Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 5)

SM: The question I asked was a little different. I asked how many agencies are using CrowdSPRING for generating business?

RK: Working on CrowdSPRING as creatives?

SM: Yes.

RK: It’s the same answer. Obviously, the big agencies are generally not working on CrowdSPRING as creatives. They’ve got plenty of work to keep them busy. But we do see plenty of agencies – I would say it’s hundreds. I’m not sure if it’s thousands because we haven’t formally surveyed them, but there are definitely a very healthy collection of small agencies around the world that are leveraging our platform collectively. We talk with many of them every week through our customer service team. We hear from many of them who’ve asked us to create products. I’ll give you one example.

One of the pieces of feedback we’ve been hearing more and more is from the small agencies that have been working on CrowdSPRING as creatives. One of the things they’ve been asking for is the ability to share work on the project with their own clients, both when they’re buyers and sometimes when they are creatives, they need to share that work. So, we’ve built a series of tools that let them more easily do that. We want, especially agencies that have the flexibility to work as buyers or creatives, to have the right tools to help them manage that process.

SM: Right. Let’s say I’m an entrepreneur in the design community, do you have examples or case studies where entrepreneurs have built million-dollar businesses using CrowdSPRING as a channel?

RK: I’m not aware of anyone building a million-dollar business using us as a channel. Remember, we’re still a pretty young company. We launched in mid-2008. So, I would be very surprised if we have someone in our community who’s built a million-dollar business.

SM: What’s the largest amount of revenue a company has been able to generate by working on CrowdSPRING as a creative agency?

RK: I’m not sure if it’s a company. I can tell you we have a healthy group of creatives who are regularly earning five figures a year. We have some that are approaching six figures. And, remember, for many of these, it’s part-time work. So, even many of these who are earning healthy five figures, this is part-time work for them. Some decide to leave their full-time jobs and concentrate on freelancing full time. We talk with them regularly because we’re always interested in what motivates our community to work more or work less. Is it projects? Is it the amount of money offered in projects? Is it the opportunities that we offer?

Some, when they realized that they could make more money working part-time on CrowdSPRING that they could make in their full-time jobs, they leave their jobs. And they concentrate on full-time freelancing, which may include a lot of freelance on CrowdSPRING. It may also include freelance work on other marketplaces or with offline clients. But there’s a very healthy mix of people around the world who are successful. One of the biggest mistakes that we often make when we think about successful businesses is that a successful US business that may see a million-dollar floor as the measure of success looks very different from a successful business in Africa, in Australia, in Brazil. Those agencies – and this is the thing that always astounds us – is the kind of progress we see people making in South America and Africa and Australia when they’re given an opportunity to compete on a level playing field. They’re able to create strong businesses that are supporting families, putting food on the table, that are allowing them to change life for them and the people around them in ways that they could not even begin to try to do because their local economies cannot support the kind of work that we allow them to do.

SM: You’re absolutely correct. The benchmark of what’s considered a successful business … the bar is much lower elsewhere. No argument there. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about this trend, and why we’re covering story after story on crowdsourcing and these crowdsourcing marketplaces, which really level the playing field in terms of people being able to access projects and access work and get paid in a reliable way from clients around the world.

RK: Absolutely. And there are some interesting anecdotal facts that we see every day that make us wonder and make us really excited about the strengths. We see businesses that are buyers from India, from China posting projects on CrowdSPRING and ultimately ending up picking a US-based designer or writer. And we look at that and we say, “That’s interesting.”

Traditionally, when we think about outsourcing, crowdsourcing, a lot of people think that the work is flowing from the US to overseas. There’s a lot of that, of course, because talent can be anywhere. It can be in a small village in India. It could be in Manhattan in the United States. But when we see businesses from around the world, including countries that traditionally have been places where jobs have gone, when we see those businesses sourcing work and hiring US designers, it suggests to us that there is a way for us to compete. But it has to be a level playing field. And in the areas we touch, design, industrial design and writing, there’s no better way to establish a level playing field than to allow the work to speak for itself. If you’re a talented designer, you’re a talented designer, whether you live in New York, in Sri Lanka, in New Delhi, wherever you live in the world.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING
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