Music Teacher Quits Job to Earn $100k on Fiverr

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome back once again, or welcome if it is your first time, episode 1172 of "Sidle School." We are all about equipping individuals, ordinary people, not startups, not quote unquote entrepreneurs, not famous people, just regular people who want to have extra income, who want to create something for themselves. Do something apart from their day job to give them more options and security for their future. All kinds of good reasons to have a side hustle. And I want to make sure you have one that actually makes money for you, which sometimes is kind of a novel idea, as strange as it sounds.

All right, so today's story. We've got a case study for you here today. We've been talking this week, as you may have heard yesterday, about finding time to work on your hustle. Well, Fiverr, the website platform service provider, Fiverr began life as kind of a fun website where you could pay people all over the world five bucks for an array of tasks. Now it is a freelancing platform of real force, boasting over 5.5 million buyers, 830,000 sellers, and processing 50 million transactions per month.

And the motivated music teaching student that I'm going to tell you about today hits the perfect note by freelance writing on Fiverr. And then she ends up actually going all in, making over a hundred thousand dollars in a year, a hundred thousand dollars a year on this platform, which was originally about making $5 doing kind of menial tasks. So she has obviously found a way to hack it. Music teacher quits job to earn a hundred thousand dollars on Fiverr. I'm going to tell you that story in just a moment after the shout out to our sponsor.

[Music]

The year was 2013 and Carrie French was in her second year of college studying music education. With high tuition and living costs, she was looking for ways to make extra money. However, her goal to graduate a year early made her days just too full for a traditional part-time job. It was around that time that she first read about Fiverr in a 17 magazine article. Fiverr is a freelancing website that allows anyone to post a gig, what they call a job essentially or a task, and have others pay for it.

At the time back then, the cost for all gigs was $5, hence the name, Fiverr. The article suggested that teens use the site to earn money for One Direction concert tickets, a frivolous pursuit in Carrie's eyes. She was much more interested in paying her tuition than lining the pockets of Harry Styles. The site seemed ideal, so she decided to check it out. In particular, she noticed a lot of people were offering and looking for ghostwriting services, which piqued her interest.

Carrie kept a daily blog at the time and considered herself a pretty good writer. She figured, why not? Posting a handful of gig offers, including article writing, proofreading, and even something called dream interpretation. The latter found a home in a category known as Just For Fun, which was a popular section at the time. Over the next month or so, Carrie earned $40, the equivalent of completing eight gigs.

Nothing to write home about, but she enjoyed learning how it worked and being exposed to online freelancing, which was a completely new concept to her. So she decided to stick with it and see how she could improve. Although it was just a small side gig, Carrie took it seriously. And unbeknownst to her at the time, began writing her own destiny. You get it?

You know, she was writing $5 posts, but also writing her own destiny. Okay. She made sure to fill out her entire seller profile, including adding photos and detailed descriptions. She also added a video of herself speaking about the services she offered. That added relatability and authenticity.

Furthermore, she treated all of her orders with a level of importance, delivering on time and with high quality. This resulted in all of her early customers awarding her five star reviews. She continued that way for a while without too much change, other than of course more change going into her pocket. But while visiting home for Christmas break, things got crazy. Carrie woke up one day to over 30 orders and 100 messages.

They were coming in so fast, she could barely keep up. It turned out that the team at Fiverr had chose Carrie's profile to feature on the homepage of the site, which sent a ton of traffic to her profile. Now, although there's no way to nominate yourself to be featured, Carrie believes the attention to detail she placed on her profile and the original orders worked in her favor. That being said, Carrie sees the day, locked herself in her room, keyboard in hand, and got to typing. She wrote faster than James Patterson, delivering every order on time and to the best of her ability.

After that influx, the first thing Carrie did was raise her prices, or this being Fiverr, she reduced the number of words she would write for $5, thus requiring more money for longer assignments. She figured that she would nearly double her future income for the same amount of work. And this continued for the next few years as Carrie used Fiverr to cover her college tuition and living expenses. She did so well out of the venture that she was able to graduate college with only $7,000 in student loan debt. Would have been a lot more otherwise, and of course that's an enviable position for most people her age.

After graduation, Carrie got a full-time job as a music teacher, a goal that she had had since the fourth grade. But unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever it is, a soon afterwards reality hit, and it turned out that Carrie didn't really enjoy being a teacher. After giving it a fair shot, she made the decision to quit and pursue her freelance business full-time. She describes this as one of the hardest decisions she's ever had to make, but she hasn't looked back. This decision to focus on freelancing had the immediate impact of doubling her income once again.

She put effort into further optimizing her Fiverr listings and proving her pitch, updating her videos, and offering new services in sales, copywriting, and brand consulting. In addition, around this time, Fiverr expanded out of $5 gigs and allowed freelancers to charge higher prices, which Carrie took advantage of. And now six years later, she's earning, wait for it. Well, I mean, I told you already, but still it's kind of amazing, right? Six years later, she is earning over $100,000 per year as a writer through Fiverr.

More money than she would ever earn as a music teacher. More recently, Carrie has launched a YouTube channel with the goal of helping other aspiring freelancers improve their Fiverr skills. [Music]

All right, amazing success story. Well done, Carrie, you inspire me. And this is the second story we have featured, I believe, of someone earning six figures on Fiverr.

Actually, I'm mistaken. It's the third, how about that? The third story, earning six figures on Fiverr. The irony, right? 'Cause it was a $5 website, you know, to begin with.

Episode 521, man earns $100,000 serving clients on $5 website. And episode 548, Google employee makes $100,000 using Fiverr. So what do these people have in common? And I think it's interesting. I went back and read the notes on those other episodes.

If you're interested in Fiverr, you definitely want to check them out. Again, 521, 548. And interestingly enough, I think two of the three are basically grinding it out. And I don't mean this as a criticism. I think it's actually pretty interesting, you know, for all the talk about working smarter, which, you know, I say that a lot.

I think it is important. I think it's good to think about how can we not just, you know, work harder, but work smarter. But there's also a lot to be said for working hard. So they're just grinding it out. They're doing a lot of assignments.

And the third story is the one about the Google employee. He actually has a pretty specialized marketing background and experience working with YouTube. So he's doing these kind of specialized consultations, actually charging $1,000 for a 60-minute session. So obviously, Fiverr has come a long way. You know, it's like a 1,000-er.

Yes, that doesn't sound as good. You know, 1,000-er.com. Anyway, so that guy has like, you know, highly specialized charging these high prices using what's known as Fiverr Pro, which allows certain service providers to charge more. So if you have a highly valuable service, like what he offers, then Fiverr Pro is clearly the best bet. And I think Carrie, of course, as mentioned in the episode, has increased her prices as well.

But I also find it inspiring that people like her can really crush it out just by taking on a lot of assignments and, of course, working hard to get those five-star reviews. So great story. Thank you again, Carrie. And listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. To find the show notes for today's episode, featuring links to everything I mentioned, such as Carrie's Fiverr profile, her new YouTube channel, et cetera, all that, just come to www.sidehustleschool.com/1172.

One, one, seven, two. That's gonna be it for today, but be sure you do something today, just one small thing to get closer to a goal you believe in. I'll be cheering you on. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."