Matt Barrie, 37, is chief executive of Freelancer.com: a giant outsourcing marketplace connecting 3 million professionals from around the globe. Last year, the website racked up $US35 million in turnover. The site ranks in the world's top 250.
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Read last week's story: Making $40 million with just 14 staff
Freelancer.com debuted in January 2009 when Barrie bought GetAFreelancer.com: a Swedish marketplace with 500,000 users ranked the 5000th biggest website in the world. Tweaking the business model, Barrie used the cash flow to buy several regional marketplaces dotted around the globe.
Now Barrie, who is based in Sydney, says Freelancer.com is a household name in the developing world. For example, he says in Bangladesh, Freelancer.com is the 21st biggest website, outranking Microsoft.com, Amazon, Apple and Bing.com.
The top jobs are website design, search engine optimisation, graphic design and copywriting. While the United States posts the most jobs, India does the most freelancing, according to Barrie.
Here, Barrie, who won last year's Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year Award, talks about how he achieved international success.
What impact has the Ernst & Young prize had on your business?
It's hard to measure this sort of thing directly. All these awards go to building brand recognition, awareness and credibility, which is fantastic.
In response to the prize, you said you plan to make Freelancer.com a billion-dollar business like eBay, Google and Facebook: how?
We want to be Australia's first big consumer internet company. The only way to get there is to put our heads down and focus on the business.
We've got a great team that's working around the clock to continually drive user experience, process improvement and launch new features and functionality on the site.
What's the biggest obstacle to growth?
Figuring out how to let every small business on the planet know about us. We have tremendous volume, but make a relatively small amount per customer.
The trick is to figure out how we can get the most reach with the lowest spend on marketing. That's why we focus on things like search engine optimisation (SEO) and public relations.
If you could launch the site again, what one thing would you do differently?
Focus, focus, focus!
It's so easy to get distracted and work on things that are "vitamins" not "pain killers". People will pay for pain killers. While they would like to take vitamins every day, it's a “nice-to-have”, not a “must-have”.
It's tough to maintain discipline over the long term, and we've certainly worked on functionality or features that were not core to our business.
Who's the most successful freelancer on the site?
We have a freelancer in India that worked his way up from the ground floor to earning US$1 million a year. He has about 100 people working for him now in three design facilities.
What does the average freelancer on the site earn?
It varies greatly depending on experience, geography and how much in demand your skill set is. Tens of thousands on the site use us as their primary source of income, earning multiples of what they would earn in their local country.
Some of the payments offered by Freelancer.com hirers are minimal: your thoughts?
Pricing is determined by the market, and we are one of the best examples of a truly global marketplace in the world. Some payments might look low, but you have to realise that somewhere around 5 of the 7 billion people on this planet live on around $10 a day or less.
So something that looks small to you might be a month's wage for many others.
What's next for Freelancer.com?
To keep focusing on making the site better and easier to use for everyone, expanding our functionality and letting everyone on the planet know about us.
What keeps you awake at night?
Jet lag.
What's your dream?
We want to turn Freelancer.com into Australia's first big consumer internet company. We don't have a Facebook or Google in this country. We're working hard to be a company like that.
Matt Barrie's five business secrets
1. Aim for the hole, not the green.
2. Don't spend a dollar unless you know damn sure you're going to make at least a dollar back.
3. Focus, focus, focus.
4. Remember: no one is going to hand you success on a plate. It's up to you to make it happen.
5. If you're not going to do it now, when? When you're 60?
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Need some small business advice? Email editor Larissa Ham at lham@theage.com.au and we'll get an expert to answer your question.
