In a scenario where employees are being terminated without prior notice, the most experienced have turned to freelancing to earn their daily bread and butter. Many can afford the cheese too.
For example a local sweet shop in Nagpur, the winter capital of Maharashtra, wanted to expand its business, and also wanted Web presence to display home delivery numbers, shop specialties, etc. It wanted to give customer all this information at the click of a button. But, it did not have monetary resources to afford the job. It went to LimeExchange for help. Today, the shop not only has a steady flow of loyal customers, but also gets inquiries from new ones.
In India, as more service provider surf the Internet in search of jobs, companies such as LimeExchange are providing them with that perfect platform to find work. Many service providers have also vent out their creative sides by designing Web sites, Web pages, software design, and development among other options.
According to an E-Value research, online marketplace services stood at $250 million in 2007, and will reach $2 billion by 2015.
Launched in India in February 2008, the company today has more than 13,500 registered users for the site. Essentially, LimeExchange is a marketplace to exchange digital services. Users/customers are buyers who have a business need for outsourcing software development, mobile applications, designing, business process outsourcing, SEO/SEM, data entry, writing/translations, audio/video/multimedia services as well as services such as financial, legal, sales & marketing, accounting, customer support services.
Vendors/providers, who can deliver these services online and again, are typically freelancers, SMBs looking to get sales and earning opportunities from around the globe to expand their business also hit the site. Buyers have multiple challenges, ranging from finding the right vendor to outsource to managing the vendor seamlessly.
This can be further broken to, questions posing these challenges as:
- Which country or vendor to outsource to for my on demand services need?
- How do I ensure quality of the vendor?
- How do I manage my cost vs. quality vs. efficiency, which directly impacts my business?
- How do I mitigate my financial and delivery risks, during outsourcing?
- How do I conduct repeat business?
On the other hand, service providers are finding it difficult to get more sales avenues to grow their business. It is a constant struggle for them to manage their operational costs (investing in sales, increase in wages), while generating more revenues and establishing a customer relationship for repeat business opportunities.
"In India specifically the freelance market is not yet mature and there is a lack of awareness of an online services marketplace becoming a monthly income channel relying on own skills & expertise and having ability to replace a permanent job. Other challenges in India have been low Internet penetration and low infrastructure availability when compared to developed nations, which hamper SMB's to expand their business reach faster than expected," said Pawan Agarwal, head of India operations for LimeExchange.
For the company, this has translated into a 100 per cent growth month on month. Of the 13,500 users it has, 30-40 per cent buyers and service providers are from India, said Sorabh Jerath, VP sales and marketing for LimeExchange. "Among these, 80 per cent are service providers and 20 per cent are buyers."
Agarwal and Jerath said that in the face of lay-offs, freelancing is the current trend across any industry these days. The problem in India is that freelancing is not a successful model. Countries such as US, UK and the Europe have success stories in this model. "However, given the volume and traffic of demand, the skill set and the current talent pool, the scenario is gradually changing. Also, given the fact that corporates may reduce off shoring assignments, but they will continue to outsource is one more reason freelancing is gaining ground," said Agarwal.
On the other hand, people are relying on the Internet to get more work done. "SMBs are looking at options where developing Web presence is not a part of their core business. We have seen a lot of traction among the retail, manufacturing (for distribution and sales channels), health care and luxury (hotels, restaurants, pub owners, and entertainment industry)," Jerath said.
The company issues a private login and password to all its users. It also provides communication and collaboration tools such as chat, messaging, etc. on site. Going forward, it wants to be a one stop shop for any digital service. It also wants to introduce risk management tools, an identity tracker, among others.
"We want to introduce unified communications like features to our collaboration tools, where in a buyer will be able to interact with the service provider even from a remote site. Desktop sharing is also on the cards," said Agarwal.
But is everything hunky dory in this business? What about the goof-ups?
There are some problems at the provider end. Since this is not a mature model, they tend to take up more work than they are capable of. Eventually, they realize they do not have the capacity and bow out. There are also some instances where the quality commitments were not met.
And for that Agarwal is planning to set up a display board with complete details of the number of projects, number of projects where there was a dispute, profile of every LimeExchange user, among others. All these are a part of the India expansion plans, Jerath said.
http://www.cxotoday.com/India/News/An_Online_Market_for_Digital_Services/551-96039-908.html
