Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: Ignacio Galarraga, CEO of NetMen Corp (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How does that translate when you are working on Elance? You deliver customer satisfaction by having good discipline about when you deliver projects, and then you get your customers to review you on Elance, right?

Ignacio Galarraga: Right. That’s correct.

SM: Besides that, when it comes to bidding for projects and sending proposals, would you talk a bit about what some of the practices that you’ve learned over time?

IG: Actually, my company is one of the more expensive profiles on Elance. And it is the biggest one. In a marketplace where I have maybe 100,000 providers competing with my company and selling two, three, or five times lower than my company, the only thing that keeps my company getting more business on Elance is the track record I have and all this commitment to our customers and, of course, our portfolio. When people go and see our company, they find that we have a lot of reviews. We have done more than 10,000 projects on Elance. But they also are able to see that we deliver 100% original designs of a high quality and at a reasonable price, but not cheap.

SM: But this is today. You have so much momentum today, but as you were building your company, can you look back on how you built up that kind of profile. And how did you compete? From 2002 to 2012, it has been a gradual process of building the momentum. Would you talk a bit about what strategies you followed early in your journey?

IG: Yes. The only difference between now and 2002 when I started is that right now we handle 500 projects per month, more or less. When I started, I only had one. But my commitment is exactly the same. To me, winning a project today on Elance is exactly the same as it was six years ago. My commitment, my commercial speeches and my sales point of view have been always the same.

SM: I know that, but how do you convince a customer that you have that kind of commitment when you don’t have a track record? Today, you have a track record. It’s easy to convince people when you have a track record, when you have thousands of hours on Elance and lots of successful projects, lots of reviews and so forth.

IG: I understand. What I can tell you is the difference in those years I don’t have anymore because everybody copied  my company speeches, but I have a well-written speech for my customers. When I bid on a project, I stated clearly all the steps that he was going to receive or what the time frame was going to be. Everything was very clear so nobody could have any doubts about what I was bidding. That, 10 years ago, was the big difference between me and other providers who were only bidding prices without giving detailed explanations.

SM: Articulating a good, clear-cut process of exactly how the project was going to be managed was something that was helpful.

IG: Yes. I also state that I use a brief guide, and they have to fill in the brief guide. It would be a multiple choice guide where they would be guided through the same process. I made these very professional. At that time, it wasn’t done professionally.

SM: That was the differentiator, that you were professional in an otherwise generally unprofessional environment.

IG: Correct. Everybody was scared of hiring online for services because they believed that hiring online for graphic design services, you were going receive plagiarized designs and when they went to trademark their new logo, they would find out that somebody else has the same logo. So, what I did at that time was specify how I was going to make the logo and where the images came from so people were looking at a proposal that was clear. With my portfolio and no reviews and no track record at that time, I was able to start selling.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: Ignacio Galarraga, CEO of NetMen Corp
1 2 3 4 5