Good day everyone! We are very excited to share Design Inc. with you today. Our broad mission is to bring great design to the world by making design easy to understand and obtain. We have launched with our first two design services - Logos, Brands and Visual Identity package and Design Critiques. We have many more design services on the roadmap, including services focused more around user experience and user interface design. Would love to answer any questions you may have.
@hemeon congrats Marc..I love the fact that i could actually work with best designers in the world.. have applied for beta access...would love to start with the design critique...all the best and i look fwd!:-)
@hemeon Great work Marc. I'm a big fan of any company that comes in and provides healthy competition against Upwork. Keep it up! P.S. I applied as a designer.
@kevinrose@hemeon awesome to see this
I'm a big believer in these types of on-demand businesses.
Nice to see a real focus on quality here. What is the vetting process of accepting designers?
How many designers are there to hire on the platform already?
@bentossell@kevinrose Ben! thanks for your the questions - currently I lead portfolio reviews - we typically live stream them (in fact someone wrote about them here: https://uxdesign.cc/your-design-... we have had thousands of applicants so the reviews can be a bit brutal and fast. We dont talk about the number of designers on the platform but we have plenty to support a marketplace.
Love this model, @hemeon. It's often very useful to get new ideas from talented designers who don't have their heads in the weeds of the product or business already.
@rrhoover Thank you Ryan! The Design Critiques have been especially insightful, even though they only last an hour, we have seen designers make a big impact through feedback around product strategy, navigation and general UX issues, helping to say "no" to bad ideas and features - I'm pretty sure some of these design crits have saved some product teams months of unnecessary engineering work, or at the very least provided an objective sounding board with no emotional ties to what has been designed or built thus far.
@hemeon interesting to see more talent moving toward a remote, freelance lifestyle. Gigster 3.0 has a similar model for engineers. Maybe you and @rogerdickey should partner up. 🤔
@alexwinkyface Hey Alex, I saw your Encore App, I commend you for putting your savings on the line and building something you believe in. If you are up for it, would love to offer you a free hour of a Design Critque to run through and talk about your app - let me know if you're interested.
There are very few people over the last 5 years that have helped me more to land solid clients and overall great design opportunities than @hemeon. He's a good dude and the perfect fit for a business like this and I am stoked to see the launch. Congrats Marc!
@mazzeo Thanks for the shoutout Matt! - excited to launch more services that provide a wider breadth of design services for startups and folks building digital products. You have been a wonderful sounding board and helpful advisor over the last year - thanks again for being so willing to give of your time.
Any chance of adding copywriting talent? :) Obviously I'm a bit biased, but copy is a huge complement to UX/UI, which so many companies/apps gloss over.
Hey @hemeon, congrats on the launch!
Since they say, competition doesn't kill startups, I'll offer my feedback. I recently started a similar design company.
I think the site looks great and you've done a really good job of detailing what comes with each product. I think, as a whole the site does well a presenting a low-entry barrier for non-design folk.
In regards to the model as a whole, I have some questions. When I started DesignCue (www.designcue.co) I had a deep inclination that the best work that could be produced is by having remote designers work like an in-house team with a creative director leading each project. Like others have said, how will you ensure that the quality of work is the very best if only one designer can get their hands on each project? Are you doing any personal overseeing to ensure quality?
Also, I've been learning that good design doesn't happen simply by pairing a good designer with a client. Its more about facilitating relationships that produce high-quality work in the end. How are you going about ensuring smooth designer to client relationships? Do you have any personal part in making sure communication is top notch and milestones are met?
I wish you luck, well done so far!
If you want to see what I'm up to at DesignCue, feel free to take a look and offer your critique!
@prestonattebery really cool to meet you and I dig what you're doing with Design Cue! I wanted to share some thoughts I posted on Designer News - the question there had a similar spirit to yours:
TL;DR; We seek to commoditize design as a services and make design easy to understand and acquire, at the same time we want maximize the revenue designers yield for those services.
Building platforms and software is brutal so I am not going to take time to criticize those who have tried something similar - at the end of the day we I want to always be supportive of anyone who has the guts to build and launch something.
This is a relaunch for us. Two months ago we launched our first version and it didn't go so well. We made a bet that users would want to hire "hand-picked" "world-class" designers, but turns out most users cant tell the difference between a designer of high caliber and a designer one year out of school. Here are a few more learnings from our initial launch.
- User don't care if a designer is world-class, hand-picked, vlogs or was the head designer for Uber
- Users want to know the scope, price, timing and deliverable when they hire you
- Users will always go to price, but will happily pay for value once they understand value
- Designers tend to publicly overprice, and privately take deep discounts during negotiation
- Klout matters, but not in the way you would think.
- Design is still thought of as just aesthetics and making things beautiful (we of course want to help elevate design to a discipline that helps a company build a better business, not just look nice)
- Most folks are dehydrated and need to drink way more water (we didn't realize this, I just wanted to share a personal life philosophy)
What we launched today is our solution to all the things we learned over the last two months. Design Services need to be easy to understand with a clean scope, price and deliverable for a user to transact - those same guidelines are also necessary to help designers to be consistent in their quality.
Hope this gives a bit more insight into how we are tackling this problem - cheers!
@hemeon Interesting observations! Those are super helpful. Following the @trygigster story, it seems they started with the "work with world class programmers" and moved into "we create world-class apps." I think you're on to something about those specific value points for clients. Question: Obviously you'd prefer both, but if you had to chose, are you trying to be the go-to design agency for branding and MVPs or primary a extra resource for design teams, startups, and big companies when they need to outsource?
@prestonattebery@trygigster I would never classify us as a design agency - I dont think airbnb would classify themselves as a hotel. When anyone runs into a problem and they believe design to be a part of the solution, then I hope they would look to Design Inc.
So excited for @hemeon and his awesome team. I wanted to be one of the first customers and booked a great designer for @skurt when our design team was maxed out. It's so easy and they've attracted the the most amazing designers in the community. I'm definitely using them again. Great job guys!
@apcommunicate@skurt Aaron! thank you for the kind words! hope you are well and please come visit again soon. We really appreciate your kindness and support.
This is great! Mega-congrats on the launch team Design, Inc. I often find myself using design marketplaces, like 99d, for brand identity but wishing I had my hands on something that took a lot of leg work out of finding great/vetted designers who love what they do & respect the process.
Great timing. We're looking to dramatically improve my wife's brand identity. We may run in this direction sometime in the next couple of months! Looking forward to seeing this evolve.
Best of luck with the launch!
congrats on the launch @hemeon! have you thought about adding some sort of design feedback loop? personally, i'd be a lot more inclined to pay the $16.5K if i wasn't just paired with a designer, but if the work he or she comes up with also receives feedback/suggestions/tweaks from multiple designers on your service. so that when it comes back to me as a client i'm mentally assured that the logo, brand, and identity are the best they possibly can be given the multiple perspectives gone into it and not just the subjective opinion of 1 designer
@arjunkmehta So whats interesting here is we have built a community behind the scenes for the designers on design inc. they share work with each other, get feedback privately form one another and really support one another. For me, I charge around $8k for a logo with a usage and branding guide and all the corresponding social media and marketing assets - I've done quite a bit of branding work for the last 20 years and I can say with confidence wether you hire me or someone else on the platform you will get every pennies worth of value that you invest on Design Inc. / Design can truly be make a huge difference in your product or service
Hey congrats on the relaunch @hemeon (+ @zinssmeister, @mkadenbach et al)! Everything looking super great.
Now that I'm full-time freelance I'm looking forward to seeing the services expand from here. Plans to push out into more product / project based chunks or is that too big for the commodity focus you've got going on?
@buckwilson@zinssmeister@mkadenbach we have a strategy to chunk up product design - its the one feature we think is going to really set this platform apart - more soon.
This is great! We've needed a service that makes thoughtful design-driven critiques easily accessible for customers. What an exciting step forward! I'm looking forward to contributing to the community through it! Congrats, @hemeon!
@cdavis565 Here! here! We have tons of design services we want to build out - for example things like "visual design and style guide from wireframes" or "product design audit" and of course more classic services like Illustration, pitch decks, content market etc.
Had the pleasure of meeting Marc and Joshua when they held open office hours in San Francisco last spring and the design and product feedback they gave me was invaluable. Affordable, quality design is something that even small, stingy, bootstrapping startups cannot skip and your new service could be a great solution. I do wish that you had included prices (or a range of prices) for the various packages and options (or maybe you did and I missed them?)
Anyway, best of luck! Looks like a great service!
@hagit Hi Hagit!!! really great hearing from you again! glad you found us again - so go to Desinginc.com > then select Design Critiues > then Pair with Designer give that a try and then you will see a bunch of designers who are offering that service and their prices - hope that helps!
Super excited to be an early member of Design Inc. Great early product and I'm looking forward to seeing it develop and evolve from here. Congrats @hemeon!
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