99design Founders Invest $460,000 In Tweaky.com | Hacker News Reader

99design Founders Invest $460,000 In Tweaky.com

thenextweb.com

43 pointsantr24 comments

While I'm sure tptacek will jump in to rant about the perils of less-than-a-day-at-a-time consulting, I think this is a great idea. At one point last year I had a CSS problem I couldn't figure out (I think it was about how to add some space somewhere -- I managed to hack around it with HTML but I wanted a "proper" CSS solution) and I would have happily paid for the 30 seconds of thought it would have taken a CSS expert to solve it for me.

Instead, I inserted a  comment and someone sent me an email a few days later.

We had a slide in our pitch deck from Joshua Schachter where he was trying to find someone for a similar problem.

@joshu: "Business idea: CSS helpdesk. Because I am about to rip my hair out"

@joshu: "i'm serious. Pay $10 for css help RIGHT NOW. Operators are standing by?"

I think tptacek and patio11's arguments are a bit more nuanced, when you look at the context and which side of the transaction they are on. For example, patio11's recommendation to use themeforest.

I don't think either of them would have a problem using this service (for something like fixing their nephews Pokemon page), but if you want to be a top tier consultant/freelancer You most definitely don't want to be a part of this service.

None the less, rant on Thomas!

The design or css irc channels always have people in there willing to help.

As per a comment below, designers/people "don't know what IRC is." I agree with you (and anyone working in web should understand its technologies -- past and present), but that's an argument.

Did you ever try one of these outsourcing sites which have no minimal amount for projects? I usually just go with fiverr in these cases. In fact I use it so much that it almost feels like the craigslist of digital services and can't help myself from speculating that many of similar services to tweaky (e.g. psd to html/wordpress, implement x to my site, all the way to testimonial videos) are using fiverr to source their business.

What's the difference between this site and freelance websites besides the limit? I had many tweaks done through freelancer.com and the responses are almost instant.

I'm not being cynical, but are they purposefully holding back some of the more important details on the "How it works" on http://www.tweaky.com/

I can't actually find the details on this. Is this an offline service, or are you expected to provide access to your development server?

This is what I think it would say (which would scare the hell out of me)...

1. Submit your brief

2. We assign each task a $25 charge.

3. You pick a developer.

4. You provide FTP details to your live production server

I think it is mostly revolving around fixing CSS or markup so you don't have to provide anything really, besides the link to live version.

That is limiting though, I imagine I would think twice before sending either credentials for production server or entire source or something.

There are many people who won't care about providing a designer with production server credentials. I'm guessing it's probably the same people who are looking for $25 tweaks. In fact, those same people would probably see it as a perk to the service that the designer implements the code for you.

The "safety" probably comes from them being hand-picked.

For those that care, they could make the CSS changes and image uploads themselves.

Currently online.

Having talked to the tweaky guys last week -- they are aware of the potential concern -- have some mitigations (encryption/etc) in place -- don't feel that it's a massive concern of the target market -- and have prototypes of more detailed technical solutions.

In short -- smart guys - and they have a strategy to deal with it if the market says that random developer access to prod is bad. (And I think the market for $25 tweaks is probably ok with that anyway)

This is an interesting idea but I'm afraid that their target market isn't going to be the guys who know their FTP information and will have to at least bug their existing site provider for it and who knows how long that will take. Other than that getting their name out there to these people is even harder because again the target market from what I've seen doesn't usually have a clue to what's going on besides Facebook and email. Once they figure this out though their market will expand greatly.

Um, there's this "service" called IRC. They mostly do same thing, and you have the opportunity to get "fixed" by the creators of the technology involved.

Most people don't know about IRC. I know that makes your head explode, but most of the designers I've talked to either thought it was a social chatroom or have never even heard of it.

If designers, our counter-parts, don't know about IRC how is the pet shop owner in Omaha, NE supposed to know about it when their designer bails and wants to change "this one little thing" on their website?

Yes, I blurted out. I was just pondering on the idea of frontending IRC channels somehow to provide similar service.

A "tweak" is basically their way of saying a half an hour's worth of work (http://www.tweaky.com/faq). All those home page examples would be much more than a tweak besides maybe "remove white space". I think it's misleading. It would be WAY more than $150 to make all the adjustments to that example.

There's a new service coming, but with $0 changes, and the developers are charged $100/yr.

Well done guys, great to see this going big after seeing you working on it for months.

Great idea, well executed with a very attractive pricing model. I do wonder though how I can get my crappy, classic ASP table-layout site tweaked for a fixed price of $25 for each change.

> from $25

Hah. Just saw Matt yesterday

I find it fascinating that an earlier version of this story -- which did not namecheck 99designs -- has basically languished in the doldrums.

nice work @nedwin. great to see it get off the ground from startup weekend melbourne.

Congratulations guys

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