Look out Freelancer and SribuLancer, this new startup is gunning for you in Indonesia

In recent months, Tech in Asia has reported a few times on the growing level of popularity of Indonesia’s freelancing marketplaces. So far, the main players in the country include a localized version of Freelancer and homegrown rival SribuLancer. However, those sites now have a new local competitor in Projects.co.id.

Apart from letting users earn money by working on projects for people around the world, freelancers on Projects.co.id can also sell digital products that they’ve created on the site. These can be pretty much anything, with listings on the site ranging from mobile games on Google Play and the App Store to templates for Adobe – and even birthday party invitation designs. Additionally, the new site lets freelancers earn cash by promoting Projects.co.id through an affiliate program.

As per usual, it features a built-in escrow system to ensure that freelancers and employers pay and get paid appropriately and on time for the products and services successfully exchanged.

“Projects.co.id is awesome because you can make money in many ways,” explains the site’s co-founder and chief marketing officer Wiro Hardy. “It’s like Freelancer, Fiverr, and Envato put together.”

See: Game on! Indonesia’s race for outsourced work heats up between Freelancer.co.id and local challenger SribuLancer

A newborn baby by freelancers, for freelancers

Hardy acknowledges that his company directly competes with Freelancer.co.id and Sribulancer, which are much more established. Sites like these have huge market potential in the archipelago, says Hardy, but Indonesia remains relatively untouched. According to him, there are several language and cultural barriers that prevent larger freelancing marketplaces like Elance-oDesk from executing well in the Indonesian market. He also claims the majority of Indonesian businesses are still unfamiliar with the concept of outsourcing to freelancers online. Those factors combined with the nation’s complex epayments issues continue to make the space somewhat challenging, explains Hardy.

He refers to Projects.co.id – which launched in November 2014 – as a “newborn baby.” So far the marketplace has been able to gather more than 4,300 users. The team classifies active users as people who have simply verified their emails and phones numbers after registering on the site. He did not elaborate on how many of those users were freelancers or employers. “It’s still relatively small,” he says. “Within a year, we hope the snowball effect will help us to acquire 870,000 users.”

Projects.co.id monetizes by taking a cut of each transaction. The site takes 12 percent of project and services fees, but for digital product sales, it collects 20 percent. It also makes money from ads. Hardy hopes to charge membership fees after two years. He did not comment on the site’s current revenue, but he did say that he believes it can bring in US$1.9 million in revenue within three years after gaining an estimated 2.7 million users. “Within five years we’re projecting US$11.5 million in revenue with an estimated 8.7 million users,” he adds.