Design Inc. - High quality design work on demand from hand-picked talent

@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 Congrats on the launch Marc 🚀

@hemeon congrats!

@hemeon Congrats on the launch, Marc! Hoping to get accepted soon and see how it compares to TopTal, Crew, Gigster, etc.

@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.

@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.

@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. 🤔

@rrhoover @rogerdickey you bet! Roger feel free to reach out - would love to chat!

@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.

@alexwinkyface people who take pride in their brand, I think $3k is a solid investment, have you seen the shit on fiverrrrrrrr !

@marktmcewan we definitely see a need above 99designs and fiverr- now time to see if the market agrees with us.

@brandwinnie Thanks for the kind words Brand! rock on!

@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.

@krisryanwhite Kris stay tuned, many more wonderful services coming to Design Inc. soon :)

@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.

@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.