Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 6)

SM: Who do you consider as your direct competitors, who follow that exact model where people are actually submitting work before they get paid as opposed to be hired based on resumes and feedback?

RK: In the graphic design space, our primary competitor is a company called 99Designs out of Australia. It has a similar business model. Our communities are different. The products that we have are different. I’ll give you two ways to look at it. I mentioned earlier that we work with more brands and agencies than all of our competitors, including 99Designs, combined. In part, it’s because of those differences that many more businesses choose CrowdSPRING. But there’s also another difference. When you look at the average types of projects, both from the perspective of the businesses that are posting them and the creatives who are working, our projects tend to be about 50% to 70% higher in value in terms of the awards that are being offered. In part, it’s reflective of the kinds of businesses that are posting. In part, it’s reflective of the kind of community.

In the last survey that we did, we found that more than 70% of our designers had more than five years’ design experience, which is pretty phenomenal. If you consider it’s a crowdsourcing marketplace that’s easy for people to join. There are no barriers for somebody to participate as a designer. The fact that more than 70% of designers have five or more years’ experience is a phenomenal statistic. In the graphic space, 99Designs is our principle competitor. We do see clients from time to time mention that they’ve sourced work from companies like Elance and oDesk, although we don’t consider those companies our principle competitors because we rarely see that.

In the industrial design space, we’re not aware of anybody else who is using this model for industrial design. Industrial design tends to be a very closed market, and it’s tough for people to access. One of the reasons for our success is our ability to attract sophisticated companies that are looking for help with industrial design in a hungry community of industrial designers that doesn’t have many outlets to find new clients.

In the copywriting space, similarly, so in the naming and writing space, there have been a few businesses that have tried this since we’ve launched. Most have failed. In fact, all of the ones that I know of have failed, which doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody doing this kind of work. There are competitors everywhere.  There are lots of small agencies that, for example, will help a company with naming. They’ll help with branding. So, in a sense, we have competitors everywhere. We have agencies. We have freelancers, whether they’re small or big agencies, existing marketplaces. But we think we have a unique model and few people can match one of the biggest things that we offer, which is choice.

If you look at a typical project today, you’re going to get more than 130 unique entries. Working with a freelancer who will give you two or three concepts can never compare to a project where you’re going to pick from 130.

SM: In terms of categories, are you also doing video work or is it just graphic design, writing, copywriting and naming, that kind of work?

RK: We’re not doing video work at the moment. At the moment, it’s graphic design, industrial design and copywriting. Video has been something that we definitely are interested in doing. In fact, my partner spent 20 plus years as a producer and director working for Hollywood studios and TV networks. It is one of the things that initially prompted us to ultimately co-found CrowdSPRING. So, we continue to keep a close eye on video to try to figure out a way that we could effectively solve this problem, again, for predominantly small and mid-sized businesses.

We want to be able to present a solution to them that’s affordable, effective and quick. As soon as we figure out how we can do that appropriately, we’re going to get into video. For us, it’s not a technical limitation. We can have video launched 10 minutes after we finish this call. Our product is set up to allow us to go into any vertical. For us, it’s the need to create a really strong product of which we’re proud.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING
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