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?

SD: Today, as far as our overseas market is concerned, we have more than 2,500 customers. Our rates range from $50 to $20,000.

SM: How many of these are maintenance customers that you continue to serve over a longer period?

SD: We have more than 300 hourly-based maintenance customers.

SM: Okay. How much will you earn in 2011?

SD: In 2011, as far as Indian revenue is concerned, is around INR 50,000,000.

SM: So, five crores? That’s more than $1 million.

SD: Yes.

SM: Very interesting. What else can you tell me about your process of building this company? Are there other things that you can discuss that are of interest?

SD: As far as building the company is concerned, it required a lot of dedication and hard work for 16 to 18 hours a day. We enhanced our marketing efforts by bidding aggressively on various portals, participating in various contest sites and contacting customers via email or phone. We have always conducted business with established values and remained honest with our clients. We have always honored our project commitments in terms of timely delivery and budget adherence. Many times, we did suffer losses monetarily while delivering projects because the bid value was too low.

SM: You sometimes underbid on a project?

SD: Many times that happened. The bidding process requires a fast understanding of projects and quick responses to customers as there are many players involved. This results in underbidding, too, due to lack of proper communication with customers regarding project deliverables.  As I spoke earlier about honoring project commitments, we have always delivered the project in spite of suffering losses as we don’t find it fair to ask for an increase in rate once the bid is awarded. We are now more confident and bid carefully, communicate with our customers in detailed fashion and try to evaluate the project in all the aspects before accepting any project.

SM: What kinds of failures did you experience, and what did you learn from them in terms of what to do or what not to do?

SD: The most important thing that I learned over the years is the ability to give a polite no to a customer if we are not able to do a particular job, rather than keep him in the dark. It is important that customers are updated on a project’s progress and provided with honest recommendations and feedback. On Freelancer.com, we now get almost 5 to 10 projects on a daily basis. Since our inception, we have been very careful in undertaking projects and never over promise. We have always kept communication channels open with our customers and never undertaken a project with false promises. If a project does not fall into our skill set or budget range, we have politely declined it.

It is also very important to consolidate our resources and form a strong team.  A strong in-house team is required in order to commit a firm deadline to our customers. Also a strong team gives us the necessary control in terms of project management and communication. We are lucky that we have a strong team in place who is able to handle the challenges of the website industry. We consistently monitor our resources and augment them as needed.  Hard work, a long term vision and cordial relationships wth customers form the base of a successful organization.

SM: And you do mostly Web development and logo development?

SD: Yes, ours is a dedicated website design and development company. We do PHP programming, ASP programming and ASP.net programming. Our services are quite varied in nature starting from $50 to $20,000 in which we have delivered high end database oriented sites. We are working with a clear focus of becoming a leading company in website design and development services.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net
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