Turning Animation Into a Side Hustle Business with Fiverr

I will create an animated cartoon caricature
from your photo that says your message.
View Gig on Fiverr.

Creating a side hustle business from your animation skills does not have to be as complicated or time consuming as you may think. Which is ideal if you just want to earn a little money to pay your bills while you create your epic, animated, independent, feature film with the rest of your time.

Fiverr Makes Side Hustles Easy

Fiverr, the online marketplace for paid 'gigs', makes it easy to create a side hustle without the need for a built in audience or social media community. People specifically go to the site to search for low cost services that solve a need. All you have to do is stand out when people search for your specific skills.

Joining Fiverr is free as both a buyer or seller. Becoming a seller is a little more involved as it's a little like filling out a job application with information from your resume. Nothing too difficult though, and don't worry if you don't have an impressive list of qualifications. People will more likely focus on your gig work examples more than whether you've studied at some prestigious college.

Creating a Simple Animation Gig

Creating an animation gig involves designing a simple, repeatable service that you can offer to as many people as possible. The simpler the better since Fiverr is the home of low cost services. Ideally you want a service you can complete in a couple of hours at most (especially if your basic service starts at USD$5.00 - which is how the site got its name but that does not mean your basic service must be $5.00).

One popular service on Fiverr is 'cartoonizing' people's avatars for social media. Even though there are quite a lot of people already doing this, no one is doing it in your unique art style. There will always be room for more gigs in this niche because art is a subjective thing. There's even less competition in the space of animating cartoon avatars.

How to Create Cartoon Caricature
Faces From Photos Using Krita.

It occurred to me that my tutorial, How to Create Cartoon Caricature Faces from Photos Using Krita, is the perfect gig for Fiverr. It teaches you how to quickly create a caricature face from any photo using easily repeatable steps that can be done in less than an hour.

It also occurred to me that Cartoon Animator 4's Morph-Based Heads feature makes it extremely easy to animate and lip sync photo based cartoon caricature heads speaking about thirty seconds of dialogue. A great upsell to the original gig where the buyer provides a recording of their thirty second message.

Finally, Cartoon Animator also makes it easy to add more detailed face and body animation using its human character templates, giving an excellent opportunity to add a premium upsell of more detailed animation.

From that point on, it was a no brainer for me to decide to create my own gig on Fiverr doing exactly that. View my gig on Fiverr.

Art is Subjective and Other Ideas

Just because I've already posted this gig should not stop you from doing the same gig too. Once you've gone through the steps of my tutorial it's very likely your artistic sensibilities would produce very different looking caricatures to mine. That tutorial is really just a starting point. Even I don't follow it step for step exactly anymore because I've learned more techniques that can enhance my caricatures.

Alternatively you could come up with a different, repeatable, animation process. Creating animations and avatars based on people's pets is just one example. You could use the exact same techniques in my tutorial, just apply them to people's pet photos.

Or you could do something different like creating animated banners, graphics for websites etc. The point is, to create a relatively simple gig that isn't going to take up too much of your time. 

Too Many Orders or Not Enough?

Don't worry about being inundated with orders (should you be so lucky). Fiverr lets you cap orders to whatever level you feel you can manage. Your listing will be automatically paused while you work through your active orders. 

If you're having the opposite problem of no orders, it could be, people on Fiverr aren't really looking for that service (or you may need to improve your keywords and tagging). Regardless, you're not limited to just one gig. Try putting together a few to see what takes off.

I'd also recommend (as do Fiverr) to promote outside of Fiverr's marketplace too (just be aware it's against their terms of service to promote gigs with Google Ads). Take advantage of Fiverr's free training for Fiverr success for more ideas. You'll get linked to that as soon as you sign on as a seller.

Justifying Fiverr's Fee

While Fiverr does take a 20% fee from every order keep in mind they are giving you access to a huge market of people looking for services, and handling all the administration, so you can focus entirely on delivering your orders on time to the highest quality.

You could go out on your own and sell services from your own website but you'd also have to drive all the traffic to your website too. If you're good at that kind of thing and enjoy doing it, definitely give it a try. Personally I've tried it, and I'd rather pay a 20% fee to have someone else take that work off my hands.

Anyway, I feel I'm starting to ramble at this point. If you would like to earn some money from your animation skills, Fiverr is a good introduction to freelancing that you can do without a lot of setup.

Simple gigs without too much time commitment could be a nice little side hustle to fund your independent animation projects.

* This article contains Fiverr affiliate links. Clicking on them will not obligate you to make a purchase but if you do buy something I may receive a small commission that helps to keep this site free.