What would you do for $5?

Clearly, I do many interviews for this blog.  Some interviews are done through email exchanges, but I’ve done several telephone interviews and I get a great deal of information that way.  In fact, telephone interviews usually produce the best interview results because it allows me to ask related follow up questions quickly and easily.  It also allows the interviewee to speak more candidly and less calculated which usually spurs excellent conversation.  The only drawback to the phone interviews is the amount of time it takes me to transcribe the conversation and convert it into a readable interview.  To solve this problem, I turned to the least expensive source I could find.  Fiverr.com.

I find myself drifting off and writing about some brandable names, and that’s okay.  One of my Twitter connections mentioned Fiverr.com in a tweet and I had been meaning to check it out.  The plus side to this domain, it was easy to remember.  It had been weeks since I saw the tweet and I still remembered the name.  Unfortunately, I forgot who tweeted it, so forgive me for not giving you credit.

Fiverr.com is a site where people post what they are willing to do for 5 bucks.  It’s crazy, really.  People will do things such as dress up in stupid looking close and send you a picture, to doing actual programming and solving real problems.  Now as you might expect, I have found that you get what you pay for.  I searched someone to transcribe a call for me.  The rate was $5 for 15 minutes of audio, so I gave it a shot.  Timeliness was excellent, I had the transcribed audio in my possession in less than 24 hours.  Accuracy, not so excellent.

The person transcribing was offshore and likely used English as a second language.  That said, he did a decent job.  He transcribed and got several words wrong or placed “???” in places he didn’t understand based on the quality of the audio.  There is no way I could use the service and trust the results without going through it with a fine tooth comb, but it did take the edge of transcribing the whole call.

I’m not sure if I’ll use the service again for this purpose, but it was kind of fun to test it out.  I guess it did save me some time and was probably worth the $5.  But if you’re looking for high quality and accuracy, you’ll have to ante up for a pro.