Appreciate the link, that was one of the contests we checked out while thinking about the SXSW concept. I think that the design and interactive nature (no video) of vator's contest could be improved a bit but it is a good example.
122 karma · joined January 27, 2011
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.
Well I guess that is more job security depending on what you want. You can always go back to doing startups, plus you will know a bunch of other engineers who may hop on board with you.
If you know the type of work you want to do, have a list of some of the stuff you have coded/what languages you know, and/or are interested in a specific company we have feel free to shoot me an email and I will try to help out (info is on Nathan's blog).
Appreciate the feedback, new to hacker news and I titled it that way because of the sentence "What amazes me is how poorly crafted many of these presentations are." Apologize if it wasn't best practice.
Agree that the number 4 bullet seemed vague. The way I read "value" was "cheapness" rather than creating value-add, but I might be reading it wrong.