Few months after quitting full time work, the usual question that came my way was “Isn’t there something you can do part-time, from home ?” I normally ignored the question, because even if I wanted to venture working part-time, I didn’t know where to go.

If you have a product to sell, there is always Amazon – virtual product supermarket. What if as a supplier you don’t have a product to sell, rather a service to offer – more specifically online services ? For example I need to find someone to write a few blog posts or develop a logo or design my website? Is there a place for meet to go to? Yes. And they exist under the name of Freelancing platforms. I came across one called Fiverr. And then saw there were many others in the running, the more famous being Upwork, Freelancer.com, also the homegrown platform called Truelancer.

Freelancing platforms – online services supermarkets – reminds me of the often quoted example of the era of gold rush in the west (the famous California Gold Rush), the people who made most money are the those who provided the spades for digging. But considering the exchange rates, a freelancer sitting in India and earning in greenback is good money – Pinterest pins, blog posts, graphics design, logos, data entry, editing, coding…anything and everything can be outsourced; the seller gets 80% of the fees and the rest goes to Fiverr as per the site.

Education was considered a social leveller; but now technology has fast replaced it. Globalisation ushered in the era of outsourcing the non-core functions of a company; here more work translated to more profits. But what if you wanted to get some work done for yourself ? Where would you find someone interested is a small task like designing your website? And now outsourcing has become super easy at the individual level, thanks to the services supermarkets. Tim Ferriss in his bestseller “The 4 hour Work week” talks in depth about this.

But it is important to note that there is no dearth of competition even in the free-lancing world, nothing is free (pun intended). And it would be wise to do some research on which skills are valued most or paid highest and hone those skill sets. The creatives will win hands down here. Since I have not yet made a transaction at these sites, I cannot comment on anything else except advertise their existence. It may be of help to someone.

So, Fiverr or Freelancer?😀

Till next post, take care !!