Jade Magnet has been leading the crowdsourcing wave in India for the last 2 years. One of the earliest platforms to provide crowdsourced creative solutions, Jade Magnet has delivered more than 1800 projects. Close to 700 brands from India, US, Middle East and Australia have used the platform. Currently Jade Magnet is paying out about USD 20,000 every month to designers and technologists.
2. crowdsourcing ~ $350,000 in savings
by SMEs working with
Jade Magnet
is the new “impact-sourcing”
Jade Magnet Business Impact
In the last two-and-a-half years, Jade Magnet has strived hard to forge a culture of speed and
creativity. On one hand, Jade Magnet has been about division of responsibility and on the other
hand the platform has been about creating an easy passage for businesses to reach out to
brilliant creative people across India and 4 more countries.
Faster time to market Low-risk investments! Cost v/s Quality
For any business and especially for There are very few business Jade Magnet has been able to
small & medium businesses, it is transactions where you can get in address the cost-quality tussle to a
imperative that they reach their without putting much on the table. great extent by using
target customers instead of making Being a platform that Jade Magnet is, crowdsourcing. This “tussle” is
huge investments in creating a it gives its customers the freedom to mainly a testimony of the fact that
market for themselves. decide how much they want to pay for you need to pay big bucks for very
a project to be delivered. high quality creative work.
While it takes some doing to
identify a creative team (or agency) If a project does not get the desired But by reaching to a crowd of
to work on your campaigns, Jade response, you let go off just a fraction providers which also includes
Magnet has enabled companies to of the budget therefore giving you students and a lot of talent in small
generate effective creative solutions enough leverage to experiment. town India, high degree of creativity
within 3 days. is now accessible at low costs.
3. How businesses are extracting It has been our goal at Jade Magnet
value from Jade Magnet to make it easy for our customers to
When it comes to fast growth, one of
talk to us and discover what value
they can extract from Jade Magnet. 715
the largest areas of help for small and Going forward, Jade Magnet is
medium businesses is in finding automating a part of this process in
customers
unique ways to reach out to potential order to make it even easier for small
new customers or generate repeat businesses to find out where they
business from the existing ones. need to invest their marketing dollars
for best results.
1,800+ projects
As small business entrepreneurs, we
have seen that our customers know
This process is being enabled by
everything about the intricacies
experience and data from businesses
involved in running their businesses.
across different markets – used as a
But they are not sure of their options
benchmark for their respective
when it comes to marketing.
marketing spends.
CUSTOMERS
“Jade Magnet makes you feel safe by giving you daily
updates on your project”
Having conceptualized Zen Republic, we found it difficult to engage a good
designer for our creative work and when we did manage to
get someone, the output was shoddy.
Feeling lost, we posted our requirement on a freelancers' forum & were inundated with responses. But Jade Magnet
stood out because of it's methodical listing of references, projects and display of earnestness. We were also able to
price the project close to our budget.
The best thing about getting work done at Jade Magnet is that you receive daily updates on the progress of the project -
that makes you feel safe!
Ravi Kumar
Curator, Zen Republic, Singapore
4. “Crowdsourcing works very
well for SMEs and startups”
Prateek Kulshreshtha
5,500
providers
Jade Magnet has been a very good
platform for us. It has provided us with
many projects in the web development
category.
Crowdsourcing, as a concept, works
really well for SMEs and startups and is
PROVIDERS
quite unique in India. Jade Magnet team
has a very good understanding of the
creative market which helps providers a
lot.
Rijas Backer
I congratulate Jade Magnet for
completing 2+ years of success and that
too with a good provider family.
Prateek Kulshreshtha
Director at AKS Websoft,
Noida, India
Jade Magnet Champion Provider
5. provider expertise
& customer domains
providers
across
18 creative
skill-sets
750 1,750 2,200
digital marketers technologists graphic designers
Top 4
Business Services
Technology customer
brands across
16 industries
Retail
Ecommerce
6. mega-trends
1.2 billion
mobile workers in the world
International Data Corporation (IDC) & the
recons that the number of people
looking to work from mobile offices
or home or coffee shops or beaches
freelance
or any place they can be productive
in is swelling by a couple of million
every year.
culture
The next couple of years will see the
Asia/Pacific region leading this
“population explosion” and the
growth will be further buoyed by
20 percent
increase in moonlighting habits
seamless communication and
especially enabled by the growth of In 2011, the highest payout for a moonlighting provider at Jade Magnet was Rs.3,50,000 (USD
video conferencing as it becomes 7,000) at a monthly average of about Rs.30,000 (USD 600). People working in tier 1 agencies
more and more affordable. such as O&M, Lowe and Lintas have been regularly participating in customer projects posted on
the platform.
Worldwide, it has been observed that moonlighting increases during recessions – easy to guess
why, with more people losing their jobs. Back in the 1970s, less than 3% people were looking
for a second job. 2011 saw about 12% people wanting to work two jobs.
55 percent
of critical work is now being delivered by freelancers
7. 3 new platform features
to help us keep it simple
The key to scale a crowdsourcing business is in automation of as many crowd-management
processes as possible. Over the last 2+ years of its existence, Jade Magnet has created, executed,
analyzed and fine-tuned many such processes. Now we are ready to invest in technology that will
help us automate these processes to reach higher efficiency levels while keeping costs under control.
1. Crowd motivation enhancement 2. Sales support & portfolio 3. Delivery Assurance Dashboard
system showcase
One of the most critical elements of Targeting a customer-base that needs As the volume of work at Jade Magnet
crowd management is to drive immediate solutions, the sales process increases – with number of monthly
productivity by motivating the at Jade Magnet need be very short. projects going beyond 100 – we are
participating crowd members to give Also, since project sizes are low, sales releasing a new application that will help
their best. costs have to be constantly kept to the the Delivery Assurance team manage up
minimum. to 1000 projects every month.
At Jade Magnet, one of the next
products being created measures the A new sales support and portfolio This application is a simple dashboard
participants’ involvement in a project application organizes collateral designs that tracks the progress of each project
and charts the same on a rewards by category and cost to enable Jade by manager, by status, by payments, by
matrix. Customers running projects, can Magnet account managers close deals provider and by complexity.
choose different reward systems and faster. It doubles up as a design
assign the same based on project showcase for provider portfolios at
complexity. Jade Magnet.
8. Focus on revenue-generation from
Day 1
With hundreds of thousands of dollars
passing through the Jade Magnet
Escrowing project fees and
systems within the first 2 years of its
existence, efficiently managing money is automating milestones
something we focused on right from the Jade Magnet has constantly focused
day Jade Magnet started. on learning how to efficiently
About 70% of the monies that Jade manage working capital while
Magnet generates, are passed on to the ensuring good Provider participation.
providers executing projects with When a project is posted, the
another 10% being spent on delivery customer is encouraged to escrow
assurance experts who understand the the fees with Jade Magnet so that
nuances of creative. providers are sure of the authenticity
of the project.
Businesses getting work done have to
pre-announce the project budgets and Subsequently, for every milestone of
Jade Magnet systems then ensure that project execution, the fees to be
the unit project finances are managed paid-out has to be escrowed in
accordingly. custody of Jade Magnet. The same is
paid to the provider upon successful
completion of each project
milestone.
managing
payments
9. community
engagement
Providers are the life and blood of Jade Magnet
and we concentrate significant time and energy
on developing meaningful engagements with
them – going beyond a project based
transactional relationship.
Induction
Introductory skill appraisal Creative Skill
- Creative thinking & ideation Enhancement
- Design skill assessment
Appraisal & Accreditation Creative workshops led by
Jade Magnet Champion
Jade Magnet Code of Conduct - Client feedback - City-wise creative
- Creative copyrights - Client rating of providers workshops conducted by
- Plagiarism 101 - Monthly skill assessment Jade Magnet Champions
- Collaborative Workmanship - Voting on project entries - Trainers for different skill-
- Voting on Portfolio sets
Know your industry
- Online enablement as part
-Domain based white papers
of the package
-Popular industry collateral
- Partly funded by Jade
Magnet
10. “Lost with Logos. Engineers 5 of the best designs received
seeking Design.”
Robert Bosch initiated a program
that they called “Smart solutions
for the Globe”. They used Jade
Magnet, looking for a logo that
could represent their program and
attract engineers and technologists
to participate with heart and soul.
Final selection
-
-
More than 25 design entries for the contest
A timeline of less than 10 days for the contest
project
- Logo design expert to see the project brief before the launch is formally done.
- Regular guidance from experts while the project is in progress to ensure that Bosch
got the right degree of fine-tuning after shortlisting the initial designs showcase
11. “Marketing collateral
development”
This global footwear brand is in the
processes of establishing its presence
in India. While the ground presence is
increasing aggressively for Clarks, its
marketing roll-out has also got a lot of
impetus.
In order to maintain their agility online,
Clarks has chosen to use crowdsourcing
for saving time and investing just the
right amount of money.
social media engagement
microsites print collateral design
emailers on-ground marketing rollout
project
- Curated teams for different requirements
- Designs generated with a mix of creative competitions and focused creative delivery
- Technology and distribution teams created to back the creative collaterals showcase
12. next crowdsourcing initiative
Telecom VAS With telecom most operators and content generators focusing on
similar areas of VAS content and similar business models, there is very
little to differentiate between two service providers and therefore
potential for bottom-line (or top-line) growth is still limited.
Crowdsourced content creation for Using the crowd for creation of VAS content infuses freshness &
VAS providers in the Telecom arena creativity in the content.
Estimated cost of production of an asset for
VAS provision, by a 5 people team is about
INR 1,50,000 per month to develop about
300 content assets (assuming simple assets
such as jokes and quotes). This brings the
cost per asset to about INR 750 for simple
assets. For increased levels of complexity,
no more than 10 assets can be created
(games, music for ring tones etc.), bringing
the cost per asset to be about INR 15,000.
Crowdsourcing presents infinite
possibilities. For starters, it can bring the
cost of a simple asset down to less than INR
100 and still enable the
creation of more than 1000 assets per
month (conservatively). Similarly, at least 3
times the number of complex VAS content
assets can be created for about 60% of the
cost.
13. In 2012-13, the theme of working together at Jade Magnet is efficient planning and speed of execution. There is a
significant focus on building great technology because by now we have figured out most of the processes that need to be
automated for Jade Magnet to scale quickly.
Within the immediately targeted markets, Jade Magnet is faced with the challenge of reaching out to and satisfying
about 4.2 million small and medium businesses. The magnitude of this opportunity has forced us to think about
ourselves in a totally new way. Instead of trying to offer the best services to customers, we are now working on helping
customers extract the maximum value from using Jade Magnet.
Looking at the future
The Middle Eastern region has about 2 million small Seeing the increasing use of Jade Magnet by
and medium businesses that could use businesses in Qatar, Kuwait and UAE, the team has
crowdsourcing for development of creative decided to get more local support and promote Jade
collateral. More so, this region is financially well-off Magnet aggressively in the Middle East.
(Qatar has been declared as the wealthiest country This year will see us making a significant investment
in the world). of time and energy on increasing the output from
the Middle East to add to the global top-line.