Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 1)

We’ve featured lots of successful outsourcing companies in this series, whether they’ve been companies that successfully outsourced work to third-party vendors or accepted outsourced tasks from other businesses.  None, however, has been quite like Smartinfosys.net. A small Web design and development company founded in Gujarat, India in 1999, Smartinfosys increased its customer base by taking advantage of Freelancer.com — then GetAFreelancer.com –to advertise Smartinfosys’ services and expand its horizons beyond India’s borders.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Sanjay. Tell us a little bit about your background. Where are you from? Where do you operate your business?

Sanjay Dange: I graduated with a degree in engineering. I completed my masters in marketing management in 1999 and started my website design and development company.  The concept of websites was in its infancy in India due to low penetration of the Internet. We started with a small set up in 2000. We are located in the state of Gujarat in India. Today, we have two development centers in Surat and a designing studio in Baroda.

SM: So, in 1999, you started a small Web development company. Who were your customers at the time?

SD: Yes. In 1999, we were quite fascinated by the dotcom boom in India, and lots of venture capitalists were pumping in money in Indian portals, so we started with a portal named SmartYouth.com. We could not make it a success and in 2001, we thought of entering into providing customized services in the area of website designing and development and this is how our partnership firm Smartinfosys.net came into existence.

SM: And who were your customers at the time?

SD: We were catering to Indian customers until 2004. In 2004, I thought of venturing into overseas markets. Freelancer.com was the very first portal from which we started our overseas operations. We did a detailed study about various sources of getting website designing and development orders. We came across various portals, and Freelancer.com was the one that we chose. We started bidding in 2005.

SM: At that time, Freelancer.com was not as big, obviously. Why did you decide to work with Freelancer.com?

SD: I wasn’t very sure about venturing into theoverseas market. Also we were doing quite well in the Indian market and were not able to devote time to bidding operations. Our Indian operations were yielding an annual revenue of around INR 10 million ($204,332). However the profit margin was going down and competition was increasing due to new players coming in. That’s why we also thought of expanding our reach by entering into the overseas markets. At that time, Freelancer.com was GetAFreelancer.com. We thought of bidding on it for three to four hours a day. The efforts were not very aggressive as we were preoccupied with our local commitments; however, our bidding efforts gradually started converting into orders.

SM: What kinds of orders were you getting when you signed up for Freelancer.com in 2005, and from what kinds of companies?

SD: We started getting small value orders in 2005. The first major order was from ZZPerformance.com, a Grand Prix components manufacturing company in the USA. The order was to deliver a complete e-commerce site. We took it at a very low price of $1,000. The project was quite big in terms of technical requirements and it took us five, six months to complete it. It gave us a major breakthrough. Since then, we have worked on hundreds of dynamic content management sites and e-commerce applications.

SM: What did you do in Freelancer.com to raise your visibility?

SD: As far as raising our visibility is concerned, we put in a lot of hard work.  The female director on the board, Nishi Dawra, used to bid on Freelancer.com for many hours. We would study projects carefully and bid on them by keeping our margins quite low. Also we leveraged on our good portfolio  of more than 400 websites that we acquired in our Indian operations over four years. At that time, Freelancer.com was quite small and 50 to 60 projects used to be posted on it daily. We would bid on 20 to 25 projects that fit our skill set. Initially, the success rate was quite low, but we kept bidding. Every month, we would get fiveto seven orders. It was quite a tough start, and it remained tough for a year and half. By mid 2006, we reached a comfortable position on Freelancer.com in terms of number of projects worked and positive customer reviews. Today, we are the leader.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net
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