Matt started his first company, SitePoint, while still in high school, and has leveraged his early success into two additional companies, 99designs and Flippa. 99designs, has hosted more than 130,000 design contests and paid designers more than $30 million since its founding in 2008 and secured $35M in VC funding in 2011.
2. What is it?
• “Disruptive innovation displaces existing
businesses, in a way that the market does not
expect - typically by designing for a different
set of consumers and later by lowering prices
in an existing market” - Wikipedia
10. Hiring a Designer -
Old Process
• Ask around for designer recommendations
• Spend hours reviewing portfolios
• Spend days trying to get a reply to your email
• Negotiate price & contract terms (rinse & repeat above steps if too
expensive)
• Be told the designer is going away on holiday during the middle of your
project and there will be a delay
• Possibly end up with designs you don’t like, get charged $75/hour for further
revisions or be stuck paying an invoice for work that you’re only so-so happy
with
11. Hiring a Designer -
Crowsdourcing
• You set the budget upfront
• No portfolios to review
• No contract negotiations
• Guaranteed results in 7 days
• Get dozens of designers / hundreds of
original designs to choose from
• Don’t like any of them? Refund!
12. Birth of 99designs
• The Unexpected: “Design Contests” Forum Becomes Popular on SitePoint
• Creates lots of headaches, so we start charging $10 via PayPal to start a
Forum Thread
• Starts making 4-figures/month, we invest 6-weeks with 1 designer & 1
developer building an MVP and giving it more visibility
• Mainstream SMBs start using us, despite no marketing, little documentation,
and bad UX
• We decide to create a spin-off in 2007, launch Feb 2008
19. 99designs - The Stats
• $39 million in payouts to designers
• 158,000 design contests
• New design uploaded every 5 seconds!
• Dozens of designer meetups worldwide
27. Questions?
matt@99designs.com
New startup:
DeveloperAuction.com
Notas do Editor
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Let’s take a look at some examples... Square allows anyone to accept credit cards with a cell phone and a $10 dongle\n
Barry, from SecondMarket, allowed private individuals to buy Facebook shares years before the IPO\n
AirBnB allowed tens of thousands of people to rent out spare rooms in their apartments and houses, while disrupting the hotel industry\n
iStockPhoto allowed designers and small businesses to buy stock photos for a buck\n
... and uber, eliminated the need to hail a cab, by providing an on-demand car service accessible from any smart phone\n
and Plenty of Fish challenged Match.com by starting the first 100% free dating website\n
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Let’s dive into one particular example that I’m very familiar with - crowdsourcing graphic design. The old process, for the vast majority of people was fundamentally broken... \n
the new model, created by 99designs, radically shifted the rules and eliminated a TON of problems with the old model\n
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However, wherever there is a disruptor, there are people on the opposite side of the fence\n
Uber-cab, which disrupted the taxi industry starting in San Francisco with its on-demand car service, was also not without its opponents, being issued a cease & desist order and forced to drop the word “cab” from its name.\n
Even AirBnB got a lot of backlash, not only from the city where it’s founded, but hoteliers and legislators in NYC, where it’s technically illegal to have rentals for less than a month.\n
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In the case of 99designs, the AIGA and a handful of designers, objected to the entire model of working on spec -- that is, submitting work without guarantee of payment. Yet the crowdsourcing design model works for tens of thousands of designers in our community who use us to supplement their income, find new clients, or earn a full-time living.\n