We noticed an interesting niche marketplace pop-up on our radar recently: Fiverr. Fiverr is a site where people sell and buy goods and services for five dollars. The site is essentially hundreds of answers to the question “What would you do for $5?” Other than the set-in-stone price, the scope of the marketplace is very broad. Goods, services, creative work, nonsensical services—it can all be posted and potentially sold on Fiverr. In the short time that we’ve been watching the site we’ve seen deals like “I’ll send you a 50 year old postcard from Scotland”, “I’ll write an original poem”, and “I’ll make an angry phone call to your boss at 3:00am”.

When Fiverr was initially covered on InsideHandmade on March 11th, John and Tony predicted that, due to its nature, the site had a good viral potential. A simple idea combined with an easy interface mashed-up with the potential for both useful and amusing offers equals a big sharing potential. Since covering Fiverr on InsideHandmade, the site has gotten some impressive press coverage; namely a Wall Street Journal article that was featured on the Yahoo home page. If the site continues to grow as we initially expected, we’ll start to see individual offers bring in large amounts of visitors when shared on social sharing sites and among friends. Funny/Wacky offers will get Fiverr in front of new customers; a portion of those customers will be attracted to the site not only for its uniqueness but also its utility.

Being able to spot potential new viral hits is useful when you want to leverage their fast growth as marketing for your business. At this point Fiverr is still relatively new and early adopters in any network usually have an advantage. If you have goods or services that you can sell for $5, it’s definitely worth a try. You may be able to reach new customers via this budding marketplace and new customers always have the potential of becoming returning customers.