Ask HN: How do you hire freelance designers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you hire freelance designers?

3 pointseduardordm7 comments

I've been trying to hire a freelance designer to build me a landing page for 3 days. I went to dribble.com and tried to contact exactly 21 designers. NONE of them answered to my emails. How do you people hire designers?

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My experience with quality designers on dribbble is that they don't take on very small jobs. They get hit up a lot so you have to appear worthwhile ($$$). Here is the email I used to reach out and got 8 responses contacting 12 designers:

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Hi [name],

I'm the co-founder of [startup]. I saw your work on Dribbble - impressive! We are looking to do a design overhaul and I wanted to chat to see if this is something you would be interested in.

Would you have some time this week to jump on a skype call?

Thanks

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Your project could be too small for them to respond. Have you considered 99designs or using Elance, Odesk, etc?

I'll try 99designs. I don't like the way Elance works, it's feels way too focused on getting me to signed up (and paying) instead of getting my project to work.

How do you format your emails?

If you have a site, you can create a careers page and keep a backlog of developers/designers to have for when you need any.

Of course, networking is a great way to go, and also give you another source of resume backlogs.

This is pretty much the standart e-mail I've been sending:

Hi X

I'm a startup founder in Y We have a product that is finished (functionality-wise) but we are not designers at all. We used twitter bootstrap to build a good of this app, which is pretty ok for now. Thing is, we can't get to build a good welcome page. The welcome page is pretty much a login/signup page with some text and screenshots in it. (see attachment)

I would like to know if you are available and if you could provide me some quotation to build us a single welcome page containing a login and signup. You would use twitter bootstrap and the html that is already there (we could customize if required).

what is your budget and timeline?

Can you ask your network vs cold call emails?

Maybe check out - http://www.scoutzie.com/

It's interesting, really. In this specific case, I find myself stuck in a situation where maybe I'm an opportunity lots of people are waiting for, but at the end, no one takes.

Shoot me an email, I might be able to help you with it.

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