With 15,000+ consultants on its platform in four months, Feelance Co. aims to disrupt the way high-end consultants engage with clients.
Feelance Co. is an online platform that enables senior independent consultants and consulting firms to get discovered by clients across the globe. The platform aims to completely disrupt how freelance consultants today search for assignments, engage with clients and execute these assignments. Given the initial response from the freelance consultant community, the Mumbai based startup is well on its way.
(Left) Harshdeep Rapal, CEO & Cofounder of Feelance Co. (Right) Subir Mitra, Cofounder and CTO
Feelance Co. (www.feelance.co) is an online platform that enables senior independent consultants and consulting firms to get discovered by clients across the globe. The platform aims to completely disrupt how freelance consultants today search for assignments, engage with clients and execute these assignments. Given the initial response from the freelance consultant community, the Mumbai based startup is well on its way.
The venture’s cofounders come with extensive industry experience. Harshdeep Rapal, the co-founder and CEO of Feelance Co. is a serial entrepreneur and Ex-Rocket Internet executive with MBA from Great Lakes Institute of Management. The second co-founder, Subir Mitra, comes with Masters in Information Technology from Virginia Tech and has a strong experience in headhunting for CXO and Interim roles.
Feelance Co. is backed and incubated by Hunt Partners, one of Asia’s leading CEO and Executive search firm with offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore and Shanghai. The venture received its first round of funding in December 2015 and started operations in January 2016.
More and more organisations across the globe are realising the benefits of engaging on-demand talent. With flexible workforce becoming a norm rather than an exception now, even consultants working with the Big Four consulting firms are ditching their regular jobs and opting for freelance consulting careers.
“Freelancers are one of the fastest growing segments in the workforce. Currently 53m or 34% of the American workers are freelancers. The number is going to grow to 40% by 2020. At 15m freelancers in its workforce, India stands second only to the United States. This segment of workforce is not only huge, but also growing at an astonishing pace.” says Harshdeep Rapal, co-founder and CEO at Feelance Co.
“There are platforms for freelancers but none of them addresses the post-sales issues faced by freelancers.” he adds.
What sets Feelance Co. apart from other platforms?
Feelance is not only building a platform for independent consultants to connect with clients and search assignments but also a complete ecosystem around the independent consulting practice. Although there are more than 115m freelancers across the globe, but the support system around the freelance consulting space is either missing or too fragmented to help with the consultant needs. Feelance Co. is stepping up to fill the gap.
“The high-end freelance consulting space is a $30 billion a year market across the globe. We need a seamless ecosystem to facilitate the execution of this huge chunk of business” says Subir Mitra who is heading the operations and product development.
As a part of this ecosystem, Feelance recently launched ‘The Feelancer’ world’s first magazine for the freelance workforce where consultants can share their articles, case studies and industry new analysis. The magazine has taken off really well in the consulting circles. Over next six months Feelance has lined up one such major element to be launched every month.
“Six months from now, powered with analytics and big data, Feelance aims to become the default dashboard for consultants. The consultants can search engagements, execute the same with the help of various tools and services on the platform and also create and send invoices to the clients and accept payments as well. It will completely change the way freelance consultants engage with the clients. That’s what we are building at Feelance.” says Rapal.
Traction
Feelance was conceived in November 2015 and launched in January 2016 and within four months after the launch, on-boarded 15,000 plus senior consultants across 12 countries and 20+ different industry sectors and is on track to cross the 25,000 mark by April end. Till date about 200+ clients have used the platform to find consultants for more that 400 consulting assignments.
Future Plans
Currently about 25% of the site traffic comes from the US, about 60% from India and majority of the rest is from South East Asia and Middle East. Feelance is now all set to consolidate its presence in India and South East Asia and further expand into additional geographies. All the new product and services offerings of Feelance will be launched with a global audience in mind. The company aims to expand its presence in 15 countries in next 2 years.
