FreelanceZone on SGEntrepreneurs!!!

FreelanceZone.com.sg was mentioned on SGEntrepreneurs blog:

His start-up experience: from the founder of Dovalize

“Dovalize was incorporated since April 2008 and our mission is to provide a wide range of innovative online services under e-commerce category. FreelanceZone.com.sg is our very first product. Primarily, it enables small and mid-sized businesses to operate outsourcing and staffing in an easier way to achieve cost savings across various services. Our objective is to extend and open it for the South East Asia market. We believe in this service because we, at the same time, provide the service as well as using the service. I have a small team of 3 persons, our organization structure are comprised of 30% fulltime employees and 70% freelance workforce for both management and operation team. I would say, perhaps, as the Founder of Dovalize, we might be the first company in Singapore that operates in this formula.”

Steven Diep, Founder and Managing Director of Dovalize:

If you are a freelancer, here is some advice:
- Make sure what you deliver is a quality product because this product will be the base for others to offer you the payment amount in your next freelance assignment.
- Plan your milestones, and to protect yourself, ask for the milestone-payment before moving on to the next stage. Well, for e-Bay product, they called it “cash-on-delivery”.

In a nutshell, setting up Dovalize, I think I do have the advantages because of my multi-disciplinary roles since 2002. I have worked as a fulltime employee as well as freelancer, moving across several companies with many positions like web programmer, software specialist, project leader, application architect, etc.

Our most difficult moments? Well, like many other new start-ups, we have to work hard, really really hard from marketing up to the implementation. Funding is also one of the issues. It is why we are actively seeking and welcome all the potential partnership and investments. For me, “challenge” and “difficulty” are two different terms; I would choose “challenge” to describe all the issues that we have faced so far.