iLevel 2 Laptop Stand

@hemeon I've been intrigued with Design Inc since launch. What about the v1 marketplace didn't work? (I enjoy Undo btw!)

@hemeon Hey Marc, it is a great concept and I am always keen on marketplaces that enable people from different parts of the world to make things together. With engineering background, I started learning design since last year and went through a few design iterations with different designers. Some thoughts here: 1) I worked with two designers, one is the referral from a designer friend, the other is the referral from one of the engineers since they work together very well. Both of them are incredible but very different styles though. The endorsement from someone you trust is quite important. For example, if I get 5 quotes back, if one of them is recommended by my friend, the likelihood that I will go with that is much higher. 2) The transition from designer 1 to designer 2 took a bit time. I had to explain the business, branding, personas, everything before the 2nd designer could get started. More ever, similar to programming, everyone brings their own style and takes so they tend to change things to their likes even those change may not seem to be critical at one point. So this made me think: if I use one designer on DesignInc to start one project, I would prefer the same designer for future iterations and other related projects under the same product (such as pitch deck, illustration etc). How do you keep them on the platform? Overall, great concept!

@cmconsing Super great question Carl - we kept a lot from the first version like messaging, designer portfolios (mine is up at desgininc.com/hemeon) and you can even hire folks from their portfolios for set services like a logo or a pitch deck. Here is what we learned and this is why we made 2.0: - We had a lack of transactions, despite demand. - Transaction fees are hard to pull off when a transaction is made online, but the service is delivered offline. - High priced design services require a human to sell the service and interact with the user. For a successful transactions on our platform we were calling people on the phone or having hour long chats to close the deal - even for simple logo projects for a few grand. - Most customers cannot authorize transactions to hire labor - they need approval. - Due to the high dollar amount of our transactions, users were not willing to pay with credit card, asked to be invoiced - Design Services are wildly variable making them difficult to narrow and commoditize. Users scope never quite fit into the service buckets we defined. - Many users are ok with "good enough" design - in other words, if they have a limited budget then we found they reduced their quality expectation.

@viviancromwell we have learned the core problem we need to solve is helping you find a great person to work with. If you find a designer through Design Inc. and then want to keep working with them for all your design work (pitch decks, illustrations etc.) then do it! We think it's weird to try and max out every dime and nickel and we don't really care about keeping a job or someone tied to a platform. Most designers are strong in one skillset, so we know you will eventually be back to Design Inc. to find someone else to augment your team in the future. If we can help you find a great person, then we have done our job. I will admit, We wanted to initially take care of the entire process of working with and hiring someone, and this is what we built at first - payments, portfolios, messaging and status updates. At the end of the day the core problem people had was simple - how can I find a designer to help me, so thats what the new 2.0 and the new focus is all about ;)

@hemeon hey marc, great insight. what you described would have been my initial take on the product as well. but users often have their own mindset how they want to use the product.

@mat148 thanks for your questions lets dive right in! 1) Why join Design Inc.? we have a great community, shared slack group, and we share a lot of great templates, tips and general help designers out - I've been a designer for a while now and wanted a community I could be proud to be a part of. You could join Design Inc. and never even use what we just shipped - in fact you could get your account and have your profile at designinc.com/matmorse and just have folks work with you through that link - up to you on how you want to use our platform :) 2) Quality of client projects - so, since we launched we have projects for $20k and projects at $250, some projects have great descriptions and others I wonder if they know how to speak english - we are a free marketplace and anyone can post a project - so this means you are going to get some bad projects from time-to-time - but we are building tools and introducing rules to get rid of bad projects - for example, we introduced a rule yesterday, if a project doesn't get any bids for 2 days then it is removed from the platform. We will also focus on educating customers and helping them to understand how to create a truly compelling project. 3) One of the reasons we have moved to our new model is so we don't have to be the design police. Since we still have the feature that allows designers to transact we do occasionally have to get involved with a dispute. Thankfully we have only had one dispute the entire time and we ended up deciding to let the designer keep their deposit but not receive the additional payment, the reason being the design work done was not anywhere close to the design work we had seen from the designer in their portfolio when we approved them - the client kept asking to push the design and the designer just didn't do what the client asked. We are very transparent with our community and are truly trying to build something great for designers and users alike!

@hemeon Thanks for taking the time to answer. 1 ) This sounds great, very helpful. I've been looking for a community, so this might just be the one. 2 ) That makes sense. Hopefully the platform will steer clients away from thinking design is a cheap, easy, and quick task ( at least to get quality ). 3 ) I appreciate the transparency. That sounds like you made the right choice in that dispute. My only hope is that you can keep it up when you start expanding. I wish you all the luck, my application has been turned in and I look forward to diving deeper into the service.

@mat148 Good questions. I've been using the services for 2 days now and I'm specially concerned about 2. Seems like most of the current client projects are really bad described. It's almost impossible to quote these kind of projects. And it's not really the client's fault, it's just a matter of educating the client as you explained @hemeon. Different types of projects need additional context. Definitely need to build in some qualifiers/rules or some guidelines for the client. I've used 10 credits just to get some additional context :).

@robturlinckx @hemeon Yeah thats what I was worried about. Maybe some sort of report feature that tells the client to add more context and then put their project back up. Bad project descriptions can really hurt both the client and freelancer.

@colmtuite Sorry mate, we have had a great deal of applications and are scaling up slow and steady right now. But check your email, maybe Santa came early?

@colmtuite hey Colm thanks for your patience, we were super heads down on 2.0 now that we have this out we can start letting more designers back in. Sick Michael Jackson solo btw.

@zinssmeister @hemeon He came!

@colmtuite nice!

@colmtuite @zinssmeister @hemeon Inappropriate caption

@joshua_ariza Hi Josh! Frankly we have seen pretty wide diversity so far, but we see lots of logos, marketing site designs. Thankfully we are seeing more product design type of projects come in where folks need throughtful user experience and visual design for their applications. We have seen a few long term contracts like "i need a designer for 20 hours a week for the next 4 monhts" and some very short term stuff like "put my logo on a transparent background" which lets a designer make $200 in 10 mins. We had some neat writing projects on the platform as well.

@venturejakef thank you Jake! We are trying hard to add value to the design industry, while building a great company. This new feature set has been the result of many months of hard work. Trying various models and building out a lot of ideas. Everyone on the team did an amazing job at iterating fast and I hope our users and designers feel it 🙌

@gregchristian thanks Greg!

@jeremykovacs sorry to see you go - perhaps reach out to those on the community and chat with them :) lots of happy freelancers there.