New solution Fiverr Business continues Fiverr’s up-market move, helps teams collaborate remotely with freelancers

Fiverr International Ltd., the online freelance services marketplace, announced the launch of Fiverr Business.

The new subscription-based solution provides a way for larger, buy-side organizations to engage and work with freelancers. As such, it is a step up-market for Fiverr and a way to respond to a market adopting remote work models. Spend Matters recently reported on Fiverr’s explosive growth in Q2 2020, in the wake of the initial COVID-19 economic shock.

Fiverr Business is designed “for corporate teams and departments to collaborate with each other while managing projects with freelance talent,” the announcement notes. Previously, Fiverr only offered organizations separate single-user accounts. Now an organization can subscribe to Fiverr Business with any number of individual users within the account.

Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman stated: “The pandemic has forced companies everywhere to rethink best practices for hiring, and this means focusing on a full-time team supporting their core competencies while integrating freelance talent as a way to easily scale. Fiverr Business was designed to integrate into a companies’ workflow and become a part of the digital onboarding experience for employees — they get access to email, Slack and Dropbox, as well as their Fiverr Business team account wherein all of their projects can be managed.”

With Fiverr Business, organizations can establish and manage team projects and source work from Fiverr freelancers. Team managers, the announcement said, “have the administrative and collaborative tools needed to give them the necessary overview and insight into all projects being managed through Fiverr.” Key features include:

• Project management tools to create new projects, manage upcoming orders and organize your team around shared goals and tasks
• A curated portfolio of Fiverr Freelancers, customized to an organization’s needs
• “Personal executive assistants” for account setup, freelance talent matching, etc.
• Capabilities to establish purchasing policies; to control order creation, required approvals; track project status and budgets; to manage teams; to access reports, etc.
• Capabilities for communication and collaboration among in-house team members and external freelancers
• Capability to create an organization’s or a team’s private talent pools

The $149 annual subscription (per organization) includes access for up to 50 internal team members. More team members can be added at additional cost. Fiverr also charges an embedded fee when a freelancer is engaged on the Fiverr Marketplace. Currently, there is a promotional offer that waives the annual subscription fee for a year and includes up to 50 team members.

From an analyst perspective, a number of observations can be made about the launch of Fiverr Business. Fiverr is:

• Continuing its incremental movement up-market
• Joining other marketplaces with “enterprise,” multi-user account offerings
• Leveraging the hell out its two-sided platform (in a stepwise manner)
• Fulfilling its commitment to freelancers by expanding the buy-side of the platform
• Transforming itself from just a transactional marketplace to a digital work-execution/opportunity platform

These are all strenuous, capital consuming movements — some of which have been tried by other marketplace providers. But for Fiverr, its timing — during the coronavirus pandemic — may be right (and its business network effects momentum is also strong).

The pandemic has brought what appears to be a structural shift in how organizations will get work done, in the coming year and beyond. That includes a significant shift to more remote work (among knowledge workers — both employees and contractors) and a greater use of agile teams. Ultimately, the reduction and repurposing of office real estate will “cement the deal,” as it were.

But that structural shift was already underway, just impeded by institutional inertia and lagging mindsets. To think more about this structural shift, see two of our posts that envisioned these developments: “Beyond Contingent Workforce Management: Embracing an Agile Workforce” and “Maximizing Enterprise Value of an Agile Workforce with the Talent-to-Value (T2V) Model.”