Scout, by Dribbble — Find and hire the world’s top designers

Seems to have caused a lot of backlash in the community. Discussion: https://dribbble.com/shots/37432... Looking forward to a detailed blog post or comments here about the process that went into this, and what the plans are for smaller businesses that can't afford the high fees (deeper Crew integration?)

I have to be honest that I am super confused about Scout. As a marketplace founder myself, I think the idea is solid and very smart for Dribbble (though I'd be interested to hear their thinking around how Scout and Crew work together), but the business model makes no sense to me. I'm looking to hire a designer, but yesterday I went to sign up to use Scout and was asked to pay $199/mo or $2300 (up front!) for the year. What? Maybe (maybe!) it makes sense for a small subset of agencies constantly looking to find a designer for a project or for a few Fortune 500s with a lot of projects, but for the average business owner looking to find a designer, it does not make sense. What am I missing?

I'm a bit confused about the "search by location" when designers on Dribbble can list absolutely anything in their location preferences. It seems that some are already using this to cheat the system. 😟

Interested to see if people will pay this. I could understand $20 a month, but $200 blows my mind.

Zack Onisko, Dribbble's CEO, is without an internet connection today, but I wanted to share his response to the feedback we've been getting so far on Scout. -- Apologies for getting to this just now but I’m traveling and just found some wifi. One of our core company values is to release work that we’re all proud of. We are proud of Scout, but it looks like we fumbled the ball by under-communicating these changes to the community ahead of the release. *Our Mission* Our team members, regardless of function, have backgrounds as designers and/or a huge affinity for the design community. Our mission at Dribbble is to be the world’s best platform for designers to gain inspiration, feedback, education, community, and job opportunities. This is what drives us and keeps us focused each day. *Background* We’ve been talking to a lot of Dribbble members and visitors lately, in-person at Dribbble meetups, talking to folks online, conducting interviews and usability tests, and we got a ton of great feedback from a global survey that we ran on the site. The number one user request for many years was an iOS app. We checked that box in June and have received so much great feedback. (By the way, lots of really exciting updates are coming to the app next week.) But by far, the biggest complaint that we get from the community is that we have an imbalance in exposure. A select few designers, granted designers who have been on the site for years building up followers (and who we love), have gained dominance of the Designers “leaderboard” and created a monopoly that keeps newer users from gaining exposure, hiring opportunities, followers, etc. The way we fix this long-term is to revisit our search and sorting algorithms to allow both popular and up and coming designers great work opportunities on Dribbble. This algorithm is not something that we don’t want to open up publicly because we’re still fine tuning it. *Pricing* We also talked to a lot of hiring managers and recruiters at companies small and large. A lot of hiring managers we talked to pay $1000/mo for hiring tools and tens of thousands to headhunters and hiring marketplaces. We felt $299/mo was reasonably priced, but we also consider pricing an experiment. We’ll continue to A/B test price points to find the right price for Scout. Historically, Dribbble has done very little marketing or sales of any kind. The higher price point allows us to bring more employers to the designers who are looking for work opportunities. We can accomplish this through advertising, building out marketing and sales functions. Existing Pros are grandfathered to basic access to Scout for free for life (as long as they don’t cancel their subscription). This means existing Pros retain the ability to search for and message designers. Teams will also have basic access to Scout until their annual subscription expires. New Pro and Team subscribers won’t have access to Scout without a subscription. *Location search (our intentions were good, but we missed the mark)* We put a lot of thought into location search. Scout is a tool geared towards hiring managers. If hiring managers are looking for illustrators in Berlin, it’s pretty easy to show them illustrators currently in Berlin. Our goal for expanding the search was to make sure we also captured the illustrator who may not currently live in Berlin, but would really like to live and work there if the right opportunity came along. We wanted designers to be able to show that to potential employers and I wanted potential employers to know about that additional pool of talent. In practice, this didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped for a variety of reasons. Today, we updated this so that after you search for a location you have the option to include people who expressed a desire to work in that area. But by default, we now only show those who currently are in that location (based on their profile location). We’re working quickly to update a few other components of Scout in addition to location, including sorting by follower count so that’s it’s still easy to find the top designers on Dribbble. We have a lot more in the works that will add a ton of value to our community. Thank you for the feedback. We are listening and want to hear your thoughts, ideas, and criticisms. I’m open to direct feedback as well, you can shoot me a note at zack@dribbble.com. We are forever working to improve and make Dribbble the best platform on the internet to help designers further their career and craft.

A day after @hemeon announced The Success and Failure of Design Inc. Dribbble introduce Scout How it works: - Find the best designers that match what you’re looking for - Improve your workflow by easily organizing your favorite designers - Connect with and message designers

If you've ever tried to hire someone you know the insane amount of time it takes simply to find _good_ people. How much is your time worth? I'm willing to bet (and Dribbble is too) that it's worth more than a measly $200/month.

I think its good for designers who doesn't have tons of followers. Previously when searching, accounts with most followers will come first. So, since a normal start-up company who cannot afford this will have to find a designer from shots. So they will find matching designers from good shots they like, not from the followers count. Good Move Dribbble :D ~Surjith

Downvote options ? :D

ouch... I miss Design Inc :(

Literally, every man and his dog are trying to build a freelance marketplace for designers these days. Marc Hemon tries it, Crew tried it, I tried it with Availo. And as Dribble bought Crew a while ago, this really isn't a surprise https://medium.com/@mikaelcho/we...

@zack415 - Great to see the launch of Scout. Looks fantastic!

Real thing which many dont accept is, dribbble becomes yet another portfolio site. 8 out of 10 designers are now on dribble. Posting GIFs and rebounds are making people get more followers. If you are looking forward to hire UX designers / UI designers with product knowledge- Yo you are in the wrong place.

Don't want to get into this too deep, but what is alarming is not so much the cost of Scout. It's how the searching capabilities are implemented. People are backlashing not so much because of the cost, but because of how wonky the search is. You now have designers in different parts of the world that now show up in Los Angeles and visa versa and even going a step further with follower count. A lot of these dribbblers have been on Dribbble for a very long time establishing a high follower count because they produce amazing work. Now their efforts have been a bit skewed because someone with 500 followers is now above someone with 45,000 followers, and sometimes not even showing up in the list at all. We will see how it pans out but I don't think that is a good strategy. I get the fact that things need to be fair, but in all fairness, produce good work, get followers, get clients. Success doesn't happen overnight. Ask those who have thousands and thousands of followers, it took a while I am sure. #sad

Definitely needed, but why so expensive? 😵

I think I'd rather focus on using my network more efficiently if hiring. This has potential to backfire even further, and who hires based on an 800x600 gif?

So for 300$ per month you get what really? Was a bad idea, they should just kill it

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! Here are my latest thoughts on Scout and where we are headed at Dribbble: https://medium.com/dribbble/scou...

Dribbble is good resource for finding designers. Makes sense that they're trying to make some money, but they have recently changed pricing that's way out of scale for what they're providing.

This will only appeal (maybe) to large corporations. Definite way to kill the soul of something creative and communal.

Pros:

it's fine as a product

Cons:

way too expensive.