October 29, 2012

Fiverr

This is getting kind of ridiculous.

Desktop manufacturing and the micro-payment market 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?

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 mechanical turk.