead. So no waste time and order my gig now <fiverr link>

Not sure about the spam, but I regularly do jobs and for the money I pay, the value is great. I also think they streamlined the experience pretty well. I personally use the shotgun approach sometimes where I hire multiple designers and just use the result that I like the most.

I just spent $60 for some quick image work we needed, worked well and it is easier than trying to find someone long term.

What are you talking about? There are so many legit people offering legit services there. Yes, many of them are first timers, but their site clearly lets you choose people based on reviews and ratings.

How much of the "spam" is actually gigs to get thru big tech's anti-scrape filters?

Youtube started as an easy place to watch pirated movies.

Out of interest years ago, I spend $20 on a few different gigs that offered link building, the results were actually amazing. (Not in a good way)

They usually offer to post links for a couple of days, and sure enough, right on the dot, you can see traffic flowing in, once the period is over, it suddenly stops. Of course all traffic came from AWS or Google Cloud. I confronted one of the guys with the data I saw, he then decided to just keep one of his virtual machines up, and drive fake traffic to my site for months.

I did have some good results with some tedious data scraping tasks. But you have to explicitly tell them what you want, and in what format.

What is link building supposed to be?

It's mostly to give your domain more authority (thus making it rank higher) by putting your link on various other sites. Of course in reality, you want your link to be on other sites with relevant content.

Also use Fiverr, and you can find quality designers with portfolios from Dribbble and even some developers that are competent. You have to dig deep but the quality is there. The negative attitude in this thread is misplaced. Not sure where it is coming from.

For example, I use an iOS developer that charges me $50/hr on Fiverr, and I'm willing to put him against any Google or Facebook developer for quality and exceeding expectations. Although, I will admit that he is a rare find on Fiverr.

> developer that charges me $50/hr

> any Google or Facebook developer for quality and exceeding expectations

Something about basic economics tells me that's an exaggeration. But I do agree with your point that there are hidden talents to be found on sites like Fiverr.

Its most likely geographical arbitrage

Do you usually find salary to be a strong indicator of skill?

What part of basic economics tells you this?

I could think of a few ways that this makes total sense.

$50 is $400 in an 8 hour day. There are places where $1000-1500 covers you for the month, even with non-local, white guy pricing.

My hourly comes out to "only" $20/hr more, but my apartment alone is likely a few hundred more than this guy's entire monthly expense profile.

He's going to get consistent work at this price point, so he won't have to hustle for contacts. That's more time billed or spent on the beach.

Stepping away from the economics and getting into comparison to Google/FB engineers, there are tons of people that could outproduce many Google engineers in a startup setting. They just aren't good at Leetcode problems or never took a shot at FB/Google. A lot of stuff just works as an engineer at Google that you don't get for free elsewhere. They're good at leveraging the output of some truly amazing engineers across their org. They're also generally overstaffed.

> There are places where $1000-1500 covers you for the month, even with non-local, white guy pricing.

This is hilarious. There are places were $300 covers you for the month. I was paying $7 a day rent at a hotel at one stage.

a lot of good dev in europe (not only eastern europe) can only dream about $50/hr. A lot of would be willing to work for even less to have a comfort of working remotely from anywhere.

Freelance devs in North Europe costs around 105 USD per hour.

Most of the world's developers earn less than $50 an hour.

Another example of the HN bubble.

Assuming you can get 1800 hours worth of work a year for $50/hour, that’s $90K a year. That puts you at the 84 percentile of individual income in the US.

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

If I were living in a smaller city like the one I came from, $50/hour would lead to a very comfortable life.

Heck, because of $poor_career_choices, I didn’t make $90K until 15 years in my career and by then I had a big house in the burbs (not the most affluent area of town but I was single. I didn’t care about the school system it was safe enough)

Have you tried using upwork? Reason I ask is I’m surprised to hear you can find quality reliable technical consulting on fiverr.

We tried using Dribbble at one point to hire designers (ft and project based). Maybe it’s just been our bad luck, but I really think there is something about Dribbble that seems to attract people who think they are at a very different place in their career than their experience, knowledge, skill level or ability to deliver would justify. It’s almost a weird, aspirational site.

It had never occurred to me to try Fiverr for this.

I find dribble designs pretty to look at but rarely functional and accessible.

Dribbble is just a giant circle jerk. It's actually uncomfortable reading through the comments on there. Someone changes a single pixel, on the 10000th iteration of an email icon, and you'd think they created the Sistine Chapel. It's worse than those Instagram travel accounts, where every other comment is about the "mood".

Fiverr is almost reverse. While you find lots of unskilled people, with some effort you also find people who really don't know how to value their skills there.

Expect to take some time and try out several people to find them, but it's worth it.

> The negative attitude in this thread is misplaced. Not sure where it is coming from.

HN is not immune to anything, it's just a place for people to give their opinions. Sometime the opinionated person knows what they're talking about, other times the opinionated person is not a customer of the business and only derives the business based off "one-off" experience, passing knowledge through articles, or SEC-1 numbers (and at the same time the person might hate Wall-Street folks).

(just like my comment is just an opinion (^_^)).

LOL

“We are believers in the long-term potential of these marketplaces,” MKM Partners’ Rohit Kulkarni wrote Wednesday before trading began"

says the guy offloading risk onto a public market -- that's a statement so hilariously full of shit it deserves to be laughed at.

Even worse, he' going to follow up with “unclear pathway to profitability.”

good god, here we go again.

Wow. I know Fiverr for years but I never thought of it more than as a cheap version of freelancer dot com and now it goes to IPO with $700M valuation? That’s crazy!

Especially crazy given that, as far as I can tell, they have never turned a profit and never will.

I'm surprised Fiverr has 360+ employees. I always figured it was 50 folks max, "craigslist" type of company.

What the hell those 360+ do there?...

Well, some of them are required to manage the others. Those managers need secretaries. Some of them are required to prepare reports for the managers. Some of them provide HR support for such a large workforce. Also, you need IT support for all those secretaries, report-generators, managers, and HR people. Payroll department needs to be larger given how many people work there. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

I work at a warehouse with ~300 employees, selling over 70,000 different skus, etc. We have 3 Programmers, and 3 IT/network people, 1 hr, etc. We're hiring more programmers though.

What the heck are 360+ employees doing? You're right you do need lots of management, but there's no way they need that many people. Like, thats a LOT of people.

They have 7 offices so there's probably a lot of people who have jobs to communicate between offices.

Probably region-specific support and dispute resolution, most likely. Two-sided markets require twice the support, now multiply by country and locale.

Probably marketing, hence why they lost so much money.

The majority of companies that IPO aren't profitable at the time they IPO. This is nothing new.

The fact that it's the case for the majority of tech companies is actually new.

The internet trends slides which were on the front page a couple of days ago showed just this phenomenon.

"never thought of it more than" used to have no bearing on companies accessing the public markets, and obviously it still doesn't whenever someone wants to do the paperwork.

IPO has been improperly elevated to a form of validation, put on a pedestal that doesn't exist, imagined solely because of the improbability of an IPO occurring.

I would point the finger at VCs but they are a byproduct of accounting and securities market regulatory devolution at the turn of the century

Fiver is great for quick tasks where you just need a decent job done and have clear requirements. It’s optimized for volume. For example I recently needed a voiceover and was able to quickly sample dozens of British male voices then contract one. I got the finished product in a few hours.

I’ve also used Upwork but find it really clunky and time consuming to use. It’s not at all optimized for short one-time tasks, which is what many users want.

Had a bad experience with a designer on Fiverr. They were "highly rated" and all.

The task was a logo for a side project and we settled on a clean design that was just text and code brackets with a specific font and color scheme (I ended up doing this on my own in the end)

The design was acceptable, but the delivery/communication/execution was atrocious.

The request I made from the start was SVG over transparent backgrounds with the font in two different colors, and three different positions for the logo, so six total SVGs

What I got were:

PNGs JPGs Illustrator files

I went back and forth four times before giving up and just marking the job as complete.

Once I finally got SVGs, they were not over transparent backgrounds and/or they were weirdly cut in ways where you could see border lines halfway below the image, and the SVGs were mixed in with the other file formats.

Every time I asked for what I wanted in explicit detail, I would get the complete opposite with, say, one SVG fixed in an acceptable way but another (which was already acceptable from the last delivery) completely broken again

Overall, completely frustrating

I've had similar experiences with development on eLance (prior to Upwork acquisition). The issue often is the person you're communicating with isn't the person doing the work.

Hmmm, I wonder if, no, it can't be. But I do wonder, sometimes, if you get what you pay for.

I don't believe this kind of snark is welcome on HN

One of my favorite songs was produced with Fiverr: https://youtu.be/v1V5Oc3hMbc

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1UO3iBE0nsuayzNceZPeK2mynHj...

Here's a tune I made with Fiverr.

Bassist from venezuela, rhodes keyboard from greece, rapper from washington dc, rhythm guitar from finland, jazz guitar from USA, mastered by a guy in croatia.

Both of these are so cool!

Wow! Really nice

I've never liked Fiverr since I heard about how they really screwed over voiceoverpete. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anbBwpoI9TI

It is legitimately terrifying the power over our lives these tech companies are amassing. The ability for them to arbitrarily cut us off from our livelihood is terrible. I'm afraid that we are headed toward a world of corporate tyranny if this trend can't be reversed.

It's crazy to me that a marketplace like this can be trading at 10x revenue w/ -50% net margins when a company like Blue Apron is trading at 0.2x revenue when they're turning the corner to profitability.

If you're not zero margin, you can't scale the same way.

Well, to be fair, while Blue Apron's gross margin is expanding, it's operating margin is still negative and it has ~20% negative LTM sales growth the last few quarters.

It is, in fact, crazy, but that doesn't mean Blue Apron is the one whose result is out of whack with the fundamentals. Quite the opposite, in fact.

hiring talent in under 24hrs, to stand in front of the Taj Majal[0] to say your (past)startup's tag-line [1]..for just $5... is priceless.

[0]https://www.fiverr.com/arjunrocks/record-a-video-at-taj-maha...

[1]https://www.dropbox.com/s/98udl9ypeuqvcph/M4H07189.mp4?dl=0

- edit - seems like he 2x his rates as of 5yrs ago.

That's outstanding!

I've been a long-time Fiverr user. I've had my share of hits and misses, and it looks like many of you are in the same boat.

Would any of you be interested in Slack group where we can trade Fiverr referrals? If so, I'd be happy to set it up.

Yes please.

Like a lot of comments here, the only winning strategy I've found with Fiverr is to hire 3 or 4 sellers for the same task and pick the best.

But I have to admit, I once ordered a completely custom logo for $8 and it was perfect (the 2 week wait was worth it).

Seconded!

Slack group is created! Instructions on how to get the Slack group invite here https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2019/6/14/better-freelancers-...

What did that logo look like?

Slack group is created! Instructions on how to get the Slack group invite here https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2019/6/14/better-freelancers-...

Yes please

Slack group is created! Instructions on how to get the Slack group invite here https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2019/6/14/better-freelancers-...

Fiverr's competitor Upwork IPOd last year and is currently valued at 1.68B

I'm amazed Fiverr is "worth" close to half upwork. Upwork seems to be in an incredibly strong position and that service has improved a ton in the past 2 years.

There are some quality people on Fiverr,but as others already mentioned, you need to spend time finding them. The valuation,on the other hand, is complete overblown nonsense baloon.

Then you must believe that about nearly every valuation..

I have used fiver for finding developers to do small business Wordpress work, for telecom consultants, for windows server consultants, for an audio engineer to discuss soundproofing, for a tutor in a new programming language, and for a bit of graphic design.

There is no better market on the web for finding low cost talent if you ask me. I love this website.

Fiverr is awesome. Where else can you pay someone to dress up like Jesus and record a personalized Happy Birthday video?

I use FIVERR for micro secretarial services and research work. Works great!!!

Can you elaborate on exactly the types of things and roughly the pricing you pay for to do this?

Sure. 5-10 USD per hour and I create "tenders" for every 2 hour job hence the micro part.

The jobs must be meticulously thought through so they can be communicated succinctly to a person in the other side of the planet.

I also have to go over all the work, because sometimes there are errors.

Sometimes I have several contractors working in the same Google Drive Spreadsheet on separate sections at the same time. That is pretty cool to do, and watch happen in real time.

Thanks, out of curiosity, how is this work not better suited for Mechanical Turk?

Maybe you are right. I never tried it.

Cool. Not meaning to criticize, but am genuinely curious if fiverr has something special here.

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