Freelancer Tips

Fiverrcast Episode 35: The “F” Word

By
Fiverr Team
|
May 24, 2016

Transcript

Adam: Hey Redd.Redd: Hey Adam.Adam: So you’re not going to be around for a little bit, right?Redd: No, I am getting married and I’m moving across the country. So I’m going to be taking this summer off from the podcast so I can get all that straightened out and I will be back in the fall.Adam: All right. Well, good luck and we will see you in September.[Intro music]Adam: Hi there and welcome to Fiverrcast, the podcast for sellers by sellers. I’m Adam AKA Twistedweb123.Ryan: And I am Ryan AKA Customdrumloops and today we’re joined by Kevin who is Irishguy1 on Fiverr and Kevin, welcome to the show.Kevin: Hi guys. Thank you.Adam: So Kevin, you actually came forward to us and pitched the idea of the topic for this show which is we’re going to summarize it as the F word. Why Fiverr shouldn’t be a bad word for freelancers. So what made you decide to tackle this topic and approach us?Kevin: Well, I’ve been seeing a lot of negative comments about Fiverr lately amongst my circle of colleagues and friends in the voiceover business and it’s really what brought me to Fiverr in the first place. A friend was talking about Fiverr almost five years ago now and I had no idea what it was and he was – as we say, he was using Fiverr as an F word and that really kind of intrigued me and sparked my curiosity about what Fiverr was to begin with and why is it so bad.So I looked into it and obviously I found that Fiverr is not so bad and I think that’s – I’ve made it my mission lately to try to sell my colleagues on using Fiverr as a source of income. It has been a great source of income for me and I try to rationalize with them why Fiverr is good versus the way that they’re doing business in the voiceover industry, which is not a bad thing. But with the economy and such being what it is and companies, even large companies, looking for solutions to the overpriced voiceover Gigs, Fiverr is the great alternative.Ryan: I think it’s interesting too because both of you, Kevin and Adam, work in industries on Fiverr where they seem to be two popular industries that people hate on, the graphic design and the voiceover. So I think you both might have some interesting perspectives on this.Adam: I don’t know if it’s the same for Kevin. But when it comes to the graphic design, it has been this way for a while. You have the graphic design agencies who don’t seem to like the freelancers and then you have the freelancers or certain freelancers who don’t seem to like the aspect of Fiverr with the cheaper lead-in and it has always kind of been that way.But for me, it’s a case of picking and choosing what service you can actually offer for the broken-down price as opposed to undervaluing yourself because that seems to be a common misconception. If someone in that agency is charging say $500 for a logo and they come on to Fiverr and they see a $50 logo, they kind of think to themselves, well, that’s 10 times cheaper than I am. They either massively undervalue themselves or there’s a bit of a rip-off on that part.I mean to that I would say it’s all about picking and choosing the service you offer. For the person or the agency offering $500 for a logo, the chances there are – kind of they’re sketching out. They’re sending multiple drafts, multiple sketches until they even get to the actual digitizing aspect of it and then taking it from there whereas on a platform like Fiverr, you can kind of say, right, we’re going to go with two revisions. Both are going to be digitized from the start and we can move on from there.So for that client who doesn’t necessarily need the whole back and forth and all these other aspects of that logo, they’re receiving a strip-down service and I’m not spending as much time as that $500 Gig is or that $500 agency is and it kind of pans out. But a lot of people don’t seem to kind of see it that way or realize it works that way. Is that something you’ve noticed as well Kevin?Kevin: Absolutely. It’s all about perception from the people who view Fiverr as a cheap alternative. It really comes down to well, OK, I’m not giving a half hour narration with music and production for $5. So as far as educating people who have that perception, that’s part of the challenge, but I agree with you. I mean a voiceover artist will spend equal amount of time in doing the same work as a graphic artist would do with sending out demos and doing follow-ups and this, that and the other thing whereas on Fiverr, I’m knocking out 10 or 20 voicemails a day.Ryan: Yeah. I mean I think a big part of that is developing your process and so when you’re on Fiverr and you do it enough, you get to a point where you are more skilled at doing that higher volume than someone who doesn’t do that and I think touching on what Adam said, that adds sort of another element of not only the agencies that dislike people on Fiverr but also some of the freelancers who can’t adjust to a changing marketplace. They can’t develop a system that works.Instead of trying to figure out a different creative way, they immediately write it off as sweatshop labor or the quality is not good which isn’t the case most of the time. I mean Kevin, you know this. The equipment you use versus the equipment someone who doesn’t work on Fiverr who charges a lot more, they might be the same exact thing. So in terms of quality, you’re getting something that is very comparable and 99.9 percent of the people unless they’re audio engineers might not even be able to tell the difference.Kevin: Yeah, there are a thousand “professional” voiceover artists who are in their closet with a cheap microphone and a laptop charging the same prices as the true professionals. So yeah, there’s cheap voiceover artists on both sides either in the non-Fiverr world and in the Fiverr world and you just got to be careful about who you’re selecting.Ryan: And I mean it is subjective too. Some people might want that booming radio voice sound and some people might be looking for the everyday voiceover sound. So I think you have both sides where you have people that have topnotch, top level equipment selling on Fiverr but then you also have people who pitch themselves as a professional that are recording on a USB mic on their laptop.Kevin: Exactly.Adam: I think that’s a really good point because it’s also all about the buyer’s needs and when it comes to things like voiceover, really the ultimate unique selling point of that service is the voice at the end of the day. It’s not so much how much is being mastered or rendered and the fact is if you come on somewhere like Fiverr and there’s someone doing it as a hobby, $5, 30 seconds, that’s kind of all they offer and it’s a dry recording. As a buyer, you can come on. You can grab that $5 dry recording and then you can take it to other places on Fiverr to go get it remixed and mastered and made to the degree that you want.So it all kind of depends on what the buyer is looking for. If they’re looking for the fully polished, finished product, then they’ve got the equipment ready. If they’re looking for the unique voice and the [0:07:41] [Indiscernible] they love, they can then take that forward.But coming back to what you said about the process as well Ryan, I think that’s an absolute key area because when you often look at external or alternative working processes, if I were to come to Kevin and say, “Hey Kevin, I’ve got this script. It’s three minutes long. Can you do me a couple of demos? Can you record out for me?” Now if Kevin had to book in studio time whether that’s in his own studio or whether that’s in an external studio, even if it’s your own studio, running that equipment will cost you money. So the fact is you can’t – you’re not really going to book in the studio time for – to make it valuable for three minutes. The chances are you’re going to be there for about 30 odd minutes whereas that is going to take up your time. That is going to reflect in the cost.But when you’re on somewhere like Fiverr and you wake up in the morning and you check your orders and you’ve got a list of everything you can do, you can go into that studio and rather than spending like 30 minutes on one recording, you can kind of do 10, 20 recordings in 30 minutes, send it out and maximize your time efficiently so you’re pretty much probably earning the same ratio of wage as one recording elsewhere but as you say Ryan, you’re optimizing your work flow.Ryan: Yeah. I mean I think that we sort of take for granted that we have spent thousands of orders in years putting that together and that’s not something that’s easy to do.For new sellers and people who don’t do that, they don’t understand that concept of developing that process. So maybe they don’t misunderstand it but they haven’t done it yet. So they haven’t figured out a way to make it work for them versus we have and that’s why we understand when you get that process, you can block out time and make even more per hour than if you were doing just the standard freelance work.Kevin: Yeah, I think that’s key. One of the things I try to explain to the narrow-minded folks who view Fiverr negatively especially in the voiceover industry but I think it transcends among all the creative services. How much time – what is your hourly rate for accomplishing this voiceover compared to the hourly rate that I’m making accomplishing the same voiceover? Sometimes it sinks in. Sometimes it doesn’t. But I think it’s again how you set yourself up. You’re right. It’s whether or not you’re going to be successful at it.Ryan: I think yeah, doing that. When you optimize with your Gig extras, you can even earn more per hour. For example a $100 order might take you the same amount of time as a $5 order depending on what you – how you offer your extras and how you position those. So that’s one thing that people don’t realize is it’s all about finding that average order price and what you want to work at per certain hour and making it work.Adam: Yeah. I mean for me I actually – when I’ve got the orders in place, I actually earn more on Fiverr per hour than I do in my external job which is running a web development company and that’s simply because you can charge someone a per hourly rate for development work but there’s always going to be a cap. You can’t turn around and say I’m going to charge you this much because that – it might take their mick a little bit but the fact is on Fiverr, if you’ve got six or seven orders like you say Ryan, that you can do in under an hour because you’re perfected that queue, you might let’s say turnaround and you do, I don’t know, seven orders at $30 a pop. That’s $210.So if you go to someone outside or to an external client and saying my hourly rate is $210 an hour, that’s an expensive hourly rate. That’s like lawyer fees. So when you’re trying to justify that to a single client, it becomes more difficult. You become more bespoke and you have a very high set clientele which is obviously a harder thing to do. But if you’re picturing that as $30 job to seven clients and you can do that in an hour, that market is a lot easier to break into. It’s a lot easier to crack than it is to crack a market of one client $200 plus an hour.Ryan: It’s very true and I mean I think touching back on what I said earlier in relation to that, say if you get a $5 order and it takes you five minutes to do. But then you get your next order that’s a $5 base order but they also order the source files. They order a day faster delivery. They order a different format. All of those are probably going to be sort of time-free extras that you’re adding on. So you’re spending the same amount of time on that project but because they want a more all-inclusive package, you’re making more in that timeframe.Adam: As you say, it’s about finding that balance where for me my logo design service, if someone just comes to me and orders the cheapest package, it’s OK. But if you could call it maybe a borderline loss leader if you like. But I spend so much time and effort on the upsell afterwards that when they come back, it goes from being kind of borderline to an OK wage to majorly ramped up through as you say pretty much passive upsells because when you’re creating a logo, you are also creating the source file along with it but it’s about retaining those rights or retaining that file format and to then pay an additional price.So for the buyers, that works perfectly because often I have buyers come to me. They’ve just launched a website and they want a logo set up. I will set up a logo for them. They walk away happy. I’ve earned money from that and then their business will do well. They come back in say a month’s time and say, “Hey, our business is doing fantastically. We’re now looking to print some business cards. Then we’re looking to print some posters. Can we have the source files as well?”Then I don’t really know many other areas where you would be able to have an upsell that’s passive for a continuous period of time. I’ve had clients come back to me as much as about a year afterwards asking for the upgrade files.Ryan: Yeah, I mean I think that’s true. You don’t really find that anywhere and that’s where from that seller’s perspective, you have that always to sell on the future but also from the buyer’s perspective when they get that initial base price, they have that extra room in the budget not spending all upfront to then experimenting with buying traffic or with running ads to their site. They have extra room with that money to grow their business to a point where they can come back and then get that from you. So it’s win-win for both sides, the buyer and the seller.Kevin: Yeah, I guess you guys in the other creative fields have that option with voiceover. I’ve seen some people who offer but they don’t do any mastery and they don’t do any editing. I suppose for them there’s an opportunity for them to upsell to get the full package. I sent out a quality product ready to go.Ryan: I mean that’s part of your process. That’s a part of your strategy for selling and I mean I think it’s going to vary seller to seller with what they do. I think I’ve seen some voiceover artists that sell commercial rights to the voiceovers. I know some offer the broadcast quality mastery and things like that. I think it depends on the person and – because you can charge differently for word counts. There are all sorts of different ways you can strategically price your product to stand out.Kevin: Oh yeah, absolutely.Adam: I think as we’re talking about, it kind of comes down to different scenarios or a combination of the two scenarios where you either have a service where you can do a passive upsell for not too much extra work and it’s more a case of giving rights or additional formats or you’re able to streamline a work process to fit more into your time. So with logos and maybe video animations and stuff like that, you can get more file formats. With things like voiceovers, as opposed to spending a large chunk of time on one, you can split that to do multiples in a shorter amount of time.I think really the great thing about Fiverr as well is it not only allows you to create that process but it also saves you money in a sense as well because Fiverr itself, the platform, is almost like a personal assistant in a way it’s set up with things like the to-dos, the queues, the lists and everything else. I mean I’ve freelanced before and I’ve worked other places and often I’m there inside my email account responding to messages, trying to group them together, trying to keep track of everything and often when you’re quite busy, you need to maybe look to hiring help. But on Fiverr, the way everything is set up as well, you’re effectively using an assistant for freelancing.Ryan: It’s like a marketplace. I mean for both the buyer and the seller. The seller has their products out facing the buyers and the buyer can come and look at what the seller is offering. There are not too many places especially with freelancing where that happens. You post your project. Then you get bombarded with a bunch of emails. You then have to go filter through those prices, filter through those portfolios versus on Fiverr, you go and everything is in front of you and you can do it at your own leisure.Adam: That’s actually a really good point to mention. I didn’t think of it that way. I mean for me, Fiverr is one of the few places where that kind of dynamic relationship is turned around where as you say it’s buyers coming to sellers as opposed to sellers coming to the buyer.Kevin: Yeah, I think marketplace, that’s a great example of what Fiverr really is. It is a marketplace and it gives you an opportunity as a seller to – here’s what I offer. Here are all my prices. Here are my demos. Here are real examples in the portfolio section. Here are real examples of what I’ve recorded versus someone who is not on the Fiverr platform has to spend time, money, energy to do all that.Ryan: You have real world reviews right there too. So they can see the reviews even right on this one spot from actual users.Kevin: Exactly.Adam: I think the keyword there is passive because you only set up your Gig once. You may tweak it now and again but you set up your Gig and it pretty much manages itself where when you’re looking at freelance now as well, you are – you’re always kind of chasing the client, chasing up with them, seeing if they want to hire you, show them examples as you say whereas on Fiverr, it’s a marketplace as you say. You set it up and the buyers come to you, which again saves so much time and energy and I don’t think enough credit is given to the platform for that. So when people kind of look at it and say, “Oh, it’s not great for freelancers,” really it saves so much time and energy that again you can afford to maybe lower your rates a little bit because you’re saving money by not having to spend the time and energy doing things you would elsewhere.Kevin: Exactly.Ryan: So let me ask you both to debunk a couple of F word myths. So I know we touched on this a little bit but the first being that Fiverr is sweatshop labor, stealing jobs from – insert to blank. What would you say to someone who approaches you with that argument?Adam: What I would say is first of all, in general, anything is a free marketplace. So the price someone wants to set themselves or the price someone else wants to set is completely up to them. It’s all down to what you’re willing to do and how you pitch yourself in that way. But nine times out of ten, you can guarantee the person setting their price knows why they’re setting that in that way.So if you see someone on Fiverr offering something for $5 such as a logo and you think, “Wow, that is so cheap for what it is,” what you don’t see is the background process they have to maximize the revenue for that time spent and to actually make that very worthwhile for them.So when people are saying it’s sweatshop or it’s very undervalued, the truth is nine times out of ten it isn’t because there’s so much going on behind the scenes process-wise that they’re probably doing very well.Ryan: That’s very true and I know you mentioned the concept of using it as a loss leader and I do the same thing. You can set that base price lower knowing that you will make it back on the backend.Adam: Yeah. I mean there are so many different elements to it where I – in fact, actually just today, I had someone come to me and they purchased a logo. I think it was for $20 and after the Gig finished, they said, “OK, I don’t really need anything else logo-wise but I see on your profile you do websites. How much would you charge to build a website?” We’re currently discussing and securing that order which is obviously a lot more than $5 or $20 but having that product or that service out there got them in, gave them a small taste for a small fee. They became happy. The risk got reduced and now we’re moving on to bigger projects.Ryan: Yeah, and they know the quality and the communication is there which is a big, big deal for a lot of people in addition to the price.Kevin: With Fiverr now offering sellers the options of doing packages, I can offer you a tremendous product for $25, for $50 or whatever and that’s now the starting price.Adam: One of the Gigs I offer is website reviews where I start off by offering 10 tips to improve your website. Now the first ever review I wrote took me 90 minutes to write. Since then, my process has gotten a lot better. I’ve put a lot of time and energy and effort into doing that and the time it takes me now to do a website review is very, very, very marginal compared to that. But the fact is I had to start off low to build my reputation, to build up my process and everything else along these lines. So you might find someone offering a service for $5 but if it’s picking up and they’re doing it successfully and they’re doing it well, come back in a month later and they probably would have upped their price and expanded their service. So it’s all about having that kind of initial lead-in and we mentioned the loss leader aspect to be able to get to a point where you can alter your dynamic.Ryan: I think that’s interesting too and it also leads into something else and that’s the fact that when you’re paying a lower price like $5 or $10, you’re going to get something that’s cheap or bad quality and I definitely don’t think that’s true. With Fiverr, people who have bad experiences buying, I think they go in to something with expectations that are very unrealistic. I see they’re doing explainer videos. They send the Dropbox video or the Amazon explainer video and say, “My budget is $10. Can you make something like this?”Not understanding that those videos are probably $50,000 or $100,000 videos. So if you go into wanting this full branding process for your brand and order through a logo designer and you get something back that you don’t like and the cool thing about Fiverr, it has millions of Gigs and millions of sellers and I always compare it to YouTube. There are a ton of terrible videos on YouTube. But if you were to go and watch one video and write off the whole entire site and say every video on YouTube is terrible because I watched this one video, that would just seem ridiculous. But so many people approach Fiverr with that same mentality where I had one bad experience. Maybe it was unrealistic expectations. Maybe they just hit a bad seed. But don’t give up on the whole site because of one experience.Kevin: You really hit a nerve here. I don’t do explainer videos but I do regular commercial videos using stock images and such and it astounds me how many people will say, “Can you do something like this?” and they will link a YouTube video that has professional actors and sets and the whole nine yards. Can you do that $5? I have to explain to them. Well, I don’t do live actors because they cost a lot more than $5 but here’s what I can do for you. That’s – I think that’s for the portfolio sections really are – you know, here are examples of what I can do for you.Adam: I think the comparison to YouTube is absolutely genius because I think when people have a habit of talking about Fiverr and talking about the services available, they seem to put it under the banner of Fiverr and not under the banner of a service provider on Fiverr. So as you say, there’s always going to be different levels of quality in varying services. But then again, Fiverr is almost like a search engine if you like in the sense that it allows you to find services. It indexes them if you like and it gives you the filters available to choose what best suits you. So what other misconceptions do you have Ryan or common misconceptions have you heard?Ryan: So one other big one is – maybe you can help with this one Adam because it’s specifically tailored to graphic design and I personally have an opinion on this but I will be curious to hear your take and that’s the fact that when you go to get a logo, it’s the most important thing that represents your branding and you need to have that set before you proceed with anything else.Someone on Fiverr who’s cranking them out is not going to be able to take the time to go and understand your brand and understand your concept and nail exactly what you’re looking for before you can proceed with everything else with your business.Adam: So I would disagree with that in the sense that as long as the designer is managing their time correctly, if anything, doing a high amount of logos is actually going to give you a better perspective of what a company needs. So when I’m actually busy, my creative juices flow a lot more and I often have buyers come to me and they give me an idea and they’re not really sure what they’re looking for or they aren’t really 100 percent or they may ask for something and I’m thinking that’s going to look terrible and I will kind of – I will actually ask in my Gig description, “Do you want to give me free rein or do you want to give me extra details?”Most of the time people give me free rein and the experience that I’ve picked up from always thinking, always working, working on so many different concepts and so many different aspects is I often send something back and they kind of think, “Oh wow, I didn’t even think of that at all.”But if I’m sat down and quiet, often you kind of find it dry up. I mean if I worked on one logo a month and someone approached me, I would probably spend a lot of time trying to think of an idea or a concept not knowing what other industry sectors are doing, not knowing what their competitors are doing, having not – you know, kind of worked on that and maybe that’s why the price is higher for certain agencies because they do less. So it takes more time or effort to kind of get up to date with that industry whereas if someone comes to me today now and says, “I want a fitness logo,” I do quite a lot of fitness logos. So I know what’s going to look saturated. I know what’s going to be quite unique. I know what sort of color schemes you will usually associate with fitness. I know what color schemes you want to avoid and that’s all from actively working. Whereas if I did a fitness logo six months ago, I would have to do so much research to keep up to date with that.Ryan: And especially with how fast the marketplace evolves right now, technology changing so quick and I’m probably going to get bashed on the head by every graphic designer I run into by saying this. But in my opinion, that initial start with the logo doesn’t matter that much because you can always change it and I mean look at Instagram. I mean they just did a massive overhaul of their logo.So it’s – I don’t think it’s as much as it used to be like the Nike swoosh. Like OK, that’s it. That represents their branding but digital marketing and things like that, it changes so frequently. I mean go look at how many brands have changed their logos just in the past 10 years.Adam: Yeah. I think when it comes to logo design, it’s not always the conviction of how it’s achieved. The better thing to look at is the proof of concept. So we see websites or companies all the time changing their logo or changing their branding. I mean Uber changed their logo I think it was the beginning of this year or near the end of last year and although it’s quite different to their old design, it retains the proof of concept. Google changed their design recently. It still retains the proof of concept.Instagram again has retained the proof of concept. So even if you’re coming on to Fiverr and you come on with an open mind and you think, right, I’m going to hire 20 different $10 Gigs, I’m going to spend $200 and have a look at what’s available, you may get varying degrees of quality come back depending on where you’re looking. But if you get a proof of concept that comes back or an idea that you absolutely love, that is more than worth it, the money that you’ve invested and you can either hire someone to improve that further on Fiverr. You could look elsewhere. Completely up to you.But for me when it comes down to logo, the proof of concept is normally more important than the literal design because even if you do redesign, as long as you retain that proof of concept, you’ve maintained the key brand of the business.Ryan: Some like Uber were fairly drastic redesigns. I mean that was a pretty big shift in terms of the look.Adam: Oh, yeah, definitely. In terms of the look, it’s completely different. But when you look at it, the proof of concept, you can see it’s still there. You can still see it related to what Uber is. I mean to my knowledge, it has picked up quite a lot of negative publicity on the actual design itself but people still know it’s Uber.Ryan: Yeah. It’s all subjective especially with logos and even look at Airbnb too. That’s another one.Adam: That’s the other bit as well when it comes to branding and logos. I always find it funny when you kind of see designers critique each other’s work in quite a negative light because although it’s good to you that you follow certain trends or certain patterns and some things are generally preferred by a majority as opposed to a minority, at the end of the day, it all comes down to what the buyer likes.Now I’ve created logos before that I’ve loved and the buyers wanted to change it. After changing it, sometimes I thought – personally I thought it looked nicer beforehand. But if the buyer likes it and they’re subjective to that, who am I to argue or question what they want. They’re hiring me as a logo designer in that respect. So I think it all comes down to what the buyer wants as well and how that’s reflected in the work.Ryan: That’s very true.Kevin: I think sometimes it’s easier to please a buyer who has no idea of what they want. I think you can wow them because with more experience that you have, you can kind of feel what they really want and give it to them whereas I think buyers who come in with this preconceived idea of what – this is exactly what I want and if you don’t interpret that correctly, you’re not going to give them what’s in their mind.Adam: I have experienced the opposite of that in some respects where sometimes I actually have designers come to me to purchase logos for their clients. Not specifically for their clients. It’s not their final deliverable. But just because they’ve gotten to the point where they know so much that they’re set in their own mindset and they need a fresh take or a fresh perspective on something. So going somewhere like Fiverr and picking up a proof of concept for what’s relatively a small amount of money that’s not going to break into their margins. It helps to give that fresh idea or to look into it further. In the same way when I do my website report, I often have a lot of companies come to me and offer them white label because they’re picturing changes and stuff to their client’s website by having worked with this client and have this contract with this client for years. They’re trying to think of fresh things that they can do that they haven’t already mentioned in the past.So it’s almost like consulting if you like with other professionals to get that fresh take or that fresh look on it. The buyers who for me don’t know what they’re looking for are some of my hardest buyers because some would turn around and go, “Wow, this is exactly it. This is what I’ve nailed.” But then others will kind of turn around and it’s the mindset of, “I don’t know what I’m looking for but it’s not that. Can you do something again?” Then they do something again and they go, “I don’t know what I’m looking for. It’s not that. I will know it when I see it.” You’re kind of thinking this is difficult. I’m not there with you kind of thing.Kevin: Yeah. Maybe it’s the differences between our two creative industries. I found that most people want to say – I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’ve got a medical office. Record a voicemail greeting but I don’t know what kind of approach I want. Well, I recorded hundreds of medical office voicemail greetings. So I know what you want and I usually wow them but I guess it changes from industry to industry.Ryan: I agree with Kevin on that one to an extent. You get people that come in and say, all right, just picture Morgan Freeman and mix that with Bruce Willis and just do a voiceover that sounds like that. They have these specific images in their mind. I mean I say too with explainer videos, the whole start in the sandbox and it zooms out and it’s a desert. It zooms out again and you get – when people have these specific things in their mind, it’s often near impossible to recreate.Kevin: Yeah.Ryan: So when you have that element of freedom, it gives you – relies on your professionalism and your experience to deliver the product.Kevin: Yeah. I think with Fiverr, you can see that in a seller by the level that they’re at, the number of Gigs they’ve completed, their feedback and so forth.Ryan: So what advice would both of you give to someone coming to Fiverr as a buyer to avoid the F word experience, to get the true Fiverr experience? What should they look for when they search for Gigs? What questions should they ask the seller? What should they do to make the Fiverr process as awesome as possible when they’re buying something?Adam: So my recommendation is kind of threefold. The first one is to shop around and see what options are available. The second one is to kind of don’t put all your eggs into one basket. So if you’re looking for a logo design, maybe order from five different people at the lowest package or the lower price to get a varying degree and then the third one leaves off of that where come in – if you have any reservations or you’re not quite sure or you haven’t worked with a seller before and you’re a little bit reserved, come in at the lower price and you can always upgrade later on from that because if you’re kind of weighing and you think, well, actually that didn’t turn out how I wanted it to. But you spent $5, completely fine. You look for another seller. Whereas if you spend $100 and you say that didn’t turn out how I wanted it to at all, you may have soaked up your budget doing that. So it’s all kind of finding that balance because I just say – I would stress it’s only if you have reservations.Now those reservations for me are reduced the more ratings you see on a seller or the level of the seller and so on and so forth. So really just for me it comes down to shopping around, looking to put your eggs in multiple baskets and if you’ve got any reservations, act upon that.Ryan: What about you Kevin?Kevin: I agree with that wholeheartedly. But I think also if a buyer has come to Fiverr to begin with, then Fiverr is not such an F word to start off with. So you’ve got them. They’ve taken the carrot as it were but I agree with Adam to shop around, to see what the seller offers, see what the feedback for them is. Again I keep on going back to the portfolio. It has been the greatest thing since bread and butter.Ryan: Sliced bread and butter.Kevin: Thank you. That’s what I was looking for. You can see what the seller offers beforehand, before you jump in the pool.Adam: Yeah, I think that’s very true because I mean I have seen samples before where coming back to your Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman voiceover, Ryan, where people kind of say, “I ordered this voiceover and it sounded nothing like Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman,” and you’re kind of like, “Oh, who did you order it from?” Oh, this British guy and you kind of think, well, if you have looked at the portfolio and make sure the seller is a right fit for you, that it’s more likely to come off the way you want it to but again I think that kind of falls under the perception of some buyers where they see Fiverr as the entity, as the main provider and they don’t seem to have a distinction between the individual sellers.So if you want a voiceover, you don’t buy from Fiverr. You buy from a service provider who’s on Fiverr. So it’s all about finding that service provider who actually matches your criteria. So if you’re looking for an American accent and you’re hiring from a British guy, chances are it’s not going to be how you want it to be.Ryan: Right. I mean I think to even take that a step further, if you were to work with someone who has done a lot on Fiverr, for example if I do explainer videos and someone says, “I need a radio style voiceover from someone who’s truly a professional,” they can dig through my network. We do so much work on Fiverr that chances are that we have a lot of connections for different Gigs. So I would say ask people that you like and have good experiences with who they recommend because that way you’re probably going to get somebody who has the similar style approach to customer service and quality and different things like that.Kevin: That’s a good point. I think the more relationships that you establish with sellers, that increases your network for new sellers – for new buyers rather. I’m sorry.Ryan: Yeah, and you become a trusted source and a connector, so that it builds even more trust with that buyer to potentially refer more clients your way.Kevin: Yeah.Adam: Well, that’s all we have time for this week. Thanks again to Kevin for joining us. You can find him on Fiverr at Irishguy1. Our jingle today was made by Ryan AKA Customdrumloops and as always we were edited by Dansha. Thanks again and see you next week.Transcription by Trans-Expert at Fiverr.

Fiverr Team
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