I am planning to create a Kickstarter project for the next year that involves electronic engineering, production and then a marketing campaign.
I have found FIVERR as an amazing source of talent in many areas that look really amazing: There are guys there that could help in many areas like hardware design, software, mechanical design, campaign videos, advertising, website, packaging design, etc. And the cost is in some cases really low.
What's your opinion/experience about this kind of talent-sharing? Does it have a dark side that I cannot see now?
I'd read some of the "problem with Fiverr?" webpages.
Fiverr takes a big commission from that miniscule amount you are paying.
Fiverr is not nice to it's sellers.
A lot of the sellers are from Asia and beyond and you may spend a lot of time with just communicating back and forth and ensuring that they understand what you want.
I've used Fiverr previously for logo design and that was really good. The person we found was responsive, we had several iterations and he made some proposals which we ended up accepting. Overall it was easy and very affordable.
I haven't used any of the more sophisticated services you mentioned
There is a saying... "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys".
There is no doubt that sites like Fiverr and Freelancer are a good way to get bids from a wide range of people who claim to be able to do what you need.
You can also get lucky, and find a person just starting out in that field who is highly talented and does not yet know their true worth. For them, a good project is win win.
But you have to know exactly what you want, how to brief it, and how to evaluate if what you get back is as good as it first looks.
I've hired a number of web devs and designers via these sites to do little jobs for me. I did get lucky with one guy in india who did a fabulous recreation of an existing website into wordpress for very little cash. But the next time I used him, the price had gone up significantly... and by the fourth job, he'd started his own company and was charging proper prices for the quality of work. He'd also got busy, so speed suffered.
The other guys I tried were... bad. Really bad.
I've also had little logo design jobs where although the guys portfolio looked good, the designs received were, to be frank, shoddy, and obviously not done by the same person.
On balance of my experience... yes, you can get a project sorted via these sites, with good results. But it's not as easy (or cheap) as it first looks. And you can't be sure your IP will remain yours, to the same extent you could if your team were all real not virtual.
And then there are those who give you an acceptable and good looking result , but needed total reworking by a very expensive company in order to get the product ready for print.
IMHO, using such "random" providers require high architecture and project management skills. If you really know what you want and are able to define it really well (detailed) in technical terms up-front, it's easy, the worst thing that can happen is delay.
Not judging, but most entrepreneurs are dreamers, have little knowledge but big dreams. Dealing with them as an engineer is like "I need x, y, z", but when you deliver it you hear, oh, I don't like it, then it goes either "I didn't meant that, it's your fault" or "oh, sorry, could you take up an additional task for me (and get bored to death in such nonsense iterations)"
A sucessfull entrepreneur requires a high portion of a dreamer. Check Steve Jobs. That's not a bad thing at all if you are a good executioner at the same time, and know how to put lines. And of course a good seller with empathy is important as well.
It's clear that you need to have the result clear in your mind before using these services. But I think, that's the same when you are working with coleagues in a company, as I've experienced.......