School for Startups frequently recommends entrepreneurs consider Elance and Guru when they need to hire skilled labor. Fiverr.comis another resource that entrepreneurs should consider when looking for labor to do odd jobs.
Fiverr lists hundreds of tasks, called “gigs”, that people are willing to do for $5. Some of the offers are silly but most are quite useful in the right context. For example, you can find professional voice actors who will record new audio clips based on your script, graphic artists who will create book cover, folks who will transcribe text from a video, writers who will create articles about any topic based on your keywords, and SEO experts who will promote articles through RSS feeds.
You can also list your own gigs on Fiverr. This is a great way for entrepreneurs to pick up new business doing trivial, well defined tasks. If you don’t see a service you need, you can request it. Fiverr represents such an extremely large and highly skilled pool of labor, you can find people to do a wide range of things.
The management at Fiverr police the site aggressively, swiftly removing illegal and unsavory gig proposals, and terminating users who deceive customers. Still, as always, it pays to be cautious when asked to provide any private information or when a gig sounds too good to be true.
You do pay for transactions before they are completed, but Fiverr holds the payment until the customer rates the gig as complete. Some Fiverr members offer gigs that require multiple Fiverr payments. This isn’t a common thing, but it does happen.
About the only bad thing about Fiverr is that you’ll find yourself spending $5 quite frequently because you can get so much great work for so much less than you expect.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?