Victor Jiang wants to see “reverse offshoring” become a trend, with Australian companies offering their professional knowledge and skills to Asia, rather than Australia’s mining exports dominating key trade relationships with countries like China.
He recently lodged a patent application for a concept and web platform that would allow just that. It’s called Skillsapien; Jiang describes it is a futures market for top end professional services.
“ Our target is those professionals charging more than $200 an hour,” says Jiang.
“We connect them with potential buyers, through an availability calendar. I want it to be a fully fledged marketplace.”
Jiang first had the idea for Skillsapien three years ago, while working 60-hour weeks as a consultant with IBM.
“It was comfortable and there was good money but I was unable to fulfill my entrepreneurial desire.”
Skillsapien was launched as a beta at the end of May. According to Jiang, the platform means consultants will be able to secure billable hours months – even years – in advance. That will save money, says Jiang. Potentially the site could alter pricing based on supply and demand, essentially creating a market for time. A derivatives market is also on the cards down the track, where you could trade other peoples’ time.
Now that a patent has been lodged, Jiang is able to release the public version, which should be live within the month.
He’s thinking big too; the site will launch globally, with China, the US and Australia key markets to target. Jiang spent six weeks in China recently, meeting with other entrepreneurs, investors and potential clients. He’ll head to the US next month too.
Until now Jiang has funded Skillsapien himself, with money he saved prior to quitting his full-time job last year.
“If I had the resources to hire a team of 20, I’d want to scale. It would increase by 20 times the speed of our ramp-up.”
The well-known Professor Jesse Jin, former head of Computer Science at the University of NSW, is one of the three co-founders who have now come onboard. Professor Jin helped develop the video-sharing standards that led to the creation of MPEG and YouTube, and is familiar with the Chinese market.
Flipping traditional outsourcing and freelancing on its head, Jiang’s site will create a “buyers market”, opposed to what he describes as the “race to the bottom” that outsourcing sites encourage, where cheaper is always best.
It’s an experience Jiang has been through himself. Prior to bringing in Gagneet Singh, now a co-founder and CTO, who he met through the Sydney Founder Institute program, Jiang outsourced web development to a team in India.
“They said they would deliver against specs but there were always issues. There were often communication lags of days or weeks.”
“I realized they had come to the conclusion it was a loss making project. It was fixed cost for delivery.
“While it was under $10,000, we could have hired a few interns.”
Jiang says there is huge potential in professional services; a niche market — where there may only be five or six suitable people in the world — to deliver what a company needs in the way of something like data security.
“We would welcome derivatives trading at some point in the future.”
Jiang’s advice for turning an idea into reality:
- Don’t take advice from others as gospel. Jiang says he had received plenty of advice. Most people told him not to bother patenting his idea, because of the time and money involved. However after some research Jiang found a lawyer who could help and was able to work out a payment arrangement;
- Get a tech co-founder. The outsourcing experience was a painful one, says Jiang. It wasted valuable time and money that could have been better spent;
- Network, network, network. If you’re passionate about your idea that will go a long way. It’s how Jiang got Professor Jin involved and also how he was able to get 2000 subscribers to the website in the first fortnight of the beta version.