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
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
Sramana: You mentioned that eBay is one of your customers. What do you do for eBay? Lukas Biewald: We do a lot of different things for them. The most mature application for them is classifying products. They get a lot of products in from their users, and they want to make sure they are going
Sramana: What is your business model? Lukas Biewald: Our business model is pretty simple. We quote customers the price for completed tasks, and upon completing those tasks recieve payment regardless of the cost we incur competing those tasks. We assume the price risk. Let’s suppose a company has a large directory of other businesses and
Sramana: When you first recognized the concept of croudsourcing was working, what stood out at you the most? What about it make you recognize its overall potential? Lukas Biewald: When you get thousands of people looking at your site or your data, you will get a lot of interesting ideas. They will point out confusing
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Lukas Biewald is the founder and executive chairman of CrowdFlower, the world’s largest enterprise crowdsourcing platform. Prior to co-founding CrowdFlower, Lukas was a senior scientist and manager within the ranking and management team at Powerset, Inc., a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft.
Sramana: In your history of the 11 years, have you litigated using these patents offensively before now? Zafar Khan: Yes. As the market becomes more interesting with shorter sales cycles, it is natural that more people want to get into the marketplace. We are trying to make it more well known that we are the
Sramana: Going back to the beginning of your company, at what point did you start considering and filing for patents? It is expensive to go through the legal process of filing for patents and getting them approved. Zafar Khan: It is a very expensive experience, not just from the aspect of filing for the patents