Fiverr connects businesses with freelancers

Fiverr was launched in 2010 using the premise that you should be able to hire a freelancer to do virtually anything from as little as $5 – hence the name. Like a lot of successful online platforms, it provides a marketplace for buyers and sellers to meet, rather than offering the service of in-house staff. For Fiverr, it’s freelancers of virtually any stripe offering their services to virtually anyone who needs to find someone with specialised skills they themselves lack.

The company was and remains very successful. If you’re looking for someone to help you with copywriting, graphic design, digital market, social media marketing, voice-over recording, video editing, programming; basically, any digital service, Fiverr is the best place to start. While the company has not been immune from criticism, it has responded effectively to complaints to create a platform that is equally fair to both freelancers and those hiring them.

Equally if you are a freelancer, or aspire to be one, it can be challenging to find work and grow your portfolio.  There are a number of marketplaces that give you the tools and access to simplify the process and find new clients – Fiverr is definitely one of the leaders  in this realm. It can save you a lot of time while still giving you a reasonable flow of work, assuming you know how to use it.

TL;DR

• Free – there’s no cost for starting or having an account on Fiverr
• Convenient – it makes it much easier to find freelance clients or employees
• Rewarding – it’s possible to make enough from Fiverr for it to be your primary source of income
• Quick – you can get complex jobs done in no time by skilled experts
• Competitive – you may find a lot of freelancers offering similar services, but it’s possible to stand out if you work hard and to find a good freelancer by using the right filters
• Active Income – you will need to work for your income, but it can be doing something you enjoy

Important features of Fiverr

Fiverr is one of the most popular freelance marketplaces on the internet. There are plenty of alternatives in this field, though a relatively small number dominate it and Fiverr is among them. This means that there are many potential clients and jobs to be found there, as well as many freelancers.

The name comes from the original premise. If you’ve got a quick and relatively simple job that needs doing and lack either the time or the skills to do it yourself, you can slip someone a fiver and they’ll do it for you. That concept evolved into a place where you can find skilled freelancers willing to do quick and simple jobs for as little as $5.

Of course, $5 won’t get you very much these days, so the prices are now slightly higher and proportional to the complexity of the tasks you can get done. However, the site still specialises in helping people get clearly defined tasks done quickly. These tasks include writing, translating, graphic design, web design, search engine optimisation, digital marketing, social media management, animation and a lot of other business-related digital tasks. You could, in theory, start a business without ever needing to hire a marketing or IT department since you could get it all done on Fiverr.

But that’s all from the buyer’s perspective. How can you use Fiverr to help you develop a side hustle? That’s down to the way that Fiverr differs from other freelancing platforms. Sites like Upwork and Freelancer.com work by providing a board where clients can post what they need and freelancers can offer bids to do the job for them. While this is great for nuanced tasks with unique requirements, it means that freelancers need to be constantly on the site, looking for potential jobs. Fiverr works the other way.

With the gig economy, the emphasis is on having a constant flow of new jobs in order to maintain a consistent income. With sites that demand that the freelancer bids on jobs, a lot of time needs to be spent on looking for jobs and making your offer. What’s worse is that only a small fraction of those offers will result in work, meaning that a lot of that time and effort is wasted. That’s time that you could be spending working instead. Fiverr allows you to do exactly that because it works as a seller’s market, not a buyer’s. Freelancers post what they are willing to do and how much they’ll charge to do it and clients come to you.

How does Fiverr work?

Fiverr is just as simple for buyers to use as it is for sellers. Setting up an account as either takes just a few minutes and sellers putting a gig listing up can theoretically be equally quick. However, it is worth taking a bit more time over the process.

One issue with Fiverr is that there are thousands of fellow freelancers in one place offering similar services, making it quite hard to stand out if you’re new to the platform. You will need to craft a high-quality gig offer, with appropriate price and feature tiers, showing as much proof of your reliability as possible. You may even have to offer less-than-ideal rates or extremely generous terms in order to get your first few clients. How exactly you craft that perfect gig depends on exactly what service you’re offering.

Once you’ve got your first client, the important part is that you do a good job, delivering whatever you promised within the time you agreed to. Do that and you should get the good reviews you need to start developing a good rating. With that, you can start charging more since buyers will generally be willing to pay extra for the peace of mind that comes with choosing a good, reliable, proven freelancer.

The massive amount of freelancers on the platform also presents a challenge for buyers. How do you pick out a good person from a sea of unknown talent? To a certain extent, a bit of trust is required. You can reduce the amount of trust required by choosing a freelancer with good ratings, a lot of positive reviews and a string of successful gigs. Alternatively, you can save money but increase the risk by working with a new seller. In either case, Fiverr provides an extensive array of filters to help reduce thousands of possibles to just a handful. So long as your specification are very clear and well-communicated and your expectations are set relative to the reputation of your chosen freelancer, you should get precisely what you want.

To make things easier for both buyers and sellers, there is a ranking system on Fiverr. Sellers can move up the ranks with continued successes while buyers can have more confidence in who they are hiring by targeting the top tiers. With 10 successful gigs under their belt, freelancers get upranked to a Level One Seller, allowing them to stand out from the many New Sellers. They’ll rank up to Level Two at 50 gigs, then hit Top-Rated Seller at 100. The only level above that is to become a Fiverr Pro, but you need to be hand-picked by the Fiverr team to achieve that. Again, the best way to get selected is to consistently do excellent work.

• New Seller – the name says it all. This is a freelancer that is just starting on the platform and has no reputation to work from. They may offer their services for less to encourage early sales, but they are inevitably the least experienced.
• Level One Seller – a seller that has been on the platform for at least 60 days and completed at least 10 gigs with high buyer ratings. While they remain relatively inexperienced, they have at least gained a reputation for reliability.
• Level Two Seller – a seller that has been on the platform for at least 120 days and has completed at least 50 gigs promptly and to the satisfaction of the buyer. With six months of work under their belt, these sellers are pretty much proven freelancers.
• Top-Rated Seller – the most reliable level of seller, these are freelancers that have at least 180 days on the platform and over 100 successful gigs behind them, earning them at least $20,000. Inevitably, these are also the sellers that will charge the most for their services, though you will generally get good value for your money.

While the prices on Fiverr are no longer fixed at the signature level of $5, the prices remain very good, primarily because most of the freelancers offering their services are solopreneurs. Without the need pay for other staff and premises, they can charge significantly less than large companies offering the same service would.

When creating gigs, freelancers have the option of setting up different packages with tiered pricing. The Basic package is the cheapest, but lacks some features, the Premium package is the most expensive and comes with bonus bells and whistles while the Standard package is the middle one in every regard. Each package will also have a promised delivery time and agreement to a number of revisions – none, a fixed number or unlimited – so sellers can take comfort in knowing that they won’t necessarily be stuck with the freelancer’s first attempt.

If things do go wrong, there are fortunately plenty of tools for both the freelancer and the customer to seek recompense. For example, if the freelancer does not stick to their agreed timeline and stops replying to messages, the buyer can cancel the order and get a refund. Fiverr’s Resolution Center will look into more nuanced grievances, like the finished product not meeting the specifications.

And how does Fiverr make their money out of all of this? How did they report $107.1 million in revenue for the 2019 fiscal year? Simple: they charge a fee of $2 on purchases of up to $40 and 5% on purchases above $40. Additionally, 20% of the value of each gig is taken from the freelancer’s earnings.

Fiverr Pro

Using Fiverr Pro makes it a lot easier to find quality freelancers. The sheer popularity of the platform can make the choice of sellers overwhelming, making it harder to be confident that you’ve found a reliable one. Fiverr Pro narrows that choice down to just the elite – a hand-picked selection of expert freelancers specifically chosen for their exceptional track record of high-quality deliveries.

Fiverr Pro is not just a badge of honour for the freelancer, either. Buyers get the bonus of 24/7 VIP support from the FIverr team. Of course, this does come at a price and the cost of hiring a Fiverr Pro freelancer is slightly higher than picking a regular Fiverr member. Additionally, Fiverr Pros are only available in the fields of Digital Marketing, Graphic and Design, Music and Audio, Programming and Tech, Video and Animation, and Writing and Translation.

Fiverr vs Upwork

Upwork is one of Fiverr’s biggest competitors in the area of finding and hiring freelancers. Unlike Fiverr, Upwork chose to limit the number of freelancers available on their platform, especially freelance writers. However, it’s worth mentioning that this does not necessarily mean that they are any better at vetting applications and you still end up with some sub-standard freelancers among their listings.

One convenience that Upwork offers is the option to invite a freelancer onto Upwork and hire them through the site, using their payment infrastructure to ensure the process is kept safe and above board. On the other hand, Upwork’s approach to hiring is for the buyer to post what they need and for sellers to make offers, rather than the other way around like Fiverr. This means that freelancers have to be constantly checking for potential jobs. Add an incredibly counter-intuitive user interface and you have a platform that is inconvenient for everyone concerned.

Fiverr vs Freelancer.com

Freelancer.com is one of the largest players in the gig economy, in part because they charge a very low commission rate for both the buyer and the seller. In terms of getting the job done cheaply, they are one of the leaders in the field. As a result of their popularity with clients, they are naturally also very popular with freelancers, too.

In contrast to Fiverr, Freelancer.com makes it very hard for the seller to make a good income on their platform. For one thing, the popularity of the platform among buyers dramatically increases the amount of competitors for each gig and it makes it much harder for a new freelancer to make a name for themselves. To make matters worse, the site charges a monthly fee for different membership tiers, limiting the number of bids you can make on gigs each month based on how much you are paying. By contrast, Fiverr is entirely free with no such limits.

Things to consider before starting up with Fiverr

As discussed, the major consideration with Fiverr is that it is difficult to get your foot in the door as a freelancer since your gig will be one among thousands offering functionally identical services. Once you gain some momentum on the platform, it’s possible to start earning enough for Fiverr to go from a side hustle to your main source of income. However, getting that ball rolling may take a colossal amount of effort on your part, especially if your gig is in a field that is already well represented. One bad review at this early stage could end your career before it has started, so you really will have to bend over backwards to please your first few customers.

One thing that both buyers and sellers need to remember is to be specific. Sellers should be extremely exact about exactly what they are offering and buyers have to give them very precise instructions. Most bad reviews on the site come from clients who did not have a clear vision of what they wanted the end product to be and subsequently wanted countless revisions. Fiverr best supports those who have a very specific idea of what they want and just lack the time or technical skills required to create it. If a gig offer is too open-ended, it is inviting failure for both parties. Of course, the downside to a more specific gig offer is that you will inevitably end up doing exactly the same work over and over again, which can get monotonous.

Fiverr also best supports those who want a very quick turnaround on their work, with delivery often expected within a day or two. If you are running Fiverr as a side hustle, you will need to be very careful about exactly which jobs you take and how you manage your time. If you are unable to complete the job within the time limit stated in your post, your ratings will suffer. On the other hand, giving yourself more generous time limits will likely reduce your earning potential as you will have fewer clients interested in a slower delivery.

As a buyer, you can use Fiverr for ongoing projects. However, unlike other platforms, this will generally require you to keep hiring the same freelancer over and over again for the same gig. As the purchasing process is extremely simple, this is really not that much of an obstacle.

Costs to get started with Fiverr

Unlike other freelancing sites, there is no charge for starting or having an account on Fiverr and there are no caps on how many gigs you can post or buy. That means you can start and continue running a side hustle on the platform indefinitely for free as a seller or you can be hiring freelancers to do urgent tasks for you in a matter of minutes.

How does Fiverr actually make a profit, you ask? They charge both the buyer and the seller a fee on each job. In the case of the buyer, it’s a relatively small one. For the seller, though, it’s 20% of the value of the job. While this is a very large cut, it is worth re-reading that previous paragraph. On other sites, you will be losing money regardless of whether or not you are getting work. Even so, you will have to factor that fee into your pricing.

Some final thoughts

Each of the available freelancer marketplaces really focuses on one specific type of job and one specific type of client. In the case of Fiverr, the ideal client is someone who wants something done  quickly, competently and to a very precise specification. You have a clear vision of what the finished product should look like and merely lack the technical skills to do it yourself, Fiverr is the perfect place to find someone who has those skills.

Of course, the freelancers themselves must also face ups and downs with each of the available sites. Fiverr does take a bigger cut of your earnings than some of its competitors, but it also offers a free and easy platform. Unlike its competitors, there’s no monthly charge, no limits on the amount of jobs you can post or accept and no limit on the number of members with similar skills. Most importantly of all, though, there is no need to constantly trawl the job boards and post speculative bids, wasting time you could be using more productively. The fact that Fiverr is the only platform where the work comes to you instead of the other way around makes it stand above the rest in terms of convenience for the busy solopreneur.