In my ongoing journey to figure out a side hustle (or three or five), I stumbled across Fiverr in a podcast from The Side Hustle Nation:
https://www.sidehustlenation.com/how-to-start-a-bounce-house-rental-business/
The podcast episode was about starting a bouncy house business (which I had no interest in doing) but what I am learning that no matter what side hustle someone is doing, even if it is something that you would never want to do, they always have at least one or two nuggets about starting or running a side hustle that I find relevant and helpful. In this podcast, the nugget I found was about outsourcing work to Fiverr.
I had never heard of Fiverr so I went to their website to see what they do. They consider themselves “the world’s largest freelance marketplace” and you can outsource everything from graphic design, video editing, business plan creation to astrology readings. It’s pretty amazing and now that I know about it I wonder how I could have lived so long without it (I had the same realization a few months ago when my sister-in-law introduced me to Etsy).
Check it out at:
https://theordinarymom.com/fiverr
(fyi- this is an affiliate link so I may get paid if you buy something)
I was amazed at all of the things that you can pay a contractor to do at reasonable rates. I was just kicking off my t-shirt business on Teespring and I have no designer experience so I thought I should look at how much it would cost to hire designers to create my t-shirt designs. At the same time, I was really liking the phrase that I had come up with on my The Ordinary Mom Parenting Community Facebook page (now renamed The Ordinary Parent Community) “Ordinary is the new awesome”.
I thought there might be some way I could brand that phrase through t-shirts and other merchandise and was also interested in creating a website around it but I didn’t know how.
The first thing I decided to do was to create an avatar of myself as a test of Fiverr. I searched “avatar” in the search bar and found someone who did carton pictures in a style that I liked for a price that I thought was reasonable. I clicked on his link below to read more:
He said he had a 5 day delivery time and would deliver a high res color file with 3 revisions. You could pick standard, basic or premium. I decided to go premium because I wanted to be on the up and up that it was for commercial use (not sure that is necessary but that’s what I did). I clicked “continue” on the link.
The base price was $25 for premium but then you have the option of adding additional features. I added a printable resolution file for $10. I uploaded a decent picture of myself and waited. Three days later I got a fun avatar of myself (it’s the one on my www.thesidehustlejourney.com website) and was thrilled with his work so I tipped him $7. There was a $4 service fee and the order totaled $46.
I ended up going back to him for 2 more avatars, this time of my dogs. For the first one I paid $10 extra for the source file and tipped $8 and the total was $54. On the second one, I selected source vector file of AI/EPS for an additional $15 and added a transparent background for $10 (I’m not sure why I did either now that I’m looking back at the order details but it’s what I did), I tipped him $10 and my total ended up being $64.50.
I loved the images of my dogs and have used them on some t-shirts in Teespring and Amazon. I didn’t interact much with this designer but he did great work and I’d use him again. Sadly one of my dogs died a couple of months later and now I’m so glad I have this avatar image of her (it was well worth $54 for that memory and my kids love wearing the t-shirt of her with the saying “Love me some labrador”).
The next Fiverr project I did was to find a graphic designer to design some t-shirt logos for my new t-shirt side hustle on Teespring:
https://teespring.com/stores/the-ordinary-mom
I really liked the work of one designer I found so I hired her to do some designs:
I ended up spending $496 with Adri over a 3 month period. I have at least 25 designs now by her so that’s about $20/design, which seems very fair. She was so easy to work with and I could send her revision suggestions and she’d do them right away. She is in Brazil and she often would have revisions ready for me when I looked in the morning. Her English was great, the different time zones were never a problem and it was fun thinking about how Fiverr was creating a global economy where what matters is the end product not the location of the people doing the work. I will definitely use her again and highly recommend her.
The final project I did on Fiverr during this ~3 months of getting my t-shirt business up and running was to hire someone to create a website for me. As I mentioned earlier, I loved the phrase I had come up with for my The Ordinary Mom Facebook group of “Ordinary is the new awesome”. I decided to buy the URL www.ordinaryisthenewawesome.com from WordPress with the Premium account and the private registration for $96.
To sign up for your own WordPress account to start your own side hustle journey, click here: https://wordpress.com/alp/?aff=13401&cid=2093430 (FYI- this is an affiliate link and I’ll make money if you sign up this way).
I searched Fiverr and was looking for a female designer because it seemed to be male dominated niche and I wanted to give work to a female web designer. I found the following designer under the name Puremagic in England at:
She said I had to upgrade my www.ordinaryisthenewawesome.com account on WordPress to business so that I could give her access to customize the site. I upgrade to the Business account for an additional $204. I also added G Suite to get an ordinaryisthenewawesome email address. I paid Puremagic for a 4 page website with 2 revisions (I had to pay for extra one because we kept going back and forth) with photos and a $50 tip (in hindsight I think I way overtipped) for a total of $334.94.
This was my least favorable experience with a Fiverr designer. I think she found me difficult because I was not liking any of the drafts that she was sending so I kept asking her to go back to the drawing board. In the end, I had her really pair down what she did to a much simpler site and was just ok about the end product. See it here at
www.ordinaryisthenewawesome.com
I don’t love the website but it’s functional and the whole point is to have an easy way for folks to access my t-shirts on Teespring. I had created a second Storefront on Teespring called “Ordinary is the new awesome” and this site takes the user directly there.
The funny thing about not having a great experience with the Puremagic designer is that it encouraged me to decide to create my own websites in the future and opened me up to learning basic web design which I wouldn’t have done if it had been easy to outsource the work. I’ll talk more about my journey on website creation in a future post.
As promised, I am being transparent about the money I am spending on my side hustles so the earlier running total was $198. Adding the $995.44 I spent on the above Fiverr projects (ouch!), I had spent $1,193.44 to date without generating any income. I have assumed that I would not generate any income for at least the first year so I’m not discouraged yet.
As I heard someone on a podcast say that if your side hustle is not generating revenue than it’s just a hobby, I guess it’s still a hobby but I am learning tons and it’s giving more energy instead of taking energy away. To follow my side hustle journey, go to www.thesignhustlejourney.com and sign up to follow my blog via email.
