Romanian Startup: Outsourcing.io Brings Contract Awarding Online INTERVIEW

There’s a very interesting startup brewing in Romania. The company called outsourcing.io is bringing the contractor’s bidding and awarding process online, to an easy to use, navigate, bid and win platform. We don’t want to go as far as calling it the ebay for contractors but it allows contractors to bid out jobs online.

Right now the startup is being coded, built and developed in Romania but the team plans to open their official European office in the UK shortly.

Outsourcing.io is taking all of the contractual bidding process into account. Contractors and those submitting calls for bids will be screened and verified and it’s a paid bidding process. Contractors will be able to bid on real good, and well paying jobs and those doing the contracting will know they’re getting qualified, interested contractors who know it takes money to make money.

We got a chance to talk to one of the co-founders, George Bratan in the interview below.

Outsourcing.io is an enterprise development hub, projects being awarded to contractors through an e-auctioning process.

The company focuses on emulating real-world project awarding conditions and is dedicated to provide a clean and safe environment for online contracting. This is done through paid user participation, verified credentials and human moderation removing spam and fake participants.

We’ve been working together for over 7 years (Zenit Systems – http://zenitsys.com) and have a healthy team of specialists in most major areas of expertise: architecture, development and security.

George Bratan

Product Specialist

George has been working with web technologies for more than 10 years and is lead developer for Zenit Systems. He is proficient with PHP, MySQL, HTML and JavaScript, among other.

For 3 years, George has been part of the management team supervising the development of eLicitatie – government backed eProcurement / eAuction system for public procurement – and provides valuable experience to back our project. George is now lead product specialist for outsourcing.io.

Dan Horobeanu

Systems Architect

Dan started his career more than 10 years ago tinkering with ASM machine code. Fast forward to more recent days, Dan has built and managed a multi-million data mining web system within the Amazon marketplace, has a solid experience with Amazon’s Web Services (hosting, processing), is a guru Unix SysAdmin and is our best Systems Architect.

Dan is proficient with Perl, Python, PHP, C/C++, MySQL, process optimisation and scaling large, power hungry web applications.

Outsourcing.io is currently located in Bucharest, Romania, – where we do most of the coding – but we’re planning to open an office in the UK by the end’s year.

You mean on the internet, where we live most of our days? It’s great! ;)

Though Bucharest attracts most conferences and events on a radius of 500km, investments and hands-on involvement are still under-developed considering the man-power and talent available. The closest real startup hub in Europe remains London, Berlin and a few other major cities in Europe.

Well, to be blunt, freelancing sites are a disaster. Everyone who’s ever been involved with trying to get a project done knows this and I personally have vouched not to return there every time I did. They’re cluttered with garbage under-documented and under-budgeted projects, which are bid on by unreliable, low-quality workers.

It’s impossible for serious work to get done and it’s a general waste of time and effort.

We want to solve this problem. We’re dedicated to provide a clean and safe environment for online contracting. We’ll do it through paid user participation, verified credentials and human moderation removing spam or fake participants.

I want to be clear that we’re not building a freelancing service. We’re targeting established companies that would benefit from reliable outsourcing and proven IT, design, copy-write and branding wizards to take on these challenges.

Oh, that has to be the first user. I immediately called my fiance and bragged about it, casually of course. I’m not going to say his name, but he’s out there and will get a golden star for it.

The response we got was and is fenomenal, considering it’s a vertical niche. Our launch page has been up for a few days only and we’re closing on the 1k users mark, with little to no media coverage. We’re barely starting to reach out to editors and am now positive that we’ll reach the 5k mark we initially set as a validation milestone for the startup.

I will be cheesy and say that Steve Jobs, but not due to his renowned obsessions for perfection. I find him remarkable due to his single product -the iPhone- that generated a great amount of wealth for capable developers, gave millions of people a place to work and a chance at financial independence, sparked tons of fabulous ideas and generally kicked ass in the mobile segment, forcing a new level of competitivity. If only he’d be around to create an iPrinter as well!

A more down-to-earth person I highly admire is Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter. Though not a Twitter power user myself, I totally understand the addiction and psychological effect it generates on people. It’s the perfect communication medium of this era and an exceptional idea, generating a niche of itself.

Well, I don’t want to brag but I will.

I guess people don’t know about the amount of work we put in this. And I’m not talking just about myself, but about all startups. We’re pulling 10-12 hour shifts constantly, 6-7 days a week. We get frustrated when something doesn’t work, throw it out the window and continue. And it’s all for a share on twitter, that’s what makes us happy. When people share our product or news, it means they enjoy it, and it deserves to be promoted. Might sound mindless, but we spend our free time counting the number of users we sign-up, and the number of shares or mentions in the media.

So make us happy and sign-up. We want to know you’re there.

We’re going to spend the next weeks gaining some traction among professionals and seeding a community of well-trained, reliable contractors.

We’re taking the healthy route by focusing on the talent first, this being the driving force of our service, and we’ll stop when “outsourcing” and “online contracting” are cool.

In the mean while, development continues on the technical side with undisclosed secret features that our users will surely enjoy. Having been involved with this area of expertise from both sides of the fence, we’re homing in on the most pressing issues making people uncomfortable: reliability, transparency, communication and support.