Why? Barrie explained that as hard as it is for perpetually plugged-in Europeans and Americans to imagine, only about 30 percent of the world’s seven billion inhabitants are online, leaving billions of potential Freelancer.com customers out there yet to get online. In Asia, for instance, internet penetration is still at a modest 21 percent, leaving some 825 million people yet to get connected.

Getting those folks onto the internet will be great for them (we’ve already seen scattered cases of “million dollar freelancers” who have built seven-figure incomes off platforms like Freelancer.com in the developing world) but it will be pretty awesome for Barrie’s business as well, he believes. The flood of newly wired workers will provide a huge and growing customer base of hungry and driven potential freelancers for his site, which already has about 3.5 million users around the world. Barrie’s company charges them and job posters a hefty but variable commission to connect on the site.

Dismissing fears that the trends his site is banking on will mean fewer jobs in the West, Barrie is even optimistic that this explosion in online outsourcing will be good for those of us in developed countries –provided we develop an entrepreneurial mindset and start putting the huge pool of cheap talent across the world to work realizing our ideas and supporting our businesses for, essentially, peanuts. While this inexpensive labor pool may be good news for someone hoping to get a business off the ground on a shoestring, the ability to get stuff done at low cost may be cold comfort for those who are less entrepreneurial by education or character and would like to remain employed. But Barrie seems less than moved by these worries.

Is there anything Barrie isn’t bullish on? In short, online labor platforms that look to compete by serving a specialized sector or targeted geographic location. The likes of Zaarly and ExpertBids “are all going to fail,” according to Barrie because of their inability to scale sufficiently to make enough to be attractive business opportunities. Want to take in a million dollars? Then ten million in business needs to go through the site – the equivalent of something like $100 million in U.S. labor costs if you’re dealing in lower wages overseas – and Barrie just doesn’t see the market being there for niche sites. Those that aim for geographic specificity in the style of TaskRabbit will struggle to reproduce their success in one city in another a bit down the highway, making expanding the business a gigantic money sink, in Barrie’s opinion.

Do you think Barrie’s optimism is well founded?

Image courtesy of Freelancer.com.

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Cronin decided there must be a better way to match businesses in need of professional services with those able to help and ExpertBids was born. An online labor platform that aims to connect small- and medium-sized businesses looking for help with accountants, lawyers and consultants hoping to build independent practices, Chicago-based ExpertBids launched in November 2010.

A standard post on the site is free for companies (though a premium post which guarantees three bids within a week costs $50), while professionals pay small amounts to bid for work depending on the size of the project’s budget – larger projects have slightly higher fees. Quotes can be either a flat fee or hourly rate and the once the parties agree to a price, monitoring and billing for the work is entirely their responsibility. The site now has over 10,000 users, about 80 percent of which are US-based experts looking to sell their services and 20 percent are businesses hoping to hire.

Of course, ExpertBids is far from the only labor platform out there, with space leaders Elance and oDesk, reporting impressive growth. But Cronin feels his little site serves a need the big boys don’t by focusing specifically on professional services. “Some legal needs, you need to be able to go into the lawyer’s office and discuss with them, so we focus a little more on location than some of the other platforms,” Cronin says. But even in this relatively specialized niche, Cronin has company — oddly named Shpoonkle restricts itself to lawyers but aims to do basically the same thing.

Cronin acknowledges that there are hurdles for his fledgling business to overcome, including trust issues when clients are shopping for higher-end services. “For some people that’s their first hesitation with using the site,” Cronin concedes, but he notes, “the alternative is that you go through your phone book and you make a bunch of calls and you have less information.” ExpertBids also verifies the identity of the professionals who use it, checking bar numbers or CPA license numbers, as well as encouraging users to do their own research through relevant professional associations.

Perhaps a more troublesome objection is that sites like ExpertBids drive prices down for professionals. Cronin notes that pros on his site can’t see competing offers to discourage a race to the bottom. “We’re telling the experts to give whatever price makes sense for them, and if it’s not good for them then they shouldn’t be bidding that amount,” he says, though he also understands that, “if I was a professional, I would not like how cost conscious some of these companies are, but that’s a reality.”

Cronin sees the online labor platform model not as undermining professionals economically, but as empowering small operators to reach larger markets and give huge firms a run for their money.

Over the years, the legal industry and especially big firms just started to get so fat, inefficient and expensive, so there’s really an opportunity for solo and small firm lawyers to undercut these people without the high overhead of these humungous firms who have offices in all the downtown areas. If you can cut your overhead as a small firm, you’re going to be able to lower your prices significantly and still make a very decent profit.

Rather than view ExpertBids and the like as only a tool for businesses to drive down costs, Cronin paints a picture of platforms like his as arming professional David’s to take on complacent Goliaths. If he’s right, we should be seeing more of them popping up.

Do you think we’ll be seeing more niche online labor platforms as other industries embrace the model?

Image courtesy of ExpertBids.

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