What happens when you become a Fiverr millionaire? Until 2024, not a lot. What happens when two Fiverr millionaires storm off, sending the company into a mini PR crisis? You desperately look around for ideas that keep your best sellers on board, of course!
Recently, you may have noticed that Fiverr has started celebrating its millionaires. But do you know the story behind this initiative? Probably not, since it’s one that Fiverr wanted to keep under wraps – and one that reveals that this was a PR campaign to smooth over recent bad press and serious internal issues that are affecting sellers at every level.
It also plays heavily into the recent Product Release for the Summer of 2024. I’ve been working on this article on-and-off for the past two months, so there are a lot of threads combined here that create a picture of where Fiverr HQ is at – and in my view, Fiverr is stuck in the promises of AI wonderland while firmly ignoring the realities around it.
It all starts with the birth of Fiverr’s latest self-outed millionaire, Phoebe Johnson. Johnson is a Shopify dropshipping expert and ecommerce Pro from Virginia. In a post on the Fiverr Forum on June 5th, she shared a few tips and an image of one very interesting survey from Fiverr:
Fiverr is absolutely correct that reaching a million dollars in sales on Fiverr is an incredible feat; that’s $200,000 paid in commissions to Fiverr! What kind of incredible and thoughtful gift was Fiverr thinking of sending as a token of their appreciation and celebration?
Johnson didn’t specify. But she didn’t need to, because another Fiverr millionaire, who wishes to remain anonymous, shared an interesting correspondence with me on this same topic around the time of this post.
And they were pissed.
It All Began with Millionaires Quitting the Platform – Noisily
2024 has been a difficult year for many sellers. The introduction of the success score and changes to the feedback and ratings system have dismayed sellers across the board. For Fiverr, it was bad enough that Levi Newman, another Fiverr millionaire, announced he would quit the platform. It got worse when just a couple of months later, Alex Fasulo followed him, calling Fiverr a place to get your “freelance training wheels”.
Ouch.
These two very public departures got Fiverr scrambling behind the scenes, leading to survey that was sent out to all millionaires. It reads:
Congratulations!
You’re receiving this short survey because you’ve reached $1M+ in gross order amount on the Fiverr platform.
That is no small feat!
You work hard every day, and now it’s our turn to celebrate you.
We’d like to send you something small to show our appreciation, and to do that, we need a bit more information from you.
Fiverr
Fiverr Quietly Messaged Millionaires – Yet Annoyed Them
At the time, a Fiverr millionaire contacttold me that once they filled out the form, they got a message about Fiverr’s $1 million campaign:
Unfortunately, as the millionaire seller told me, “They sent this blanket email saying I was part of an agency. I’ve never been part of an agency. It must be that there are so few solopreneurs on Fiverr that it’s unheard of to do it alone. She didn’t even address me by name! I feel really appreciated….”
So, there you have it. Fiverr’s big campaign to win back its millionaires started with a survey, a generic automated email, and the promise of some sort of engraved award made out to you or your agency. The anonymous millionaire seller also told me that “this is all very hush-hush. They don’t want it leaking.”
The Great Launch of The Fiverr Millionaire Club
Remember Phoebe, the millionaire at the beginning of this story? While she received the award, she was disappointed that she was not considered important enough by Fiverr to be featured in the accompanying PR blitz.
Kesha never responded to this question, presumably because the answer would be too awkward during such a special moment for Fiverr’s millionaires.
Fiverr wasted no time celebrating its “breakthrough achievement” in celebrating its millionaire freelancers, although its first public millionaire came out in 2017. However, Johnson’s experience shows that Fiverr still managed to annoy its millionaires with careless oversights – all it would have taken to keep Johnson on a high would have been to send a simple email.
It’s an incredible oversight, especially when you remember that other Fiverr millionaires have complained of being mistaken for agencies with boilerplate emails not even mentioning their name, and it is certainly one that overshadows the event.
Clearly, this is all public relations, but these oversights simply point back to the issue that necessitated the whole ceremony instead: it is a sign of Fiverr choosing to ignore the issues that are causing millionaires to leave in the first place!
No plaque can make up for that. And since Fiverr millionaires have more to lose than most, many are choosing to smile and take the award.
What platform issues could the Fiverr millionaire plaque be covering up?
If you’re a seller, you already know the answer. First, we’ll need to look at an email the CEO sent out.
Fiverr’s CEO Sent an Underwhelming Round Robin to Sellers
Kaufman rarely addresses the community, but when he does, it is typically through emails like this, and typically talking about the next Product Release.
At Fiverr, our mission has always been to help our community succeed and grow by building a platform everyone trusts. As market trends evolve, especially with the rise of AI, we recognize both the opportunities and challenges these changes bring. While AI offers incredible tools for efficiency, it cannot replace the human creativity and craftsmanship that transform good projects into extraordinary ones. At Fiverr, we believe in the irreplaceable value you, our freelance community, bring to the world.
As the Fiverr platform evolves and grows, so does our community’s desire to achieve more with it, find more ways to work together, and maximize the opportunity for talent to develop. For sellers, this means new ways to present yourself, new ways to connect with potential customers, and even new ways to get paid. It is our job to see that this is made possible.
In recent months, you’ve likely noticed several new capabilities we added that were designed to enhance your experience. These include more insights into your business performance and greater clarity on your performance and reputation in the marketplace to help you position yourself more effectively.
We understand the freelance landscape is constantly shifting. To stay true to our mission, we’ve been making changes to help you adapt and thrive. As the trust of our community of customers grows, the more they wish to do with you. That includes focusing more on searching for professional skills when they have larger projects in mind rather than only searching for specific services. To help showcase skills, we will introduce a new profession-based catalog to better address these searches in our upcoming summer release. We’re starting with a few service categories and plan to expand further gradually. You’ll hear more about this in the coming months as we roll out these updates.
Together, we are expanding possibilities and redefining what it means to work on Fiverr, the leading marketplace for all digital service needs worldwide. Thank you for being a vital part of our community and for your continued trust in us. Let’s show the world the incredible things we can achieve together.
Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman
If you found that email vague, you’re not alone.
The Community’s Reaction to Kaufman’s Email
There isn’t one.
Although this was presumably sent out to every seller on Fiverr – and that’s a lot of people! – it seems like few people cared. With millionaires quitting and sellers still upset over the banal evils of the success score, few want to know what Fiverr’s hiding in its big bag of mean tricks.
When I first got it, I glanced at the corporate platitudes and skipped it – and I suspect many other did, too. Fiverr definitely has some interesting things up its sleeve over the summer, and I’m interested to see how they pan out (read more about Fiverr’s Summer Product Release 2024). But at the same time, I can’t help but think of the last few times Kaufman sent out emails like this – typically before other major platform changes – and how poorly they were received by the community.
Take the disastrous “emoji reviews” fiasco, a feature so bad that it was retired just a few short weeks after launch. Had Fiverr listened to its community, rather than the blinkered ideas of its seemingly disassociated leadership, it could have avoided the embarrassment of cartoon reviews on top of a broken Likert scale.
Rather than deal with real platform issues that users face daily, Kaufman chose to make a point of how Fiverr is redefining what it means to be a freelancer, and I must say, he’s not wrong there – and the entire theme of the Summer Product Release for 2024 was plenty of AI and “re” in front of words.
It’s hard to know what to make of this email. Sellers are not the right audience for it; investors would have been a much better target, simply because they aren’t quite so intimately aware of the platform’s issues, which continue to grow by the month.
With r/Fiverr and the Fiverr Forum frequently up in arms about Fiverr’s latest corporate shenanigans – and in particular the success score – you do have to wonder if Kaufman or Fiverr are listening at all. Of course, we can’t expect the CEO, or anyone at Fiverr leadership to fully address the community’s concerns; that is the job of the community managers.
Unfortunately, at least on the Fiverr Forum, there has been a spate of sellers quitting the forum in protest of poor forum management – or simply banned for asking critical questions or giving critical feedback. Personally, I hope this is just a failure of the forum management team rather than a directive from Fiverr’s leadership.
Fiverr seems to have forgotten that it is a business and both sellers and buyers of the platform represent its customer base. Sellers are not just easy-to-replace disposable assets. They are talented human beings who deserve far better than the inane paint-by-numbers treatment they currently experience at the hands of poorly-designed AI systems.
Our opinions matter, even if they’re not the ones that Fiverr wants to hear. The Success Score is the perfect example of how Fiverr’s systems are actively worsening sellers’ relationship with the platform, yet Fiverr refuses to take on board any feedback, whether from a day 1 seller or a veteran millionaire seller.
The Problem with Fiverr’s AI That Millionaire Plaques Doesn’t Solve
Last month, I completed a gig. The client has since gone on to become a repeat client.
Yet my success score dropped from 10 to 9. Concerned, I went to look at my level overview. Something had to be wrong, because I had received a 5-star review with all of the additional boxes checked. Pretty much as perfect as you can get.
Although I have nothing but 10s, 5-star reviews, and exceptional feedback, I’m now a 9. Buyers often comment on my attention to detail:
When I asked Customer Support about this, I was given incredibly contradictory information; that gigs without scores aren’t weighted, but since I’d completed a gig on an unscored gig, it was now weighted (but still unscored!). This is hardly the great victory of transparency that Fiverr promised, even if it aligns with the requirements of the EU’s DSA.
I was also told to “find clients outside Fiverr” to improve my score. I don’t need to do this – and I do not find this a satisfactory solution, especially when a perfect score from these imaginary buyers could also drop my score!
It is incredible that Fiverr leadership cannot see how inane and damaging this kind of ludicrous feedback is to Fiverr’s most successful sellers.
How can a small token of recognition make up for years of inadequate support?
I spoke with CS at great length about this, and they simply are not able to clearly and adequately explain the score. They do recognize how repulsive the success score is to sellers, but only because we don’t understand it well enough:
When I explained that the reason behind so many of my gigs being unscored was a 2-year-long illness during which I was hospitalized several times, I received a response “empathizing” with me and commending me on my courage in facing an autoimmune disease that isn’t that difficult to spell correctly:
Courage? I just want a Success Score that makes sense – and a forum where a diversity of opinion, negative and positive is welcome!
The success score is driving people away the platform, including your millionaires.
Now, maybe that’s what Fiverr wants. It certainly has far too many sellers who are not able to deliver what they promise. But if the success score is designed in part to eliminate these sellers – which it is – then how did the designers of this system not realize that it would alienate the sellers it wants to keep?
How can a plaque make up for this level of inadequate support and when faced with a completely broken Success Score delivering nonsensical results that nobody understands?
It seems nobody, not even Fiverr, understands the Success Score – only that it piles on the stress and worry for successful freelancers who find themselves demoted with no transparency and no idea why.
If you’re reading this, Kaufman, this is why millionaires and many your sellers and buyers are unhappy with the platform at the moment. This is not something that a PR campaign cansolve, and it is not something that an AI-intensive Summer product release will solve.
Take a hint from McDonalds, who at least retire their own AI systems when they’re ludicrously broken!
Fiverr’s Changing, But It’s Still The Same Old Fiverr
Between the CEO’s grand vision of Fiverr’s future, millionaires fleeing the platform, and sellers unhappy with multiple aspects of Fiverr, it’s all business as usual for the platform, who, over the years, has held a consistent track record of treating its sellers poorly. I can only hope that the second and last product release of 2024 turns out to be more successful than the first, but I am not encouraged by what I see. Despite my issues with the platform at the moment, Fiverr is still a great place to make money online, and ultimately, all of this is just a sideshow.
The most telling event is Fiverr’s weak celebration and reward for its millionaires. Did they have to do this? No, not at all. They haven’t in the past, but clearly, losing two high profile millionaires rattled someone at Fiverr HQ (and there’s no telling how many other sellers have abandoned ship). There’s nothing wrong with giving users an engraved rock to put on their mantlepiece. YouTube has been doing plaques for years.
But that’s the difference. Fiverr’s first millionaire (to go public) was Charmaine Pocek, a resume seller. Yes, she was celebrated in a blog, but she did get demoted from TRS to Level 2 when Fiverr introduced its original levels system all the way back in 2017.
It has taken over half a decade for Fiverr – and millionaires quitting the platform – for Fiverr to issue a survey, an unpersonalized automated email, and a plaque to its most successful sellers, all as part of a campaign. And it’s that little word, campaign, that makes me shake my head.
None of this makes up for the absurdities of Fiverr’s gamification, now at an all time nadir with the success score. This isn’t a celebration of appreciation. It’s a marketing campaign to try and offset the PR damage of big sellers walking and calling your platform – that wants to go upmarket – a kindergarten for baby freelancers.
No matter what grandiose statements Kaufman may make, fundamentally, Fiverr is still the same platform with a lot more gloss and the same old problems. And that’s a shame, because Fiverr could be so much more if the freelance platform chose to listen to its community rather than beat them down and occasionally throw gold-tinged bones their way.
