Captain DIY Tries Fiverr - Twice

As you know from articles such as The Side Hustle: Step Up Your DIY Game, I love the side hustle. Sometimes. As you may also know from Captain DIY Screws Up At Life, sometimes the hustle takes over, and that’s not a good thing.
During my flood of podcast interviews a few months back, I was told by a couple of hosts that I had a “voice made for radio,” to which the natural reply is, “and a face made for radio too!”
All jokes aside, as much as that is possible for me, having my voice praised in this way not only felt really good, it also opened up my thoughts to the possibility of a new side hustle idea: voice work. Where else to launch your soon-to-be incredibly lucrative voice work business but the online side hustle monolith Fiverr?

I didn’t come up with the name, so don’t blame me for the funny spelling! fiverr.com is a website that allows people to promote their skills and offer said skills to other people for a set price. The skills they feature include content creation, editing, voice work, and so on.
They also prominently feature people who have used the platform to created massively successful business in all of these different avenues.
I had a microphone that I had purchased for the purpose of podcast interviews, so I had all of the equipment I need to start up my voice work business. All I needed to do was set up an account, create a profile with a little introduction about me and my services, and record a blurb showcase my amazing talents. Then I could kick back, watch the offers come pouring in, and that would be the start of my new voice work career!

I was elated to find that, after just a day or two, I already had messages in my inbox. This was going exactly as I had hoped it would! Next stop: Hollywood!
Except that isn’t how it played out.
What I found was that the first message I got was from someone looking for me to work on a project for them, but they didn’t want to pay me through the Fiverr platform. As soon as I pointed out that the entirety of the transaction had to remain in the Fiverr platform, they disappeared.
The next message I got was from someone looking for some work, but, in my naïveté, I neglected to run them through the contract portion of the platform. I performed a small bit of work for them and then they also disappeared.

At this point, I kind of gave up on the whole Fiverr thing and went back to life without it, which wasn’t a whole lot different than life with it had been.
After a while I thought to myself, “self, you should throw your hat in the ring as a writer on Fiverr. I mean, you write stuff all of the time, and sometimes people think it’s pretty good, so you should get paid for it.” So I created another profile presenting myself as a writer.
In a matter of hours, I had several responses. Several! I was crushing it!
As it turned out, every single response was someone trying to get me to do work for them outside of the Fiverr platform. In other words, spam.
It has now been a few months since I first started on Fiverr, and I have yet to receive a legitimate request for work of any kind.

Probably lots of things. I want to point out here that I am not shitting on Fiverr. By that I mean that I’m not trying to make them look bad. I suppose if someone wanted to pay me through Fiverr for some other types of jobs I could…wait wait wait, this is getting out of hand! Plus I don’t think they have a category for that.
One of the things I could have done better was create a more prolific profile. Fiverr recommends having a video introduction of yourself, and they report something like a 40% higher success rate for those that do so. I did not make a video, as that just seemed like too much work at the time.
I also did not put a whole lot of effort into learning all about the Fiverr platform and how to best utilize it before I dove in. They threw a whole bunch of free lesson videos at me as I was getting started, and most of them seemed like pretty obvious stuff so I skipped them. I’m guessing, with the clarity of hindsight, that those videos probably had a lot more to offer than I thought they did.

Oh right, I almost forgot about that. See, my second attempt was nearly identical to my first, except that I decide to offer up my writing services to anyone looking for content creation. I figured, “I’m a super successful blogger with a subscription list of tens, why not throw my hat in the already overfilled ring of writers on Fiverr and see what happens?”
I wrote up a quick introduction, set up my pricing schedule, and published my profile. Once again, I immediately got a few hits, and, once again, they all turned out to be spam. Sigh.

As it stands right now, Fiverr has paused my profiles, meaning if you go and look for me you won’t see me until I log in and tell Fiverr I’m ready for work again. I haven’t gone on there in a long enough time span that they figure I have given up hope and abandoned my dreams of Fiverr success. Which is pretty accurate.
So here is my big take on the Fiverr side hustle idea: if you are willing to put in the work up front and really make a fantastic profile, there’s a chance it could work for you. The problem is, you’re competing against people who have done thousands of jobs on there, and they have thousands of reviews and a long history to make potential customers feel like they will know what they are getting.
You, as a beginner, will need some trusting soul (i.e. some poor schlub) to give you a chance. If that happens, and they don’t turn out to be spam, give them the absolute best product you can as quickly as possible, and hopefully they really like you and come back for more.
As for me, I might pop on there every once in a while and open up my profile again, but I’m not putting too much effort into it. I’ve had my share of spam interactions, and I’ve moved on. If you think you have what it takes to rock your side hustle on Fiverr, don’t let me bring you down!
The worst thing that can happen is nothing, and it costs you nothing. Might as well try.