Launching a Product - How do I Find Designers?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I wanna talk about how to find designers. How do you find designers when you're a startup? How do you find them when you're a company? And you might be wondering, why, why is Ian talking about finding designers. I run a design firm, but the reality is we're not the perfect fit for everyone. Everyone's budget is different, everybody has different needs, and we're by no means— I'm not gonna be able to help every single person on the planet. But finding the right designer, even if you work with a freelance designer at first, get it to a certain stage, then work with my firm, then work with somebody else for some other component. If you don't get a good designer, you're going to be coming to someone like me in order to fix a problem rather than being able to just improve a design or really catapult you forward into the next step of your product lifecycle. So this is really important, and I've spent I've spent a lot of time fixing problems that were created by people who hired the wrong designer and that designer was not what they should have been. And people also come to me and say, well, I don't even know how to find a designer. Like, I'm able to find you, you're an agency, you have presence, you're easily found, but I just need someone, I need someone that's far cheaper for a very small thing that, is just not enough to hire a full agency for. And so this is to hopefully help you if you're launching a product and you want to get an idea of where to find people to talk to and see who might be a good fit, then there's a few different options for you to go for. There's 4 I'm gonna cover: direct hire, contractor platforms, agency directories, and of course, just good old web and social media, things like that. So the first area, direct hire. Direct hire is great if you have the HR in place to manage it, you have management or the person you're hiring is able to self-manage themselves on projects. Direct hire is great if you have the ability to pay for all of the overhead required and you really do have a long-term need and enough work for them to be busy with their specific skills for, you know, long enough to be real employment. Like, this is a long-term engagement. A direct hire is not a contractor. You shouldn't be hiring people just for a, you know, brief time. It's a real commitment. It's for typically real businesses. It creates payroll, all the expenses. And when you do that, there's— those are all the platforms that you think of that you would go to in order to go find a job. You know, different job boards and things like that, LinkedIn even. And so that is how you're going to get a direct hire. You can also hire HR or headhunters and people like that that can help find, place, and even potentially manage your team for you. But that's, that's the serious commitment. I'm going to build my own in-house team and I don't want contractors. I want them employees. Second area that you can— place that you can look for and type is contractor platforms. And this is where people are really familiar with places like Fiverr and things like that that are just platforms that you can go to that everything is contract. There is no hiring. There's no, you know, you don't have to provide benefits for anyone. It's all just contracting. Now, in addition to platforms like that, there's of course people will hire through their network. They'll find contractors, they'll know people that will work for contract, and it really just depends on what you're looking for. If you are looking for, you know, cheaper rates and things like that, that's a lot of what the contractor platforms are for. You know, Fiverr became a thing based on most of the services starting at $5, which depending on what you're getting was a really great deal. So it really just depends on what your financial position is and what quality level you're aiming for and what you're really looking to get from it. Now, Fiverr of course has grown and other platforms, so you do have high-end, more high-end, but it does cap out. You're not gonna find big agencies on there. You're not gonna hire my firm through Fiverr just because Once you get to the real agency status, especially if you're US-based, typically Fiverr is not how you're going to do it. That said, you will find quality there, you will find bad there, you will find good and bad pretty much everywhere you look. But that is, those kinds of places are where you can find designers. The third area is agency directories. When you aren't looking for just a contract, you are looking for an agency, then you'll find those in places like Course 77 runs the Design Directory, and there's other directories that they are agency-focused. They're not for contractors, not for individuals. They're for real agencies that are, you know, that second segment that you're going to be putting down more serious money for. They're real agencies. They're not going to charge you know, tiny contractor rates, and they're not for hire as a direct employee. They're teams of people. And kind of the difference between contractor and agency and what I've seen in the design world, and I've used— I've used contractors, I've used agencies, I've managed multiple agencies and contractors at a single company before. And the reason that you use different ones is contractors are really great for bringing in short-term Really project-specific and skill-specific. So contractor is just one person. They're gonna do a job. They're really good at, hopefully really good at that job, and that's their scope. They're not gonna do multiple things for you, whereas an agency will do multiple things. It can flex their team. So rather than going have to find 5 contractors at one point and then 3 and then changing it, You go to one agency and you say, well, I need this done. I need this project done. They complete that project and maybe they give, you know, you can have it on retainer so that they're always available and they have to deal with all of the hiring, firing, the HR, managing the team, making sure that there's enough of a team, making sure that they scale their team to hit deadlines and then pare it back down. And you're just paying them based on whether they're doing something or not, and they're able to scale with you. And that's why agencies usually are more of a partnership relationship, because when you build a relationship with an agency, you— they become your department for you. And as your department, they manage everything. You just write the department a budget and you say, this is your budget, and, you know, negotiate with them. They'll make sure it's a budget that actually works, but then they take that and they disseminate it to whatever skill are needed for that project. And that's why I built the agency model is because it's something that I believe works very well for startups and businesses in general, but not everything. So some things are better done by an individual contractor, small projects, you know, something that requires only one specialty. If you only need one, don't pay for an agency if you don't need an agency. You know, that's one of the things I turn down clients that they wanna work with me, great, but they really don't need me. We're not in the right— we're not the right fit at the time, and they just don't have enough of a need for services. Whereas an individual contractor could be charging half the rate and do just a very specific job for them. Great. I would rather save them money and down the road when they're ready, work with an agency and have a partnership. Then that's the right time. So that's the difference. And those are— those are the two. There's two separate platforms typically for, for those. You have directories for agency level, and then you have platforms like Fiverr for contractors. The last place that I tell people is you can't find anything on those platforms, if you can't find anybody to directly hire, then your kind of last place is, of course, Just search it. You can just search, find people, companies with SEO, you'll find them. Do your research and places like social media, people put up their portfolios. I've actually hired designers from looking at their portfolios on social media before. So that process is, it works really well and there's a ton of designers out there. There's many options here to find a designer and find the right fit. And hopefully I've given you a little bit of idea on where each kind of designer and whether it's an agency, a contractor, or a direct hire, when the benefit is for those and where you should be looking to find them. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description, and of course we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.