I knew something was up when my 12-year-old-son wanted to borrow my credit card. “For what?” I asked, expecting something to do with video games. I was close, but also completely surprised: Turns out, he had commissioned an illustrator on Fiverr, the freelance creative services marketplace, to create a custom gaming avatar from one of his pencil sketches. Despite the fact that he now owed a complete stranger $15 he didn’t have, I was honestly impressed by his resourcefulness. So hiring professional illustrators is what young people do these days?

The timing actually couldn’t have been better, as Matt and I were in the middle of researching Fiverr for the below interview with the company’s new VP Brand, Duncan Bird. Fiverr feels so accessible that even a seventh-grader can use it, and therein lies part of its success. For those unfamiliar with hiring creative services, Fiverr makes the idea not only approachable, but attractive.

Although my son had a good experience on Fiverr, our own exposure to the platform wasn’t quite as seamless. We experienced a range of customer service styles: some we reached out to didn’t write back at all, two ghosted after detailed project conversations. However, we also encountered a few that were impressive in their professionalism and communication (in addition to their talent), and we showcase their work in our story.

Then there was Fiverr’s tipping option. The practice of tipping is good, don’t get us wrong. But if you’ve been in the industry for awhile, tipping your designer might feel, as it did to us, a bit unusual at first (not to mention the service fee Fiverr charges to tip). Personal experience aside, the creative gig economy is here, and it appears to be thriving. Arguably, no company has done more to change the landscape of freelance creative services than Fiverr. That’s why we’re looking forward to sharing our interview with Bird, who discusses how Fiverr grows and evolves as a new public company.

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed to and shared The Creative Factor. If you have something you’d like to see covered, please reach out. Starting today, we’re going to send our newsletter every other week. Expect more pieces that go behind-the-scenes with the leading minds in design and 100% more comics, if Matt has anything to do with it. A.T.

Amanda Tuft and Matt McCue, Co-Founders / Editors@thecreativefactor.co

Depending on who you talk to, Fiverr is the most beloved, loathed, celebrated, or misunderstood company in the design industry.

The digital marketplace has democratized the process of selling design services, ushering in the rise of creative services as a formidable engine fueling the greater gig economy. Fiverr can be a powerful tool for designers to grow their client and revenue bases while lessening the heavy lift of marketing and business development.

And yet, Fiverr started out with a complicated relationship with design professionals because its early marketing campaigns took a big swing at how designers value their work. One memorable Facebook ad aimed at buyers said: “Why pay $100 for a logo? You’re paying too much for design.” It continued, “Put an end to being ripped off. Get quality design work for just $5 on fiverr.” It was tone deaf at best, and a nonsensical way to try to connect price with value.

At the same time, Fiverr has struck a powerful chord with sellers and buyers. Since its founding in 2010, the platform has served over 5.5 million businesses and facilitated more than 50 million global transactions. (Fiverr does not break out design gig figures, but it says its most active design markets are North America and the UK.) After going public in June, Fiverr’s market cap has settled in above $700 million.

Fiverr’s notable achievement is the creation of the marketplace itself, which is on a scale not previously seen in the industry. It has also given agency to the idea that every business can benefit from professional creative services, and, significantly, that anyone can hire for it. For buyers, Fiverr removes the pain points of sourcing designers, getting job quotes, and reviewing proposals, while handling all the contracts.

In order to grow and succeed as a public company, Fiverr needs to continue to draw more sellers to the platform, especially professional designers, so Fiverr becomes the default spot for working professionals to advertise their services.

There are changes underway: Fiverr has launched Studios, a way for designers to partner with other designers to offer a cross-disciplinary studio approach that fulfills multiple buyer needs. And there is the growing Fiverr Pro network, which aims to separate the working professionals from the hobbyists. Rob Janoff, creator of the Apple logo, is a new Pro member, and a signifier of Fiverr driving more awareness around the range of services it offers: Yes, you can get a logo starting at $5, but a brand can also hire a world-class designer to create its logo for $10,000. All things for all people.

Leading the way is Duncan Bird, the new VP Brand. He has spent 31 years in the design industry, and joined the company in June.

We met him at Fiverr’s office in Soho, New York City to discuss the state of Fiverr: the way its carving out space for professionals on the platform, the meaning behind its messaging, how it values quality design work, and where Fiverr fits in the gig economy landscape.

Duncan Bird illustration by graphic designer Bagas Fahru.

What do you attribute the success of Fiverr to? That it is accessible for non-professionals? Price? Ease of use?

It’s a number of factors, and it depends on who you are, and where you are in the world. At the heart of why people are interested in the service we provide is that you can have a frictionless transaction. Back in the day when I was starting my career, I would have to phone someone up, courier a brief, and get something couriered back. I would have to know someone or know someone who referred that person. We removed that friction through the platform.

Then in the question there was that line about pricing. I’ve worked at advertising agencies who charged phenomenally high fees for something that, if it were in the public domain, you might say, Wow, why is it worth that? I’ve also worked at agencies where I’ve started them up, and I’d do things at a very low cost, and sometimes at no cost where it is for a charity. I think it’s down to like everything in life: a buyer and a seller agreeing what the value is. What we allow our community to do is to decide the price.

When we started out it skewed towards a particular type of service. But what we realized is that when you get more people who are more skilled, you need to allow, for lack of a better phrase, price elasticity of demand.

When Fiverr started out, it had a certain connotation, $5 for design work. As it grows, how do you evolve the brand to let people know that, while you might have started in this range, that Fiverr has opened up the doors to everybody?

There are two answers to that. One is, I’m working on it.

The other is that is depends where you are in the world, as to how big of an issue it is. Where I come from in the UK, “fiverr” is part of the vernacular. It’s part of rhyming slang. So we have a challenge, and we are working on it. But once we show people the range of prices, it’s not an issue. I think as time goes on, it will be less of an issue. The challenge is showing the breadth and depth of the things you can do and not tying it to a price.

The name made sense at the time of launch. But if you look at names of most successful brands—take Amazon. Amazon in relation to books and rainforests and paper is kind of meaningless.

The bigger challenge is making sure the percentage of people who are interested in freelance services who are offline, are aware this is an alternative way to, Do I have a friend, or a friend of a friend?

How will you go about recruiting more designers to the platform?

There are two ways designers come to us: Pro and regular. For Pro, it’s a very rigorous process, where we look at people’s work and check out references and portfolios and something like 95% we don’t take on as Pros. At the high end, we’re looking for people we can stand behind and guarantee the quality of their work.

With anyone who comes to our platform, whether regular or Pro, it’s a process of making sure we are getting people who do a quality service and deliver against the terms of our platform. There is huge growth in the number of people coming to us.

Is there design education for the sellers?

Absolutely. It’s a tremendously important part of what we do, should do, and will continue to do. We have Fiverr Learn, which helps people to be educated on the platform and understand the kinds of services they can give. While it is relatively new, it is the tip of the iceberg.

I think of institutions like D&AD. They are the pinnacle of quality, but they are also, at a grassroots level, helping people make that transition from interesting design to a bit of a capability in design to a career in design. They are a combination of holding peoples’ hands and putting an arm around and encouraging them. The arm around part is where we can continue to grow our efforts.

How do you monitor customer service on the platform? For example, what happens in a situation where a seller doesn't respond to a buyer inquiry? How are things like that handled?

We take the quality of service on our marketplace very seriously. Sellers are incentivized to offer the best customer service possible. Through a system of public customer reviews, levels (we have Level 1 sellers, Level 2 sellers, and Top Rated sellers), and quality indicators including responsiveness, on-time deliveries, and more, our tools match customers with sellers deemed fit to handle certain projects. If there is an issue between a seller and a buyer, our customer service team is available 24/7 to handle any disputes.

What would you like to do to grow Fiverr?

Our mission of changing how the world works together is what attracted me to come here. Helping people from wherever and whatever their business needs are, increasing the services we offer, and increasing the quality. Without sounding too grand, we are a company that can change lives.

There are people out there who look at the world that we operate in and other companies that are in this gig economy and it gets a mixed bag about how people talk about it. I feel strongly that the people who are on our platform as sellers, and the people who come to us as buyers, are respectful of the fact that the people on our platform have skilled services.

I think we get wrapped up on articles around exploitation, bad attitudes, call it whatever you will. And I don’t believe it is anything new in the evolution of us as a society. If you look back to the Industrial Revolution, there were people who said a steam engine is crazy, and factories are terrible, and in time people grew to realize that actually, four days with a horse and cart from Manchester to London is not as good as jumping on a steam engine that we thought was terrible.

We are at that point in the gig economy where there are certain companies in the gig economy that people love and people hate, and I think we are respected. But there are, I’d say, a minority of people who are really vocal and when they talk about what we do they talk more about their feelings about how the gig economy is changing lives, particularly in unskilled areas.

A difference between Fiverr and an Uber is that sellers can set their own price, like Airbnb, which gives the seller more command of their work.

I am a huge fan of Airbnb, but it’s not really a skill—it’s a destination, a building. With Uber, it’s a transaction of transport from A to B where they [the drivers] don’t set the price. What’s so unusual about what we are doing is this huge range of services, pricing, and different skills that go into making up this fantastic soup.

Besides the communication on the range of skills and prices, where else are you focusing your effort to develop the Fiverr brand?

Post IPO, on a growth curve, I look to companies like Airbnb who went from very niche, on price versus a hotel, to being an alternative for travel for everybody. There are inspirational things we can do around creativity at large, not just design…It is more complicated for Fiverr because it is a skill-based thing, but hopefully you can tell from my energy I’m tremendously excited.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

And now this:

No One Wants to Have a Big Butt (and Other Design Guidelines)
In its latest issue, MIT Technology Review asks: Why are products for older people so ugly? One of the biggest mistakes designers make is to assume people around age 60 lose interest in aesthetics. But, as the story notes, no one wants to stick a golf-ball size hearing aid the color of chewed gum in their ear, any more than they want to wear a T-shirt that reads “SENIOR CITIZEN.” When companies make product assumptions, rather than conduct proper user testing (or use common sense), this happens: “Elizabeth Zelinski has a story she likes to tell. It’s about the company that made a wearable pad to prevent people from hurting their hip if they fell. “They couldn’t sell the thing,” says Zelinski, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. “Because, guess what? You know why? Nobody wants to have a big butt.”

Remote Workers: Can cold, hard cash entice you to leave hip metros?
Let’s be honest, if you’re looking to decamp from Brooklyn or San Francisco, moving to Denver is a relatively easy sell. Tulsa, not so much. That is why a number of cities and states are offering incentives to attract transplants and remote workers, according to HR Dive. Tulsa, for example, has introduced Tulsa Remote, a program that provides $11,000 grants to remote and self-employed workers to cover relocation and living expenses. Meanwhile, Vermont’s remote worker grant program allows applicants to earn grants worth up to $5,000 per year, over two years. That, plus first-rate maple syrup, three-ish idyllic seasons, and no such thing as rush hour traffic. Now we’re talking.

We’re following: The Plastic Vortex Swim
We are responsible for the products we design, create, and put out into the world. Here is a sobering statistic: 91% of all the plastic we use isn’t recycled. Ninety. One. Percent. A lot of it winds up in our oceans, and the currents create large concentrations, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, estimated to cover twice the size of Texas. To better study the impact of marine plastic waste, French long-distance swimmer Ben Lecomte swam the 300 nautical miles from Honolulu, Hawaii to San Francisco through the Great Garbage Patch. Along the way, he collected garbage to analyze back at the lab. “We found a razor. We found a toilet seat. We found a lot of different bottles, like soap and shampoo. We found the sole of a shoe. We found a hardhat. We found a lot of crates,” he told National Geographic.

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