Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Fiverr Q2 fiscal 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Charlie, and I'll be coordinating the call today. You'll have the opportunity to ask a question at the end of the presentation. If you'd like to register your question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypads. I'll now hand over to your host, Jinjin Qian, Head of Investor Relations, to begin. Jinjin, please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on Fiverr's earnings conference call for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022. Joining me today on the call is Micha Kaufman, Founder and CEO, and Ofer Katz, President and CFO. Before we start, I'd like to remind you that during this call we may make forward-looking statements, and that these statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions as of today, and Fiverr assumes no obligation to update or revise.
A discussion of some of the important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements can be found under the Risk Factors section in Fiverr's most recent Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC. During this call, we'll be referring to some non-GAAP financial measures.
A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are provided in the earnings release we issued today in our shareholder letter, each of which is available on our website at investors.fiverr.com. Now I'll turn the call over to Micha.
Thank you, Jinjin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. In the second quarter of 2022, Fiverr delivered revenue of $85 million, representing year-over-year growth of 13%. We continue to see a rapid consumer and SMB sentiment shift amidst the challenging global macro environment. Geopolitical volatility, spiking inflation, and elevated energy prices meant that spending power of consumers and SMBs was impacted more than expected.
This trickled through to the overall demand for freelancer spending. We are not immune to these macro trends. We are encouraged, however, that Fiverr continues to serve as the backbone for millions of businesses to connect and engage with freelancers. Active buyers were 4.2 million, up 6% year-over-year, and spend per buyer was $259, up 14% year-over-year.
Our marketplace scaled up significantly during the COVID years, and most of that gain continues to hold today. We see older cohorts continuing to spend more today versus pre-COVID, and we continue to attract a significantly larger amount of new buyers to our market base every quarter compared to our pre-COVID. Take rate remains strong at 29.8%, up 200 basis points year-over-year, reflecting the tremendous value we provide to our community of buyers and sellers and the continued expansion of value-added products.
Our Q2 results also demonstrated our continued discipline and operational efficiency. In Q2, we delivered adjusted EBITDA of $4.6 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 5.4%. Fiverr has always run a lean organization, but the macro environment requires us to recalibrate our growth and profitability profile in investment priorities.
Post the quarter, we made a tough decision to reduce our team by 60 members. It is not a decision made lightly. Over the years, we have built an incredible team and an amazing culture at Fiverr, where we gather super talented and passionate people together to build towards a common mission. This means we have to part with many teammates we love and value. We have great people leaving, and other companies will be lucky to have them.
With this, we are putting ourselves in a strong financial position to continue delivering growth with positive adjusted EBITDA and heading towards our long-term target model. Ofer will provide more color on that. Now, I want to spend some time discussing the investments we are focusing on to strengthen our core and position us for long-term success.
Fiverr's buyer base consists of 4.2 million people coming from all types of businesses, from solopreneurs all the way to the largest companies in the world. We know that there are over 30 million SMBs in the U.S. alone, and even more in Europe and the rest of the world. Our level of market penetration in the SMB space is impressive, but nowhere near saturation. There is ample addressable market available to grow into, and this remains a top priority for us.
We are doubling down on building deep technology moats for our core marketplace. This includes supply, quality, search and personalization, marketing, and growth. Fiverr's marketplace is uniquely complex. We have hundreds of thousands of sellers who have created millions of services listing across more than 550 categories. Each of these sellers, listings, and categories comes with unique skills, attributes, pricing, and scope.
Understanding the quality and matching a buyer with a seller is highly complicated, not only due to the diversity of services we cover, but also because quality is subjective depending on the buyer and their specific project. The fact that Fiverr is an end-to-end transaction marketplace gives us not only the ability to track reviews and ratings, but also powerful data to dissect user behavior and user interactions to understand quality and matching. Do they come back and buy more? Did the project deliver on time? Was the communication between the buyer and seller smooth? How many dialogues and revisions were needed before a successful delivery?
The recently introduced Fast Response badge is an example of how unlocking metadata can create a meaningful impact on conversion rates. We have built a lot of deep tech over the years to extract those signals, and there is so much more to do.
We are also constantly expanding the capabilities of our marketplace to facilitate larger and more complex projects with longer engagement duration between buyers and sellers. During the quarter, we rolled out project briefing capabilities to allow buyers to describe projects with complex scope in a structured way. We can then feed the data into the matching engine to provide our best recommendations.
This is designed to allow us to understand post-order satisfaction with more context to enrich the data and the algo. This is the magic of Fiverr. The second area of investment is our upmarket motion. Among our buyers, we have identified tens of thousands with a spending capacity significantly larger than the average spend on our marketplace today. It is mission-critical for us to unlock this potential, and that is why we created Fiverr Business.
With Fiverr Business, we are a lot better at identifying those customers, understanding their freelance hiring needs, listening to their pain points, and mapping out key product gaps. In the last 12 months, we started to implement a number of initiatives with Fiverr Business in order to land, expand, and improve the overall experience for those business buyers. This includes streamlining onboarding flows, creating a talent-focused browsing experience, stepping up the vetting process, and developing new marketing channels. We have seen early success in those initiatives.
The number of buyers who spend over $10,000 per year increased over 60% compared to a year ago. Fiverr Business today already represents over 5% of total marketplace GMV. We have barely scratched the surface. There's so much potential ahead of us. We believe the online freelancing market opportunity is vast and is in the early innings.
As freelancing workflow moves online from offline, just as e-commerce has over the last two decades, we believe the Fiverr marketplace is ideally positioned to empower this workforce transformation for both businesses and freelancers. While the global economy goes through cycles, and so does SMB spending, the consideration of incorporating a freelance workforce as part of the company's strategy talent planning is only going to become more relevant and more urgent. In fact, we see an emerging opportunity for freelancers as a viable alternative to fill talent gaps and provide cost saving for businesses that are cutting costs on full-time employees.
A recent survey we conducted in partnership with Censuswide indicates that over 80% of businesses are implementing hiring freezes or layoffs, and around half of them plan to use freelancers to fill these gaps. Fiverr will be in a strong position to capture these opportunities when the time comes. With that, let me turn the call over to Ofer, who will share some financial highlights.
Thank you, Micha, and good morning, everyone. Our Q2 results demonstrated the combination of a challenging macro environment and our ability to deliver strong execution with discipline and efficiency under such an environment. In Q2, revenue was $85 million, up 30% year-over-year. The recent macro headwinds of increasing inflation, higher energy price, rising interest rates, and highly uncertain geopolitical risks with more significant implications on consumers, SMB, and overall GDP than expected. It is being felt not only in Europe but also in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Fiverr responded quickly to this challenging macro landscape by streamlining our expenses and executing with the highest level of focus and efficiency. This led to Q2 adjusted EBITDA of $4.6 million above the top end of our guidance, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 5.4%.
In addition, post the quarter, as Micha mentioned, we further examined and recalibrated our cost structure and investment priorities, which resulted in the reduction of 60 employees. These people did not come from a specific function, but rather across various departments in the company. The process was rigorous and thoughtful to ensure that our long-term roadmap remains intact. With the completion of this realignment of teams and organization, we expect to be able to strengthen our core focus area, accelerate the pace of execution, maximize team performance, and most important of all, maintain a highly motivated corporate culture.
Our underlying business is strong. We continue to drive a significant amount of new buyers to our marketplace every quarter, and we continue to do it super efficiently. In just one quarter, our Q2 cohort already generates revenue equivalent to 85% of our performance marketing dollars spent in the quarter.
This highly disciplined, data-driven marketing approach will ensure that we only invest in areas where there is efficiency, and will put us in a good position to save our time through this market environment and lean in when opportunities arise. We are also making exciting progress with our upmarket initiatives from Fiverr Business that attracts large business buyers to product efforts that encourage bigger projects and longer engagement. All of that is helping us to continue pushing spend per buyer higher at a fast pace, even with the overhang of macro trends.
Take rate continues to be strong and sustainable as we grow value-added products such as Promoted Gigs and Seller Plus. Going forward, we expect the take rate to remain stable with a modest upside. Now let's turn to guidance.
For the third quarter of 2022, revenue is expected to be $80.5 million-$82.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 8%-11%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $5 million-$6 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6.7% at the midpoint. For the full year of 2022, we now expect revenue to be in the range of $332 million-$340 million, representing year-over-year growth of 12%-14%.
Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $19.5 million-$21.5 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6.1% at the midpoint. Our Q3 and updated full-year revenue guidance reflects more significant than expected macro headwinds that we saw in our marketplace in June.
Specifically, European activity levels deteriorated modestly from our previous expectations, and the U.S. started to feel meaningful pressure as SMB sentiment grew more precious in the last two months. The extended macro trends are expected to impact both existing cohort spending as well as the acquisition of new buyers. For the full year of 2022, the midpoint of our guidance represents active buyers to be down by a few percentage points compared to the last year and spend per buyer to grow in the low double digits.
With cost reductions and the strengthening focus, we expect to deliver stronger adjusted EBITDA for the second half of this year. We are committed to continuing operating with discipline and efficiency, delivering growth with positive adjusted EBITDA and marching towards our long-term EBITDA target of 25%.
Together with a healthy balance sheet, I believe Fiverr is in a strong financial position to navigate through this market with an unwavering focus on investing and building towards our long-term success. With that, we now turn the call over to the operator for questions.
Thank you. If you'd like to ask your question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypads. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure you're unmuted locally. As a reminder, that's star followed by one on your telephone keypad now.
Our first question comes from Bernie McTernan of Needham. Bernie, your line is now open.
Great. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just to start, can you talk about the change in strategy for thinking about growth versus profitability on the last call and during the quarter? I believe the commentary was largely still investing for growth despite the headwinds, but now pulling back on those investments. Can you talk about the decision or the change in tone or anything to share there?
Sure. Good morning, Bernie. Essentially as we said in our opening remarks, what we've seen throughout Q2 was a worse than anticipated headwind during the quarter, and we've seen a more expensive growth. As a result of that, macro change and given the fact that, you know, from a technical standpoint, we are in a recession. I mean, we have two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. Inflation continues to be high, and there is pressure certainly on small and micro businesses, and we felt that. Because of that change in environment, we decided that since growth has been more expensive, it doesn't actually constitute or justify to grow at any cost.
In that situation, we felt that it was the prudent decision to prioritize EBITDA and free cash flow, accelerate the pace towards the long-term target model.
I think that this would put us in a strong financial position to double down on growth investments when the market condition improves. That was the basis for our decision. It doesn't mean that we stopped prioritizing growth. It will always be a priority for us, but we don't think that it should come at any cost.
Understood. Is it possible to put context around that 85% payback for the 2022 cohort, 85% of the performance marketing spend? How that trended versus, you know, other periods of time?
This is Ofer. I think that if you guys track historical record of the return in our last quarter it was 90%. I think the quarter before it was approximately three months or one quarter. All the time, there is a kind of fluctuation in the return. If you track historical number, you know, if you go to Q1 2017, the multiple of return is 5x. If you go to Q1 2020, Q2 2020 two years ago, the multiple is already 3x. We believe that the cohort that we are able to acquire throughout the previous period, but also this period, happens to be consistent with a very high multiple.
The fact that the headwinds that we are seeing barely impact the return on the new cohort that has been acquired give us high confidence. Our ability to keep and acquire a new cohort at a high lifetime value to CAC with a very short return on investment.
Understood. Just one last one for me. The opportunity for strategic partnerships to form another funnel for the company, it seems like an intriguing proposition. Just wondering, you know, what you're looking for in a partner, how the integration goes between the two products, you know, how big of an opportunity is this to add another funnel for you guys?
We're working on the partnership channel. We believe that at this point, it would be too early to share news about that. We're seeing very exciting things around partnership, and we'll be happy to share that with the market in the upcoming quarters.
Understood. Thank you both.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Doug Anmuth of JP Morgan. Doug, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking the question. Just a couple on kind of mix. Just trying to understand, I guess, across categories perhaps if there are some things that might be holding up a little bit better than others. Micha, I know you talked about going up market with Fiverr Business, and I recognize it's still early there. Just curious in this kind of environment, if you just talk about the you know the traction that you're getting there, and how those businesses might be behaving a little bit differently perhaps than the SMBs. Thanks.
Thank you, Doug. Good morning. For the first question about categories. Our category mix has been pretty stable. We see small trends, and some of these trends indicate that there's a slight less interest in categories that are related to very young businesses and their period of start. There are categories that are related to more mature businesses that are seeing slight increase in trend. These are not very significant. Over the year and over the years, we've been seeing those trends shift across different months of the year and different years.
We didn't record anything unusual across those categories. I think we've provided some color in the shareholder letter on specific categories. Again, the mix remains very healthy and stable.
On the up-market, the signals that we're seeing from Fiverr Business are very, very strong. It's a fast-growing product, and we continue to double down our investment into Fiverr Business. The improvement that we've done in Fiverr Business in adding tens of thousands of vetted sellers or top 1% of sellers, upgrading the experience, the listings and seller pages, putting talent in the forefront and adding decision indicators, all of them contributes to the growing activity of our Fiverr Business customers. We're also building marketing muscle for larger customers and optimizing the funnels for Fiverr Business and also increasing our category coverage within Fiverr Business.
We're streamlining the onboarding funnel, and now we see that attracting more large customers from Fiverr into Fiverr Business, where we can increase their activity and spend over time and maximize their spend capacity with Fiverr. All in all, very good signals and doubling down on Fiverr Business.
Great. Thank you, Micha.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Brad Erickson of RBC Capital Markets. Brad, your line is now open.
Hi. Just a few for me. I guess first, when you speak to this SMB weakness, just to clarify, do you think this is more of a funnel issue and maybe a function of fewer small businesses, or is it more of just an existing cohort issue and some of the sending headwinds you called out, just to clarify first?
Hey, this is Ofer. Brad, I think that is, it's an issue across the board. It's not about the funnel. It goes both for new cohort, but also for existing cohort, whether it's a very old cohort or new cohort, whether it's a U.S. or European. This headwind goes across all dimensions. That's how we see that.
Got it. I guess the guide maybe seems to reflect active buyers looking to be down again sequentially in Q3. Just curious how we should think about, you know, maybe timeframe and getting back to sort of sequential active buyer growth.
Yeah. When you look at active buyers, I think that what we've seen are really three things. The first is worse than anticipated markets that created this headwind, so macro influencing that. The second is growth has been more expensive, which meant that we need to make changes into our growth investments. The third is more focus on quality of buyers, which is well reflected in our spend per buyer, up 14% year-over-year. All in all, that has been the factors that have been influencing active buyers. Certainly our focus continues to be on the quality of our buyers over time as we can focus on those who have the spending capacity that is much larger than the average spend per buyer on our marketplace.
Got it. That's great. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Matt Farrell of Piper Sandler. Matt, your line is now open.
Thanks for letting me ask a question. I was wondering if you could help quantify the cost-streamlining efforts, in order to look at it from an impact to adjusted EBITDA as we go forward. Then you've been able to, you know, expand adjusted EBITDA margin as we've moved through 2022, despite the lower revenue levels. I just wanted to understand, is that something that we should expect moving forward, is continued leverage in the model through 2023? If not, you know, what could be the factors there? Thank you.
As for the quantified cost streamlining, I don't think we share the specific numbers. But the guidance definitely reflects this adjustment that we did a few weeks ago. You know, I'll give you a hint. Look at the adjustment of the revenue, and bear in mind that we have increased the EBITDA target for the remainder of the year. This should give you a pretty good indication as for the overall cost streamlining. The expected margin, I think it's too early to discuss the expected margin for next year, both because it's the middle of the year, but there is a lot of uncertainty and volatility that we experience as we speak.
Yet to be said, and I think it's mentioned on the shareholders letter on the prepared remarks, we do plan to accelerate the pace towards long-term target.
Maybe you know, as a follow-up, could you give any more color here on just kind of the strong growth that you're seeing in Promoted Gigs and kind of the success that is having here as of late? You mentioned in the shareholder letter, and just any more clarity would be great. Thank you.
Yeah. As I think we've mentioned in previous quarters, there's been a continued expansion of Promoted Gigs across more categories and more assets within our marketplace, and also with additional cohorts of sellers that can benefit and enjoy from this product. What we're seeing in that growth is just a very healthy, steady growth of this product. I think it's reflected in the continued expansion in our take rate as demonstrated.
Thanks for taking my questions.
Thank you.
Thank you, Matt. Our next question comes from Andrew Boone of JMP Securities. Andrew, your line is now open.
Great. Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I'd like to start on June. In the letter, it talked about U.S. demand slowing in the month. As we think about July and just the guide for 3Q, does 3Q imply a further step down from where you guys were in June? Are you seeing any stabilization as we get into 3Q or kind of what's the trajectory?
Then secondly, as we think about more disciplined OpEx, can we just go back and revisit ROI? Should we expect levels that have been consistent as kind of the earlier question mentioned, or is there a chance that you guys would step that up? Then how do we think about brand spend? Thanks so much.
Thank you. As for what we're seeing in July, in the past few weeks in July, we've seen activity better than June. It has been slightly better and definitely stabilizing, but it is too soon to call it a trend. This is what we've seen from it, and I think that is reflected in the range of our guidance. Meaning that on the midpoint, what we're assuming is that the current situation or level of headwind will continue to be as we're seeing it right now. On the lower end, a deterioration or a stronger headwind, and on the upside, an improvement in the current macro environment and headwind that we're seeing.
On the second part of the question, I think that the restructuring or the streamlining of the expenses that we discussed earlier brought us to position of super efficient operation. I think the company was lean even before. Yet to be said, you know, if needed, we can trim the company further to make sure that we meet the EBITDA target and to secure the accelerated path to long term. In terms of brand spend, we keep spending on brand as previously. You know, we always monitor this investment as compared to PPC. We haven't sensed a change of this strategy of investments.
We used to be lean, and we continue to be lean to make sure that the marketing are being expensed in a very efficient manner. Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew. Our next question comes from Eric Sheridan of Goldman Sachs. Eric, your line is now open.
Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe two, if I can. Can you help us understand a little bit better how, Fiverr Business as an initiative will ramp over the next couple of years, you know, putting in place the pieces to go to market and then the time it might take to sort of execute on the go-to-market strategy so we can better understand a little bit of how the revenue cadence around Fiverr Business can build over the next, few years? That would be number one.
Number two, maybe just philosophically, I think there's this debate among investors about as, you know, workers continue to look for balance in their life, and now employers might be looking for cost flexibility in their business models. How do you think the opportunity set might shift, and create different opportunities or challenges for you as a platform, when you look at this environment over the next maybe 12 months or so? Thanks so much.
Thank you, Eric. For Fiverr Business, Fiverr Business is really a transformational move for Fiverr. We anticipated and we said that when we launched Fiverr Business, that this is going to be a motion that will start being very impactful within two or three years. It's a multi-year investment. At the size of it right now, we haven't been recording it separately or guiding for it. As we've said many times, it is growing faster than the marketplace, and we're very happy with what we're seeing there. It allows us to engage with customers that have a much larger spend capacity and maximize their spend capacity with our product.
We've done so by improving our catalog and the quality of supply and adding functionality to the product that is sought for by larger customers. We see tremendous success by doing so. By optimizing the funnels of entry into Fiverr Business, we optimize the move of those right customers from Fiverr into Fiverr Business, but we can also use Fiverr Business as a channel of acquisition. That is thanks to the improvements in the funnel. Eric, sorry, can you repeat the second question, please?
Just curious on the broader environment you're seeing, because I think there's sort of a push and pull between your workers that still want flexibility, and you increasingly could find employers who want cost flexibility and how, even though there might be some headwinds you're seeing from the macro environment, maybe there's a broader theme around aligning flexibility with your platform, that could offset some of it. I was just kind of curious philosophically how you thought about the evolution of the long-term secular theme versus some of the macro headwinds. Thanks.
Thanks, Eric. Definitely when we think about the way we market Fiverr, and that has been in our brand for many years, it is all about flexibility. I've spoken in previous quarters about the fact that companies need more control over the balance between fixed expenses and variable expenses. Using talent from the Fiverr marketplace gives that flexibility. It allows you to hire people per project, and that allows you to also scale up or down as needed.
I think that if anything, the remote work or the work from home for a certain amount of time opened up the eyes of all employers to the option of actually benefiting from the fact that not all of their employees need to be on location, and not all of them need to be full-timers. We're definitely seeing that. We think that in the current environment where a lot of companies are also doing cost reductions and are thinking about how to lower their fixed expenses, they're using variable expenses or flexible talent as a way to close talent gaps and make sure that their performance doesn't decrease while their cost structure needs to improve over time.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein of Oppenheimer. Jason, your line is now open.
Guys, I'll ask two questions. Maybe talk a bit more how you think about the puts and takes as we kind of enter what's probably gonna be a worsening environment for at least you know I don't know a few quarters or so. As you think about, like, buyer spending, cost to attract a new buyer, seller pricing, like what they choose to price themselves and take rates, just how do you think of kind of those all fluctuate as you go into a you know a weakening environment and kind of what you can do that maybe favors Fiverr? And then the second question, you know, can you rank what features or capabilities drive conversion?
You talked a little in the letter about it, but where do you think you have upside or the ability to roll out new features or geographies in the next 12-18 months? Thanks.
Thank you, Jason. Good morning. On the puts and takes, I think that what we're seeing right now is definitely pressure, mostly on small and micro businesses to be more cautious on how they spend their budgets. I think that if we look at public data from public search engines, we're seeing that there's a decrease in searches, in public searches for keywords that are related with our industry. Because of that decreases or shrinks the top of funnel, which makes the acquisition or adding new customers more expensive.
If that continues to be the case, we'll continue to act based on our current strategy, which is to optimize our EBITDA and maximize our free cash flow so that when the market improves, we can invest that free cash flow again and double down on growth. In terms of features that drive conversion, you know, it's all about being able to do the right segmentation of our both customers and talent and do great matching. It sounds very simple. In reality, it's extremely complex. We've been talking about our technology and how we create our technology moats to make that magic happen. It's not getting simpler. The more we go upmarket and the more we entertain larger types of customers, that matching becomes more challenging, but with a larger reward.
This is why we continue to invest in our search technology, recommendation technology, algorithms, matching, segmentation, and there's also opportunities to do that from the top of the funnel, and that's why we continue to invest in search engine optimization and so forth. We're seeing good results on conversion improvement. The more we use the metadata that we collect being a transactional database to improve our algorithms, the better our matching is and the higher the satisfaction of our customer is, which means that we can maximize their spend with us over time.
Perfect. Thank you. We have a follow-up question from Brad Erickson of RBC Capital Markets. Brad, your line is now open.
Yeah, thanks. Just a quick follow-up. Just on how quickly things changed after you guided in May, kinda like last year, I guess. Just curious, is there any aspect of that hyper seasonality we saw last year that's maybe going on here alongside just pure macro? Just curious. Thanks.
We haven't seen any unusual seasonality. Obviously, you can see that from leisure. You see much more travel than usual. You see people taking long, you know, extended vacations. But we haven't seen that impacting as much as the macro environment. We believe that this is the macro environment being worse than anticipated. By the way, not just anticipated by us. I think that, you know, in general, as I said, technically, we're in a de facto recession, and inflation continues to be very high.
I think that Fiverr is just more sensitive because it's still more focused on small and micro businesses, and they are the first to respond to it, much like they were the first to jump up during COVID and show triple-digit growth. They're now being more cautious, and this is why we're feeling it a little bit more, and we're responding to it.
Got it. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Daniel Shahrabani of Fard Investments . Daniel, your line is now open.
Yes. Yes, hi. Thanks for taking my question. Two questions. First of all, in your last quarter, you said that a lot of the marketing expenses were preloaded in the first quarter. So is that do you see that giving benefits going forward for the next three quarters? Second question, in terms of macro, like how are you guys doing with the other languages like Spanish, German? Is that a source of growth for you? How are you expanding in other markets besides English? Thank you.
Good morning, Daniel. Thank you. On the marketing expense in the first quarter, from a seasonality standpoint, Q1 is our strongest quarter. This is why we invest more in that quarter, because that investment is extremely efficient and that creates a new baseline for us for the rest of the year. That is why we made that comment on Q1. That has been the case ever since we started the company.
Okay, thanks.
Thank you, Daniel. Our next question comes from Matt Schindler of Bank of America. Matt, your line is now open.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Just a couple of things. One, on the up-market approach, are you seeing this as more an approach to get and the higher spend per buyer? Are you suggesting larger enterprise do more purchases of similar-sized things, call it the $50 logo, that traditionally small businesses buy on your service? Or is your market developing into larger enterprise purchasing bigger projects, longer-term projects through your system? Or is it still same with the same basic world that you have been in the overnight, largely?
Hey, good morning, Matt. Thanks for the question. I would say on your first question, the answer is probably both. We're definitely creating a catalog where larger customers can achieve more and acquire more complex types of projects, if that is what they desire. It is also built to offer best-in-class vetted supply to allow for the small projects to be done very effectively. We think that the profile of customers is such where their spend capacity is higher, their needs are higher. Sometimes it manifests in more frequent purchases that are not necessarily very large, and sometimes it's less frequent in much larger types of projects, depending on their complexity.
Within that, within the Fiverr business, also the ability to use not just individual talent, but also agencies that have higher capacity and multiple talents to accommodate for more complex projects.
Does this move put you on a more of a collision course? You've been, you know, kind of free from any substantive competition in these kind of fast, quick catalog projects that you have been traditionally doing, these, you know, again, the $50 logo. That area you have owned and been free from competition. As you get into the larger projects, there are a lot of other players, particularly Upwork, which has kinda tried to come down to your world but not really done very well. Now are you going into its world?
When you think about the roots of where Fiverr started, we started from the SMB world with maybe focus on micro and small types of businesses. If you look at our current user base, we have 4.2 million active buyers on our platform. Half of them are from the U.S., so let's call it 2 million or 2.1 million out of 31.7 million. In that market, there's endless space to grow into. Now, as we move, we're not moving into the enterprise space. We're moving more into the mid-market, more into the midsize and sometimes large. It doesn't mean that we don't have enterprise customers, but we're not marketing for them.
In that space, there's tremendous space to grow into, and I don't think that the majority of competition is going to be there. I think that the majority of activity anyway happens from direct connections with talent or direct connections with agencies, and we have the ability to actually move that from the offline to the online without much interruption. I don't think that this will increase our competition that much.
Great. Thank you.
At this time, we currently have no further questions. I'll hand back over to Micha Kaufman, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Thank you, Charlie, and thank you everyone for joining the call today. Have a great rest of the day, and we'll see you at the upcoming investor events.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you so much for joining. You may disconnect.