Quantfury Gazette

🖥️Technology

Jobs without frontiers

by
Carlos M Contributor
Freelancer working online remotely Fiverr International NYSE FVRR (1)

It was 2018; I had just graduated from college and was presented with the opportunity to work as an administrative assistant in a rubber company. At that time, in my country Venezuela, we were going through one of the worst economic crises in history; where for my job of 8 hours a day for five days a week, I received a salary of $10 a month. Everywhere else, the salaries were not better, and the cost of living was very high, but my job options were few, and I preferred to at least gain experience before applying for another job that paid a little better.

After eight months, my depression started to increase as I felt I was stagnating, so I thought of using my idle time in the office to do something good for me. I opened a blog using WordPress with the theme “finance for dummies,” which is currently my personal brand. My goal with the blog was to generate more than $10 a month and thus quit that unfulfilling job and continue to grow professionally doing something more enjoyable.

This is where the biggest turning point in my life occurred since I discovered what “Freelancers” were.

These are people who, through specialized websites like Fiverr International (NYSE: FVRR), you can apply for small jobs online to get paid, and they happen to be the best in the industry for this type of work. It was perfect because I could make money from home doing things like article writing, translation, video editing, animation, music, audio recording, programming, and data analysis, among hundreds of others. I specifically mention these because they were jobs that anyone with an average level of knowledge could do, and since I already had several posts on my personal blog, along with having read a book on how to improve my writing, I was ready to try my luck in Fiverr International (NYSE: FVRR).

Fiverr International (NYSE: FVRR) was born in 2010, and since then, its user base has grown by double digits. Their IPO was in 2017, and back then, they had sales of $52 million, which has now increased significantly to $297 million in 2021. Their success is undoubted, plus they have been able to expand their business model to projects like Fiverr Workspace, which provides freelancers with a software solution to manage invoicing, contracts, time tracking and workflow organization.

My biggest enemy in this story was statistics. In the US alone, there were already, by 2018, some 60 million freelancers with millions of profiles not only on Fiverr but on other sites similar to this one. Today that number has increased to 70 million, and according to several global consulting firms, half of the workforce will be remote/freelancers within the next five years. This is based on the social reaction that people and companies had when they realized during the pandemic that today, you could do any job at home if you have the right equipment.

The competition was clear, but my desire to earn more than $10 a month was much stronger than any statistic. So I decided to make myself the most professional profile I could, and like any new user, I offered my work at a very low price in order to gain a reputation on the platform. After a lot of hard work, I was able to get a contract with a digital marketing website to write three articles a week.

Mission accomplished, but it was time to go for more. My skill set couldn’t stop at just writing articles, so I decided to use my earnings to take online courses on Udemy Inc (NASDAQ: UDMY) on topics that would teach me a profession I could do from home. I took courses in website design, stock valuation, finance-focused Excel, video editing, and even an English course.

To my surprise, all this knowledge helped me today to create my personal brand and focus on what I really love, which is to be an investment analyst focused on the stock market with a very well-paid remote job that I got thanks to the fact that, in my interview for the job, I showed my youtube videos, the finance articles I had written in my blog and my Instagram account.

This is the miracle of living in this day and age, where you can learn any skill from home, monetize it and then aspire to do bigger things.

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