Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ Macro shot of trendy jeans with american 5 dollar bill on its pocket

Fiverr on Wednesday announced the launch of Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese language versions of its website, bringing its highly successful version of the “gig economy” to countless new markets.

Fiverr said in a statement that its goal is to accelerate geographic expansion over the next few months.  This follows in the footsteps of this summer’s $30 million round of Series C funding.

But in a conversation with Geektime, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman outlined plans that are even more ambitious.

“Our vision is to build the next ebay or Amazon,” he told Geektime. “We consider ourselves a catalog company and we would like to build the largest catalog for services.”

The company, which bills itself as “the world’s largest marketplace for creative and professional services,” currently lists over 3 million “gigs” or tasks in more than 100 different categories across 196 countries.

Creative professionals, such as writers, graphic designers, voice-over artists, and others do small jobs or gigs for anyone with an Internet connection,for a price starting at $5.

Fiverr also intends to increase their presence in the mobile industry, Kaufman told Geektime, as well as take advantage of specific mobile capabilities like the ability to offer services immediately and from anywhere.

Fiverr says the majority of their customers are small businesses but that they’re seeing an increase of Fortune 500 companies using the service as well, and everything in between.

One of the attractions of Fiverr, and perhaps a reason for its popularity, is that the web site is very user friendly. In addition, Fiverr describes its model as “Services as a Product” (SaaP), providing “consumers with a catalogue-like, e-commerce experience that allows Gigs to be purchased with only a few clicks, and without the time consuming process of negotiating a project.”

According to the company, Fiverr is one of the top 200 websites in the world in Alexa rankings. It employs 140 people, with primary offices in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv. The company is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Qumra Capital and a group of private investors.

How can you make a living from $5 gigs? 

This all sounds great, but five dollars seems like a very low rate, at least for people in OECD countries, especially considering some of the things people are offering on the web site for that rate, like write a 350-word article, draw a caricature or design a logo.

Kaufman reassures Geektime that “our sellers are smart.  They know how to slice their product thin enough so that it makes sense for the price.”

For instance, he says, if you’re a translator, you can offer to translate a paragraph for $5 or an entire essay for $150. Five dollars is the starting price, but prices for more time consuming projects can go as high as $5000.

Kaufman explains that Fiverr is at the forefront of a changing job market.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that the job market is changing: the economy, the lack of job security, and people realizing that they don’t want to spend all their time working out of an office. I think technology is playing a large role in that. Fiverr is helping to make the world smaller. You can sit in your house in New York and service customers in Dubai, Tokyo and Berlin.”

Kaufman says this is a good thing because it enables people to discover their bliss.

“In the past people applied themselves to whatever job they had but it wasn’t necessarily what they were passionate about. But how can a person test the viability of another job they’re interested in?

“One of our sellers was working at a bank and became a voice over artist. Fiverr allowed them to see that this was a real possibility.”

Nevertheless, companies like Fiverr, TaskRabbit, Uber, and Mechanical Turk have come under criticism recently for part of a “sharing economy” which many people believe increases income inequality.

Kaufman stresses that his company is different from TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk.

“TaskRabbit pivoted about five or six times. Now they’re more about local services like cleaning. They’re not a service catalog. Mechanical Turk is about doing very robotic type services on a large scale for very little money—like fill in a form or captcha at a rate of 2 cents per form.”

“We’re super global and on average we’re doing a transaction every 4 seconds.”

Regarding the claim that sites like Fiverr are pushing down wages, Kaufman responds, “I’m not sure that this is true. When you measure everything in terms of hourly rates that gets the picture wrong. We don’t measure things by time. It’s about performance, not about how much time is spent on a specific task and I think that that is the way the market is going.”

As for criticisms of the sharing economy in general,  Kaufman replies “what the sharing economy is doing is making this more efficient. You used to have to skim the yellow pages or ask a friend to help you for small tasks. But now you can have that task covered as easy as it is to order something on Amazon.

“Twenty years ago you had the same criticisms about ecommerce, that it would kill traditional commerce. It didn’t. It’s the same with the sharing economy. Right now we’re every early in the game and I’m sure in the long run it will be very beneficial to those who embrace it.”