CEO of labor-as-a-service platform provider CloudCrowd, Alex Edelstein, was kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions about CloudCrowd, and the services provided by the company.
Alex Edelstein described the company mission, the concept of labor-as-a-service, and the types of people hired by the organization. He also discussed the different approach to outsourcing taken by the company.
Thanks to Alex Edelstein for his time and for his interesting and informative answers.
What is the mission of CloudCrowd and how does the company help its clients succeed?
Alex Edelstein: CloudCrowd is a Labor-as-a-Service platform that uses the Internet to tap into vast underutilized pools of talent, labor, and creativity to get work done. CloudCrowd helps companies reduce overhead, increase efficiency, and lower costs by breaking large projects into smaller tasks, and distributing them via a proprietary online platform that brings work and workers together. CloudCrowd saves companies money by offering on-demand labor at a fraction of the cost of on-site or contract workers. With a workforce of thousands, each doing a portion of a client’s project, the work can be completed much more quickly than it would be done in-house, or even with traditional outsourcing.
CloudCrowd takes a fresh approach to outsourcing. How is CloudCrowd different from other outsourcing companies?
Alex Edelstein: Unlike traditional outsourcing alternatives, clients don't pay for setup fees, training, management, and overhead costs. By breaking their work up into discrete workflows and granular tasks that are paid for only when accurately completed, CloudCrowd gets client work done more efficiently, and at a lower total cost than traditional Business Process Outsourcing. CloudCrowd creates tools that guide workers through each task, and it continually improves workflows to increase efficiency and further reduce costs.
CloudCrowd knows that task design engineered by experts delivers superior results, so it partners with its clients, working directly with them to determine their needs, and then utilizes its set of proprietary tools to engineer tasks, peer reviews, and workflows that deliver accurate, high quality work. Each client project has a Design & Trial phase to ensure early in the process that tasks are correctly designed to deliver optimal work results.
What size of companies are the typical clients?
Alex Edelstein: They range from large Fortune 500 companies that have had projects that up until now have been too cost prohibitive to tackle, to smaller companies such as online retailers, to established institutions like the University of Southern California.
What services and solutions does CloudCrowd provide?
Alex Edelstein: Many types of complex projects can be accomplished with CloudCrowd. It can accomplish a number of different types of work, including internet research, content creation, content moderation, audio & video transcription, foreign language translations, image categorization, data entry, and data processing.
CloudCrowd CEO Alex Edelstein (photo left)
What types of people does CloudCrowd employ to provide the required business solutions?
Alex Edelstein: There are at present more than 10,000 registered workers in the CloudCrowd Workspace. They access tasks through Facebook. This number will rise as more clients engage CloudCrowd. They are highly motivated, richly talented, diversely experienced and ready to take on clients’ tasks. CloudCrowd offers new ways for them to make money, and fits work into busy schedules because work can be completed anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
CloudCrowd’s online workspace tears down barriers that prevent many from holding traditional white collar jobs by creating a place where anyone can come and do work. Many types of individuals that don't map neatly to a "9 to 5" job are a part of CloudCrowd:
* Stay-At-Home Parents with unpredictable availability.
* Rural Home Owners isolated from areas with significant employment prospects.
* Disabled Workers with commute mobility challenges.
* College Students whose class schedules can't accommodate traditional employment.
* Retired Teachers with pensions, free time, and a desire for something to work on.
An interesting concept developed by CloudCrowd was extending the idea of Software-as-a-Service to Labor-as-a-Service. How did you arrive at that extension of an already proven system?
Alex Edelstein: Labor-As-A-Service is similar to Software-As-A-Service in that it scales as client’s demand changes over time. When you use traditional methods to get your work done, there is a ramp-up period to achieve results. If you hire employees in-house, you need to post to job boards, review stacks of resumes, hold interviews, provide a workspace and equipment, and employ management.
If you offshore your work, you need to pay setup fees, wait for training completion, check for quality, and deal with cultural communication problems. CloudCrowd's Labor-As-A-Service platform removes all these obstacles by designing a workflow for your project that provides almost infinite scalability. For the first time, companies can effectively leverage a huge pool of skills and talent through the Internet.
What challenges has your company experienced in the area of employee recruitment?
Alex Edelstein: Virtually none. CloudCrowd has more than 10,000 registered workers, and the pool is growing daily. Each has their own account on Facebook, and accesses the list of available tasks on the CloudCrowd’s Facebook page. CloudCrowd requires each work to fill out the Worker Agreement, and requires that workers provide accurate information when registering.
Based on work submitted, each worker earns an individual Credibility Rating that determines the level of tasks they are offered, and their rating improves with each task a reviewer accepts. Earnings are based on the complexity of each individual task, and when accurately completed, are paid to the worker’s PayPal account. In a single day, more than 60,000 tasks have been posted by CloudCrowd.
As your company has grown, how have you addressed the usual problems and challenges of growth?
Alex Edelstein: The leadership team is very experienced in launching, developing and growing successful companies. It was started by experienced visionaries from breakthrough technology pioneers including Microsoft, Netscape, Inktomi, Napster, and Cloudmark.
What advice would you give to a company seeking to outsource some of its workload?
Alex Edelstein: Contact CloudCrowd. Our project managers create workflows every day and understand how to break a complex project into small pieces that are easily distributed to a global workforce. Our instruction writers understand the eccentricities of the English language, and know how to refine copy to get better results. By managing the whole process, we craft a workflow that produces better results. Each client project has a Design & Trial phase to ensure early in the process that tasks are correctly designed to deliver optimal work results.
What is next for Alex Edelstein and CloudCrowd
Alex Edelstein: The CloudCrowd solution works closely with enterprise clients to create customized solutions. For individual tasks, a new self-service solution is now available. EditZen (www.editzen.com) provides a fast and easy way to have documents (including business letters, reports, proposals, and forms, website or advertising copy, student reports and much more) quickly and correctly edited, proofread and corrected, by qualified editors who have the skills required to deliver reliable results. Turnaround time is 24 hours, there is a money-back guarantee, and the cost is only $3.95 per (300 word) page.
