Crowdsourcing design startup 99designs is putting its own product to the test with a competition to redesign its homepage. The company, which connects businesses in need of design help with freelancers willing to compete for design work, wrote a request of its own, asking its 158,000 registered designers to revamp its site for a chance to win one of three $1000 prizes.
To company CEO Patrick Llewellyn, using 99designs is a great way for any lithe start-up to get design help without stretching its resources. “We’ve got lots of different projects on the go, and not enough design resources internally,” he says. “What better way of thinking about how we can do this than running a contest for our community?”
Each contest on 99designs works like this: customers can create a brief to give designers a clear, detailed idea of what they’re looking for, from logos to websites to stationary, mobile apps and more. Depending on their budgets, they can choose between bronze, silver and gold packages (for example, between $299 and $699 for a logo, or between $599 and $1,499 for a website). Then, as designers submit ideas, customers can collaborate with them, explaining what they like and don’t like. Once users find something they want, they pick the winner and get the final design and a copyright for the original work. 99designs gets a cut that averages between 20and 30 percent of the fee, and the rest goes to the designer. Simple.
This isn’t the first time 99designs has started its own contest. In the past the company has hosted light-hearted challenges, like a contest to invent a new hairstyle, and more timely ones, like designing a new logo for The Gap after the retailer’s revised mark was widely panned back in 2010. But this time, contest entrants will be putting their work in front of famous guest judges, including lean startup guru Eric Ries, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and 99designs co-founder Mark Harbottle.
Though bringing in such heavy hitters could be seen as a move to push back against 99designs detractors who have complained that high volume doesn’t make up for low-quality design work, Llewellyn says it’s simply a smart move by a smaller company in need of design help.
“The driver for us is that we need this work done,” Llewellyn says. “It’s less about what other people think. But if that’s an offshoot and we get to show off some cool work, that will be great.”
99designs has a transoceanic origin story. Back in 1998, a Canadian teenager named Matt Mickiewicz needed to build a website, so he documented his experience online, giving advice to others. As Mickeiwicz’s Web design forum grew, Harbottle, who lived in Melbourne, began selling his software through the site. Eventually, Harbottle realized that it was a great business opportunity, so he reached out to Mickiewicz and suggested that they go into business together.
Despite his Web prowess, Mickiewicz was only seventeen. So he stayed in Canada, and Mickiewicz and Harbottle built their company, called Sitepoint, via long-distance collaboration. At the time, Sitepoint distributed books on design and development and hosted different forums including a Web development and designer forum. Soon, designers took over the threads, inventing a sort of design tennis match where people would post fictional briefs and hold contests to see who could come up with the best design. At first it was just for fun, a way for designers to bounce ideas off each other. But then a designer building a website in need of a logo asked the forum to submit logo ideas, and offered to pay them if he picked one.
“All of this was just happening in a forum thread,” Llewellyn says. “Mark saw all of this activity and said, ’I wonder if there is a business here?’”
Harbottle decided to start charging a listing fee to see if that killed off the forum. But people were willing to pay $10 to post a brief. Then $20. In 2008, Sitepoint spun out 99designs as its own product.
“It was essentially observing a naturally occurring behavior inside this designer forum, then creating a minimally viable product,” Llewellyn says. “It was a wacky start-up in this little business called Sitepoint.”
Four years after it was founded, the company has grown to more than 55 employees, relocated its headquarters from Melbourne to San Francisco, hosted 136,000 design contests, and paid out $33.8 million to designers. In 2012 alone, the company expects to pay out $25 million.
“It’s been a really interesting ride,” Llewellyn says. “The most interesting thing is that for the first 3½ years of existence, we didn’t spend any money on marketing. We were all word of mouth. We had a really big
