How we made a $25,000 website for $3,000 | Hacker News Reader

How we made a $25,000 website for $3,000

thomvest.com

37 pointshurricane60 comments

I have a big problem with this because it takes advantage of people who need the money, otherwise they wouldn't be participating in this kind of contest. It's one thing if you have ten participants and you pay the winner the equivalent of 10x the value of one site. But that's not happening here. If there are ten sites worth of work being done, only one site worth of pay is being spent.

Let's make a comparison:

Let's say a day's worth of yard work is worth $100. Ten home owners in a neighborhood need yard work done. They get ten unemployed people to each do the work on their homes. These people really need the money. At the end of the day, the person who does the best job gets the $100, and the rest get nothing. Ten houses worth of yard work has been done, but only one day's worth of pay is given out.

Yeah, you can get away with it, but it's because you're taking advantage of people. Just because you can ask for it and just because you'll find people to do it doesn't make it right.

Most of the complaints I hear about crowdsourced design services come from people who don't participate in them (just for the record, I don't either). It seems kind of presumptuous to say the designers are desperate and being taken advantage of. Maybe the long-term value is worth it for them (e.g., winning 10% of contests)? Maybe they find it a fun way to build experience?

It's easy to forget about revisions, it's not unusual for a simple project to go through 3 iterations and several meetings -- all of which sap up time.

In a healthy crowdsourcing process, failed bids aren't all that different from thrown out iterations and dead-end meetings (in the long term).

They are different - because some companies are left with the task of only creating iterations (for which there's no payment)

Hence the "healthy" part (I agree with the general tone of the comments that this instance seems a little less than healthy).

In general (like an average 99designs user) a long term process where you win 10% of the bids can be entirely fine. Especially if the trade off is towards spending more time designing and less time in meetings.

(Worth noting too, many designers submit slight variations of the same design to multiple contests)

Crowd-sourcing is sometimes just cleverly marketed exploitation.

What is the difference beween this and when I was just starting to learn online marketing, and I worked for free? The designers choose to enter the contest, they know how much their time is worth.

The difference is that the company actually used your ideas.

I think painting the people who partake in these 'contests' as victims is a bit hyperbolic ... they simply should know better.

Maybe if designers redirected their efforts from pouring opprobrium on the people who follow natural human tendency of wanting good work done on the cheap to educating members of their profession on the dangers of partaking in spec work ... things might be different.

"Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement."

What I hear you saying is that we should respect these businesses for providing designers with an opportunity to exercise bad judgement. Someone's gotta teach the hard lessons, right?

If they need the money, they should be looking for contract work or full-time work, not entering competitions. I'm for letting people try new methods of commerce and letting adults make their own decisions. Nobody was exploited here.

Where's the "new method of commerce" in "send us stuff for free and we'll pay one of you?"

Inbetween your second set of quotation marks.

Well then, someone should take that idea to a patent prosecutor and make some bank.

Trying to figure out what your point here was. I think you might be sarcastically suggesting that what I called "new", isn't "new"? If you are, then you've taken it out of context; I can try something new, without it being a brand new idea that nobody has done before. So can this company. That's what I was saying.

I have a full time job, and I do contract work on the side. I don't employ people. So I am one of those people who might have been "exploited". I didn't take part in this particular competition, but I'm glad for all opportunities, and I don't need protecting from them.

Let's make another comparison. Most of us pour everything we've got into our startups. The only difference is nobody asked us to build them, the rest of the story is the same - most people are going to waste a lot of their time and money.

Why would Johnny Designer deserve guaranteed money in this of all communities where we gamble years of our lives in the hope of getting paid? Like us he's chosen a route that only rewards a lucky few.

Not sure where to even start on this one. Spec work sucks, it wastes designer's time and the end product often doesn't turn out great because they have an incentive to spend as little time as possible.

But I have to say, this is even worse. Looking at point #4, they actively went out and tried to get as many designers as possible to do free work for them. From their post:

"The response rate was staggering, with around 85% responding and almost an equal amount actually submitting designs. The most time effective way to do this is to download an auto-text completer which allows you to save a message and quickly populate any document with it by selecting a shortcut."

Congratulations, you just figured out how to minimize your time spent while maximizing the hours wasted by the 'losing' designers. Or, in their own words... "For a minimal amount you are able to tap the creative abilities and talents of a multitude of people across the world. Why pay one designer 10 times more for a product you may not like?"

Edit: Not looking to get into a back in forth here, so I would recommend this to anyone who thinks design contests are a good idea: http://www.no-spec.com/faq

Hi tbgvi,

Thought the article made it clear, but we specifically went out and got designers we thought were good, especially from competing platforms. In total I believe that it ended up being around 10-15 messages that we sent out. I thought the auto-text completer was a useful tool for things I would be repeating anyway.

Also in the post you will note that we tried to stress giving feedback, if you don't like something you don't waste a designers time and you move on or they will come back with something else.

I understand designer's frustration with crowdsourcing, but this post was for other startup folks who don't/can't spend a great deal on a designer.

Finally, this wasn't a minimal time process. I spent a few hours every day for a few weeks responding, giving feedback, and iterating. It would have been much more simple to offload this to a designer who took care of everything, but at the end of the day I was happy with the result.

Whose fault is it if a designer chooses to engage in a contest and they end up spending their time in a losing effort?

We all have to compete but rather than disparage a business owner for being a good steward of their money could you instead present a valid argument for using a designer as opposed to a contest? Some good reasons why a designer, that might hypothetically cost 10x more than a contest, would be better money spent in the long run, would offer a lot of value to this conversation. I feel like the last quote in your post is valid. Why would someone want to pay a lot and possibly get nothing for it? Is that not a waste of the business owner's time and money?

I'm not trolling. As a business owner on a limited budget and with clients in the same boat, I'm genuinely interested in the answer.

A good designer would treat it as an actual design project rather than merely a "make it pretty" project. A good designer would step back and examine the actual business and functional problems and evaluate ways in which design could solve them. They'd work with the client to translate those problems and solutions into a visual and functional design.

Rather, in this project, it sounds like this Andrew.Tweed (the OP) attempted to solve all those problems himself, and then went shopping (shadily, I would say) for a photoshop monkey to solve his only issue, the "make pretty" part.

One of the other things you get working with a real designer is an actual relationship. When you need some collateral designed or work on a new project done, a designer that knows you and your business is invaluable. I wouldn't say it's impossible to find with some guy over the internet you paid $3000 to make your website, but I'd say it's less likely.

This may have been effective from a narrow viewpoint, but a real design process it was not.

A good designer wouldn't participate.

The part that's so frustrating is that thomvest (and lots of other companies) is in the business of creating relationships and yet they don't understand how having a relationship with a designer/agency will benefit them.

I completely agree.

If a company treats the people involved in its business relationships as cheap, expendable commodities - the company is not going to shine.

And it's an investor/partner/employer to avoid

Would you feel the same way if you thought you were hiring a designer and they sold you what amounts to a template that they've used for a hundred other clients? After all, the designer would merely be a good steward of his time by maximizing the value of work already done.

Selling the same work to multiple business owners is the flipside of spec'ing out to multiple designers. Think of it as a contest to see who the best businessperson is, by seeing who can derive the most business value from the same design.

Great point. It's interesting to think of crowdsourcing websites as just another channel through which designers can sell templates.

If the customization/client service end is kept to a minimum, a 10% conversion would probably be a pretty nice, relatively hassle-free business. There'd be an initial investment of time in developing a stock of templates to use, but after that, a designer could probably profit off the same work for quite some time, with a minimum of effort dropping in logos, changing colors and swapping stock photos.

And for every 'contest' won, a 99designer would make way more than they could selling a single psd template—not to mention having a much more aggressive sales strategy and zero advertising costs.

It kind of makes you wonder who's exploiting who.

I think the problem with this whole notion is that you didn't get a $25,000 website. The results look like something that could have been bought off of themeforest.net for $50 and installed in under an hour. Nothing wrong with that at all but let's not go conflating things.

And just to be clear, there are many amazing freelancers or small agencies out there that deal in the sub $5k price range that would provide the same level of service discussed in the blog post. Hell, as a small investment firm it should be obvious that there's room for both big and small and everything in between in any industry.

That's a pretty shady approach for a VC firm. Do they deal with startups in this way too?

In what way, specifically, is it shady? Is using a crowdsourced design service inherently shady?

Yes.

A nice word like "crowdsource" doesn't eliminate the exploitive aspects of this technique.

I wouldn't say its shady ... its just human nature to try and commoditize anything that costs money ... its up to designers to try and resist this ... plus you should be blaming the people that fall for it and are actively helping the (commoditization) process along.

Spec work controversy aside, they make a statement at the end I find ironic:

  The one big drawback is that it is a time-consuming endeavor, and to manage a good contest takes a decent amount of planning and focus.

I've worked through redesigns with many clients, and the time they spent on running this contest is on the low end. Plus, they did more work than they really needed to by emailing contributors and coding it themselves. If they want to take the easy way out (crowdsourcing) then they may as well go all the way.

Managing a "good contest" takes anything but a decent amount of planning and focus, and is not time consuming.

How could it ever be? In order to run a really top-notch contest, they would have to spend a lot of time and effort on each part of it, including the design. And how will they find somebody to design their contest for them?

The article is informative, but I don't find this approach really "ethical".

I'd second that. It's not about saving $22K, it's about getting people to give things away and devalue themselves as professionals.

No, actually it's about saving $22K.

Actually no it isn't because he got exactly what he paid for: A template-like design and a mess of code worth $2K-3K tops.

Instead of saving $22K what he actually did was waste time running an ego-stoking circus for two weeks.

Maybe this story would be better framed as "how to convince people that your $2K redesign is really worth $25K." I mean, if the guy is the CEO and this took two weeks, $22K "savings" over two weeks works out to about $500K/yr, which is probably near the value an average CxO sees in themselves.

I don't understand this viewpoint at all. No one is holding a gun to the designers heads. When I first got started in marketing and SEO, I did a lot of work for free. The confidence and references it gave me let me get paid work very soon after. Are you saying I shouldn't be allowed to do that?

Looks like a cookie cutter template.

Why not just use a premium wordpress theme, or the like? Get your '$25,000' website for closer to $100.

To back up my somewhat inflammatory comment, I'd like to add that a quick perusal of sites like http://www.freepsd.com/ or http://www.elegantthemes.com/ will back up the contention that it looks like a template you could get anywhere much more cheaply.

I'd bet that the crowdspring designer either based their work on a template from a site like this, or developed templates of their own that they reuse on project after project. It's the most efficient way to do spec work. It's what the business model rewards. Anyone doing time consuming original or creative work burns out quickly after investing hours in work they were never paid for.

Browsing websites like 99designs or crowdSPRING, it seems like all you see are three column layouts with slideshow. The most standout aspect of this one is that it's not blue. But since most of the clients on crowdsourcing websites seem to want the same design as everyone else, this model seems to work for all parties involved.

The only losers are the clients, who are overpaying for templates they could procure more cheaply elsewhere.

Woah, hold on. Their website is not worth $25,000. They would have gotten a bad deal if they paid $10k for it.

If they would have put the same amount of time finding a competent agency they may have ended up with a better site for at little as $5-6k.

Inline styles, tables, 344 validation errors, no meta descriptions and 88 objects (coming in at 800kb/page) loading. 25,000?

Also why is the blog homepage a single post?

Still trying to make up my mind about crowd sourcing, but I like to compare it to the well-established practice of architecture contests. That system also gets criticism for forcing architects to do a lot of work without a guarantee of being paid anything, but nevertheless it is broadly accepted: big-name bureaus participate in them too. The reason why it works, imo, is because the potential reward is much bigger. They might spend weeks preparing an entry, but in case of a win it's usual to have months or years worth of paid work. In my eyes, for web design/software crowd sourcing to gain the credibility needed to attract more than starters looking for a foot in the door, it will need the same effort/reward ratio. For example, you design a specific part of the future website in detail, and the winner gets to redesign the whole site. That way, the client still has the benefit of getting more than well-written intentions in a project proposal, and the contestants know that the potential reward is bigger than being paid for what he has already done.

Eh, all is fair in war and business. They didn't break any laws, so let's throw fair and ethical out the window.

First off, who is to say this site is a 25K site? Web developer rates are all over the map, you can pretty much pull any number out of your ass in declaring how much your site could have cost to build. I bet I could have found someone who would have charged 50K. ;)

This site was done in only three weeks. That includes the time taken to figure out all this stuff and gather submissions. They also essentially took the design and coded the site themselves, that's going to take a chunk out of the cost. This site wasn't very complex to take that long.

So, you did a lot of the work yourself. That's going to take a big chunk out of the cost. A lot of people aren't willing to do this. Some people just want to deal with one person who is a professional in this industry. People doing work for free aren't industry professionals, they are doing this on the side (or they are bored.)

So... why did it cost you so much then? I bet I could have done it for $1500, but not for someone else. ;)

Would anyone care to explain the prevalence of comments from designers complaining about "spec work"? I had never heard this term applied in a derogatory manner before. Is the idea that because you are an "artist" you are somehow exempt from the economics of competitive pricing?

http://www.no-spec.com/

It's not about competitive pricing - it's about working for free.

Spec work involves doing a unit of bespoke work for a company, for the chance of payment. It's not fair - and there aren't many industries which operate this way. I totally abhor the concept.

I'm guessing many of the designers on those sites are from developing countries, where even the chance of landing a $3000 contract would mean a great deal to themselves and their families. So yes, it is competition: somebody is willing to do the same work for less.

I can see how this rankles the establishment, to which I say, Welcome to the 21st century. You don't get a free pass any more simply because you live in the first world.

This isn't creating some brave new world - levelling the playing field for all .. if you believe that you're quite simply bonkers :)

The injustice isn't that some people are being paid less - it's that some people aren't being paid at all.

On top of this there's one person, or company, who is wholly benefiting from the situation, while another takes a cut of the proceeds.

Logically, the system works because some people are willing to work for free. It's rotten.

This is what I was getting at in my original post: why do so many people feel the need to render a moral judgement on the behalf of others? If it's rotten, don't participate. Everyone using those sites does so of their own free will.

For the same reason you've been replying in this thread: it concerns you. Similarly, if you don't like peoples' comments here, why refer to them or reply to them at all? Just ignore them. See how anti-social your line of logic is?

Last post on this and I'm finished. Read the comments I was originally referring to. They are not of the "This threatens my way of life and my stream of income, and I'm concerned about it" variety. I would have no problem with that.

Rather, they uniformly denounce the whole practice as immoral and wrong. They disguise their own self-interest as a moral argument. Why? Because admitting that's its their own asses they are looking out for immediately begs the question, isn't that what all these spec designers are doing as well?

At which point the argument is shot, unless you happen to believe that by some preordained right certain people should be allowed to pursue happiness and wealth, while others should not. Now /that/ is anti-social.

I don't think crowdsourcing is allowing many people to pursue happiness and wealth.

Well .. unless you include the company operating the service :)

I was aware of crowdsourcing design, but I like how the article outlined each step of their process. Looking forward to the next one about figuring out the message to convey with a site's design.

Two words: "View Source"

I second that. Good front-end coding, just like good graphic design is a real skill not a cheap commodity. I don't see who has gained from this exercise except as an example of how not to get your website made.

Can any designers here give us a clue on how much it would've taken them to make a design of about that quality? Naturally if you work no spec it's going to be better... but approximately?

We can't judge because we don't know the inputs. We don't know what the site looked like before and we don't know what the requirements were, what the company asked for. You can't extrapolate from a finished product.

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