Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s wonderful. In fact, I would say that’s easier to do in Calcutta than in other parts of India and easier to do in other, smaller cities in India than a Bangalore or Bombay because the attitudes of people working in Bangalore, Bombay and so on is mercenary. They’re not interested in this

Read Full Article »

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 2)

SM: What kind of price range did you have for these projects? Let’s say you did a mockup in 2002, 2003 time frame. What size project would you expect to get from that bid? SA: Normally, the projects were between $200 and $600. That was the range we were working on. $200 to $600 was

Read Full Article »

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 1)

The founders of Elance, Freelancer.com, and others perhaps never envisioned that one day smart, industrious, and innovative contractors would use the freelance work platforms to build million-dollar businesses. Srish Agrawal, CEO of A1 Future Technologies created accounts on Elance and Scriptlance, which was acquired by Freelancer.com in July 2012, and before long, he found himself

Read Full Article »

Outsourcing: David Bonthrone, Executive Vice-President, Group FMG (Part 4)

SM: There is an effort in India to move certain types of outsourced functions into the smaller cities or towns, not Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore kinds of places, which are pretty crowded, pretty saturated places. Some of the types of functions that you are talking about have shown up, on my radar at least, as functions

Read Full Article »

BlueSnap and Elance Offer 1M/1M Scholarships to Digital Commerce and Subscription Businesses

Fremont, Calif. – April 23, 2012 – BlueSnap, a global provider of open cloud commerce technology and services to meet the rapidly changing needs to today’s digital brands, and its CEO, Hagai Tal, today announced the BlueSnap–Elance Entrepreneur Development Scholarship Program to encourage new entrepreneurs who are launching or engaged in digital commerce ventures. This program is supported by

Read Full Article »

Outsourcing: Ian Ippolito, Founder and CEO of vWorker (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I think I’ve heard of Rent-A-Coder. Ian Ippolito: OK. That’s the way it started, and it was just programmers back then. The first month it probably made only $50 or $60, but it grew. Over the next couple of years, it started going faster and faster. We got some good publicity. We were

Read Full Article »

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: Ignacio Galarraga, CEO of NetMen Corp (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the composition of your customers? You said you have 500 projects a month, right? Ignacio Galarraga: Yes, we handle 500 projects a month. SM: And over the course of the years, you’ve handled more than 5,000 projects? IG: We have done 15,000 projects.

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: Ignacio Galarraga, CEO of NetMen Corp (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a specific question about the bidding process on Elance. Do you have somebody monitoring requests for proposals as projects come online 24 hours a day? Ignacio Garraga: Not 24 hours. I work 10 hours a day. There are two types of processes when somebody posts a proposal. You can go into

Read Full Article »