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.
