[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Awesomic (YC S21) - Get design tasks done...
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Launch HN: Awesomic (YC S21) - Get design tasks done with 24-hour
turnaround
Hi HN, I'm Stacy from Awesomic (https://www.awesomic.io/). Awesomic
is a website where you create a design task and receive a draft
from a professional designer in 24 hours. On freelance platforms,
it takes up to 7-14 days to find the right designer. You negotiate,
then manage, and you need to look for a new person every time a new
task is needed, like branding first and then a website design for
web and mobile. With Awesomic, our algorithm connects you based on
availability and expertise required. Then, you never manage this
person or worry about deadlines--we do it automatically and
guarantee a 24h turnaround. You have all skills covered under one
fixed price subscription. While running a local online business
(coding school, the first Github partner in the CIS region), we had
the hard time hiring the right designer part-time. We experienced a
lack of quality, style consistency and speed as freelancers
changed. Roman, my co-founder, thought that being matched with the
right person on subscription would be the perfect solution. We got
traction in 10 days just from the idea, with no product. Our first
client was YC alumni Outtalent, and the next 20 clients came from
word of mouth. Our best-selling ad was a napkin left in a co-
working space--it brought us People.ai as a client. For the first
2 months, we emulated the app processes manually and turned the
tasks around in 24 hours via email. Since then we've been gradually
building software for everything that can be automated, including
matching tasks, managing daily updates, files and communication.
Our matching algorithm defines the criteria of each task (like
timezone, type of task, software) and finds the best-fit designer
due to them. When you create a logo task, you work with the best
logo/branding designer. When you do an app or landing page that
requires different skills, an algorithm will match you with a great
UI/UX designer. If you like the result, you will continue to work
with the same person based on matching. When you log into our app
(https://app.awesomic.io/login), you can choose any popular design
task brief or add a custom one. Then you describe the task, and it
gets matched with the best-fit designer. In 24 hours you see the
first results, and every business day a new update is guaranteed
for you. So you can iterate fast on any visuals and stick to your
deadlines. The expertises covered are branding, graphics, product
UI/UX design and animations. You communicate with the designers
directly in the app, via comments or screenshare calls. All files
are stored on private DigitalOcean Spaces and are accessible over
the platform, so you don't need to go back and forth between
various tools, email, etc. We operate on a subscription model, but
it is flexible: startups can upgrade/downgrade or cancel their
plans anytime. This helps to stay cost-effective and scale easily.
Here's a case study on how we made a redesign for the most funded
app on Kickstarter: http://awesomic.io/case-study/memory-os. Here's
one on a Norwegian fitness startup using us for 18+ months already
--their app is in the top 10 most popular apps in the country:
https://www.awesomic.io/case-study/entirebody. As specialists,
we've been reading HN for quite some time and we are really excited
to share our story with you. We would love to hear back from the
community! How do you manage your design tasks? What is the most
painful?
Author : Pavlyshyna
Score : 90 points
Date : 2021-08-16 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| These company names are getting lazier by the year. Just call the
| company "Cool, Man" while you're at it.
|
| Not sure how competing with firms with the exact same business
| model on Clutch requires VC funding, but OK. Best of luck.
| romasevastyanov wrote:
| > Not sure how competing with firms with the exact same
| business model on Clutch requires VC funding, but OK. Best of
| luck.
|
| We are not competing with agencies from Clutch, that's our
| second target audience after startups. We help agencies scale
| faster while working with designers on the platform.
|
| Awesomic is not an agency, it's a super simple tool where you
| can start working with a designer on the same day. And then
| constantly receive everyday updates on your design task.
|
| Why do we need VC? Because we have 0 design managers and have
| no plans to hire ones. Instead, everything is managed by our
| product - platform. Most of the tasks are matched automatically
| by an algorithm.
|
| And for the designer - Awesomic is a better solution versus
| platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. Designers don't like to hunt
| for the next freelance project, feel insecure to negotiate, but
| they are passionate about design. So Awesomic gives them what
| they want while caring about everything else.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I understand that, but I'm the guy you're selling to, and I
| don't see any difference.
|
| I need quality resources, and you can't avoid the fact that
| you're sourcing labor at the end of the day.
|
| You're effectively an agency to me. I pay you for labor.
| Whether I pay for labor on Upwork or your platform or an
| outsourcing agency makes absolutely no difference to me. I
| look at all of them as resource funnels.
|
| And frankly, I don't want to work with kids who call their
| company fucking awesome. Are you going to take my business
| needs seriously?
|
| Imagine if Bloomberg called his company Jack-Off Capital. Or
| if Walmart called their business Cheap Bastards.
|
| Is labor arbitrage fucking awesome? You bet. For the owners.
| You should call your company fuck the little guy. At least in
| western culture we don't intentionally bring undue attention
| to the fact that we're offshoring labor beyond a business
| transaction.
| dang wrote:
| Hey, please don't break the site guidelines. You can make
| your substantive points without crossing into this sort of
| attack. The nationalistic swipe at the end is particularly
| not cool.
|
| We've had to ask you this sort of thing more than once
| before. If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix
| this going forward, we'd appreciate it.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I understand you're particularly sensitive as an
| administrator to nationalistic comments, but I would
| appreciate it if you didn't categorize my matter-of-fact
| statement as some sort of nationalistic sentiment.
| dang wrote:
| That wasn't a matter-of-fact statement--it was an us-
| vs.them swipe drawing a line ("western culture") which
| itself is already provocative in this context.
|
| Also, please don't ignore the other ways in which you
| broke the site guidelines with your post.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It was a matter-of-fact statement. Observational life
| will show you that we don't call out the fact that we
| arbitrage labor. Tim Cook doesn't tell customers that
| Apple keeps prices attractive enough by utilizing cheap
| Asian labor. It is tasteless.
|
| If you find my statements to be "us-versus-them," that's
| your opinion, but I would find no fault in what these
| people are doing if they were Americans versus
| Ukrainians. I find fault in how immature the business
| approach is.
|
| I acknowledge that I am not being nice. Neither is
| building a business, arbitraging labor and calling it
| awesome that you can exploit workers globally. But you
| suggest to me that you believe otherwise. Is that not a
| fair opinion? Besides, you call my comments nationalistic
| when they are clearly not.
|
| A nationalistic comment would be, "Western culture is
| superior because we do not..." versus an observational
| statement which is "In western culture we do not..."
|
| However, it's a common theme here that posters, versus
| commenters, have favoritism preemptively due to the good
| faith guideline. So, believe me, I'm well aware of them.
|
| But if I posted an article here that wasn't nice, you
| would, by these guidelines, expect me to just be nice,
| and yet that's not how the world works, and plenty of
| posters here call out things all the time. It's a strange
| dynamic to assume otherwise.
| romasevastyanov wrote:
| Hey, thank you for noticing our name! We were initially named
| Pizdata which literally means "fucking amazing" in Ukrainian
| (where we are originally from).
|
| We got a lot of local hype, word of mouth clients and even
| became an internet meme in Romania (where it has a very
| different meaning). Decided to change a name because of
| international clients not getting the joke (right after we
| tested early hypothesis).
|
| Awesomic has the same meaning - "awesome on a cosmic level", by
| Urban Dictionary.
|
| Here's a blog post where I described effect of such an
| aggressive naming - http://awesomic.io/blog/startup-journey-
| to-100-k
| aripickar wrote:
| This is something that would have been really useful when I was
| trying to get a POC out for a startup I was working on,
| especially at 1/3 of the cost that we ended up paying for an
| agency with a lot longer turnaround time. Kudos on launching a
| product that looks really useful!
|
| ps: For some reason the expansions of the FAQ tabs expands really
| slowly, might want to fix that.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Hi! Thank you! Yes, startups especially benefit from being both
| fast and cost-effective with us. When we just get into YC
| community a few months ago, our revenue naturally grew by 193%
| and the team grew from 15 to 50 just because of startups being
| around.
|
| p.s. thanks for the sharp eye on FAQ! please tell me your
| browser (I keep fighting with Safari issues :) )
| Closi wrote:
| The one thing that isn't clear to me is how much design time I
| get with the subscription - I note that I will get an update on
| progress every day, but it would be useful to understand how much
| time will go into that design iteration.
|
| For example - assistance with pitch decks is listed, however if
| the designer is only taking 1 hour a day to help with it, it may
| take weeks to get it to where it needs to be.
| romasevastyanov wrote:
| Awesomic does not re-sell human hours like Upwork. Instead, we
| guarantee a business result. So the time designer spends on a
| task is more depending on the type of task.
|
| Some tasks are really possible to complete within one day -
| like banner ads. However, some tasks require iterating a week
| over week to fully complete - like a good website created from
| scratch. In this case, you'll receive everyday updates to see
| the progress. The whole speed depends on designer output and
| feedback from clients.
|
| The best way is to ask the designer for a kind estimation when
| the deadline matters. With urgent projects you can
| double/triple your subscription, for example, for this exact
| month, so more designers would be able to connect and deliver
| results faster.
| Closi wrote:
| > Awesomic does not re-sell human hours like Upwork. Instead,
| we guarantee a business result.
|
| I don't know what that means though, as a buyer. Like the
| pricing refers to me getting a dedicated designer, so I
| assume that means that they are non-shared, i.e. they are
| only working on my account, however the pricing seems way too
| low to justify that.
|
| So then I assume they are juggling loads of clients (although
| in that case, I'm not entirely sure what dedicated means) but
| then I can't get a feel for how busy these people are and if
| I'm getting a _lot_ of support or not a lot of support.
| Particularly considering the prices /savings are benchmarked
| against a full time employee.
|
| Maybe this is just me though, I would totally use this
| service but the pricing model is just too opaque and puts me
| off (but maybe it will work for others?). Is it just me that
| can't understand what I'm getting?
|
| Like if I want a pitch deck done, which I can estimate will
| take a great designer a few days, and I want it done by the
| end of the week, what subscription level do I get? Or do you
| just name your subscription level price and I have no way to
| estimate it prior to you giving me a quote?
|
| But again, it's probably just me not 'getting' it.
| igammarays wrote:
| Classic Ukrainian arbitrage - selling Eastern talent to the
| Western market for prices they can't believe with the high
| quality that they don't expect. I love it, I did the same thing,
| most of the design work on my startup was also done by Ukrainian
| designers. Fantastic idea ... win-win.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Hi! Glad you liked the idea and thank you for the feedback! I
| agree that Europe (and Ukraine in particular) has an amazing
| talent pool not yet connected widely to the global companies.
|
| From the perspective of design community we build, we want to
| uncover Ukrainian creative talents to the world. They really
| deserve to work with high-end companies, get a global
| recognition and do not loose a social capital while being a
| solo freelancer. Still, I would not call that a standard
| arbitrage as we are not selling hours or smth -- we provide
| companies with the smart matching and an efficient process to
| get design done, all in one app. For both sides of users, we're
| focusing on the added value.
| Brushfire wrote:
| Congrats guys, exciting! How do you differentiate yourselves from
| other on-demand design services?
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Hi and thank you for the great question!
|
| The main points are:
|
| - putting quality first, and connecting even award-winning
| designers.
|
| - having a strong product design expertise (like UI/UX and
| animations) to serve startups while typical services covering
| simpler tasks like graphics for e-commerce. We can deliver
| products, prototypes and product MVPs for YC startups as well
| (90+ already tried us out).
|
| - planning to release own API till the end of the year, so
| other apps users would be able to create their design requests
| over API.
|
| As far as I know, we have the fastest turnaround policy being
| 24h always and for any type of tasks, including complex ones
| like branding.
| Brushfire wrote:
| Awesome. Excited to try it
| moflome wrote:
| Good answers! I'm a happy user of manypixels.co but they are
| limited in their focus and so glad to see your
| differentiation here. Will check it out!
| chewmieser wrote:
| Interesting! The price seems very reasonable and the turnaround
| time is very impressive. It would have been entirely reasonable
| to have a slightly longer turnaround time but as long as you can
| support 24hrs then by all means.
|
| Hopefully you don't end up with too much abuse of the trial!
|
| Very cool. Congrats on the launch! I'll have to keep ya in mind
| next time I may need something...
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Thank you for such a kind feedback! You're right, some prefer
| turnaround being even longer to not comment so often. For
| complex or ongoing projects that may be the case -- managers
| can comment whenever have time, still, they are guaranteed with
| a designer working and updating tasks daily. Looking forward to
| you trying us out!
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Our best-selling ad was a napkin left in a co-working space
|
| Can we see this great ad?
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Sure! Last week we made a blog post about our way to $100K ARR
| (early days of the company) and it includes photo of my co-
| founder with this napkin :)
| https://www.awesomic.io/blog/startup-journey-to-100-k
| xwdv wrote:
| The secret to a great best selling ad is simply to put an ad
| somewhere that people do not expect an ad and also has a lot of
| exposure to traffic.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| That is so true! We were based at the startup-ish co-working
| space holding events before covid. That's how the right
| traffic came in.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm not sure how I feel about the myriad of services that serve
| as the service layer between cheap talent in developing countries
| and the western world. These people are indeed talented (in
| varying degrees) but doesn't stuff like this simply hollow out
| the market for local talent?
|
| Maybe this serves to break down barriers of language and nation,
| but is it also a product of the fact that we've built our society
| to be so expensive (education, bureaucracy, housing, regulation,
| you name it) that we're constantly eroding our skilled labor in
| favor of countries with less overhead?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Only $7/wk for rush jobs? Damn that sounds like a shit deal for
| the person actually doing the work, even if y'all take absolutely
| nothing off the top. I wouldn't touch that kind of deal with a
| ten foot pole, even if I was shitting out the most banal, generic
| work possible.
|
| Oh okay that's just the first week trial period, it's a monthly
| rate of $500 for "graphic" work or $1000 for "product", that's
| not _as_ shit but it 's still like $16 or $32/day (not accounting
| for weekends, I don't feel like seeing if your rules cover that,
| and again that's before your fees and any payment processing
| fees), and that's still sure not anywhere _near_ what I 'd be
| charging for a month of 24h turnaround.
| disruptthelaw wrote:
| I haven't seen the terms of the deal but it presume that most
| customers on the monthly retainer will not submit a task every
| day, maybe on average every 4 or 5 business days. That changes
| the maths quite a bit
| notahacker wrote:
| Determining "fair use" could be the challenging bit. Sounds
| like the potential clients who see a flat monthly fee as the
| attraction are the ones who could really benefit from having
| a designer on payroll but don't have the funds
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Yes, thank you! We guarantee 24h turnaround Mon-Fri. The
| designers matched keep working with the same brands for a
| long time (we have 18+ months client already, one of the
| early ones) so they need weekends for sure.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Hi! Thank you for pointing out our pricing. I totally agree
| it's not final and we might want to reconsider it to keep the
| high standards. Now all of the designers are based in Europe
| and we can be more cost-effective.
|
| Regarding the promo $7 trial -- this price is not because the
| work is worthless. We pay for you trying Awesomic :) After
| testing some boring targeting, we decided to pay our designers
| instead of paying Facebook Ads. It seems promising as
| designers' work "sells" itself and clients can test everything
| live -- like turnaround, quality and communication.
| adampk wrote:
| Very great response to maybe not the most polite version of a
| good question, love the energy!
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| thank you for the support!
| jshchnz wrote:
| Really interesting idea, just signed up for a demo!
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Thank you! We'd be happy to show you around.
| somberi wrote:
| Dear Stacy, congrats on what seems like an useful service. Signed
| up for a week and have sent a project your way.
|
| All the best.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| I am very thankful for you trusting Awesomic with your design
| project! Would love to be an useful service! :)
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Hey Stacy, sounds cool but isn't this basically the premise of
| Designpickle?
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Hi! I might have missed your comment first, sorry for the
| longer reply! Thank you for this question! I think DP is a good
| design company, still, we might be different in a few
| dimensions.
|
| First, we have different focuses. I see them going after
| e-commerce and graphics/illustrations, while we strongly
| develop a product design expertise serving global startups.
| Then, what we do is we build own design community (btw, being
| very inspired by YC community too). Having these two segments
| of users, we build our own product and a matching algorithm
| between them (you might even notice this magnet analogy in our
| logo).
|
| So I respect other companies doing things that look similar.
| Still, we just build what we believe is best for the users
| we're serving.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| TekMol wrote:
| On freelance platforms, it takes up to 7-14 days to find
| the right designer.
|
| How does this compare to Upwork and Fiverr? I would expect if you
| post a job there with the statement "Please only apply if you can
| work on it today" you would get a lot of applications of people
| who have time right now?
| romasevastyanov wrote:
| Hi, thanks for your attention! Yes, that is correct and then
| you need to check tons of portfolios and find a relevant one.
|
| Then you would negotiate a price, project size, and terms. It
| takes days including delays in answers and timezones.
|
| Once you start working with someone online, it doesn't
| guarantee that this person will deliver work on time or do not
| disappear in the middle of a project (we had this before
| Awesomic ourselves). So the search is starting over.
|
| Modern design projects typically require different sets of
| skills too - UI&UX, branding/logo design, graphic design, or
| illustrations. So typically designer is good at one main field
| or style, and others are minors. That multiplies the complexity
| of finding the right designer in a long-term.
|
| With Awesomic, you always get matched with the best person for
| your task on the same day and get the first result on the next
| business day.
| hizxy wrote:
| These design services are getting gross. Reinforces the age old
| design stereotype of a support based model churning out
| production work. I know there is a market for everything -- and
| good designers need not worry -- but really makes ya think about
| the value we place on people. Carry on and good luck satisfying a
| customer base that wants something for nothing.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| Hi! Thank you for the direct feedback. I am not sure I got your
| point correctly, so I would kindly ask to share my point of
| view below.
|
| Awesomic stands for empowering creative design community from
| Europe, Ukraine in particular (where we are from). These are
| not only "good designers", but really great and vetted talents
| that delivered creative work for 500+ global companies already.
| More than 90 of them are YC companies we truly respect and are
| inspired by. For example, we have the designer with several Red
| Dot Award, a German international design prize awarded since
| 1955.
|
| These are the people I truly respect.
| memset wrote:
| Just wanted to chime in as an early satisfied Awesomic user. I
| always have half a dozen side projects going (as you can see via
| my "Show HN" history) and always have a little bit of design
| needs that I can't do via Bootstrap. I've been burned by
| upwork/fiverr in the past who charge $100/hr with no upper bound
| on the amount of time it will take to iterate on a design that
| will work. I've often just scrapped the design work entirely
| because it was too hard to get to the right end result.
|
| The platform basically guarantees that I'll see _some_ progress
| once per day (the predictability is nice), and I don 't have to
| worry about using up my 1 revision, or whatever I'd agreed to. If
| I choose to spend the entire month on a single project to get it
| right, then great, I don't have to do a calculation every time.
|
| Congrats on getting into YC!
| OJFord wrote:
| You pay $500pcm for graphics design work on your _side_
| projects?
|
| Are they income generating or are you just really committing to
| getting them/one off the ground without actually quitting 'the
| day job'?
| memset wrote:
| I start/stop my subscription depending on the work that I
| have.
|
| Some of the side projects (for example,
| themusiciansnotebook.com) are actually revenue generating and
| so I have more wiggle room to spend $500 for a month's worth
| of design. For example, I make notebooks on behalf of others,
| so I will work with a designer to help create
| covers/graphics/etc.
|
| Since I pay for a month at a time, once the work for the
| above project is done, I'll use the remaining time to have
| Awesomeic's folks help with wireframes for other projects,
| which may not have revenue or be launched (prototypes, etc)
| so that I fully utilize the platform.
| Pavlyshyna wrote:
| hi! Thank you for much for sharing your thoughts and feedback!
|
| We also hate this concept of limiting revisions or a need to
| negotiate every single detail. It takes focus from the work and
| result to some routine.
|
| I am so happy you saw Awesomic as a valuable alternative!
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