The Cheap Revolution

Cheap Design Resource - 99Designs Crowdsources Design of your Wordpress Theme or Logo

Crowdsourcing is a new tool in the entrepreneur's arsenal.   According to Wikipedia, the term crowdsourcing first appeared in a Fast Company article in 2006.  The term is defined as:

the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call.

For entrepreneurs this provides an amazing opportunity to tap into a global pool of talent for everything from designing your Web site to designing a tee shirt to creating your logo at very affordable prices.   Platforms have emerged to manage the process of crowd-sourcing and savvy startups are using them to move quickly with a splash of style.

Today we spotlight one such crowdsourcing platform in 99 Designs.   99Designs is one of the original leaders in crowdsourcing and has provided businesses with over 50,000 designs.   While they started out with logos, 99Designs can now be used to help design:

• Logos
• Web sites
• Wordpress themes
• Stationary and business cards
• Tee Shirts
• Banner Ads

I've used 99Designs in the past and they provide a well managed process which moves along very quickly.    If you need a design in a pinch, they provide a great solution for startups.   Starting at just $99, the price point grows as more designers and more customization is added.  However, entire Wordpress themed sites can be designed and built for $595.   

In our work with entrepreneurs, finding good Wordpress themes has become a pressing issue.  99Designs gives you a professional platform, backed by a money-back satisfaction guarantee to ensure you are satisfied with your design and project.   Given the challenges in finding quality designers who can deliver, this is a terrific option to consider.

The process is straightforward. You fill out a brief detailing information about your Company and what you're looking for. After you determine how much you're willing to pay and set a time duration, you post your contest and designers submit their designs. This is the most exciting part of the process as you get to see the various directions you can take your logo. Tip: Provide feedback from the beginning by rating the designs, disqualify designers who are not providing the type of work you're looking for and answer questions as soon as possible. The more engaged you are during the process, the more likely you'll receive something you're happy with. 

Are there any drawbacks to crowdsourcing approaches like 99Designs?  Sure.  As with anything, there are pros and cons.   Designers may recycle some of their design concepts to get started quickly.   After all, to make 99Designs work for them, they have to bid on several projects.   That means you may end up with designs that aren't 100% unique to your business. To combat this, be viligent about checking their previous designs and ratings. 

If you are hoping to build an intimate, long-term working relationship with your designer, then the arms-length process managed by 99Designs might not work as well for you.   The designers are mostly anonymous, which is necessary to make the 99Designs business model work. 

For most startups, these tradeoffs are minor compared to the advantage of inexpensive, professional quality design that a 99Designs project can provide.   Check 99Designs out and see how they can help you get started on your brand. 

Disclaimer: 99Designs is an affiliate marketing partner of CheapRevolution.com that provides advertising revenue to this blog.

Climbing the Pyramid of Marketing Mastery

Team and a Dream's Skip Shuda provides a short introduction on the "Marketing Pyramid of Needs" in this five minute screencast.

This simple framework encourages you to follow the three simple marketing steps towards mastery of "See it, Say it and Be it".  By walking up each step of the pyramid, you can ensure that you have all the elements in place for a successful marketing effort. It can also help you to answer questions like, "When am I ready for a Blog?" or "Can Social Media really help my company?". If you haven't done the necessary preparatory work, then your premature marketing efforts can be wasted.

Furthermore, the framework sets the stage for the successful measurement of marketing efforts.  A marketing metrics dashboard is a key component to ensure that you stay on the path to Market Mastery once you've started your journey. The framework is discussed in more detail on a recent article at the HP Logoworks Blog article "See it. Say it. Be it. Multi-Channel Marketing in a Web 2.0 World" by Skip Shuda.

By: Skip Shuda

Creating Significance in a World of Abundance

At the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit in Philadelphia yesterday, Author Dan Pink (A Whole New Mind) talked about how design was a combination of utility and significance. In today’s economy, much of the value and margin in a product or service is created by significance.

In the course of doing business, the differentiators I often hear are along the lines of:

• We have great people
• Our consulting methodology sets us apart
• We focus on quality

  Having another project management methodology is not differentiated.

  In the past few years, I’ve been approached by at least three separate clients who have cool software that facilitates collaboration, project management and content management. While they often have nice interfaces and slick organization, they are very similar to popular products on the web that are free (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/netoffice/ ) or very inexpensive (see http://www.basecamp.com ).

  Tell me why its different?

  Its probably not – and that is a problem. If it is hard to understand the difference – or requires deep knowledge, then it isn’t significant.

  Here are three ways that you can differentiate your service and create significance:

  Geography. How can you take advantage of your knowledge of a local geography? Perhaps you know the nooks and crannies better than most. Maybe you understand the nuances of the culture in a given region, enabling others to do business there more effectively through you.

  For example, two Brooklyn transplants loved their new home of Philaedelphia so much that they started doing customized tours of Philadelphia for other New Yorkers seeking to move. (See www.movetophilly.com )

  Another example: A startup specializes in online marketing packages geared to the local market. Small businesses like restaurants, dentists and spas turn over their online marketing efforts to this firm and they use their knowledge of the space and online marketing venues for small firms to drive business to the clients. (See www.natpal.com )

  Technology. Perhaps you have purchased a new piece of equipment that enables you to perform a process that none of your competition can. Maybe you understand the latest and greatest advancements in a particular industry better than most.

  Ian Cross of I-Site (www.i-site.com) works to stay on top of the latest Web 2.0 trends and technologies. He is constantly experimenting and attempting new applications using the latest and newest techniques. Next time I launch a new web application that needs to be on the cutting edge, I know who I am going to call.

  Market. My favorite way to create significance is by selecting a micro-vertical market. Today’s economy allows you to access a larger marketplace than ever before. Therefore being too specialized is much less of a problem then it used to be. Being too general is a BIG problem.

  Some examples of market significance that I like are:

  www.recruitmilitary.com – competing as a recruiter is tough, tough business. Sometimes it seems that there are as many recruiters as there are candidates! But this firm has found an important niche. “There has never been a better time to hire a veteran!” is their tagline.

  www.secure-24.com – this computer hosting and internet service company found a way to create meaning in a crowded marketspace. By focusing their efforts on creating world class, secure solutions with redundancy plans and geographic separation, they have been able to set themselves apart from the competition while servicing the emerging markets in financial services and other worlds that are hyper-concerned with compliance, data integrity and security.

  Ask yourself how your business can create significance.

Are you competing on price or value?

"Are you competing on price or value?"

My friend "Mikey" asked me this about a new offering I plan to roll out to my Team and a Dream clients. It seemed like a good, solid question.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the answer was "both". Of course, with traditional offerings, you are either trying to provide "good enough" value at a low price point (competing on price) or you are trying to distinguish yourself with excellence, depth or insight (competing on value).

If we look deeper into the mechanics of delivering products from these two perspectives, we see that they each gravitate towards one end of a polar extreme.

Price competitive offerings emphasize efficiency, low-cost labor and factory-like approaches to production. Many of the Universal Freelance Services follow this model.

Value-based competition focuses on the highest quality by using the "best" materials (the newest, most durable, most attractive) manipulated in the hands of elite professionals with a great deal of experience and education. We talk about these "value oriented" services as "Specialized Services" in The Cheap Revolution. They are generally NOT a part of the Cheap Revolution.

There is another path advocated by The Cheap Revolution. The path is that of The Hybrid Offering. The Hybrid Offering consists of three parts:

• Templatized Wisdom. Elements of methodology that represent "boiled-down" and extracted expertise
• Affordable Muscle. Sources of competent and effectively employed knowledge work from under-utilized market segments (university interns, stay-at-home moms, etc.)
• Executive-level Expertise. Well placed expertise to guide the offering - just a pinch here and there.

  By thoughtfully combining these ingredients, service providers can put together powerful offerings that compete on the basis of price AND value.

Different kinds of Cheap

Say you want to create a new logo for your startup. You type “Logo” into your web search engine and Voila! The World Wide Web provides you with 1.8 Billion choices of sites that talk about logos.

You find logo guides, logo generators, logo books, logo clip-art, logo designers and logo strategists! Which one is right for you? In theory, you end up with a logo no matter which one you choose?

Is a cheap guide to logo development the same as a cheap logo developer?

Is a cheap logo developer the same as a cheap logo strategist?

If you examine the value delivered by different “Cheap” resources, you’ll find that there are many different kinds of cheap. These different kinds of cheap provide the entrepreneur with different kinds of power and require different kinds of interactions.

Below, four different kinds of Cheap are described along with a fifth category describing what you may find as you break out of The Cheap Zone in pursuit of value.

1) Digitized Assets (Articles and Templates)– This consists of written stuff for building businesses – things like samples, articles, advice.

2) Digitized and Automated Services and Logic – These are working parts that can be assembled into businesses - eCommerce, hosting, customer relationship suites. They include logical jobs and tools that can be outsourced. These tools are left-brain focused (logical, rational) and demonstrate logical steps that are readily translated into automated services.

The benefit of this type of Cheap is that you can use your creative powers to create novel solutions while using cheap toolkits that embody highly complex processes. Examples include Open source software development platforms or business plan templates.

3) Universal Freelance Services – This represents commoditized, solo-preneur services to perform different kinds of spot help. It would include freelance designers, coders and writers.

4) Pre-packaged Business Expertise – A new breed of business services are emerging that represent pre-cooked business services. These services are typically some hybrid of the previous three services including templates and affordable muscle but with a dash of highly specialized, creative people guiding the service. The combination creates a powerful leverage point within the offering and for the company consuming the offering. As such, the efforts can include packages for web design, marketing campaigns, naming and branding or legal assistance.

5) Specialized Services – This category is not part of the Cheap Revolution. Rather it represents the traditional field of creative specialists who focus on strategy, management consulting and customized marketing strategies

The following diagram illustrates the different kinds of Cheap.

Figure: Different Kinds of Cheap (and beyond)

Within reason, it is appropriate for an entrepreneur to heavily leverage the cheap revolution tools. The marginal value delivered by the Specialized Service category will largely be lost on young companies and will likely demand far more resource and time than a startup can afford.

More advanced companies have more demanding needs and demonstrate a higher level of specialization. As a result, it is more costly for these companies to purchase or outsource their specific needs.

Look at our site for a list cheap resources!