By Deanna Isaacs
Dinner Presentation: Crowdspring
Thu 2/26, 6:30 PM, the Parthenon, 314 S. Halsted, register at sta-chicago.org, $35, $25 STA members, $10 students.
Last May, cousins-in-law Mike Samson and Ross Kimbarovsky used $3 million raised from investors to launch a little Internet business called Crowdspring from a basement office in the West Loop. Inspired by the frustration Samson, a TV producer, and Kimbarovsky, an intellectual property lawyer, felt trying to buy creative services like video postproduction and Web site design, Crowdspring uses the same crowd-sourcing strategy that drives Threadless or iStockphoto, connecting small-business people like themselves with a global pool of hungry talent. And it’s got the graphic design world in an uproar. Widely perceived as the wave of the future, Crowdspring has also been characterized as the design Antichrist, a force that will destroy the profession.
The incendiary issue is that familiar old evil, spec work—work done on the speculative chance that it’ll bring in pay. Every project listed on Crowdspring is structured as a competition. Buyers post specifications for a job—a new logo or Web site, say—and designers submit work in response. One winner is selected, and only that winner gets paid. Everyone else—on average so far, 68 other people—has worked for nothing on a project too specific to be sold somewhere else. Who in their right mind would do that? So far, Crowdspring says, more than 14,000 “creatives,” from self-taught hobbyists to pros, in 140 countries.
Samson and Kimbarovsky call their brainchild a “marketplace for creative services,” and it looks like a buyer’s dream. Besides describing what you’re looking for, you get to decide how long you want to accept entries and how much you’ll pay (so long as you meet Crowdspring’s bargain-basement minimums). Then you sit back and watch the submissions roll in, providing feedback at will and making your selection. The average project price, the founders say, is about $400—$200 for logos, $600 for Web design, for example. And the whole process is transparent: anyone can check on a project at Crowdspring.com, where all requests and submissions are posted.
What separates Crowdspring from other online marketplaces, like Guru or Elance, Samson says, is that the others work on the traditional request-for-proposals model, where a potential buyer posts a project and designers respond with proposals—usually including a price bid and a link to their portfolios—but no design. “In our model, we cut out the entire proposal process and go right to the chase,” Kimbarovsky says. No long waits for concepts, hoping the designer got your drift, no dickering over adjustments, no coddling the artistic ego. It’s “pick from what you like,” and what you see is what you get. To make it even easier, Crowdspring provides a work-for-hire contract, handles payment (the buyer puts the money up in advance), and guarantees at least 25 entries. Fewer than that and the buyer can walk with a full refund.
Crowdspring makes its money by charging the buyer a 15 percent fee, so high volume is critical. Samson and Kimbarovsky’s own numbers suggest that their total fee revenue is about $130,000 so far. They say they expect to turn a profit by 2010.
Samson says they’ve noticed that while there’s a constant downward pressure on price at sites like Elance and Guru, “on ours there’s an upward pressure, because buyers understand that the more they offer the more response they’ll get.” He agrees that Crowdspring’s minimum prices are “very reasonable” for U.S. buyers. (It’s worth noting that in India, where he’s looked to outsource postproduction work, the average annual per capita income is less than $500—which doesn’t leave much question about the general direction of American pay in a globalized labor environment.)
Jamie Vijayaraghavan—an Indiana University design grad with a corporate day job—moonlights on Crowdspring, where she’s won four assignments. She says she’s had follow-up business not only from winning designs but from losses that got her noticed.
Crowdspring says its target buyer is an entrepreneur or small business that previously would have fallen through the cracks, unaware of how to get custom design or unable to afford it. “We truly believe we’re expanding the market,” Kimbarovsky says, noting that half a million new businesses are started every month in the U.S. alone, all of them potentially needing design services. But Crowdspring also offers a “professional” option, with a $1,000 minimum price, in which the nature of the project can remain private and contestants can be screened. Kimbarovsky and Samson say Fortune 500 companies and “big agencies”—the traditional clients of established design firms—are using it.
Design is only the tip of the iceberg. The Crowdspring platform will work for any creative service, Samson and Kimbarovsky claim, as long as it meets two criteria. “It needs a final product that can be compared side by side with another,” Samson says, and “it needs to be deliverable on the Internet.”
Next month they’ll be test-driving a copywriting channel, for everything from blog content and marketing blurbs to books and resumés; they plan to roll it out in April. Kimbarovsky says buyers here will see a slice of copy, not the complete project. “It might be the first paragraph of an article, or the first chapter of a book—not unlike what you might [submit] if you were proposing a project to a publisher.” After that: an audio and music channel and a video and motion-graphics channel.
Crowdspring has attracted favorable attention, including a story in the February 16 issue of Forbes, but also plenty of hostility at sites like No!Spec.com (“just another design contest site”) and thelogofactory.com (“yet another bottom-feeder in the design industry”). “We get pushback,” Samson says, “because this is a radical rethinking of how creative industries work. In the music, publishing, photography, and software industries, talented people around the world are no longer constrained by access to technology and software.” They don’t necessarily need training or experience, either. “It ultimately comes down to talent,” says Kimbarovsky. Crowdspring’s own sprightly logo is the result of a contest posted on Australia-based sitepoint.com (which last year spun off its own competition site, 99designs). It was created by a night-shift janitor in Canada.
The American Institute of Graphic Arts, the national professional association, is on high alert on the heels of the Forbes article, which labeled the profession “snooty.” A task force is reexamining the AIGA’s long-standing taboo against spec work. CEO Richard Grefé says design differs from architecture and advertising, where an initial design or concept can be a “loss leader” because there’s substantial subsequent billing. AIGA board president Sean Adams, who says he thinks “there’s enough work to go around,” wants to “find where the line is between open-source and spec work.” What he doesn’t want is “to be an organization hiding behind the castle walls while the world changes outside.”
Cheri Gearhart, president of the local Society of Typographic Arts, says opening up opportunities is “wonderful,” but effective design—which “has always emerged from the close relationship between a client and a designer”—can’t be bought off the shelf.
Samson and Kimbarovsky will speak at an STA dinner on February 26; it’s open to the public by reservation. Kimbarovsky says they’ll discuss whether “established designers and these underdogs who come from all over the world can coexist in the marketplace, whether the concept of spec work is evil, and whether any of that even matters now that the genie is out of the bottle.” Businesses, he adds, “aren’t particularly interested in this debate. They’re embracing change.”
