Folks! Let us go back in time – say early 2000s. The idea of mobile phones had just started taking shape. So, having a mobile phone then was considered more prestigious than owning a Mercedes. That’s just a metaphor. Apparently, today you can buy a smart phone online, sitting in the luxurious Mercedes car – if you own one. The point is, within a decade, the technology has evolved so rapidly, that you can order a phone online at 20% lower price than you can buy from a store, again using a phone. So to say, you just experienced the power of technology and e-commerce.
E-commerce is a concept of buying products, goods online at competitive rates with ample choices, without disturbing the laws of consumerism. E-commerce has empowered the consumer like never before. There are two major factors to the success of e-commerce. Price & Availability. With almost zero infrastructure costs; the price benefits can be easily passed on to the consumer and with multiple vendors in the market, the availability will never be an issue. Hence, e-commerce rather retail is here to stay.
Now, keeping the idea of e-commerce intact, we will do some changes…for instance, the products, goods are replaced by services, OEM’s (those who are providing products) are replaced by service providers, freelancers etc. and the logistics (like couriers, packaging etc.) are replaced by program management. This is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is just like the e-commerce of services, where the buyers are OEMs, companies looking to outsource work and the sellers are the service providers, consultants or freelancers. Before we deep dive into crowdsourcing, let us analyse the functioning of existing outsourcing market. So as it goes, an OEM / company plans to develop a product or application and is looking to outsource some part of the project to service providers. So, they reach out to potential service providers for executing the project. This is all done in conventional fashion (like meetings, con calls, presentations, visits etc.).
So what advantage does crowdsourcing brings to the users? Well, there is pretty much everything that one would expect, i.e.
- Cost competitive – Services available at the price point what the buyer (outsourcing party) demands, typically at 40% – 50% cheaper than existing rates.
- Availability of services – There are thousands of service providers registered on crowdsourcing portals. Services like engineering services, IT, financial, marketing, business development, graphics designing, content management, technical publications and much more are available from across the world.
- Quality and Timeliness of Deliverables: The crowdsourcing portal program management team keeps a thorough check on each and every metrics of deliverables.
Crowdsourcing portals have started evolving steadily, redefining the outsourcing strategies of global companies. This is one such platform that houses freelancers from all across the globe that synergize to solve real business issues that companies are facing today. Some of the classic examples of crowdsourcing platforms are Kaggle (a data science crowdsourcing platform recently acquired by Google) that hosts competitions, uploads sample data sets with business problems and invites data scientists and relevant people from across the world to come up with solutions. There are prizes announced for winners too.
For example, the below snapshot from competitions page of Kaggle shows prize money worth $ 1Mn for developing an algorithm to improve lung cancer detection! So, being a freelancer if you feel you have the logic and can develop a solution, all the money is yours!!
In fact, one such crowdsourcing platform Uptake has done the analysis of how much a freelancer typically makes on executing projects of different sizes.
Other crowdsourcing platforms like Blur has a wide variety of functions areas where freelancers, subject matter experts, students can take up projects and bid appropriate quotes for executing the projects. So if you are a marketer, writer, translator, business analyst, financial accountant, HR consultant, graphics designer, engineer and willing to work extra and make some cash, crowdsourcing platforms are for you. For some skills like writing, translation, accounting, graphics designing all you need is just a PC and work from home. Below is a brief snapshot of freelancing activities can be done for customers on Blur platform.
While doing the research on crowdsourcing market, i saw an interview of one of the largest crowdsourcing companies Blur CEO responding to the question on what is the crowdsourcing market potential that you foresee and how it will affect the service providers? This is exactly what he said “Currently, we are doing business of $ 350Mn., we expect to be doing $ 1 Trillion by 2022. To put it into harsh terms, the crowdsourcing model is like a raging forest fire, which will engulf the current outsourcing model and make it obsolete overnight.
So how does this work? Being an outsourcer, you post your requirements (e.g. developing an android application, designing a new logo, creating a go to market plan, manage financial accounts etc.) on a crowdsourcing website along with the target price point. Now, the freelancing consultants, sellers (supplier of services) get a notification of the project available for bidding. Eligible service providers will bid and quote for the project. The crowdsourcing portal backend team of program managers will select the best 3 bids and share with the outsourcer. The outsourcer than selects the best from the three and the project is allotted. Once, the sellers are notified of starting the project, the crowdsourcing portals act as mediators keeping a track of project, quality and deliverables.
Below is one example from blur crowdsourcing portal that invites freelancers for Website Development. The cost of development ranges from $5000 to $100,000 for 2 to 6 weeks. A food for thought. In a typical IT company, a mid-experienced web developer earns somewhere around INR 40,000 to 50,000 which turns out to approx. $800 monthly. This activity on blur can fetch a freelancer ten times what they are earning in a month. Also web development is not a niche skill, but still IT companies would quote somewhere around $30K to $40K for 6 weeks. Today college level students can perform this better. The idea is opportunities are there in the market, you just need to cache on it.
Where is the services outsourcing market heading? The market is moving towards commoditization of services, where one can buy, sell services online. It has given rise to a new model of working, where the emphasis is more on skilled based work, exploring the untapped potential in markets that were out of reach (due to lack of basic resources, demographic presence etc.) and endless possibilities of growth and business sustenance.
Finally, some words of crowdsourcing from the horse’s mouth…
Jeff Howe – Professor, North-eastern University and Founder of the Expression “Crowdsourcing”
“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”
“Crowdsourcing is the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few”
References:
Image Source: www.kaggle.com, https://www.maistro.com/, https://www.upwork.com/
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