Hire a designer from any part of world to work for you
Have you had a tough time getting designs and creatives that match your brief? It seems you are not the only one. And if the numbers showcased by Australian design crowd sourcing site – DesignCrowd - is anything to go by, then any design brief submitted on the site is viewed by over 180,000 designers from across the world, and as per the site you get at least 104 designs per project to choose from.
Founded by Alec Lynch in 2008, DesignCrowd works with one of the largest group of designers from across the world to fulfill design needs of a client. Co-founder Adam Arbolino joined the venture a year later in 2009. The two founders met at the University of Technology, Sydney, where they studied programming and IT. Alec and Adam had started another venture earlier which failed; DesignCrowd is their second venture together.
The website works very simply, all you need is to upload a brief, and pay the amount as per your budget. The brief is then picked up by designers willing to work as per your budget and they present you with options. Alec put together the initial team of designers for the website by reaching out to designers and asking them to design Designcrowd’s own logo. Once they got the initial team, they turned their attention to get clients, and designers have followed, says Alec.
Alec started the venture by bootstrapping and took loan from friends and family to keep afloat. “The first two years was the most challenging period for me personally. I used up all my savings, maxed out three credit cards and took $30,000 loans from friends and family.” In 2009, the startup raised $300,000 from four angel investors and since then they have received $6 million in venture capital investment from Starfish Ventures. The tough times seem to have passed for DesignCrowd which claims to be doubling its business each year and hit $1 million revenues per month in 2013.
DesignCrowd charges designers 15% commission on their earnings through the site, and clients are charged fees for posting projects on the site. DesignCrowd works with designers in over 100 countries and the top 5 countries on the site are USA, India, Australia, UK and Indonesia.
India is the second largest design hub - home to 21% of DesignCrowd’s design community (second to the US with 26%), with about 20,000 numbers. India is home to some of DesignCrowd’s best designers, coming in first with 14% of the top 1,000 designers. Indian designers also submit the most designs, accounting for 27% of the global total. “The demand for crowdsourced designs in India has increased dramatically with the number of sales increasing by 42% from the past six months, compared to the previous six months. And like most other countries, the top three popular design types are logo, web and business card designs. These sales, however, only represent 2% of the global total,” shares Alec. He claims that some of their top Indian designers have earned more than $60,000 in just four years. While on an average, top designers in India are earning over $1,100 per month.
DesignCrowd has created 5,858 logo designs so far and among the notable work done by them include t-shirt design for Virgin, graphic design for Microsoft, logo design for Harvard Business School’s centre for innovation and growth and TimesSquare.com crowdsourced its new logo through DesignCrowd. Other work done by them include tattoo designs, family emblem designs and reimagined famous actors as hipsters.
A 30-member team spread across sales, marketing, engineering, customer service and operations manage affairs at the startup. Alec says plans are afoot to scale DesignCrowd globally. They recently opened their office in Philippines and plan to open in the US; and overtime DesignCrowd plans to launch its service in new languages to cater to a larger customer base.
Website : DesignCrowd