Beta testing through Fiverr

At the moment, Savvy Folders is in beta testing. I have hired a few Zapier experts on Fiverr to have them test as much as possible. Here is my experience and some tips (both for hiring people on Fiverr and for offering services).

Initially I tried to find beta testers through the Zapier community and some other forums, but that was not a big success.

I had used Fiverr in the past, but mostly for graphics design. This time, I wanted to try it out for software testing.

It turns out there are a large number of people offering Zapier related work on Fiverr. None of those explicitly focus on beta testing, which I can understand. Most offered very cheap packages that usually included setting up one Zap for one specific task. These started at about €20, which seems very low.

Custom Request

So what I did was create a custom quote request. I tried to make my request as clear as possible. Including expected steps to take and some nice-to-haves. What I usually do for these things, is write something down as quickly as possible and next use ChatGPT to clean it up in a few iterations. My biggest issue with ChatGPT is to keep it back from making everything "exciting" and "life-changing" and "awesome", but otherwise I find ChatGPT very helpful in making things concise and more structured than what I usually write.

With my custom request in hand, I sent it to about 10 people offering Zapier services. I tried to find the people that focused on Zapier exclusively and picked some from around the world. My initial budget was €150/request, which I would think equals to about 2 to 3 hours of work. One hour for getting set up and one hour for actually testing.

One thing to note: if you create a custom order request, Fiverr pushes ads on you, presumably from people paying for that privilege. However, the one person I contacted based on the ads replied that he was on holidays. I am not sure how this works out for him. Paying for advertising when you are on vacation?

Responses

Of the 10 people I contacted, some responded that they didn't do this type of work and a few responded with questions that showed they didn't bother to read my request.

One person responded positively with a quote within the budget and another one asked about twice the budget. I went with both to see what difference there would be in those services.

Results

The person with the most expensive quote clearly read my brief carefully. He was able to do what I was looking for with almost no help from me. The questions he asked were relevant and helped him to quickly get things done.

He did only partially do some of the optional tasks I asked, but he clearly communicated he was going to work for 2 hours on this and was going to do his best to get as much done as possible.

Overall this was a good experience, worth the money.

The cheaper person is still on the job. He has asked a few questions, some of which where at least partially answered in the job description. Communication is good, so I have confidence he'll come up with a similar end result. I am fine with it taking a bit longer (I told all Fiverrs that I do not have a specific deadline and there was no need to rush)

While I think the work will be fine, I do doubt that this will be a profitable operation for him. The first person clearly had a better grip on what his time is worth and how to organize his work to be able to make Fiverr work for him.

What's Next

As far as Savvy Folders is concerned, it looks like the testing is showing that everything is working as expected. There is some work to do on the onboarding flow. While it is sufficient, it's clearly not the best experience yet.

So my next step is going to be to officially ask Zapier to make the integration public.

In other news, I have done yet another makeover of the landing page. I have taken @csallen 's feedback in mind (Thanks for that one more time!). This is the first one where my gut feeling is telling me I am getting close to properly communicating the value of Savvy Folders. Feedback is, as always, most welcome!

I am going to add some practical use cases to the front page. I have been messing a bit in Photoshop to figure out how to present those, and the following is an example that I am pretty happy about.