Gioacchino La Vecchia, CrowdEngineering Speaks to Management Paradise[/i]
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SC: What’s the story behind CrowdEngineering?
CrowdEngineering’s founders come from large enterprise critical business processes optimization. One of the most critical set of processes is the one relative to customer service. The continuous research of improvements in this area made us meet for the first time an interesting phenomenon: customers are very happy to collaborate and their energy and availability can become a significant aid, also a source of revenues or savings. For the first time we understood that it is possible to outsource customer service activities to the crowd.
SC: What is your vision for CrowdEngineering?
CrowdEngineering facilitates the introduction of crowdsourcing in the large enterprise and the transformation of existing business processes to take advantage from the contribution of external workers. We foresee an always increasing role of crowdsourcing in the following years to help companies reduce costs while achieving competitive advantage collaborating with their crowdsourcing contributors.
SC: Which are the pivotal moments in your life that inspired you for commencing CrowdEngineering?
Basically two: an inspiring article published on Wired by Jeff Howe with title “The rise of Crowdsourcing” describing for the first time this huge opportunity to work together with internet crowds, and a trip to the Silicon Valley during which we didn’t do just tourism in the beautiful California but we started pitching our idea to VCs to see their reaction, and it was impressive and encouraging. We understood the opportunity was real and almost mature already for the mass market.
SC: What’s life as an entrepreneur like for you?
Life is never easy for a start-up with global market ambitions. And working with the enterprise market is not harder but is for sure more difficult. There is no space for trying or worse fail, every move and every relationship must be managed in an almost perfect way. So it means to be in an always rolling cycle of events like analyze market, design products and services, raise money to approach the market and adequately support customers, generate revenues and when you may think it is time to take a break it is already time to innovate and get better instead.
SC: Most Entrepreneurs are workaholics. Are you too?
Entrepreneurs must be a little bit workaholics in my opinion. Otherwise they will become managers of companies, may be very good managers but doing start-up need much more because most of the time resources are limited. You cannot count on trained and organized sales forces, market analysis clearly indicating in which direction to invest. And entrepreneurs need to me passionate so especially in the start-up phase the company they are creating is usually one of the top 2 or 3 priorities of their life.
SC: How was your experience working with 1M/1M?
1M/1M is a great experience I suggest to every entrepreneur especially in the early stages of their companies. First of all is where you can test the solidity of your business model before making a jump in the dark, then it becomes a strong support in the following phases, funding, getting to the marker, grow. Sramana Mitra is great and her continuous support and advice is something you not easily find in the start-up environment.
SC: Bootstrapping v/s fund raising. Which one would you favor and what makes it special
Both can make sense in different phases even of the same business. The general rule is of course that if you can grow without external moneys you can keep the total value of your venture. But it is a matter of size. If you got a great idea which potentially will generate huge revenues you cannot consider to be the only one in the market forever. And if you are not able to scale fast competition can come and do even better than you. So raising money can be an option to accelerate but also a must to get enough resources to survive to the attack of competitors and grow up to safe stage.
SC: When's the right time to raise funds in your opinion?
The right time is when you are ready to jump to the next level. You already showed all the potential you could show at the actual level, you would continue to grow slower from then and additional money injection will not dilute too much but will be able to start growing fast or even faster again
SC: How does CrowdEngineering stay ahead of competition?
We work hard to anticipate the need of the market and always wow our customers. Because we mainly face an enterprise market what we always try to deliver is a comprehensive and flexible end to end solution meeting expectations of our customer with low costs of bootstrap and easy management while they go. Easy, isn’t?
SC: What keeps your team going?
Customers satisfaction and daily wins are the main and perhaps the only motivations able to reward the team for the impressive amount and quality of work produced.
SC: Marketing and public relations are a vital component to new business, how would you relate this to CrowdEngineering?
This is a key point. The enterprise market is not one you can condition easily with standard marketing campaigns and advertising. The word of mouth inside the enterprise community is the best marketing tool you have. Public relations, especially where those customers go to learn about innovation are another key aspect of bootstrapping an enterprise market start-up.
SC: How would you define success? When should one believe has achieved success?
Success market recognition, customer satisfaction while meeting or even exceeding investors’ expectations. Then, as soon you believe you achieved success then you need to keep being successful and this is a success you must achieve every single day.
SC: How would you perceive CrowdEngineering for next 10 years?
10 years are a geological era for high tech companies. There are so many things can happen in the meantime but it is our strong willingness to keep doing well and even better.
You can contact CrowdEngineering -
http://www.facebook.com/gioacchino.lavecchia
http://twitter.com/gioacc
http://www.crowdengineering.com/blog/