What made you get into the freelancing industry?
Freelancing not only gives you the chance to be your own boss but also gives you financial freedom. I believe people should do what they love to do. Work life should be flexible and fun filled. I understand some company’s give you all of this and you should work at these companies. You should freelance when you want to. It could be a part time gig or a full time work that you are doing, the point is you should like doing it. I like to help startups with a domain name search, taglines, business plan, marketing strategy, and many small & big jobs that startups outsource due to lack of resources or for expert advice. I love to freelance because sometimes you get these interesting projects that you might have not got by working for a certain company.
How long did it take you to launch your website publicly?
It took us about 6 months to build a basic fully functional site- www.100rupis.com. We wanted to make sure that the user could navigate hassle free and focus on getting their job done. For sellers we have created “Create your Service” tab which is self explanatory and for Buyers we are creating a tab where they can post a project and hire freelancer(s). Buyers can also buy directly from the services that the sellers have already listed. The site is very easy to understand and gets the job done.
What’s the biggest obstacle you’ve had to face with 100Rupis.com?
The biggest obstacle is and has been getting people’s attention- marketing the site, getting the word out. Very few people know us. We don’t have big budget for marketing, we are a small company and I do all the marketing online myself. We have recently hired a small marketing firm to get the word out but it takes time.
People who know about us like the idea and are buying more than selling, getting sellers onboard has been another major problem. Today freelancers have several options to pick from and they want to offer their service on the most popular sites as compared to a new site like us. We keep interacting with people who have services to offer; hence we have about 70 services on the site now.
Where do you see your company going in 2015?
Our focus is on getting sellers, more and more sellers in 2015. We are targeting to have at least 100,000 sellers with about 200,000 services on our site by the end of 2015. We have started to work this out by bringing Buyers onboard. With jobs already available on the site sellers will start applying to get the projects. The best proposals will get awarded. We want to become India’s TO GO site for anything for Rs.100 and multiples of Rs.100. When people think of buying anything for Rs.100 they should think of us. We are focusing on getting International buyers on our site; we have integrated PayPal Payments to make the transaction easy. International buyers will be charged $2+12.5% tax ($2.25). We will also bring investor(s) onboard to scale up in 2015.
If you could leave our readers with one last piece of business advice, what would it be?
When you do business be very frugal with your resources. Sell everything that does not make profit, if you have any used things that are sitting in your office, garage just sell them and use it to market your business. Marketing is the most important part of your business and focusing on marketing will only make your profitable.
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