What Fiverr Gave Me, and What It Quietly Took Back
Over a decade on Fiverr. More than two thousand orders delivered, over a thousand reviews, a 4.9 average and a Top Rated badge. That is a long time to spend on anybody’s platform, and long enough to have a proper opinion about it.
The interesting bit is not the total though. It is the decision I made about two years in.
By then I had roughly a thousand voice over projects behind me. I knew the platform inside out, I knew what a good day on it looked like, and I was firmly filed in everyone’s head as the voice bloke. So I asked myself an obvious question. If people will hire me to read a script, what happens if I offer them everything else I can actually do?
Video editing. Media consultancy. Build your website. Speed up your website. Turn a PowerPoint into a video. I listed the lot, just to see what would happen.
The line-up I ended up with spans a genuinely daft range. A professional British male voice over from ten dollars. A telephone IVR greeting from thirty. Podcast intros and outros, whiteboard animation, social media video adverts, PowerPoint converted to HD video with a voice over on top. Then at the other end, speed optimisation for a WordPress site from a hundred and fifty, and a full professional WordPress build from nine hundred and fifty.
Ten dollars to nine hundred and fifty, on the same profile, under the same face.
I Made a Video Pitch for Every Single Service
This is the part most people skip, and I think it is the part that made the difference.
I did not write a gig description and hope. I recorded a proper video pitch for each service, which meant anyone landing on any of my listings got to hear me, see how I talk, and judge for themselves whether I sounded like someone who knew what he was doing. On a marketplace where everyone looks identical on paper, that is very nearly the only thing that separates you.
Two years of voice work turned out to be excellent training for exactly that.
The Inbound Was Phenomenal
The enquiries started, and then they did not stop.
People from every corner of the planet, all of them with a project and a problem. I would wake up in the morning to a list of them waiting. For a business that had spent years chasing work, waking up to work chasing me was a genuinely strange feeling, and a very good one.
That is the honest headline, and it is why I stayed. The platform delivered volume that no amount of local networking was ever going to match.
Then you start reading the small print.
Twenty Per Cent, and Then Some
Fiverr takes 20% of everything. That is the number everyone knows going in, and it is defensible on its own terms. They brought you the client.
What is less obvious is what happens around that 20%.
Deals are done in US dollars. When the money comes out, Fiverr converts it, and the rate they hand you is nowhere near the rate you would get anywhere else. It is a second, quieter cut sitting on top of the first, and it is easy not to notice until you compare the number that actually landed with the number you thought you had earned.
Then there is the clientele. Plenty of buyers on there are hunting for the cheapest possible price, full stop. A fair number of conversations ended with me saying thanks, but no thanks, because the budget and the brief were never going to meet in the middle. That is not really a complaint about the platform, but it is a real cost in hours.
The Two Review Problem
This one deserves its own section, because I do not think many people outside the platform understand how it works.
When you deliver a job, the buyer leaves you a public review. Fair enough. You also get to review them. But here is the catch: you only see what they wrote about you after you have submitted yours.
So you finish a job, you are pleased with it, you give the buyer five stars and say what a pleasure they were to work with. Then the curtain lifts and you find they gave you three, because in their view you should have done more, for free.
And then they leave a second review that you never see at all.
Both feed the algorithm score that decides whether anyone finds you tomorrow. You can do excellent work, be genuinely happy with the outcome, and still slide quietly down the rankings on the strength of something you were never allowed to read. I have a 4.9 across more than a thousand reviews and it still stings, which tells you it is a mechanism problem rather than a me problem.
Then AI Turned Up
Everything was more or less fine, up and down as freelancing always is, until AI arrived properly.
Two things changed at once.
People started lifting my voice. Demos are public by design, that is the entire point of them, and it turns out a public demo is also a free training sample for anybody who fancies cloning it. Years of building a recognisable voice, sitting there available to anyone with a browser.
At the same time the web development side filled up with people describing themselves as developers, undercutting relentlessly and shipping genuinely terrible work. That created its own knock-on effect for everyone else. I lost count of the conversations that opened with a sceptical buyer explaining they had already been burned on Fiverr once and were not at all sure about trying again.
You end up spending the first half of every conversation proving you are not the last person they hired.
The Work That Made It Worth It
None of which is the whole story, because the other side of it was some of the most interesting work I have ever done.
My voice over clients over the years have included Bose, Lidl, American Express, British Airways and Seagate. There was a sponsorship campaign for Emirates, and a voice over for a National Geographic documentary. Jobs that arrived out of nowhere, from people I would never have met through any amount of local networking.
The speed optimisation gig turned out to be the sleeper. It was never the one I expected anything from, and it brought in some of the best work I have had.
That is how Smith of Derby arrived. Clockmakers since 1856, one of the oldest names in British horology, tower clocks on churches and railway stations all over the country. They had a website that had become painfully slow, they searched for someone to speed up a WordPress site, and they found me. What started as a speed problem turned into rebuilding all 276 pages and posts, which is a story of its own.
And then there was Alex Wilson.
A one-time Brummie who emigrated to California and made his fortune out there. He hired me for six months, and it turned into the most exciting stretch of work I have had. Two full websites, Precious Timber and Legacy Timber Investments, plus marketing materials, video pitches and a good deal more besides.
That is the trade-off in a sentence. The platform takes a fifth of everything and hands you a review system you cannot fully see, and it also puts you in a room with people you would otherwise never have reached.
What I Would Tell Anyone Thinking About It
List everything you can genuinely do, not just the one thing you are known for. The gig I nearly did not bother writing, speeding up other people’s WordPress sites, brought me a 168-year-old clockmaker. My profile now leads with website developer and video editor rather than voice over, which would have astonished me in year two.
Record a video pitch. Almost nobody bothers, and it is the fastest way to stop being a row in a search result.
Do the maths on the real number, not the headline one. Twenty per cent, plus the exchange rate, plus the hours spent on enquiries that were never going to close.
And understand the review mechanics before you deliver your first job, not after your fiftieth.
I do not regret a minute of it. Over a decade, thousands of orders, and work I am still proud of. But the reason I now build a business that owns its own front door, rather than renting space on someone else’s, is that I have watched at close range what happens when the landlord changes the rules.
If you would rather your next client found you directly, get in touch.
