Most of the people who register to work as freelancers on Elance don’t end up earning $1 million or more in annual revenue. Ignacio Galarraga did it with his graphic design company NetMen. As my conversation with him will reveal, Galarraga started out on Elance in much the same way as Sanjay Dange started out
Sramana Mitra: So, your project teams directly work with the customers and keep them updated? Sanjay Dange: No, they never directly work with the customers. They are always accessible on our online project management system. Only the team coordinators directly interact with customers. Usually feedback is posted on our project management system which triggers an
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: Of course, over time, as you built up more projects on Freelancer.com and you had testimonials, reviews, and so on that also helped you get more visibility. Sanjay Dange: Yes. On Elance, we have 25 reviews. On Freelancer.com, we have more than 1,400 reviews. We are the leader on that portal in 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
We’ve featured lots of successful outsourcing companies in this series, whether they’ve been companies that successfully outsourced work to third-party vendors or accepted outsourced tasks from other businesses. None, however, has been quite like Smartinfosys.net. A small Web design and development company founded in Gujarat, India in 1999, Smartinfosys increased its customer base by taking