Freelancer.com unveils regional websites in India, Singapore and the Philippines and continues to eye bigger expansion.
Founded three years ago by Chief Executive Officer Matt Barrie, and having one staff assisting him since day one, Freelancer.com has grown phenomenally into around a hundred people with offices in Australia and the Philippines in three years.
Coined as the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace connecting over 2.5 million professionals across the globe, and in the top 250 websites globally, they are looking to double their number of users by the end of 2012.
Recently unveiled their regional websites in India, Singapore, and the Philippines, they are looking forward to launching more regional websites for Asia Pacific countries.
The aim of launching these sites in each country’s local language is to assist more entrepreneurs in the countries where Freelancer mark their foothold in.
By offering local currency transactions within the sites, they expect more small business owners and freelancers in Asia to benefit from this feature as they will be arriving in more countries soon.
Primarily connects small businesses and individuals from the western world with freelancers in the developing world, empowering entrepreneurs on both sides of the globe, as of now, over one million projects have been outsourced through Freelancer.com. To fulfill the target, they are focused on building out the functionality and usability of the site. They want it to be in every country in every language for every job the members can think of.
Matt, a serial entrepreneur, has been raised over US$40 million in financing, from venture capital, strategic investors, and through government grants while running or assisting technology companies. The Masters in Applied Finance, and a Masters in Electrical Engineering graduate from Stanford University is also the co-author of more than 20 US patent applications.
Realizing there were many parts of the task at hand that could be completed online by anyone in the world, he used an existing service offered by his first company Sensory Networks to help outsource parts of the job. Everything seems clicked at that time whilst the net was about to deliver a disruptive shift to the global labor market. Seeing the flaws in the way existing services operated, he acquired GetaFreelancer.com in 2009. “A site that looked terrible but on the other hand it had huge potentiality that amassed around 500,000 users,” Matt explains. The architecture and code base was rebuilt and then moved to Amazon EC2 as he re-launched it as Freelancer.com.