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
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
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.
SM: Who do you consider as your direct competitors, who follow that exact model where people are actually submitting work before they get paid as opposed to be hired based on resumes and feedback? RK: In the graphic design space, our primary competitor is a company called 99Designs out of Australia. It has a similar
Followers of this blog may recall that Elance was featured on Deal Radar in 2008. Founded in 1999, the Mountain View, California–based company continues to give outsourcing competitors like oDesk and Freelancer.com a run for their money. Sramana Mitra: Hi, Fabio. Would you give me some background about you and also about Elance. I know
SM: Here’s another question for you. You have talked a lot about bidding for projects, and you seem to be bidding for a lot of projects on a daily basis. Can you talk a bit about the bidding process? What do you do internally? Do you have a dedicated team who sit and monitor the
Sramana Mitra: In 2006, how did the order volume change? What happened in 2006? What level did it reach? Sanjay Dange: In mid 2006, we started getting 20 to 25 projects in a month. Plus, in a year and a half, we also acquired more than 50 new customers. We would get a lot of repeat
SM: You said India is number three in terms of employers. That’s the one that I find interesting. The fact that India is number one in terms of freelancers is a very obvious one. That’s where outsourcing really took off, especially software outsourcing. That makes total sense to me, but India as number three on