I’m working on a pet project to create an interactive timeline of key events in the modern tech industry. The best source of these events is origin story books, like Facebook–The Inside Story, Like, Comment, Subscribe (YouTube), and In the Plex (Google). Every major company has at least one of these books that detail the history well enough.

I’ve read most of these books but not while recording key events. Since I don’t want to spend time re-reading a story I know, I’m hiring someone to do it for me.

Fiverr, with it’s consumer roots (vs Upwork or Toptal which are more B2B) seemed like the best service for that, so today I started a contract with someone to read the 300 pages in Nick Bilton’s book “Hatching Twitter”.

In 15 days and for $142 (with fees) I hope to have something back.

Posting on Fiverr

This is my second time using Fiverr but the first time for reading. I couldn’t find a category of job for reading books so I just created a post and waited to see who responded.

My post was:
I need someone to read the book "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton and, for each key date in the company's history, add an entry into a form. The form has the date, the event, and the location in the book. I will provide the book and the form. Timeline: No rush, take your time. Up to one month. Note: This is not a book summary — only the dates are important.

I setup an Airtable form to enter dates and details that go straight into a spreadsheet, and from there I’ll have the structured data to somehow display as a timeline on a website (that part is still TBD).

We’ll see how this goes.