There’s a lot of talent crowdsourcing going on in Asia this year, and now Australia’s DesignCrowd.com is joining the fray, taking what it calls its “first step into Asian markets” by launching today in Singapore, India, and the Philippines. The online marketplace for design work says it wants to target both the huge number of small businesses in the region, and the large pool of freelance design talent in Asia.
[UPDATED: The new country sites are at DesignCrowd.com.sg, and also .com.ph and .in].
From DesignCrowd’s Sydney HQ, CEO and founder Alec Lynch tells us that it picked these three markets as a lot of great designers from those nations have already jumped onboard the international version of the site. Indeed, Asia is DesignCrowd’s fastest-growing region these days. Alec adds:
These three countries have the greatest appetite for crowdsourcing and have adopted design crowdsourcing the fastest. We’ve seen strong organic uptake from these three countries on our US website DesignCrowd.com - about half of our top 20 designers come from India, the Philippines, or Singapore. These countries also have large English speaking populations - 80 percent of the Philippines and Singapore speak English while 125 million people in India speak English.
In terms of goals for its Asian expansion, Alec says:
We believe there are more than one million designers in the region - and we’d love to have them all on DesignCrowd, but in the short term we’ll settle for 100,000.
For those freelancers, DesignCrowd supports either PayPal or Skrill (formerly called Moneybookers) which “covers most designers in India, the Philippines, and Singapore.”
Of course, crowdsourcing works in every direction, and DesignCrowd is also keen to see Asian businesses source web/print/graphic/logo designs and ideas from designers in Australia, the US, and anywhere else.
Earlier this month, the rival site Freelancer.com launched formally in Indonesia, targeting 100,000 users in the country by the end of this year. Plus there's Indonesia's own Sribu, which recently went global. I asked Alec if Indonesia is on DesignCrowd’s radar:
Indonesia is an exciting market and next on our hit list in Asia. We already have over 5,000 designers from Indonesia using our US website.
After securing $3 million in funding last year, an Asia rollout seems like a no-brainer. The Australian startup, which was founded in 2008, is also “assessing opportunities in South America and Europe.”
