After reading Meghan Casserly’s great story earlier this year How The Startup Economy Is Creating $1 Billion Freelance Paychecks (link to left), I decided to spend time exploring some success stories. Here are three entrepreneurial ventures that have started on a small budget and grown by using the freelance economy.
There are other freelance marketplaces (including a post of 50 online markets), but Elance was helpful in providing leads to successful individuals who are building companies almost exclusively via online labor.
Simon Carter and his girlfriend, Emily, had the travel bug at 23 (and still do) and couldn’t imagine staying in one place for a 9-5 job. When the two graduated in 2008 they traveled to Thailand and started wondering how they could live there.
They quickly found Elance where Simon improved his skills as a web developer and found the work platform perfect for building out his portfolio and earning money while traveling. Emily then joined the service as a graphic designer and within months the couple realized their skills were more marketable together and launched Greenbox Designs, a web development and design company.
Since joining the online workforce, Simon and Emily have lived in Thailand, Spain, Indonesia and South Africa finding work on Elance to supplement their income while at the same time hiring online professionals on the platform to help with project flux. Simon and Emily plan to travel to Germany and Melbourne this year and you can bet Greenbox Designs will continue to be profitable as they continue their travels.
The world of mobile is booming and Brandon Cowan is the 19-year-old mobile app entrepreneur who is listening to it. With a steady drumbeat of unique, helpful apps that keeps dominating the iTunes top-ten list, he is the co-founder and director of Crazy Dog Apps, a two-year-old company based in Sydney, Australia that develops mobile apps for organizations.
Brandon’s most famous iOS app is the App Making Guide that teaches curious individuals how to develop mobile apps. The app quickly became the No. 7 app on iTunes in December 2012. Beyond the App Making Guide, Brandon created iPark, a global parking app, and it was one of the top 10 apps on iTunes for nearly an entire year and in April 2010, he released two apps on pet rescue.
Cowan was able to develop success for his company as a result of building virtual teams. Brandon knew mobile apps were a lucrative market but in order to tap this industry, he needed app programmers to help him out. He tried Elance about a year and a half ago and instantly found programming talent from all over the world on the platform. He didn’t bother wasting time trying to find a local programmer because hiring online was cost-effective and the platform’s escrow system meant he was guaranteed to get the results he desired.
Mike Scanlin, founder and CEO of Born To Sell has been using Elance since day one of his company. After spending 12 years as a programmer and 8 years with a VC firm, Mike decided to go out on his own and start a company. Given his experience with startups Mike wanted to create a company on his own without any VC funding, and did so by leveraging a virtual team. Born To Sell took 18 months to develop and launched 9 months ago.
So far Mike has spent $37k on Elance, hiring a talented pool of responsive, skilled workers that would have cost him 500k had he searched for local talent. He loves the website and cannot imagine a time when Born To Sell will not hire virtual workers to complete projects.
More Resources:
Elance publishes the Global Online Employment report (quarterly, I believe) and some of the stats are quite illuminating. You’ll see how writing and other content forms are growing, YouTube and other video are in demand, plus, STEM skills are in high demand.
There are other online labor marketplaces, such as,
Guru.com,
Odesk.com,
Freelancer.com,
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk,
Fiver, and many others. This post from JobMob lists 50 freelance marketplaces.
I would love to hear your comments of how you have used virtual individuals or teams to help grow your company.
沒有留言:
張貼留言