Alec Lynch

Alec Lynch is the chief executive of leading crowdsourcing site Design Crowd.

The site has been growing rapidly in recent years, with month-on-month growth of about 20%, with $100,000 to $200,000 of work sold through the site every month according to industry sources (Lynch won’t comment on financials).

However, Lynch has just launched a change to the industry’s traditional model, which he is calling Crowdsourcing 2.0.

Rather than a customer simply posting a design competition, Design Crowd’s new model allows customers to invite particular designers to participate in the competition, but the customer must pay all of these invited designers a small fee.

The model is designed to get around the problem of designers doing work but getting nothing in return, and the problem of customers getting poor designs from amateur designers.

Today Lynch talks about the new model, crowdsourcing’s growth in Australia and marketing an online business globally.

What’s driven you to look at this new model? There has been a lot of debate about the crowdsourcing model.

The public debate and I guess criticism from some parts of the design community has actually pushed us to do two things. One is to look at the crowdsourcing model and basically come up with Crowdsourcing 2.0 which is crowdsourcing where multiple designers get paid. But it’s also pushed us to look at reaching out to established designers within the community, sort of saying there are opportunities for you to leverage the power of our model and we recognise that your traditional approach provides a lot of things that crowdsourcing doesn’t, such as strategic advice to clients, meeting with them in person and developing a very deep understanding of the client.

After seeing thousands of projects go through Design Crowd, we’ve done a survey recently and 90% of our customers rated the experience as good or excellent and 10% were unhappy with the result. And while we’re still pretty happy with that overall, when we looked at that 10%, what we uncovered was basically that occasionally with crowdsourcing you can have an inconsistent result.

There’s some variability in what comes back, because what can happen is you can post a project and you open it to the crowd and for whatever reason, you’re unlucky, the timing wasn’t right, you might get five amateurs participating and none of the more qualified professional designers from the community picking it up and for that project the result is sub optimal and the client is unhappy.

We also wanted to try and solve a few other issues that do exist with the common approach to crowdsourcing, such as in some communities there is a degree of copying among designers because it’s almost too open. There’s also the issue of fairness for designers, designers walking away with no money after doing good design work.

Basically that’s led us to actually look at the kind of foundations of our process and crowdsourcing and come up with something we think that fixes those problems and is better.

So when a client invites a group of designers to do their work, can they invite as many designers as they want?

Correct.

What’s the level of interaction between client and designer under this model? Is there a greater level of back and forth on ideas and discussion and briefing than under the traditional model?

Our communication process is different to other crowdsourcing sites. It has actually been perhaps more in depth than for awhile, even before Crowdsourcing 2.0. But what I think you’re touching on is that whether it’s crowdsourcing or just engaging someone to do your logo online, there’s a different communication process and briefing process than if you meet with them in the offline or real world.

One of the things that we have on our site – and I don’t think it’s linked purely with the invites system – is an option for a very advanced initial brief which elicits more requirements from customers around the positioning of their brand and their target market, things that a designer would ask you in person. So we’ve tried to build in within our website the logic to act as a professional designer should.

Regarding communication and interaction from that point forward, the approach we take is actually for designers and customers to interact in a one-on-one, private basis. Most other crowdsourcing sites let that interaction be public and that has a couple of negative effects.

For example, if a customer comments publicly on a designer’s piece of work – ie. “Hey I really like this design, this is heading in the right direction, I’d like to see a few variations” – other designers will then see that and will also head in that direction. They may copy the designs or they may not, but they’ll probably head in that direction and what that actually encourages is “group think” which is one of the things that we believe crowdsourcing can help prevent by getting competition from multiple people who have different training, who come from different countries.

By allowing for private feedback and in-depth private feedback, we have a structured form to capture that feedback where the customer rates the design on certain criteria. That process means that designers don’t get copied, they interact in a private relationship with the customer and there’s less “group think”.

Will you still allow projects to be run under the traditional, non-invite model?

Basically the way it works is if the customer doesn’t want to handpick designers, our system will keep it open to designers and then automatically pick a few that have high rankings and/or are available to work on the project. So actually we have one process and it combines the old model with the new. Each project is completely open but at the same time the customer can handpick their select designers.

And what’s the reaction been like from your community so far?

Extremely positive. We’re seeing over 100 invites sent out each day on the website, because you can obviously send out multiple invites for each project. The designers like it more because it reduces their risk and it also rewards past performance, so as their ranking increases on the website, they get more prominence. If they submit a good logo to another project but don’t win, a customer might see that and it becomes an ad for them. On the customer side, it reduces uncertainty with the crowdsourcing model. In the past you needed to ask them to take the leap of faith and say, “look trust us, good designers will come to your project”. In this model when you’re asking for payment upfront, you can say, “here are our designers, here’s a list of our designers, you can choose the ones you want”.