What I want to show you today is another terrific website that shows you the power of crowd
resourcing.
What that means is that instead of just working with one individual, you work with a whole
crowd.
In this case, it’s to do with design: this is called 99designs and it’s a website that
allows you to utilize a crowd of designers.
In this case, you can see they’ve got two hundred and sixty thousand-some designers,
all looking to do work for you on whatever your design needs happen to be: whether that’s
a logo or a website design; business cards; t-shirts; kind of pretty much whatever.
So how this one works is that you basically set a design spec saying you want a logo or
a t-shirt or whatever and you set a prize amount: whoever wins is going to make this
amount of money.
So let’s have a little look at how that works: clicking on the “Get Started Now”,
you can see here that when you launch a design contest, firstly you pick out whether you
want a logo or website or advertising or what have you, and they give you a guideline about
the prize money that they are looking for.
So in this case for example, a book or a magazine cover from two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.
Now I want to be super clear: this is not the cheapest way to do this; this is one of
the better ways to do this.
For example, if we wanted a book cover we could go to Fiverr and you could type in,
for example, “book cover” and when you do, you can see here there are eleven-thousand,
six hundred-odd people who’d like to design a book cover for you.
However, they’re only going to design from the perspective of one designer: so if you
like the cover design, good; if you don’t, tough.
Another alternative is to work with a website called Elance.
If you look for designers on Elance, for example, you’ll find there are (in this case) thirty-six
thousand people who are willing to design for you.
Again however, this is going to be an individual or at best a little bureau.
So if you want to get a lot of different options, if you want to get fifty or a hundred different
covers to choose from, crowd competitions are the way to go.
So let me show you some examples of the kind of work you’ll be getting.
Now down here on the front page, you can see some examples of previous competitions.
Let’s have a look here: this one is for a logo.
You can see this person wanted a logo for the aviation industry, and they put three
hundred and ninety-four dollars up as the prize, thirty-nine designers competed and
there were one hundred and sixty-eight different logos.
Let’s have a look at some of those and you can see here as we move through there are
lots and lots.
These are the top entries; let’s look at all of the entries and you can see here there
are simply dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of entries.
So what you do is as the competition is progressing—and see here: there are pages and pages of options
here—you are guiding the designers to say which ones you like and which ones you don’t
like and what you need.
You can see some of those were withdrawn over the course of time.
Let’s go back to another design competition; in this case, let’s look at this one: this
is for packaging.
So again, six hundred and twenty dollars was the competition prize: thirty designers, one
hundred and thirty-four entries; and if you click in here, you can see some of the top
entries for that particular piece of packaging.
So the way that 99designs works is it’s leveraging the crowd: the skills of an entire
crowd of designers based on one person winning.
Not everybody agrees with this way of working, because of course if there’s one designer
winning that's twenty-nine who don’t get paid at all.
But certainly, it’s a great way to get loads of options when it comes to design.
When it comes to talking about your virtual team (which this is one aspect), please don’t
forget to have a little look at TimLevy.net.
The book that's most relevant is probably this one here, called The Entrepreneurial
Handbook, which talks about the concepts, tools and processes that you need to build
a terrific dynamic global team and it talks about Fiverr and Elance as well.
All right, I hope this video has been very useful to you talking about 99designs.