His start-up experience: from the founder of Dovalize

I think I’ll start with the initial idea that inspired me to launch FreelanceZone.com.sg. Back to Nov 2007, when I started to realize that there is a need for freelance market in Singapore, I wondered why there is a big growth in freelance market in US and Europe since 1987 but not in Asia till now.

Because of that I started to do the research and I’ve found 3 good freelance websites originated from Asia, although each of them mentions to open to all Asia countries, but their major content is still featuring for their local nation Korea, Japan and Hong Kong/China.

In Singapore, due to the economy changes, there are many up and down for the jobs market and I believe doing Freelance is one of the primary options to achieve:
- Casual income for students, part-timers
- Side income for fulltime employee
- Or just simply lifestyle earnings for working from home

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.

When I first started the idea, many of my friends and even my girlfriend don’t really believe in it. People tend to concern about the job responsibility that a freelancer could deliver. And yes, I have failed once but I’ve learnt and I would like to share it here. The success of a freelance project mainly relies on how well the project management is. Choosing freelance workforce in your business could really help you to save cost and it can really help you to reach Pay-as-Result driven concept, but managing freelancers are different compared to managing fulltime employees, there are many online articles addressing this study.

Take an example for a large scale web implementation project, the most important criteria are:
- We need to have at least 3 deliverable milestones in your project schedule.
- Always ask for documentation before implementation and update it in the later processes.
- It’s good to go through the Proof-of-Concept stage. In US and Europe, freelance service buyers would normally pay service provider (freelancer) 3-5% for this stage. It helps us choose the best service provider out of the short-listed candidates.

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.

- Steven Diep, Founder and Managing Director of Dovalize

About Dovalize
Dovalize was incorporated since April 2008, our core business is to provide a wide range of innovative online services under e-commerce by leveraging on the latest web technology. Each of our web-products is considered as the individual business unit by itself. At the current stage, we focus our business in Singapore and South East Asia region. We have many ideas and plans on our roadmap for the coming months and years ahead and looking forward to building a powerful list of high-quality online services for many years to come.

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