Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 3)

SM: So, you said half of your over 109,000 [freelancers] are from the United States. What other countries do you see a lot of representation from?

RK: We have a very strong representation, obviously, from English-speaking countries. We have strong representation from Canada, from the United Kingdom, from Australia. We see a lot of designers from Asia, Malaysia. We see a lot of designers from India. But generally, we see a varied mix. So, if we were to look, for example, at 2011 and the winning designers in our projects, there are probably between 75 and 100 different countries represented in terms of winning designers from those countries.

SM: Percentage wise, who’s winning most of the designs?

RK: Generally, I mentioned earlier, half of our designers and writers come from the United States, approximately half. And approximately half of the winning designers and writers are, in fact, based in the United States. The other half is spread around the rest of the world. They may be in the UK. They may be in Australia. They may be in Germany. Literally, it runs the gamut of countries around the world.

SM: Talk a little bit about how the payments are structured. I think our audience has already read the stories on Elance and oDesk and Freelancer.com. Their models are quite similar. Either it’s fixed price projects or hourly projects. What is the business model of your marketplace?

RK: We wanted to differentiate ourselves from the traditional RFP process. That process is very complicated. On CrowdSPRING, a buyer first of all, sets his own price. We do set minimums in all of our project categories, but those minimums are very reasonable. In most project categories, they’re $200, which means that you have to offer an award of at least $200 for a logo design or a company name. That award is payable to one person when you select your favorite. We allow you to have multiple awards. You can have as many as you want. We’ve had projects with 50 or 60 awards. So, you get to control your cost. We, unlike most other marketplaces, do not charge the creative. We do not charge designers or writers. They get 100 cents of the award that’s posted by the buyer because they’re doing the actual work. We provide a lot of value to both sides, but we charge the buyer. Ultimately, there are two kinds of charges.

There’s a listing fee that ranges from $39 to $199. That’s for you to list your project. The more expensive fee, $199, is for pro projects, which have non-disclosure agreements, private galleries, the ability for you to control all of the users. And they’re typically designed for agencies, for bigger brands, for companies that are doing confidential work. It may be product design or launching a new product. And the less expensive, our economy projects, the $39 listing fee, are designed for the rest of the world, people who are looking for a new logo or a new illustration that’s going to be public anyway, so they’re not so much concerned about privacy.

We also charge a 15% commission. That’s our success fee on the total award. So, if a buyer’s posting a logo project and she’s picking an economy project, she’s going to offer a $200 award. A $30 fee, that’s 15% commission plus the $39 listing fee is charged. So, she can post a project for $269. Our pro projects typically start at $1,000 because they attract a different category of designers. They also have a lot more privacy features, as I mentioned before. So, we do set higher minimums. We have small businesses and small startups posting pro projects, and we have big brands posting economy projects. It really is driven by the nature of the work.

We offer buyers a very simple guarantee because we want them to be happy with the work they get on CrowdSPRING. In naming projects, company names, product names, domain names, we guarantee that they’re going to get at least 100 unique names. If they don’t and find that they don’t see something that they like, we refund the 15% success fee and the award. In all other projects, design projects and other writing projects, it’s a very simple satisfaction guarantee. You are happy or we give you your award and our success fee back. We want our buyers to be happy with the work. If we haven’t been able to help them get a great new logo or a great illustration, or if they’re looking for copy for their marketing materials, we’ve failed to do our job. So, we want them to walk away knowing that they didn’t risk a substantial sum of money to do that work. That’s the kind of promise that RFP marketplaces simply cannot offer.

I’ll tell you that we have an extremely high success rate. We constantly talk to our customers. Our buyer customers come from 100 different countries. So, we’re dealing with not only different sized businesses and organizations and governments, but we’re dealing with 100 different countries. Over 96% of our customers recommend us to others. That’s a very high success rate.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING
1 2 3 4 5 6 7