Fiverr

Unbundle Etsy: spin out custom gifts as a Fiverr/Cameo-style marketplace

Shaan proposes taking one vertical of Etsy — custom gifts — and turning it into a standalone push-button marketplace like Fiverr or Cameo, then hijacking Etsy's search/Google traffic. Same playbook as people unbundling Craigslist and Reddit.

“So here's, that's the, that's the core idea is unbundle one of the verticals of Etsy. What I would do, I was looking at the, the categories, I would do custom gifts. So custom gifts is one of the top categories on Etsy and people go there because they wanna send a thoughtful, kind of like what looks like a homemade handmade gift to somebody”

Steal thisPick the single biggest vertical of a broad marketplace, rebuild just that as a focused product, and rank for its specific search terms.

Mine Fiverr's report, pick the hottest category, build a niche site

Sam's playbook for spotting service businesses: read Fiverr's annual report (or sort fiverr.com by popularity) to find the fastest-growing categories, then build a dedicated single-purpose website for that one category, like Beeroll did for UGC video.

“What I would do is I'm looking at Fiverr's annual report, and they'll actually tell you more likely than not what some of the fastest growing categories are, um, and what the fastest and most popular services are. Or you could just go straight to fiverr.com and do like rank by popularity. And I would just rinse and repeat and I would look at what B-roll did and I would look at which category is the most popular and I would create a website just for that.”

Steal thisFind Fiverr's fastest-growing category, then spin up a single-purpose site that does only that one service better.

Sam wrote a #1 Amazon romance bestseller to prove a point

To expose how easy it was to game Amazon Kindle, Sam wrote a romance novel under a fake author name ('Captivating Claire'), bought fake Fiverr reviews, and hit #1 in the category for a few hours.

“So we wanted to become a bestselling author because I knew a guy who was writing books on how to sleep with women and he was not a ladies' man, but he was just plagiarizing people. And I did it because I actually thought that what he was doing was highly unethical and stupid and not right. But Amazon knew about it and they were gonna like let it fly. So I go, okay, we're gonna do something funny just to like prove our point. And so we wrote a bestselling book in the romance novel category. We gave it a fake woman's name, a fake name called Captivating Claire.”

Cartoon dog canvas: $150 product fulfilled by a $5 Fiverr job

Shaan describes businesses that look like one thing but are humans doing cheap work behind the scenes. His test case: customers upload a dog photo, you get a cartoon made on Fiverr for $5, put it on canvas for ~$25, and sell the finished product for $150.

“The first is I found a website online that you pay $150 and you get a cartoon dog canvas. And so what you do is, it's like, I've— and I made a website to test it. All it is is You upload a photo of your dog, they send it out to like fiverr.com, they get the cartoon made for $5, and then you can get it put on canvas for like $25. They sell for $150.”

Steal thisFind an impressive cheap deliverable, wrap it in a polished niche website, and resell it at a large markup while managing the contractors.

Build a business in 30 days by reselling and repositioning Fiverr gigs

Shaan's playbook: find the most impressive $5 work on Fiverr, build a beautiful website around it, and resell at a big markup, OR find a poorly-positioned gig and re-market it to a sharp niche. The whole company is just managing the contractors.

“What I think someone can do, and I think I personally— I don't want to do this, I think I could do this in a matter of 30 days— is build a company by going to fiverr.com, finding one of two things. One, the most impressive $5 bit of work, right? Something that like I would see this and I'd be like, are you kidding me? This is only $5, right? Then I would make my own website and make it look amazing and sell it at a massive uptick and then just manage the contractors to get it done.”

Steal thisScout Fiverr for underpriced or mis-positioned gigs, repackage them under a sharp niche brand, and capture the spread.

Productized services: turn a 'service' into a buy-button product

Sam names the pattern: take something normally sold as a custom service, package it so the customer clicks a button and receives a finished output, while you quietly farm the work to Fiverr/Upwork. You're paid to connect dots for people who won't go find the right freelancer themselves.

“Somebody called this, I think, productized services. Basically, it's something that's traditionally done as a service, but you productize it so it seems like, oh, I click this button and I receive this product back, I receive this end output. And underneath the hood, you, you're farming it out to Fiverr and Upwork, and you're just connecting the dots for people that don't know that that's where they should go look.”

Steal thisWrap a manual service in a fixed-scope, fixed-price product with a single buy button and handle fulfillment behind the scenes.

Drop servicing: be the marketing funnel, fulfill via Fiverr

Productized services applied dropshipping-style: build a slick brand (e.g. best logos in the world), market on Facebook, and fulfill every order by hiring Fiverr contractors abroad. The buyer thinks you have in-house designers in Manhattan; they're really contractors in Ukraine, and you keep the margin.

“So I built a website that's like, we make the best logos in the world. I go on Facebook and market my website, and then I go on Fiverr and I hire contractors around the world to actually fulfill the orders and provide that service., and I'm essentially this like middleman. But you know, the buyer doesn't know that. The buyer thinks that I've got, you know, my designers working in my office, you know, in Manhattan, but they're really in Ukraine and they're really just contractors.”

Steal thisBrand and market a productized service, then fulfill every order through Fiverr agencies abroad and pocket the spread.

An agency staffed by failed YC founders

Shaan pitches turning failed YC startups into a high-end dev-shop talent pool: two-person 'demolition crews' you can hire for a period, positioned as the premium tier above Upwork/Fiverr/Gigster, with founders using it as an interim gig between startups.

“If they can get more failed YC startups to do this as an interim thing of like, hey, yeah, I do this while I'm in between figuring out what my next startup is. I think that's a very smart idea.”

Steal thisBuild a premium agency that farms the YC talent pipeline; hire founders between startups as elite contract teams.

Kill the job-application grind: vetted workers just get a queue

On Upwork or Fiverr the median freelancer applies to many jobs, gets rejected, and never gets paid for that selling time. Rev vets a tiered workforce; top-tier workers can take any job anytime, never bid, and never race to the bottom — they wake up to a queue of work.

“Never have a race to the bottom of saying, "That guy will do it for a dollar. I'll do it for 98 cents."”

Steal thisPre-vet a tiered workforce so top performers get a ready queue instead of bidding for every job.

The pour-over coffee flop: wood products crack

Anderson's first FBA product was a wooden pour-over coffee accessory sourced from China. It cracked and broke, earning 1-star reviews; he lost about $1,000 but gained the playbook that powered his next product.

“I started with this accessory for pour-over coffee, and it was made out of wood. And I thought, like, you know, I'd done all my product research, and I also like to choose things that were kind of trending upward. And this seems sort of like a hipster, like, cool thing. It's going to keep trending and growing. Like, all right, I got the great first product, pour-over coffee stands. It's going to be awesome. And I, you know, I source it out of China. I get this logo off of Fiverr. Like, I feel like I already got the right pieces in place. And I get it in, I launch it, and it is a total fail. It flops.”

Steal thisAvoid product materials that can crack or break in shipping; physical defects become 1-star reviews fast.