Launch HN: Awesomic (YC S21) – Get design tasks done with 24-hour turnaround
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?
61 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 74.9 ms ] threadps: For some reason the expansions of the FAQ tabs expands really slowly, might want to fix that.
p.s. thanks for the sharp eye on FAQ! please tell me your browser (I keep fighting with Safari issues :) )
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...
Can we see this great ad?
Not sure how competing with firms with the exact same business model on Clutch requires VC funding, but OK. Best of luck.
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
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.
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.
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.
Also, please don't ignore the other ways in which you broke the site guidelines with your post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aaand... if a client and designer who you matched up decide they would like to pursue a working relationship outside of your app, without paying you your cut for future work, do you consider this a success, or a failure?
We pay middle and middle+ rates in locations where we hire designers. So, Awesomic designers get the same or even more than other designers in the same location. Also, we have paid days off, and we are working on free health care program for our designers. So, does Upwork has paid day-offs or free health care program?
> And what's your plan for when the funding runs out - are you gonna follow Uber's path and start shaving more and more out of what the designers get?
We've been profitable for two years before we joined YC. Even now, we are profitable and haven't used YC's $125k. Still, we are raising money to hire more developers to build a better product – platform. Create an excellent product with AI – is super hard and expensive.
> if a client and designer who you matched up decide they would like to pursue a working relationship outside of your app without paying you your cut for future work, do you consider this a success, or a failure?
In two years working on this concept – we haven't had any cases like that. Designers like to work with Awesomic because they can grow and develop new skills on different projects. I am always happy when we deliver a great project after long cooperation.
Here is an example of how Norvegian startup worked with our designers for 18+ months in a row – https://www.awesomic.io/case-study/entirebody
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!
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!
Are they income generating or are you just really committing to getting them/one off the ground without actually quitting 'the day job'?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which makes sense IMO, then the designer can take on as many clients as they have bandwidth for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the best.
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?
Your model seems most viable for customers who need design work all the time, e.g. to replace a FT resource. However, whenever I was involved in a company that needed frequent design work, we ended up holding on to dear life to any designer we liked because there is so much variance in terms of quality, work habits, communication skills that we happily paid up for continuity and control by hiring full time instead.
On the other hand, for many customers of those freelance sites that you identify as comps, that’s not the situation, though. For them, design work usually comes up in chunks. So, those folks may attempt to churn and reenroll frequently in your service to match the flow of their design needs. To prevent that kind of churn, you may end up trying to manage deliverables and/or debate semantics (e.g. what constitutes a “task”, 50 app screens or picking the color of a button?), which ends up driving customers away.
This last bit could be remedied if you built a very detailed catalogue of tasks, but that may not be worth anyone’s while…
One question in my head was left unanswered while I read through your post and website: who is responsible for finding and connecting with clients? How do you do that (or how are you planning to scale your current approach)?