Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 4)

SM: You mentioned naming projects. If you’re getting 100 different names, how does the payment work? There’s no more work to do after the naming is done.

RK: The wrap-up for naming projects is simple. When you pick your favorite name, we pay the person who recommended it. So that you understand, we are sensitive to intellectual property issues both in simple writing projects like naming and in complex projects. It’s one reason why we work with more big brands and agencies than all of our competitors combined.

My background is in intellectual property law. I was a trial attorney for 13 years before co-founding CrowdSPRING. So, we started building CrowdSPRING as a platform and marketplace that respected and protected intellectual property. I’ll give you some examples. Every single project is protected by a customized written agreement that governs the transfer of intellectual property from the creative to the buyer. That means the buyer is comforted by the knowledge that what he’s buying is both something he now owns and acquires rights to appropriately. It’s something we found very lacking in the marketplace when we launched in 2008. It’s still lacking today because all you’ll get on most other marketplaces are form agreements. They’re not customized. They rely on parties who are not attorneys to figure out how to complete them. We make it easy for people to report violations of intellectual property, both of their own intellectual property and intellectual property they believe is owned by others.

We have a team here that is tasked with responding and prioritizing all potential complaints of intellectual property violations. We want our buyer community and our creative community to be comfortable that their rights are protected and that when they transact with each other, they’re comfortable that the other side won’t take advantage of them. We have very strict policies ranging from user agreements to standards of conduct for both sides.

SM: Got it. So, let’s talk a little bit about the businesses that are using your marketplace. Is it all small businesses and agencies or large businesses and agencies, or do you also see, let’s say design agencies or writing agencies or creative agencies building businesses using your method? Do you know what I’m talking about?

RK: Yes, and the answer is that we do, in fact, see a lot of small freelancers, small agencies building entire businesses on CrowdSPRING. We had some expectation that people might leverage CrowdSPRING to expand their businesses, but we were surprised by the ways in which people have done that. We have a rich history of freelancers who have decided to go into business as marketing consultants as opposed to creating logos for other people’s businesses. They now hire other freelancers to create those logos, and they provide strategy consulting for their clients. So, rather than work with two or three clients a month, they’re now able to work with five to ten clients a month, offload some of the work and cost onto the CrowdSPRING and significantly increase the amount of revenue they can earn in their businesses, and significantly enhance and improve the kind of work they do for their clients.

It’s the same with agencies. We have agencies that are both working as creative on CrowdSPRING and sometimes, when they are very busy with client work, sourcing additional work from CrowdSPRING. As you know, in the agency world, there are months when it’s very busy, and you don’t know where you’re going to find more help, and there are months when there’s just not much work and people are sitting around doing nothing. So, we have some agencies that are leveraging us both as buyers in those months when they’re really busy and in the months when they’re not as busy, their people are working as creatives. It gives them the best of both worlds. It lets them control their capital costs, and they have a much better ability to predict their expenses and revenues.

SM: How many agencies, let’s say, are using CrowsSPRING as a serious channel for generating business? What would that number be?

RK: It’s tough for us to measure because we have not formally surveyed our community to ask that question. So, all of the information we’re getting is anecdotal. We interact with a lot of them. We know that there are dozens and probably hundreds of smaller agencies that are doing that, that are very seriously using CrowdSPRING as a platform. These are people who are posting six to ten or more projects every month. And then we know there are also bigger agencies that periodically work with us. I’m talking about major agencies like Crispin Porter +Bogusky, Element79, Bartle Bogle and Hegarty, Draftfcb. They’ll post periodic projects. They have a lot of work, so they don’t bring all of their work to us. But in some circumstances, when there’s an appropriate project, they’ll crowd source it as well.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING
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