I assume poor country refers to Ukraine. We have designers connected to the app from almost all continents though, including Canada, Germany, Portugal.
Thank you! It's a fair question given though unit economics in businesses like ours are usually pretty healthy. As we had a bootstrap experience before and were (still are!) very lean, we considered the options you mentioned too.
The point for us was not capital costs or smth, but opportunities to grow at a different scale. We see VC not as primarily funding, but as partners for the journey — source of learnings, support and network. We were mostly focused on raising from angel entrepreneurs, even current customers joined. Hopefully this answers your question.
hi! Thank you for the reply and what a great point. I can relate and yes, a lot of business in Ukraine are urged to switch to other markets to survive. I assume their cold outreach attempts might look naive and exploiting. I still believe that begging for help and offering some services are different, and sorry that disturbed you, really.
I assume they still need to make payouts, keep workplaces and support the economy. From my perspective, begging for charity is not okay when you can bring value. Maybe I am just too optimistic about examples you mentioned.
Thank you! We also see it this way from what we hear from folks. Eg I limited newsfeed to 2 times a day and try to be busy all other times otherwise it gets all energy away for being worried.
hi, thank you for the reply! Safe and yes, therapy helps with healing. I might understand your concern around toxic culture of "growth at all cost" as SV religion. After bootstrapping my 3 companies before, I am not a fan of it too.
Hopefully, this is not the case. We were not pushing people during such heart-breaking times, on the opposite, they needed work as a distraction and spent at least 30% of work time lately on volunteering projects, eg. designing for non-profits. This gave an additional sense of purpose to being productive and stay strong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.