In early-mid 2009, I wanted to learn about all the steps of developing a website from the ground up. So, I put up a craigslist ad for someone to teach me, and found Greg, a homeless man with a laptop and pretty awesome PHP skills. I then “designed” the site myself, despite a total lack of any artistic skills, and built http://www.thesecretsservice.com from the ground up. Finally, I went about telling people about it and getting them to post to it (mostly through facebook).
My attempt at designing the site. Some of the secrets are pretty funny though.
The result is an idea that isn’t completely thought out, a design that’s pretty hard on the eyes, and front end execution that leaves something to be desired. But I did accomplish the objective of learning a lot about how to put a site together and get it going. It actually got a decent number of people submitting secrets, and still continues to get more visitors every month than I would expect. Finally, I learned the important lesson of: When it comes to a lot of things, there’s no substitute for professional experience.
So, when Utsab and I started working on Keeples and then 10pens, the first thing we decided was to get a great design for the site. For Keeples, we looked towards 99designs, and ran a contest that garnered a couple hundred entries despite the modest $600 prize (for how we did that, we’ll write another post). In the end, after reviewing so many options, we narrowed it down to three fantastic designers, and picked Yairko’s design, which is what you see on http://www.keeples.com.
As an aside, Yairko later told us that he used the money to help buy a wedding ring and to propose. Congratulations Yairko and his new fiancee!
An awesome idea for the Keeples homepage that Yairko came up with, which we probably would have never thought of.
We were so impressed with the other two shortlisted designers, we approached them for additional work as well. Kpp0209 was excited by our idea and he joined the Keeples team in exchange for equity, and we are working with him to design the parts of the site we want to put in our next version. And we then hired another designer from our Keeples contest, Simple&Clever to design 10pens – and he’s really a fantastic designer. When we wanted to speed up the process of putting together the site, we asked him about a HTML/CSS coder to make a few of pages for us, which will hopefully be done soon. In this way, we hope to produce a better site and faster, without a large cost.
While we have a very small budget for creating and marketing both Keeples and 10pens, we have to realize that our time has an economic value in lost wages. And that the best way to determine the value of the work we need to produce (like the site design and the front-end code) would be to take the value of the design itself in conjunction with how much it would cost to ask someone else to do it (the market value). In this case, we had these amazing designers make the pages, and because they leveraged the expertise they have and we don’t, in economic terms this was definitely a win-win.
While we are doing most of the legwork (the product features, the coding, the marketing, etc) ourselves, I think it’s important for us to continue to look for opportunities where we can gain by finding an expert who fits within our budget, and can help make our products better.
What are your experiences with tackling all parts of a project? Do you agree with my assessment that you’re better off getting some help, or do you like to do it all yourself? Tell us in the comments!