Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Today, you’re about a $10 million a year company, right?

Ross Kimbarovsky: Roughly in that range. We’re a private company, so we don’t disclose.

SM: A range is fine. Now, you said 109,000 designers and freelancers from various nationalities. Talk a little bit about which nationalities are represented.

RK: We have, I think, 195 or 196 countries represented. About half of [our freelancers] are from the United States, and they range in level of experience from young designers who are graduating from design school or just graduated, all the way to experienced designers who have 40 years’ experience in the industry. But we also have hobbyists, people who are not professionally trained as designers but are very skillful and are very good at the things that they do, both in the design and in the writer community. One of the big advantages of our marketplace and our business model is that we make education, experience, and a portfolio much less relevant. Ultimately, the buyer is picking from actual work. The fact that someone went to a top tier journalism school or a top tier design school becomes less relevant when you get to see the actual work and pick from that work. We give opportunity to a vast number of designers, some of whom, for example, may be disabled and unable to travel and meet clients. Some may be living both here in the United States and overseas in regions that just don’t have a lot of business clients. It might be in a small town in North Dakota or in a small town in India or in Australia. But these are people who don’t have traditional access to clients. We also give them opportunities to access a very diverse client base.

I mentioned that we work with tons of small businesses, entrepreneurs, brands, agencies, and governments. We built CrowdSPRING to solve a problem, predominantly for small and mid-sized businesses that had limited budgets and great difficulty hiring competent designers. Part of it was because they couldn’t afford to pay tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the work they needed to have done. Part of it was they just didn’t know where to find them, and they couldn’t afford agencies. Bigger companies don’t have the same problem. They have richer budgets. They have relationships with agencies, and generally, they’re able to get design or copywriting help in a more efficient manner. So, we built CrowdSPRING for the small and mid-sized business. We launched in May 2008.

What we found shortly after we launched was that our model and our marketplace were attractive to bigger companies and agencies. That surprised us because we never intended for our platform to serve a wide mix of customers, but that’s how it has turned out. We’ve worked with a lot of big brands in addition to all the small businesses. I’ll give you some examples: Amazon, LG, TiVo, Starbucks, Phillips, Con Agra, Epic Records, Grolsch, Barilla. These are brands around the world that are sophisticated companies. They buy design services every day and pay a lot for design services and have turned to CrowdSPRING from time to time for projects. These are the ones that we’re able to talk about. We have an entire category of projects called Pro Projects, which are highly private projects protected by non-disclosure agreements. So, we can’t talk about those things. But I can tell you this is a very small list of the brands we work with.

SM: What kinds of projects are they putting through your marketplace?

RK: The bigger brands have largely done design projects. So, for Starbucks, it was branding for some of internal groups they needed for conferences. Other big brands have posted much more sophisticated projects. For example, LG, for a number of years, held an annual competition on CrowdSPRING to invite the global community to design LG’s next mobile phone. And that project offered, several years in a row, more than $80,000 in awards to the industrial design community. Barilla has run a number of projects that included designing new pasta shapes, which is very interesting because it’s not the kind of project that industrial designers normally would get to work on.

The only way that most industrial designers and writers would have an opportunity to work with major agencies or big brands is if they are fortunate enough to be part of a bid process or part of a big design. They normally don’t have these opportunities. One of the huge advantages on CrowdSPRING is that these opportunities are available every day, both for experienced designers and for those who are just starting out and who are hungry to prove themselves.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING
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