Ask HN: Have you ever found a capable freelancer on Fiverr?

[FreeHugs]

I have been trying to find freelancers for various tasks on fiverr for a few days now and it seems hopeless. I wonder if the whole platform is just fake.

The profiles and gigs all look like they are done by skilled people with hilariously bad English. Ok, maybe that is a thing. Virtual assistants, programmers etc who have expertise in their area but are not well versed in English? Maybe.

But as soon as I start communicating with them, everything breaks down. When I send them a long job description with details and questions, I get back a one-liner like:

"Yes sir, can do!"

And when I reply:

"So how do we go about it? Have you looked through the documents? How would we start?".

I get something like:

"I can do for $10!".

:)

What is going on?

How do you find real freelancers on the web?

[muzani]

It's good for very specific things. Voice actors. Bass players. People who do those gaudy effects on screenshots. People who reverse engineer apps. People who gloss up photos. Someone to have conversations with.

It's an assembly line. You probably shouldn't give long job descriptions. Just reading that is going to cost $5. The professionals sometimes have instructions on how to write instructions.

[j10c]

Yes, there are some good freelancers, but most of the times their gigs description are not as polished, and that cannot beat the descriptions of other overconfident less-skilled freelancers.

If its small gig of 5-10 bucks, just try few gigs. if it is for a long term job, you need to vet them throughly with related questions and paid assignments.

[Flankk]

You get what you pay for. Freelancer, Guru, Upwork, and Toptal are the main sites. People in the West charge more because it costs more to survive. What is your project and budget? There's lots of skilled people here.

[joshxyz]

For me they excel at teaching you stuff, if you need to understand something on a high level some of them are worth it

[sh4un]

All these fiver guys are really bad, lots of them just copy and paste or provide you with stuff they find on the net.

[cebert]

I’ve had similar experiences on Fiverr. I think you get what you pay for and this is a bottom of the barrel service.

[elevanation]

I have found some skilled people for PhotoShop tasks on fiver, but it took a few tries to find the right people.

[gregjor]

Yes, once.