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Not to knock your website at all, I think it is really well designed, neat and I think that affordable quality logo design is a very important service that many
by tgriesser 16y ago
Not to knock your website at all, I think it is really well designed, neat and I think that affordable quality logo design is a very important service that many people need and do not know where to turn for help.
Unless you are outsourcing the designs, similar to 99designs and company, I wouldn't consider the business a startup by traditional definition.
When I read the description that PG gives to what it means to be a startup it really opened my eyes and was definitely a turning point in the way that I thought about designing products.
"A company has to be more than small and newly founded to be a startup. There are millions of small businesses in America, but only a few thousand are startups. To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business. By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn't scale. To be a startup you need to be the band that sells a million copies of a song, not the band that makes money by playing at individual weddings and bar mitzvahs."
So if you are looking to be a startup, you will need think about how you can mass produce the designs. That being said not all companies are startups, and that is fine - sometimes it's just good to know the difference between the two...I know it helped me a lot. Again, think the website is great and I don't mean this as a negative.
from: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
EDIT: I didn't mean this to be a negative at all, I think anyone who takes the initiative to create something and has the drive to actually get it started has done something great. I wish there were more people who actually did shit like this rather than just talked about it.
- chrishaum 16y ago[Updated. The first version of this comment didn't address some important points.] Actually, I am outsourcing the designs. I've gathered a team of designers (five of them, currently) who design the logos for me on a commission basis, allowing me to scale my expenses as I make sales. The web platform I have set up allows clients to communicate with designers directly through the design process. As this is the first version of my site, I am offering only a one-size-fits-all service to clients right now. As I work on marketing v1.0, however, I am also developing v2.0, a logo design marketplace. One of the many good questions that has been raised in these comments is how to compete with established design marketplaces. Here are some of the ways I have considered. - Offer equivalent services with a lower fee. - Add additional services, such as an hour of brand consulting before the logo is designed, or assistance in placing the logo on the client website/etc. - Providing a more complete branding package with letterhead, stationery, and website design. In what other ways could I compete? Perhaps the most fundamental question is whether this market is so crowded and has such established/successful companies in it already that I should not attempt to direct in the logo market completely. In that case, what other niches have you seen that are similar but less crowded? I am not opposed to pivoting. An open question is how I will be able to maintain customer satisfaction and also keep logo quality at a high level, while scaling my services.