Fiverr
ThoughtStorms Wiki
An interesting variation on MicroMarkets such as TheMechanicalTurk
People invent their own gigs which are what they'd do for $5.
I'm getting increasingly fascinated by Fiverr. Start scrolling through the gigs on offer and you see teenagers and amateurs offering to do jobs that would cost orders of magnitude elsewhere. Even 99Designs charges around $300-$500 for a logo. And on fiverr there are people doing it for $4. Of course it's likely to be inferior. But for some people, the price/performance trade-off will work. And the kids there are discovering new ways to slice and micro-chunk work into tinier, simpler, more predictable units.
It feels much more significant than say, oDesk or similar outsourcing sites where you still have to enter into a heavyish commitment with your supplier.
And, at the same time, the slightly larger granularity, and the fact that people invent their own gigs, rather than wait for the customer to invent HITS, gives it a different character to Amazon's TheMechanicalTurk.
This is getting kind of ridiculous :
DesktopManufacturing and Fiverr bring you custom laser-cut trophies for $5 (of which, I believe Fiverr themselves take $1)
How low is the price of "stuff" going to go?
http://fiverr.com/fabricafifa/laser-cut-and-engrave-a-custom-trophy
My Quora answer to the question What can micro-gig marketplaces like fiverr and taskrabbit do to upsell their users?:
I think Fiverr is doing the right thing by allowing sellers to offer higher-value / higher-priced add-ons to the basic $5 gig.
Could it go further? I'd guess once it starts building up better feedback about vendors it could use that in some way. Give badges / credits to successful / reliable vendors. Allow privileged vendors to create gigs with a minimum of $25 or $50.
A bolder move might be to try offering a KickStarter-like service. Allow gig vendors to create Kickstarter-like projects but at a smaller-scale than the average Kickstarter. For example "I will write this short ebook if 20 people commit to buying it for $5". Or "I'll cycle naked through Manhattan if 500 people pay $10."
Or look at something like CafePress which has been a great idea for over a decade but feels tired. Fiverr is full of creative artists and performers. Many of whom are using it to build their personal brand. Maybe those vendors would love the option of offering a t-shirt or other branded items to happy customers etc. right on their page.
Fiverr could also beef up the vendor profiles in other ways. Steal good ideas from everywhere from Behance to LinkedIn to DesignOutpost to oDesk to vizify.
My post on Composing :
I can't get over Fiverr.
Even when it's full of this stuff it feels incredibly significant to me. Perhaps as significant as Kickstarter. For what used to be known as "pocket money prices" you can hire people from all over the world to do silly (or not so silly) things for you. This is an economy where an extrovert kid can participate on equal (absurd) footing with an extrovert pensioner. It's YouTube retrofitted as an personalized attention economy. A service which unleashes new waves of extraordinary, perverse, comical creativity.
Two more things that are fascinating.
1) Lots of gigs offered by people in the US and UK. Unlike many cheap online markets it's not just for rich Westerners to buy the services of people from the developing world. $5 is a magic price that seems to motivate those from the developed economies as much as anyone else. Maybe it says something about the state of the US / European economies too.
2) At the same time, the number of people from developing countries participating in the silly stuff. Subcontinental Asians are not simply acting as your rather serious PA or cheap Drupal developer. They are figuring out how to exploit every angle and aspect of their culture and (perhaps) enjoying themselves.
Quora Answer : Is Fiverr the next big thing?
Fiverr by itself isn't the next big thing.
But micromarkets like Fiverr are one of the big things of the next decade or so. (Where "big thing" is something that will notably touch everyone, change society and make some people very rich.)
It's now looking like Uber is the most notoriously successful example of this. Which is a shame because they seem to have demonstrated poor moral leadership and be picking some of the less imaginative niches. But they're good at raising money and that will give them a lot of scope to expand into other markets and compete with everyone from TaskRabbit to Fiverr to oDesk in the future.
I've had a theory (for 10 years now, so I'm kind of a crazily ahead of my time visionary or ... er ... wrong!) that the obvious business model for social networks is to become markets letting their members sell to each other.
Instead it looks like separate micromarket companies are pioneering the niche of being micromarkets. I'm still kind of assuming that once someone figures this out, Facebook, Google etc. are going to swoop in and buy them. (Though investors have now pushed Uber out of the reach of almost everyone else.)
Why LinkedIn hasn't bought Fiverr, oDesk (or an equivalent micromarket for short term contracts) is a mystery to me. Feels like they've basically screwed up there. They could have been the mega platform for "work-related stuff" but they won't be.
Facebook obviously still have a chance to turn around an launch their own micromarket. They only have to add a "store" option or "my gigs" option to FB, to grab a big chunk of this future. But the longer they leave it to the upstarts, the harder it will be.
And perhaps the Google, Facebook, Twitter DNA is too corrupted by the assumption that they should be advertising funded "social media" rather than genuine "social utilities."
Quora Answer : What can micro-gig marketplaces like fiverr and taskrabbit do to upsell their users?
I think Fiverr is doing the right thing by allowing sellers to offer higher-value / higher-priced add-ons to the basic $5 gig.
Could it go further? I'd guess once it starts building up better feedback about vendors it could use that in some way. Give badges / credits to successful / reliable vendors. Allow privileged vendors to create gigs with a minimum of $25 or $50.
A bolder move might be to try offering a Kickstarter-like service. Allow gig vendors to create Kickstarter-like projects but at a smaller-scale than the average Kickstarter. For example "I will write this short ebook if 20 people commit to buying it for $5". Or "I'll cycle naked through Manhattan if 500 people pay $10."
Or look at something like CafePress which has been a great idea for over a decade but feels tired. Fiverr is full of creative artists and performers. Many of whom are using it to build their personal brand. Maybe those vendors would love the option of offering a t-shirt or other branded items to happy customers etc. right on their page.
Fiverr could also beef up the vendor profiles in other ways. Steal good ideas from everywhere from Behance to LinkedIn to DesignOutpost to oDesk to vizify.