How Brettn Williams from DesignJoy built a $1.3 million one-person agency selling graphic design as a productized service.
Big Idea: Selling services at a monthly fixed price makes it much easier to attract and service clients.
The rise and fall of a $50,000 digital product
How Ben Issen created a product in 2 weeks that turned out to be his main source of income for 2 years.
He created a Notion Pack of templates for freelancers and launched it on ProductHunt.
via @samdickie
Big Idea: Side projects like this can lucrative and a great way to grow your following.
Related Link: More examples of successful side projects. via @publiclab
Reselling gig work is TikTok’s newest side hustle
“Resellers buy gig work for as cheap as $5 to resell for profit.”
This article is a bit critical of “drop servicing,” reselling other services for a profit, but there are opportunities here for creators.
There are many low-cost services that could benefit from better marketing and a niche marketplace.
“Drop servicing is yet another side hustle with promises of grandeur getting attention on social media platforms. It takes its name from the more commonly known practice of drop shipping. In drop shipping, a retailer sells physical goods online without maintaining any stock themselves, instead ordering directly from a manufacturer who ships the products to the buyer. The middleman then pockets the markup.
Drop shipping is often seen as shady or misleading by consumers, who don’t know where the product is coming from.
Drop servicing, sometimes called service arbitrage or service reselling, applies that same model to intangible services and products, like copy editing, voice-over work, graphic design, or social media marketing strategy — labor that is thought to be more specialized.”
I talked about this in my Unbundling Fiverr article.
$90k a Month on Fiverr: From Freelancer to Agency – Side Hustle Nation
“Georgia took her skill of writing, and despite a crowded world of other writers out there, did over $500k worth of work through the Fiverr platform last year, including $90k the month before we recorded.”
Related link: Unbundling Fiverr - Startup Opportunities with Productized Services
The gig platform Fiverr.com is a great place to find validated business opportunities. Fiverr has a wide range of inexpensive productized services that can be started small, yet offer the potential to become substantial businesses. The number of jobs completed for all its freelancers are listed, so you can clearly see what is popular and how much people are paying.
I’ve gone through all 196 Fiverr subcategories to discover promising business opportunities. I provide many specific examples below. Hopefully, you’ll find some inspiration for your next business venture.
On Episode 116 of the My First Million podcast, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri had a short discussion on the main opportunities with Fiverr. (Start listening at 35:10) Here are the highlights from the conversation:
I think I could do this in a matter of 30 days, is build a company by going to Fiverr.com finding one of two things:
One, the most impressive $5 bit of work. Something like … “are you kidding me this is only $5?” then I would make my own website and make it look amazing and sell it at a massive uptick and then just manage the contractors to get it done.
The second thing that I would do is find talent on Fiverr ….
I would find a Fiverr job that was positioned poorly and I would reposition it and market it just like this, so for example I found this guy that would do cartoons. I would just say, oh I’m going to just make it strictly dog cartoons. send me a picture of your dog … or I will narrate this thing for you… Custom voice mails by the guy who sounds like blank… Donald Trump impression voice mails.
You take impression guy who does a good Donald Trump impression… and this is Donald Trump wishing you happy birthday for $35 as a service… You just fix the positioning.
A productized service refers to taking an hourly service and converting it into a limited scope offering at a set price.
Almost any hourly freelancing or consulting project can be turned into a set price productized service. The model works for graphic design, consulting, coaching, website maintenance, content creation, social media management, online marketing, and almost any hourly service you can imagine.
WPCurve was one of the first and most widely known productized services. They sold unlimited minor WordPress Edits for $79 per month. Instead of trying to find and hire developers to do hourly work, WordPress users could have a team of skilled developers on-call to quickly fix small issues whenever they arise.
WPCurve grew rapidly and later sold to GoDaddy. Now there are many other companies offering similar services.
Imagine if every Uber driver had to bid on each ride like most freelancers and agencies do now. It would be a nightmare for both drivers and riders.
Compare
“Get a 3 Minimialst Logos in 3 days with 3 edits for $199”
versus
“Let’s set up a meeting to discuss your requirements and we’ll come back with a proposal next week.
Productized services with upfront, fixed pricing benefit both buyers and sellers.
Benefits for the seller:
Benefits for the purchaser:
Here are some specific examples from the 196 subcategories on Fiverr. Be sure to further research the categories you are interested in to find related ideas. There are a wide variety of services under each category.
If you are interested in the full spreadsheet of the 196 Fiverr subcategories and the first 48 gig listings in each, Subscribe to my free IdeaEconomy.net Creator Newsletter. I’ll make the spreadsheet available to subscribers.
The husband and wife team behind the Sucantare Fiverr account have 8521 completed orders for their “I will create a perfect slogan or tagline” service offered at three price points: $100, $125, and $150. It’s very likely that this service alone has earned the couple over $1 million dollars in revenue. This is just one of the many services they offer on Fiverr.
The couple also owns the VerticalFold marketing agency. I suspect their success on Fiverr is generating leads for the agency.
Richard Lambert is reported to have earned over $2 million with his resume writing service. His most popular service has over 11,500 sales now which starts at $75. He’s expanded to cover letters, Linkedin profiles, acceptance letters, and more.
Wajihafatima has completed over 1050 “I will do SEO keyword research and competitor analysis” at the $10, $20, and $40 price points.
What’s interesting here is that Gotchseo discovered that someone on Upwork is buying her $10 service and reselling it for $75. There are many arbitrage opportunities like this on Fiverr because the platform tends to attract low-price-point customers. With Linkedin announcing their own gig marketplace, there will be many more arbitrage opportunities like this.
Back in 2019, Joel Young was reported to have earned over $1.5 million on Fiver. He has over 2600 orders for his “I will record a radio quality professional male voiceover” gig at $1 per word. He now offers phone greetings, explainer animations, and whiteboard videos.
Levinewman has almost 4000 sales of his “I will write a professional FBA Amazon product listing description” service starting at $65. His “I will create unique sales, ad, and website copywriting” gig also has over 2000 sales starting at $55.
I love the Amazon product listing focus. That could likely extend into product photography services, paid ads, and Amazon SEO.
Jacob21 has completed over 860 “I will provide expert SEO report, competitor website audit, analysis and video review” gigs starting at $60. While this is not as impressive as some of the other examples, I’m including this category because of the potential to take this offline.
Glen Alsopp has recently published a lengthy post on how he made over $100,000 doing website audits that started inexpensively and went up to $8000 for a comprehensive report.
Glen details a complete blueprint of what he did in that post. A service like this could be the foundation of a very successful SEO business with a variety of related services that can be sold beyond the reports.
For an example that is not business-focused, check out SocalChrist’s Jesus video greetings. He’s done over 14,000 personalized messages from Jesus that start at $10. Not bad for a direct connection to God. He advertises that “Jesus can be serious and or funny! Jesus will say ANYTHING you want. Yes, even THAT, you potty-mouth!”
Services like this would be perfect to promote on social media because of the potential to go viral. Check out the massive following that James Friedman has built for his funny photoshop edits. It’s a brilliant way to promote his non-profit foundation that supports the social and emotional well-being of children.
Here is an interesting video on Fiverr freelancers taking advantage of the popularity of NFTs. NFTs are relatively new so the competition isn’t as fierce as other categories.
Here is an example project with 110 orders, “I will create 3d nft art cards coins or collectibles.” Many of the gigs have prices starting in the hundreds of dollars like “I will create unique nft characters.“
Here are some more Fiverr gigs that seem promising. There are many different types of gigs in each subcategory, so please take some time to fully explore the niches you are interested in.
If you are interested in the full spreadsheet of the 196 Fiverr subcategories and the first 48 gig listings in each, Subscribe to my free IdeaEconomy.net Creator Newsletter. I’ll make the list available to subscribers.
While there are many successful Fiverr freelancers, it’s a competitive marketplace. Potentially even larger businesses can be built off the platform. Approach the productized service as a business, rather than freelance work and you’re likely to find customers that are much less price-sensitive. Start by differentiating your business so you uniquely stand out from other freelancers and companies.
Find a popular Fiverr service and see if you can differentiate it with better positioning. Here are some ideas:
Make your service unique by focusing on one particular in-demand trait.
Idea A: Video greetings from Santa Claus.
Idea B: Embarrassing postcards.
Rather than offering a general service to anyone, specialize in a particular market.
Idea A: Instead of website audits, do website audits for home improvement companies.
Idea B: Instead of a broad resume service, specialize in resumes for nurses.
Package together many productized services so you can offer a one-stop marketplace.
Idea A: Voice Over marketplace in a variety of accents and styles.
Idea B: SEO marketplace of inexpensive gigs, similar to what Growth Geeks does for marketing.
Idea A: Rather than ghostwriting, offer a complete ebook writing, editing, and design service.
Idea B: Add logo design and domain availability research to a business naming service.
Fiverr is predominantly English. Focus on services in a different language or country.
Idea A: Birthday greetings in foreign languages.
Idea B: Translate Shopify stores to Japanese.
Idea A: Monthly content writing subscription like Content Sherpa .
Idea B: Recurring subscription to website customizations and maintenance like WPBuffs.com.
See if you can mix and match differentiation strategies like these to come up with something else. For example, a monthly blog post writing subscription for dentists.
Once you have a unique service that you can position more distinctively than the competition, build it out into a real business. If it works on Fiverr, there is likely substantial demand from people who would never think to use Fiverr. Here are some basic ideas:
With Upwork’s new fixed price Project Catalog and Linkedin’s upcoming gig marketplace. There will likely be many arbitrage opportunities to buy low-priced services on Fiverr and resell them at a substantial profit with the right positioning. (Check out Example 3 above for a specific example.)
Many of these services can be augmented with GPT3 type AI tools. Technology is rapidly developing in this area, so it’s worth keeping up with what can be done. Check out the large number of tools that already exist for copywriting, logo design, and more. It won’t be long before computers outperform humans in many of these services. Can you automate any of these services with machine learning to minimize the amount of human labour required?
Think beyond the first service you are starting with. A low-priced productized service can be a great way to sell other services and consulting in the future. Businesses that know and trust you are much more likely to pay for more expensive services in the future.
Here are some examples of productized services businesses for more inspiration:
DesignPickle — graphic design
ManyPixels— graphic design
Pixel True — illustrations
Fairpixels — logo design
Rocking Book Covers — book cover design
ContentFly — content
iWriter — content
Scribble — content
Content Sherpa — content
Scribly — SEO focused content
Audience OPS — content creation
Smart Lead Magnets — lead magnets
Scribe Writing — book publishing
Hubsnacks — Hubspot tasks
WP Buffs — WordPress website maintenance and support
Podcast Motor — podcast hosting and editing
Cashflow Podcasting — podcast editing
Growth Geeks — marketplace of marketing gigs
$99 Social — social media management
SocialPrim — social media management
FlatRateSocialMedia — social media management
100PoundSocial — social media lead generation
Hypegrowth — Twitter marketing
Fiverr can be a great source of inspiration for your next startup. There are countless proven services with clear market demand. Take your favorite ideas and combine them to better serve a particular niche. With better positioning, delivery, and marketing you can charge more and build deeper connections with customers for more future opportunities.
