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

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Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 3)

SM: So, you said half of your over 109,000 [freelancers] are from the United States. What other countries do you see a lot of representation from? RK: We have a very strong representation, obviously, from English-speaking countries. We have strong representation from Canada, from the United Kingdom, from Australia. We see a lot of designers

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Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Today, you’re about a $10 million a year company, right? Ross Kimbarovsky: Roughly in that range. We’re a private company, so we don’t disclose. SM: A range is fine. Now, you said 109,000 designers and freelancers from various nationalities. Talk a little bit about which nationalities are represented.

Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 1)

We’ve covered outsourcing sites before, like Elance and Freelancer.com, which are open to all kinds of freelancers, from telemarketers to virtual assistants to graphic designers to bookkeepers. But some, like Chicago-based CrowdSPRING, specialize. CrowdSPRING dedicates itself to serving the needs of creative individuals, like graphic designers and writers, and those who need their services. Founders

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Creating Paradigm-Shifting Insights Through Co-Creation and Crowd Sourcing

By guest author Soren Petersen; cowritten by Tina Santiago, Tanja Aitamurto, Richard Spencer and Dr. Jaewoo Joo. Coming up with creative ideas that can change mental and technical contradictions into progress and profit are among the toughest challenges in business today. Without previous mental or technical references from which to extrapolate we rely on inspiration and intuition

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CrowdSourcing Repetitive Tasks: CrowdFlower Founder Lukas Biewald (Part 7)

Sramana: Would you talk some about the CEO transition? When did you bring in Woody Hobbs? Lukas Biewald: We brought him in a couple of months ago. The business had grown and we were selling to bigger and bigger customers and were eyeing finance, healthcare, and other industries that I had no experience with. I

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CrowdSourcing Repetitive Tasks: CrowdFlower Founder Lukas Biewald (Part 6)

Sramana: In 2009, what was your average contract size for an enterprise deal? Lukas Biewald: In 2009, we were targeting five-digit contracts. In 2010, we realized we could get away with six-digit contracts. Inside sales is one of our major penetration points when it comes to enterprises. We don’t do the inside sales, we just

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CrowdSourcing Repetitive Tasks: CrowdFlower Founder Lukas Biewald (Part 5)

Sramana: After you gained your first few small startup customers, how did you go about building the company? What were the big milestones? Lukas Biewald: There really was not a single moment where I suddenly realized that we would make it. There were a couple of things that added up for us. We had a

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