Redd: Hello and welcome to Fiverrcast, the official Fiverr podcast for sellers, by sellers. My name is Redd AKA Reddhorrocks.Adam: And I’m Adam, also known as Twistedweb123. Today we are joined by special guest host user Artisttree. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself today?Tree: Hi. I’m Tree, also known as “Artisttree” on Fiverr. I’m a Photoshop editor and I retouch photographs and I’m also – recently just launched ebook cover design, so quite excited about that.Redd: Well thank you so much for being here today Tree. Today we are talking about Fiverr and parenting and how Fiverr allows you to be both a parent and a professional. Adam, tell me about your tiny humans.Adam: Well, I have two tiny humans. One is three called Isaac and the other is almost 18 months called Padme.Redd: And Tree you have a son correct?Tree: I do. I also have a tiny human. He is almost 19 months old. He’s called Jack and he’s a little whirlwind.Redd: So today we are – one of the things we wanted to talk about was how Fiverr works with parenting and how it all comes together for people. So Tree, tell me about your experiences with Fiverr and parenting and how the two came together for you.Tree: Well, firstly, both my husband and I used to work nights. We both worked in theater and after having a baby, the scheduling really wasn’t working for us. We decided that one of us should probably stay at home and my skill set seemed to lend itself more to being the person that stayed at home. So I was looking for something that I could achieve from home whilst being a fulltime parent and Fiverr really appealed to me for that because of the flexibility and the way that you can start small and have a really good control of your client base and how you work.Adam: So when you first came across Fiverr, did you kind of have an idea in mind of what you were looking for when you’re looking for this kind of side Gig as a parent or were you just kind of looking out there to see what was available?Tree: I think it was probably a bit of both. I’m a creative person. I’m a graphic designer. I’m a photographer. I’m an artist. I kind of have a few different hats and I was looking for some way to utilize my skills that wasn’t going to interfere so much with my daily routine. I wasn’t really looking to learn something new but I really wanted to not give up on the creative side of what was partly me.So that’s kind of where I started with Fiverr was to try and use my skills and produce something that was appealing to clients.Adam: So when you kind of first signed up to Fiverr, how kind of long did it take you to receive the first order?Tree: It was a couple of days. It was really quite – it was quite slow to start with but actually for me, that was not a bad thing at all because I was finding my feet. Obviously when I decided to start Fiverr, I had also just had a baby. So it was quite good but it was a slow starter and that was not a problem and it really meant that I could find my feet within the site and work on things to a really high standard which I think has also set me up since then for how I work on Fiverr now.Redd: So Adam, you have two children and they’re both also quite small. They’re all – I’m sure all of these wonderful children are fairly rambunctious. So like how do you guys handle just the chaos that can come from having kids around while you also have to like meet your deadlines and handle your clients and all that good stuff?Adam: For me, there was a time probably – maybe about six months ago when I have big respect for Tree because I found it so difficult trying to handle both because I would try and do work and the kids would kind of want to be involved and just play around, et cetera. I found it very difficult. So I found myself kind of compartmentalizing where rather than work with the kids, I would work around them. So when they’re asleep, I would try to do work or when they were – so naptime or when they were asleep at night, I would try to work over the night.But for me, that led to quite a lot of long nights. But I’ve come to a very nice mixture now where my oldest Isaac – when he wants to, he comes and works with me. So he’s very big into logos. So he will often come to me and say, “Daddy, can I sit on your lap and can we do logos?”So we will sit there together and I don’t think my clients realize this, but he often tells me what colors he thinks could work and what would look nice together. We actually make the logos together, so he can try and be a part of it whilst I’m also bonding and having – spending time with him.Tree: I think for me it might be a little of the other way around right now because I’m still relatively new to Fiverr. It’s almost that it’s more – I don’t have a huge – my hours are not massive on Fiverr at the minute. So I do try and take the time when he is napping or is asleep to work because I think with Fiverr at the minute is it really does make me time. It’s like a time for me to do something that isn’t peanut butter sandwiches, et cetera.So I think I’m probably on the opposite end of the scale to you right now. But I’ve got a feeling that the way that you do it, as hopefully my Fiverr business grows, I should be following suit.Adam: I think that’s great though because it allows you to kind of grow into it as your son is growing.Tree: Absolutely. That’s the one thing that I really do love about Fiverr is that when I first started, few orders here and there. It was a bit of a hobby. Now I’m a little – he doesn’t need me as much obviously. He’s still a toddler but he’s quite capable of sitting and playing now, et cetera.At the same time, my client base has got bigger. So what I’m really hoping that’s going to happen is Fiverr is – I’m in it for the long haul, so to speak. I’m very interested in Fiverr growing at the same rate as my son. So it’s a hobby right now and then when he gets to preschool, it will be part-time. When he gets to kindergarten, it’s going to be hopefully fulltime.So I’m really hoping that the Fiverr business and my son kind of go hand in hand. That’s the theory.Adam: I think it’s great that you started now as well because I mean at the moment my partner is a fulltime parent. She’s a fulltime stay-at-home mom and the difficulty she’s going to have when she comes back into the workforce is – say when they’re five years old and going off to school. She’s going to have kind of no buffer leading up to that. So she’s going to go from zero to five with nothing whereas you will be in that position where he will go off to school potentially or kindergarten and you would have already set the groundwork to then make that explode or expand into something ready when you are.Tree: Absolutely. I have like – I have some long term goals for Fiverr and one of them is, you know, as he gets older, I’m going to add more Gigs and expand as much as my timeframe is allowing. So – but yeah, I kind of had this thought that I needed to start some kind of new career now because I don’t think that there is going to be a point in which I can go back to working nights in theater because obviously he’s going to be at home. So this works really well for me and Fiverr is really helping me launch this new career. I’m kind of really excited about it.Redd: So I want to know from both of you, what is like the most ridiculous situation where you have been handling a client and your child is doing something completely insane?Adam: Does my second child being born count? At that time, I was in full swing on Fiverr and I already had Isaac and then we were planning the birth of my second child as well, Padme.That was pretty hectic because you can’t really schedule it at all and I think I actually ended up calling in a lot of hands on deck to do different things to the extent where I was trying to keep up with Fiverr. I was trying to keep up with my son but I was also trying to keep up at the hospital where my daughter was being born.I think it ended up with my dad coming down and his job was to cook me dinner. So that was his job, to cook me and my son dinner.Tree: I think for me it’s more than just one incident. I think it’s just a combination of many incidents during like a period of time. I’m trying to answer emails because I do try and keep up with my correspondence as much as I can. But you will – your phone ends up inside a Nutella sandwich or I’m trying to answer an email and I’m having a fantastic – don’t get me wrong, absolutely amazing tower built on my knee in front of the computer. You know, don’t move mommy in case it falls over. So it’s more a kind of combination of crazy I think. It would be how I would put that.Adam: Yeah, I think one thing I learned quite early on as well was – especially when they were younger was to do the compartmentalizing because I found that trying to use the app on my phone to keep up with work, which you just checked in, wasn’t going very well because I started to notice – like my son would kind of try and jump over or lean over and there would be random characters going into messages.Tree: Oh, I’ve had that. Yes.Adam: I apologize for the typos, reading back thinking, “Oh, I should probably not have sent that message.”Tree: Yeah. I actually have to apologize once to a client for sending them something that was clearly not meant for them. That was the send button. It hasn’t been finished and I was like, “I’m really sorry. That wasn’t for you yet. That was yours but not quite yet. Somebody else had sent that. Yeah, that was my little one.”Redd: See, this is a perfect excuse because you guys can say, “Oh no, my kid did it.” You’re like super tired and you’re like, “Oh, I’m just going to not do that …”Tree: Like your dog ate your homework but not quite.Redd: Exactly, exactly. My kid pressed the send button. Perfect. You have your Fiverr work and as we all know, Fiverr is kind of like a little bit of a seven-day-a-week Gig and you have your kids. How do you balance making sure that you’re getting enough family time when it comes to like you all as a unit, like you and your spouse and your kids?Adam: I think for me, that can be probably the biggest challenge because you kind of get to that point where you want to spend lots of time at home but you’ve also got work that’s ramping up. So for me, what I actually found myself doing was again just trying to set specific time aside for doing both. So what I will try and do if I want to spend a lot of time with my son or to spend a day with him or take him somewhere, I will try and make sure that I finish everything I want to do the night before or I set aside a specific time at night to do that.So I don’t try and cross over as much. I learned with the whole kind of phone incident. Rather than trying to do work and my children so much at the same time, it was best to spend time with my children and spend time at work and trying not to combine them so much. Otherwise you maybe don’t get the best out of both of them.Tree: I completely agree. One thing that I’ve really found that makes me kind of boring is routine, routine, routine. I have a very kind of set routine throughout the day which benefits him really well. Anyway, he’s a kid that really does like his routine. But I have – I’m very lucky because my husband obviously has been working nights. He’s here during the day. So if I have like an overspill of work from the night before, he will take over in the mornings to give me the opportunity to finish.But what I usually try and do is everything is done for me in the evenings after he has gone to bed. Then if I have any overspill, it’s usually during naptime. But I do try and make sure that the time when everybody is in the house altogether, that I really try to focus on my family. It was very difficult at the beginning because I do feel like – what Redd said is that Fiverr can be seven days a week. You don’t want to let anyone down and you’re very – I’m very conscientious in trying to give excellent customer service.So you do have to kind of answer emails but you also have to kind of find a balance between that and it not taking over, which sometimes if you kind of get a bit anxious about it, it kind of can. But then yeah, so routine for me. That was how I kind of overcame that.Redd: So are there any other like really big benefits to working on Fiverr when you’re parenting that we haven’t talked about?Adam: For me, the biggest benefit – and it really sounds quite silly – but for me, the biggest benefit is the fact that every night, I can read my children a bedtime story because I have a lot of friends. I live in a small seaside town where most of my friends would go off to London to work, which is about an hour and a half away.The problem they have is they all catch the train or drive into London. They all finish at 5:00 PM or half 5:00. They travel back and they don’t get back until after their kid has gone to sleep.So the biggest benefit for me is that although sometimes I may be working or working quite a lot and may not always be available every single day, the biggest benefit is that I know that at least when it comes to bedtime or other times before that, I can always make sure that’s something I can always do all the time with my children as opposed to be kind of restricted by the fact that I have to commute or leave or go away.Tree: I think for me it’s about the flexibility especially now with me just starting out on Fiverr. With you being able to set your own hours and your own schedule and being able to alter your deliver times as well. It’s kind of fantastic because it means you can start off on a positive foot. You’re never going to let anyone down because it’s right there in the beginning. It takes me three days or it takes me four days, which means that you can kind of – having the flexibility to set your own hours means that I am a fulltime mom. I’m not completely distracted whilst I’m at home. The two things can work hand in hand.To be able to have the business from home that makes – fulfills me creatively and still be there for my son when he needs me makes honestly Fiverr the most amazing thing for me. It’s really kind of – it has really altered my life.Adam: I bet it gives you kind of like a great – not so much an escape because that’s the wrong word to use. But it allows you to still be you as a person, as a professional in the same way that you can still be a mother. So a lot of the times, when you might have children, a lot of the focus actually goes on your child. But you maybe lose other elements of your life even as something as simple as adult conversation. So Fiverr allows you to kind of keep that for you.Tree: Absolutely. It really does because you can spend – some days if you are here on your own and it’s Play-Doh and coloring and sometimes you do just need to remind yourself that you are still a professional in some capacity and then having a conversation with a client can kind of bring you back to yourself and make you realize that you can be these two people existing in one person, if that makes sense.So it kind of makes – I really do feel like it helps you be a more well-rounded individual because when you take timeout for yourself and not just give everything to the other. I think it makes you better at both.Adam: I will say as a side note, I’m a big fan of Play-Doh.Tree: Yeah. It’s kind of funny like going from being a sculptor in my old professional career to playing with Play-Doh on a regular basis. Sometimes it’s a really great example of how my life has changed.Adam: So Tree with Fiverr, where do you kind of see yourself in a year’s time?Tree: Well, this is what’s so great about it is it really started off as a hobby and something for me to do in the evenings that helps me be creative. I see that eventually as my client base gets bigger and that my son goes to preschool, I can make it into a part-time job and then going further in the future from that, I would like it to eventually be fulltime because I’m actually enjoying it too much to go back out to the workforce. I really enjoy the way that it fits into my lifestyle. So yeah, eventually, I would love it when he’s in kindergarten to be working from home fulltime on Fiverr. That’s my absolute long term goal, so yeah.Adam: I think the great thing as well about that aspect is if you ever did decide to go back into the workforce and thought, “I want to go into a design agency,” or something along these lines, it isn’t like you’ve been sitting at home not kind of improving yourself or keeping yourself up-to-date. So you could actually kind of walk into a position if you wanted to and kind of say, “Here’s my portfolio from the last couple of years doing this kind of work.”Tree: Absolutely. The really nice thing for me is – especially with the Photoshop editing is that I can keep up with what’s new and current and every time I open Photoshop, there’s a new little tutorial and so I always take time out to do that. So I’m always trying to learn and make myself better and make a really great portfolio in case that ever does appeal in the future to go back out and go to a design agency. So yeah, it’s nice because it does make me push myself. I do need to keep current and I do need to do the best work I can. So yeah, there’s also that aspect too.Adam: I think that’s really quite refreshing because in the UK especially, the difficulty that we have is me working and my partner not working, is that if she did want to go to work right now to an agency or somewhere else, the amount of fees and everything else to hiring a nanny or a babysitter is very high.So it becomes quite difficult. But the refreshing thing is from taking on Fiverr now, it gives you so many options where you don’t have to stay out of the workforce. So you can work on Fiverr and make that a fulltime thing as it escalates with your son growing up or you can just use it to keep yourself fresh, keep yourself current and go back to the previous kind of industry or new industry in the workforce outside of that. So really, you’re inundated with so many different possibilities.Tree: Absolutely. I think you hit the nail right on the head there. It does just open up this world of possibility and at the same time, keeps you sane.Redd: Well, that’s about all we have time for today. So thank you so much to Tree for joining us. You can find her on Fiverr as Artisttree. Our jingle was made by Customdrumloops which is Ryan and we were edited today by Dansha. Thanks so much and we will see you next week.
