Outsourcing: Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance (Part 2)

SM: How much was each of these enterprises paying you?

FR: It ranged from hundreds of thousands a year to millions of dollars a year.

SM: So, typical enterprise contracts?

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Outsourcing: Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance (Part 1)

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 you’re not a founder, but give us a bit of the genesis of the Elance story. >>>

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 5)

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 automated email to the customer. The customer in turn can post a response.

SM: I see. Is this project management system something you developed on your own? >>>

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 4)

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 projects that come up and bid on them? And how do you manage the process?

SD: The bidding process is very simple. You need to be honest and provide a clear picture of your understanding of projects to customers. Usually, outsourcing portals such as Freelancer.com only allow a single login, meaning only one person can bid using a company’s login details at a time. We have a business development team of four people who work round the clock and participate in the bidding process on various portals. The team in turn reports to me. >>>

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 3)

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 website design and development category.

SM: How many customers do you have today? >>>

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 2)

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 orders from them. It’s very important to keep our clients satisfied. We were lucky that we could get a few serious customers who developed e-commerce websites and serious business portals. >>>

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 1)

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 advantage of Freelancer.com — then GetAFreelancer.com –to advertise Smartinfosys’ services and expand its horizons beyond India’s borders. >>>

Outsourcing: Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Well, I think the reputation system, the feedback system, all that helps. Switching gears a bit, I run an initiative called One Million by One Million where we are running a for-profit virtual incubator. Our goal is to help a million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in revenue by 2020, around the world. It sounds as though you have freelancers running million-dollar businesses. If you were to kind of segment your freelancer user base, how many power freelancers do you have?

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