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The Cheapest Drawing Won: Experience Report from Commissioning an Illustration off Fiverr

The Cheapest Drawing Won: Experience Report from Commissioning an Illustration off Fiverr

We are living in interesting times. Never has it been more apparent that the world's talent is evenly distributed, but access to opportunity is not. Freelance marketplace platforms like Fiverr are helping to fill this opportunity gap in their own way.

As an experiment, for our last blog post we commissioned an illustration to help convey the visceral feeling of what it's like to try to do user research via Zoom. To be upfront, we're still warming up to the "startup blogging hustle," and finding our voice as a company as we go.

The last post was a bit long-winded, and close friends gave us curt feedback that their eyes mostly glazed over while reading the prose 🙂. But the illustration was a big hit! So we'll probably do more of those in the future, at least until DALL-E is unleashed onto the world and gives us all a run for our money.

This was personally my first time using Fiverr, and on the whole I was quite impressed. It seems like they've achieved that magical balance of supply and demand, and we were amazed to see the sheer geographic representation of illustrators across countries.

I took them at their namesake and decided to see what quality of illustration we could get for $5, $10, and $15. Within a day we had several dozen inbound requests. In total, we requested 6 illustrations, 2 each at the above price points, for a total spend of $60 (USD).

As a prompt, we offered an incredibly rough 2-minute doodle as well as a detailed description:

2-minute doodle
Prose request

These were the results:

$10
$5
$15
$10
$15
$5, our top pick!

We were absolutely blown away by the relative speed and quality of these illustrations, as well as the diversity of styles and creative interpretations. We ended up picking one of the $5 drawings, done by an architecture student based in Russia who just started doing these recently in their spare time.

What we learned: Requesting multiple cheap drawings from different folks may yield better outcomes than requesting a single more expensive illustration and multiple iterations from one person, especially if you're still experimenting with different styles.

Think we made the wrong choice? Which was your favorite drawing? Shoot us a message on Twitter or LinkedIn, we'd love to hear from you!

Building the Betafi Pilots Panel

We are just setting out to build our own global panel of product research participants with Betafi.

We firmly believe the most insightful moments can come from people anywhere in the world. We've seen that a lot of product teams serving global audiences can be fairly insular when it comes to getting feedback, often sticking to their local network out of convenience and expediency.

Betafi is definitely not a marketplace in the traditional sense, but we would love your advice. What aspects of these platforms do you find keep you engaged and coming back? Which parts are miserable slogs?

Care to chat with us about your own experience via Betafi?

Or interested in joining the "Betafi Pilots" tester panel and giving your earnest feedback about new software products? Sign up here, and we'll be in touch soon!

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