Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Steve: Several months ago on the show, we had several young entrepreneurs on the show.
They run Hire the World. It is an online site designed for outsourcing and we had a fascinating
conversation. I loved the concept of outsourcing. Welcoming now Doug Beech, one of the twins
who along with Arash Afrooze who have developed Hire the World. Thanks for coming back on
the show, Doug. Doug: Thanks for having me, Steve. I appreciate
it. Steve: Maybe eight months or nine months ago,
you were very much in startup phase. You were offering outsourcing to the internet community
at large. You were finding everything from accountants and graphic designers to writers
and photographers, any knowledge work that needed to be done, you were basically brokering
that and putting the relationship together between the people who had the work and the
skilled labor that wanted to do the work. I think it’s a tremendous space. We had
an engaging conversation, I think, and it’s now nine months later so what’s happening?
Doug: You’re right. It still is a really great space, Steve. Since we’ve talked,
it’s funny, we were offering 541 different skill categories and the kind of work that
was coming across, I guess, you just couldn’t even imagine. It was actually really great
information to see how many different entrepreneurs were doing different kind of marketing tactics
or even individual who were outsourcing. Medical writing was something that came across our
desk but in the last nine months, as we were going through the 541 categories, we were
offering all these services but, I guess we’ve talked about it before, it was really difficult
for us on a limited marketing budget to explain exactly what it is that we do. We can explain
that we were an outsourcing company. You can pretty much do anything but when we would
say that to people, people would ask, “Well, what are some examples?” and so you’ve
been trying to hit 541 different topics hoping that the customer would say hey, yeah, I really
need that. So what’s happened in the last nine months
is that we took our most profitable segment which happened to be graphic designing, which
is what we started with, and we’ve actually narrowed and focused the business solely on
graphic design. As of two months ago, we’ve just gone through a site redesign and last
month was our first month. We’d still have some jobs withering on the vine, we like to
say, so there are still people getting bookkeeping and programming done on the background on
our site but we’re not offering any new jobs. We had our most profitable month last
month and I think just for the sole reason of focus. I know this is a pretty big ramp
but we talked about it earlier, too, that now my mom can actually go and explain to
her friends what it is that we do on the internet where before she was like, “I don’t know.
It’s like around the world and they do all this stuff.”
Steve: So you simplified things. So when you started out, I can just imagine what was going
on. You were excited about every new category that you could provide services in because
you saw the potential of every one of those 500 plus categories and you thought growth
would probably come through, adding more categories and just getting bigger and bigger, offering
all these online services, which is perfectly legitimate. But it’s so difficult to capture
mind share when you’re spreading yourself that thin. So instead of growing outward,
you guys just decided to completely narrow your focus and only concentrate on graphic
design. That’s a pretty bold step. It must have caused you interesting conversations
between the three of you as you moved ahead. Doug: Oh, I’ll tell you we spent a lot of
time in, we call this our board game room because we play a lot of board games in here
but it’s also where we make all our decisions. We’re talking about a couple of months of
debate, Steve, because we’re making money in those other categories but at the same
time, you see the revenue coming in but then you also see some of our staff on customer
service calls where they’re trying to explain why there’s a dispute because there’s
this medical writing program that they’re trying to get done and we just couldn’t
provide the service. We had so many unique problems coming in and because we’re so
broad, we couldn’t really make specialized solutions that really spoke to our customers
and made it easy for them in so many different categories. It was just tough. It was tough
time. So really the biggest benefit so far is being
able to focus our marketing dollar and just making sure that our customers, when you hear
that they need something that’s risk-free, safe, and an innovative, fun way to get quality
graphic design, now we can start getting our customer to think oh, yeah, Hire the World.
Their solutions are just way better than the traditional way of doing graphic design services.
Steve: So now you guys are focusing a lot more, obviously on the graphics market, but
you’ve got a unique way of approaching that as well. You’ve got the ability to create
contests and to do some other things to create a lot of energy around the design?
Doug: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people compare have comparisons, too. We have some different
competitors in the States and crowdsourcing you know that is a great business.
Steve: Yes. Doug: But where we really differentiate ourselves
is we’re trying to build place where graphic designers can make a career. In a contest,
you’re really competing against other graphic designers and we like to take a look at it
like it’s a lead gen because a lot of our graphic designers are from all around the
world and they traditionally couldn’t access North American dollars even though they are
just as talented. So lots of customers come in and they start a contest. Maybe it’s
just for a logo for a website and they really get dozens of designers. They see them from
Japan, Toronto, or Singapore and they get to look at all their work before they decide
on what they want to pay for. But usually, when they get a graphic designer
that really speaks to them and speaks to their target market, they really want to keep working
with them. We have online tools that allow you to hire, manage, and pay people all over
the world. In graphic design, it makes our tools way better because when graphic designers
work on a contest on an hourly basis, they sign into our software and it takes screenshots
randomly every five to ten minutes just so that they know that every hour if they work,
they get paid for it. Well, you can imagine if you’re taking screenshots of programmers
or taking code in PSD, it doesn’t really say much for our client base. Our clients
are like, “I saw that he’s coding but I really don’t know what he’s doing.”
But in graphic design, you know exactly what they’re doing.
Steve: You see the evolution of it. So how does the typical contest work?
Doug: It’s really simple. There are three steps. Basically, you come to our site and
you say whatever kind of project you have so it’s like a logo, a T-shirt design, a
website. You fill up a five-minute brief. You tell us what your project is, what your
needs are, and how much you’re willing to pay. It starts at $265 which is very inexpensive
if you look at the field at what it normally cost. You’re talking about 20% of the normal
cost for even just going into just a design agency.
And then we broadcast that to thousands of designers all over the world and they go and
look at the project to see if they’re interested. Hey, do I have a vision for this person? They
create up some initial images and they send them into Hire the World and so you get a
few results in days and by the end of the contest, the average contest gets over 109
designs for you to choose from and the best thing is it’s really risk-free. We guarantee
that you’re going to get a design that you love, that meets your needs, that you’re
going to be able to use or else you can get your money back. And that’s something that
traditional graphic designers do not offer. Steve: That’s the challenge when you’re
dealing with just a single designer. While you gain the benefit of communicating face
to face and all of those sort of things, it’s still sometimes very difficult especially
for business people to communicate concepts to graphics people. That’s always a challenge.
Just throwing an awful lot of different designs at the wall is a great way of approaching
it because you’re getting some really creative and unique approaches.
Doug: Yeah, absolutely, Steve. We like to say around here there are a lot of our clients
that really don’t know what they want but will know once they see it and that’s the
beauty of our site. You’re going to see hundreds of designs and you’re like, “That’s
the one. That’s the one.” And then you pay for it.
Steve: The contests that you had on say, logo design, what’s your favorite ones that you’ve
had so far? Doug: I know my favorite for sure. It’s
called Infinite Motorcycle and it’s this really cool guy. You know what? It’s got
one of the least amount of designs. It was a really interesting contest and it was $235
so it was the minimum amount for a logo and this person was creating Infinite Motorcycle
Trainings. If you want to learn how to ride a motorbike, you go to his company. There’s
this really cool–I’ll bring it up or I guess you can post it–and there’s this
really cool motorcyclist and he’s on tires that make an infinite symbol, and the infinite
symbol’s just revving up and you can tell it’s ready to rock and the contest only
got 39 entries because when this talented designer from the Philippines put it, the
other designers on the comment team just said no, that’s the winning design. We can’t
design better than that and the employer was like yup, that’s the design. There’s no
way. Steve: Oh, so the designers can see the other
designers’ work as it’s coming along. Doug: You have a choice. You can make it a
blind contest or you make it so that it’s an interactive, collaborative contest. But
in that one, it was collaborative. Steve: Oh, okay. What about high profile?
Have you had some high profile customers? Doug: Yeah, we’ve had some really great
ones. Do you know what? We did do a contest. The one that we got the most audience for
was the Winnipeg Jets. The Winnipeg Jets, of course, had already paid a fortune to a
design company, like probably hundreds of thousands of dollars so they already had their
logo but we thought their fan base would really like to participate. So we went ahead and
ran a contest for mental aid and the local news picked it up. We had fans and fans’
children pumping designs. I think we got like 450 designs from people all over Manitoba
and of course, the newspaper picked it up. The local TV stations picked it up.
We’ve done a contest for the aptly named Blueberry Company here. They own the [inaudible
0:10:05.5]. They do the contest. We’ve had lots of really cool contests. The majority
of them are people who are starting new businesses like massage therapists or dog walking schools.
We’ve had some really great website contests. I know Captherm got multimillions of dollars
of funding for their product. They built their initial website on us and it turned out beautiful.
Have you ever heard of the company Swarm Jam? Steve: Yes.
Doug: Yeah, they’re like a groupon sale site. They’ve got a really great business
model where they partnered with newspapers and got all their advertising for free then
had like some kind of deal that if they hit a certain revenue number, there would be a
blackout. It was a beautiful plan. They got the site redesigned for SwarmJam actually
got on Hire the World, as well, a couple of years ago.
Steve: So it’s not just logos, though. You also do websites. You do book art, business
card design, print design. So even though you’ve focused on graphics, there’s a
pretty broad spectrum of graphics works that’s available.
Doug: Yeah, absolutely. We do clothing. Right now, we’re running some promo contests to
get some more book covers. We’re actually giving away two free book cover contests.
Some publishing authors, just trying to get the word out there that hey, listen there’s
a better way, that you only get the free make-your-own book cover that looks like everybody else’s
and you don’t have to pay the expenses either. And clothing design is a big one as well,
T-shirt designs. Steve: And what about motion graphics?
Doug: We don’t do very many motion graphics. I know that we do banner ads which eventually
you get those guests are like they can see multiple images. People like making them for
Google. So you can get those designs but animated graphics, we don’t do that. It’s all 2D.
Steve: Come on, guys! Grow into some markets for goodness’ sake. [Laughter]
Doug: We just narrowed down. We don’t need the pressure, Steve.
Steve: Fair enough. Listen, Doug, I appreciate the update. We’ll be posting links to the
logos that you liked, as well, so that people can get an idea for that. I wish you and your
brother well and your partner, and we’ll talk and have an update in six more months.
Maybe you’ll be doing something different, as well.
Doug: Yeah, I know. That sounds great, Steve. Thanks for having us again. It’s always
great talking to you. Steve: My pleasure. Doug Beech from HiretheWorld.com.
[END OF AUDIO]
Steve Dotto0Hire the World – Graphics Outsourcing0September 3, 2012