99designs – Hire The Best Designers For Your Business
Designing is a very crucial part of any business. With digital marketing becoming the ruler of the empire, one needs to hire top-class designers for the company. It varies from company to company whether they want to hire a designing team or hire freelancers. But, with freelancers, things get easier and faster. You hire them, assign a job, set a deadline and the job is done. When it comes to freelancers, many websites provide the service of hiring freelancers. Websites like Fiverr, Freelancers.com are ruling the market for a very long time. But, they tend to cover most of the categories needed for business operation. For example, content writers, graphic designers, software developers, web designers, etc. 99designs is a platform that is solely created for connecting graphic designers to the clients. Matt Mickiewicz and Mark Harbottle founded the company in 2008. The company’s headquarters are based in Melbourne, Australia.
About the Founders
Born in Poland, Matt moved to Germany at a very young age. He was very much interested in developing websites and designing them as well. Matt created his first website, SitePoint at the age of fourteen and after a couple of years, he met Mark Harbottle. When he was in high school, he managed both attending classes and his advertising business.
Matt met his business partner only at the age of sixteen and established 99designs as an independent company in 2008. In 2011, Matt came in the list of 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur by Forbes and INC. He attends seminars and conferences around the world as an important speaker.
Mark Harbottle has plenty of experience in the entrepreneurial world. He co-founded 99designs in 2008 and presently invests in many companies. He has co-founded other companies as well which includes Flippa.com, Learnable.com, and SitePoint (parent company of 99designs and later spun off). He is the Founding Investor at Elto.com, Hired Inc., Influx Inc, and Assembly Payments.
How did it start?
Matt created SitePoint when he was in high school. But, then he didn’t know it would take a bigger shape in the future. Initially, the people at SitePoint competed with each other regarding who could create the best design. But, with a little entrepreneurial idea, the journey of 99designs started. They decided to design the logo and get a cash prize for the winner in return. And, finally, 99designs spun off from SitePoint.com.
Success and Growth
After Matt and Mark established the company in 2008, they found that most of their clients and designers are from the United States. So, they opened an office in San Francisco. Currently, the U.S. headquarters are situated in Oakland, California. The company grew fast and by the next four years, 99designs had more than 175,000 designers from 192 countries. In 2009, the company became one of Australia’s top innovations.
In 2011, 99designs raised $35 million from Accel Partners for carrying out global expansion. By this time, the company had around 100,000 designers and hosted more than 75,000 projects. In 2012, 99designs acquired a European company, 12designer which later became the European headquarters of the company. In 2013, the company acquired LogoChef, one of Brazil’s leading designing company. This year the company also expanded its business to Latin America and the Netherlands providing Dutch version of it.
In 2015, the company raised another $10 million. Though the company mainly conducted competitions and see whose logo wins, after a few years, they decided otherwise. From 2016, the company allowed the clients to directly choose and hire designers from the registered designers. At the end of 2018, the company’s annual revenue summed up to $60 million.
In 2018, the company also announced that the total earnings of the designers crossed $250 million by the end of the year.
Why in demand?
The platform has turned out to be advantageous for both the clients and the designers. In 99designs, the clients are provided with the best designer as they are given the liberty of choice. On the other hand, the designers also don’t need to interact with every other client asking for the project. If you are a designer you only design your project. 99designs does the rest of the job. Through the span of twelve years, it has become successful in establishing trust among the company and clients.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more