Fiverr Experiment – What Would You Do For $5?
Ever wonder just what some people would do for five bucks? It is, after all, a nice, round amount and can buy any number of things: a fast food lunch combo, a drink during Happy Hour or a video rental. Yes, ladies and gents, five bucks is five bucks, any way you slice it.
With this revelation in their arsenal, a clever little website called Fiverr has made itself available to those willing souls who have all kinds of useful (and not so useful) talents to share with the world…in exchange for a snappy little 5-spot. A quick browse through Fiverr will lead you to the serious (“I will write your business plan for $5) to the quirky (“I will write your name on my fingernail and send you the picture for $5”) to the downright ridiculous (“I will light my fart on fire for $5) – hm, come to think of it, that one would be a lot of fun to see. Anyway, you get the idea. There are gobs of people at your disposal for a mere five smackers. While some of the fun and bizarre propositions were almost too tempting to resist, we decided to see if some of the more straight-laced potentials would help us promote our business. After all, a $25 investment in a business could lead to a darn good ROI, if we got the kind of response we were looking for. Here’s what happened when we put the fine people of Fiverr to the test:
Step 1: Seek out five potential Fiverr “sellers” (as they’re called) based on their offerings.
Send them a request (which they have to accept) and give them our specific instructions and/or detailed information to get them on their way. Sounds easy enough, right?
Maybe not. Out of the first five sellers we tried to contact (5 sellers at $5 a piece equals our $25 investment plan), only two went through without a hitch. The other three were either no longer available (then why were they still listed on the website?) didn’t return our request or just fell off the earth. Either way, it took several more tries to nail down five solid people. And we do mean several.
Step 2: Send sellers the info they’ll need to complete the task.
This part was easy since we were in control. However, after a certain seller – one who promised to write whatever we wanted on his fat tummy and walk around Times Square in New York City – got our info, that was the last we heard from him. Maybe, even though he said he didn’t care what we wanted on his tum, we freaked him out a bit with our request. Still, our proposition of “This belly is full of meds from eDrugstore.md” seemed innocent enough (and quite clever, if we do say so ourselves). We were totally bummed that this one didn’t go through.
Step 3: Verify that the work order our seller accepted was complete.
We had two sellers who impressed us with their turnaround time. They said they’d do the job and once they had the info from us that they needed, they did it. Swell. But the others were not as quick. One request (that was put in over two months ago) just got finished. Hm, how’s that for reliability?
Not only were some of the orders slow to be completed, some of them just plain old weren’t done well. One, in particular, was a fellow who promised to submit our edrugstore.md website to 3000 backlink sites and directories. Well, he did so, but many of them were not relevant sites and tons of them were duplicates. We were so not impressed with his job and told him so (as you’ll see just below).
Step 4: Review the job.
Evidently, for a seller to get paid, the buyer (in this case, us) needs to review the work and submit an acknowledgement that the gig is complete. Think of an eBay review type situation, only these people’s dollars are hung up until you acknowledge the gig.
We were also fooled into thinking we were able to provide honest feedback. How so? Well, remember that guy from above? The backlink/directory guy? We gave him a “Thumbs Up” rating versus a “Thumbs Down”, but then laid out our concerns (in a very professional and polite way, we might add) in the comments section. Let’s just say this guy was none-too-pleased that we shared something about him that wasn’t glowing. He messaged us back and asked why we didn’t come to him with our concerns before reviewing him (we were allowed to do that?) and how we were the only ones in all of forever who weren’t pleased with his work and on and on until we nearly shed tears thinking we’d ruined the guy’s life forever. It really was kind of over the top. Really.
Maybe this was an isolated incidence, we’re not sure, but for the rest of the reviews, we were able to say kind or neutral things, so we’ll never know.
So, what is our overall take on this Fiverr phenomenon? Well, this is one of those instances where that godawful old cliché, “You get what you pay for” definitely rings true. The idea behind it is really clever, and pretty solid. But are the sellers top notch? Maybe some. But we seriously that doubt most are. In fact, many of the buyers probably aren’t either. There is a lot of back and forth that needs to happen via the message system on the site and if you have more than a couple of work orders open with people who have easy-to-forget user names, it’s hard to keep everyone straight. It’s easy to see how a buyer could miss a message, forget to review a gig or inadvertently not send the seller the info they need. It’s kind of a confusing process unless you’re working on one gig at a time.
So, would we do this again? Maybe for fun. Like when we get the urge to watch someone slap themselves in the face five times or when we want to call someone and scream at them for five minutes straight. But to promote our business, nah, we won’t be back to Fiverr. We’ll stick to the real, live professionals, thankyouverymuch.
Liberty Kontranowski is a freelance writer and blogger with hundreds of health and lifestyle articles published online and print. She is a frequent contributor to eDrugstore.md, a facilitator of prescription medications online
I certainly agree with you, Fiverr is an amazing place for creative people. We have been operating our fiverr account from quite a few months and are pretty happy with t he exposure we got through it.
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