PeoplePerHour with Alan Weinkrantz

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Alan: This is Alan Weinkrantz for dedicatedhosting.com I’m in London with Simos Kitris he’s the chief technical officer of peopleperhour.com. Welcome!

Simos: Thank you.

Alan: Simos you’re doing something really interesting in helping to give people really an option and lots of alternatives in their work environment. Tell us a little about your company and what you’re doing.

Simos: Thanks Alan, we’d like to think so as well. Here at peopleperhour.com we essentially help an online marketplace which enables people to work remotely and offer their services on a per-hour basis, and that applies to a variety of clients most of which are startups and small businesses. The services span a very wide range from the more traditional programming web design, but more so the last year or so, we’ve seen a lot of the mining areas like sales, marketing, PR, and I guess the downturn is helping us in the way that clients are looking for more cost-effective options to out-source work and get things done. One of the things that are very different about us compared to traditional out-sourcing, where you typically outsource a function or a department to an external company, is that we have a lot of people on the side that do offer their services as what we call “five to niners” – the traditional moonlighting. So it’s not really about us finding a company that’s a million miles away to outsource work to, it’s about finding somebody that has the right skills that could be even a few miles down the road that has the time and the skills to do your work.

Alan: So, talk about your dedicated hosting strategy. What’s your approach?

Simos: The approach we took very early on is that we really didn’t want to deal with complex mining service in-house. We didn’t have to worry about things like service getting stolen from our offices… having the staff to maintain the service. So from day one we instead dedicated hosting to help us grow, we’re trying to keep our business as lean as possible as the name lies peopleperhour.com we use a little freelancers, and then our [strategy] I guess in the hosting world would be to use an external party to manage our hosting for us.

Alan: So Simos you… it seems like you’ve really got your business up and going, your business model down really well here in the UK but you told me you’re also starting to grow worldwide.

Simos: Yes, absolutely Alan. We started by marketing more in the UK and that’s still the case. In the last 6 months we’ve had a lot of clients come from the US, Australia, South Africa, mostly European countries, and [in tradition] you always have freelancers from 120 countries… more than 120 countries actually right now, without even marketing at all to them. So, most of them find us on the web. You can find our website by going to www.peopleperhour.com. Lots of them get referred by word of mouth, and I guess through the marketing efforts that they do. And it’s really very encouraging to see that there are people in all areas of the world that can now offer their services to the side and also get things done. The last 3 months we’ve seen a very big surge of projects that have been awarded to UK freelancers. It’s something that’s just encouraging us, it came as a surprise to us. So it seems that the dynamics of the worldwide global marketplace are changing, if you’d like.

Alan: And one more time your URL.

Simos: It’s www.peopleperhour.com

Alan: Great, well thanks for your time this morning.

Simos: Thank you very much.