What actually happens when you do Gigs on Craigslist for Money

“Still, three weeks brought us a couple interesting lessons, tons of interesting stories, and about $1,000 in profits.”

In early December, my boyfriend (@maxg) found himself with extra time on his hands. We are both college seniors, and he was about to graduate in a couple weeks, with only a few final projects and no finals that would occupy the time of me and his friends that he would otherwise hang out with.

I’ve always considered him to be an industrious, resourceful, stingy guy — which means he takes every opportunity to save and make money (sometimes to my dismay as a girlfriend). However, when he decided he would fill his time chasing down random quick-money opportunities on the Craigslist San Francisco Bay Area “Gigs” page, I thought he had taken these traits a little too far. It is now 2018 — a new year, and he’s about to start a new job at Mulesoft (yes, despite turning to penny-pinching strategies to make money, he is an extremely talented software engineer), and I’m happy to say that he is no longer doing gigs. Still, the three weeks of constant refreshing of the gigs page and my occasional participation during my finals-studying downtime brought a couple interesting lessons that would yield tons of interesting stories and about $1000 in profits.

There are a lot of weirdos on Craigslist

No seriously, there are a lot. There were requests for street goth models, computer tutors to help people illegally stream movies, “420 models” — all with awkwardly written blurbs with questionable usages of caps. We even found one guy who said he would pay someone money to slap him across the face in between in his breaks at the San Francisco Financial District. Still, they aren’t always shady — one of my boyfriend’s favorite gigs was when he was promised $50 to meet up with a man who wanted to know how to trade bitcoins. We met him at the corner of the Starbucks at a mall (I, of course, going to make sure that my boyfriend wasn’t murdered). He was an elderly, slightly kooky man with long, snow-white facial hair and a full black leather vest. He enjoyed every chance to tell us about his side-career as a movie star. It seemed he also just wanted someone to talk to!Of course, the majority of the “weird stuff” came in the form of salacious and somewhat illicit requests, which leads to the next point…

It pays to be a girl (well, sort of)

Anyone who’s been on Craigslist is familiar with postings for “female only” opportunities of various kinds: modeling, companionship, interactions. After reading for so long, you learn to tune them out, but you can’t ignore how just many there are. It can get up to every 3 postings or so. It made me think, how successful are these postings actually? Who even clicks on them?

What I assume is on the other end of some of the Craigslist posts

Sometimes you don’t get paid

There were a couple times where my boyfriend and I completed a task, but were either held over for more than 3 days with receiving payment, or never received payment at all. We always got worried when people asked to pay us over PayPal as opposed to Venmo — PayPal has a vendor payment feature that allows you to revoke a cash transfer in the case your vendor does not deliver. However, this never became an issue — the biggest issue was when the task was to be completed online, with the final product sent over email. There was a good amount of trust involved. We eventually avoided this by sending in fragments of our completed works prior to sending the full — but not before getting cheated a few times.

A lot of it can be done from your computer (but it won’t pay well)

The trust issue with purely digital work not only pertained to payment, but also to the quality of the interaction. I never met anyone in person to complete a task, but my boyfriend did (having access to a car and feeling less vulnerable as a man). He was able to build rapport with the people he did tasks with, sometimes getting asked for more work.

It’s still hard to find work within your skill-set

A lot of the work was still work — the computer science degree I mentioned earlier didn’t help my boyfriend very often; a lot of the work he completed involved product reviews, user testing, physical tasks such as moving furniture, and one time, even, making tacos at 4 in the morning for a temporarily short-staffed breakfast taco caterer in South San Francisco. I always was looking for tasks that would allow me to hone in on abilities such as working with Microsoft Excel or writing. However, those opportunities were limited by the smaller number of postings and my choice to not do tasks in-person.

You might have to become a sell out

Of course, Craigslist being the informal labor market it is, meant that requests for questionable services were plentiful. Posts for making fake Amazon/Yelp reviews, doing someone’s homework for them — it was all there. It all depended on how far you were willing to go, or how desperate you were.

The Verdict

If you have a week+ of time in which you aren’t doing anything, then doing random gigs on Craigslist might be for you. However, if you are trying to make extra cash on the side of a real-paying job? Probably not. You’ll spend far too much time scrolling through all of the opportunities, which, while interesting and fun, can also be very demanding when it comes to scheduling. You’d have to be flexible and ready to do something at any minute, especially given how quickly some of the better opportunities get swept up.Towards the end of our Craigslist’ing days (coincidentally, after we met up with the old bitcoin guy at the mall), my boyfriend decided to take me out to eat after letting him drive me crazy with all of the gigs-chasing. During our lunch at a quaint dim sum restaurant, we calculated our earnings on the paper placemats:

The total came out to $1,058 earned by him in various tasks ranging from assembling tacos to random computer-science related coding tasks to product testing/product reviews. I didn’t throw myself too much into it and earned a small $55.

Of course, when I suggested that we have a competition for what we could earn based on the first three pages of the gigs site, my boyfriend refused. That was probably for the best.

[Originally posted on Medium.com] (http://medium.com/@michaelagines)