Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Help me tie these two together. The media buying that brought you the right traffic to your website, how does that translate into trust and reliability? Srish Agrawal: In order to build trust and reliability, you need a client base. Once you have that initial trust, using that initial trust that you’re able

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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

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Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you hire from now? In the course of the last 10 years, what has been your hiring strategy? Srish Agrawal: Either we hire from art colleges in Calcutta or we also advertise and invite people to come down to our office. We give them a piece of paper and ask them

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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

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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

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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 4)

Sramana Mitra: You said you get invited to bid on a lot of projects. And that’s because you have a track record. What qualifies somebody to be invited to bid on projects? Igancio Galarraga: I there are a lot of things that interact there. First of all, your price. Elance has two options when you

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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

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