How CaaS (Creative-as-a-Service) Can Cut Your Design Costs By 45%. The Secret Sauce for Bootstrapped Founders

um just a little bit about myself uh I'm originally from Iran I came to the us about 10 years ago rent Parson the newest school to get my masters and that was the time that they realized how our educational system is broken uh this basically designer students coming out of the college with no experience they struggle to get a job and we decided to start a platform so that Designer students can gain Real World experience and that's how designed got started

originally um for about doing it about the year we realized nobody actually wanted the student work so we decided to add a collaborative model brought the creative directors so that they can actually supervise those emerging designers then we add a subscription model and over the past five years we were able to hit into a 10 million ARR and I think that's why I'm here today to share a little bit with you guys so here is the plan for the next like seven 18

minutes uh that I wanted to run by you uh we're going to talk about some good designs the importance of it and also like how to find the good designers and how to collaborate with them hopefully could share just um some um useful information with you guys so I'm sure you guys are all familiar with this brand but um this is a great example of how a quick uh uh adjustment to a design in this case a product design can make a big difference um you could see that they were able to basically dominant a

really saturated Market just like that by having a very unique design and this is just a great example or a great refresher for you all to to know that so not sure if you guys know about the the role of 10% uh but what basically the role of 10% says is that the that helps you to really differentiate uh between good design versus great design and the reality is that uh everyone has the 90% And

everyone um has the Futures and the same stories but only about 10% uh is the details that they get added and that usually takes a lot of time usually 50% of the time in order to really set you for success with your product with your service um these are some of the principles that I thought might be useful for you all to to uh have in mind when it comes to creating a great design um so obviously needs to be Innovative needs to be simple needs to

uh solve a problem and and many more uh there is there is a lot that goes into it but the challenge is if you could really bring everything together in uh one comprehensive result that really puts you in that category uh that you really want to be um and uh don't want to talk about too much about like the the the design and the importance of it and the things like that I wanted to just be a little bit more um tangible with things that you could take out of this so wanted to quickly talk about the

traditional Avenue Vues uh and also cast creative as a solution not sure if you guys are familiar with it and also uh discuss some of the Alternatives and see where and at what stage do you really need to um use any of those Solutions so I'm sure you all tried different Avenues here but U obviously like working with uh freelance marketplaces could be pretty good if you're an early stage and uh it's cost effective but it comes with

the challenges you have to spend days if not weeks sourcing the right talents and then you have to supervise them and the result is basically hid and miss it might work or it may not work um the other option is basically working with in-house designer obviously super reliable they would be next to you uh but the reality is their skills would be limited especially in this uh uh days that everything becomes so specialized I have a backgrounding Graphic Design but I'm not able to do many things like in

social media and website and video anymore because it's just very specialized so you're going to be limited unless you could hire a team of designers and it still requires supervision and it takes between one to three months to hire the right person and the last Avenue is working with one of those uh big agencies let's say one of those Madison Avenue agencies the quality is there but it's expensive um and uh there's not much transparency in terms of where is the project who is working on it if the result was chat GPT

or just a bunch of designers behind it and obviously takes forever so these are some of the stats for uh marketers and the reason actually creative as a service was um started so about 68% of uh marketers say that they need additional help that's a common challenge that usually marketing directors are facing with and uh at the same time creatives and designers are expected to generate about or to create

about 10 times more um content compared with 10 15 years ago uh and about 92% of uh marketing managers having a hard time finding uh the right team or the right talents to basically get the support that they need and lastly 40% of uh creatives or designers uh really feel that they're burned out and uh they're overworking uh when it comes to working

with marketing managers so that's why creative as a service was basically um a started the years ago and uh it's basically a scalable solution for marketing managers designed on a subscription based model that gives you the uh the access to the creative team and also uh all the functions around it that can basically set you for success and and scalability and to be honest one of the reason that we had a good success uh getting to a 10 million uh ER without

funding was the fact that we were able to jump on this on time at the right time um and and catch it early on so you could think of Cass as a as a let's say powerful smoothie uh that basically comes with the right combination gives you that reliability because it's backed by a by a bigger company or platform uh the quality is there because the the talents are vetted highly wedded and it's cost effective because of the fact

that it's uh it's using a share economy like each creatives and designers usually in these platforms are sharing their time with um few clients um that makes it more affordable so these are uh some of the solutions are there three of them are cast models and uh two of them are not cast models but included in there because it could be it could be useful depends on the stage of the company so for instance if your earli stage working again with upwork fiber

could be beneficial it's uh there's no problem with that you could get your projects done uh not at the highest quality there it's not going to be as hasslefree uh but it's going of work same thing with 99 design but when it comes to getting a scalable team that can basically give you the strategy that you need as well as uh scalable solution that can grow with your company you may want to consider like one of those three cast models uh super site could be a

good one uh if you guys uh really looking for quality and a scalable solution design pickl would be good for like more production work um and design obviously us could be also something in between of those two and I'm going to explain a little bit more so with us specifically we tried to add some tweaks uh to this model to make it work even better for instance when you sign up with designed you get a a dedicated

creative director who has about 10 years of experience they would be your main point of contact and they would be responsible to a strategize the the projects create timeline and assign the right creatives to the team as needed so that you could actually just leave your creative Works to to to hand of a team of professionals that can that can help you with um another fact is that uh we only work with the top 3% of uspas

creatives uh there is obviously benefits using offshore designers but in our case we wanted to eliminate language barriers time difference and things like that so that's why we focus on that we categorize our designers into emerging Senior Pro and the creative director decides what projects would be assigned to who to create the efficiency that is needed and this way you get an interchangeable efficient team under the creative director and lastly it's uh besides having a great team and a

creative director you also uh get a process and workflow that set you for Success similar to the way that when you order an Uber you would see where is your designer you would see basically where is your project who is working on it how long it's going to take and so on which is great uh to basically predict the result so we are very much proud of our um 4.8 reviews uh because design is very subjective and it's not really easy to

get to that High um let's say review and uh there are some larger companies like marot Hotel who decided to replace their traditional in-house team with design uh just to save some cost or con4 who is basically using us as an alternative for some of the produ that they don't have the bandwidth to do and um hopefully it could be useful for um some of you guys there as well so that being said I

wanted to also discuss um a few things regarding U how to start a projects that set you for success as well as uh collaborating with the designers the right way because no matter if you're having an in-house team working with the agency and so on if you don't have the right system in place it's going to be a challenge to to get result so in in a design Bo we have this saying that we say start a slow uh to move a strong and

fast and that's one of the biggest uh thing that we see actually with um with some clients or or designers that don't actually get to a good position with with each other the problem is they Rush the project in the beginning they they put it together they don't give it enough thoughts into the project Bri and the result of it would be a disaster there's going to be a lot of back and forth and Visions which is not ideal so when you wanted to start a successful

projects you really need to give these items um some thoughts such as like the main goal the why behind it the some of the Inspirations that could be useful for uh for you or for the for this specific projects the red flags that the team should know and avoid so this would be extremely important and and saves you a lot of time down the road um if we are talking about a specific projects let's say video projects for instance you wanted to also Define the tone and Voice or what's the call to actions what's the

approach what's the location there's a lot of details like this that we usually don't think about it in the beginning enough that then becomes um a problem down the road or even thinking about like the duration of it obviously the the tone of the content um and where this specific video let's say is going to be used is it going to be social media is it going to be on your website even if it's social media what a specific plat platforms and all those details can make a big

difference and lastly you need to also be honest with yourself and Define it from the beginning that how much do you want to be involved like if this project is something that you want to be involved in the in every single steps or do you just want to be somehow involved or like fully involved because that's going to change the the turnaround time it's going to change the the dynamic of the collaboration and also how much do you want the team seem to really uh dive

deep when it comes to the ideations so this project request form that I show you is a result of like couple of years of uh our team working and researching and figuring out what are the important things that needs to go into each project so that's how we usually start every projects uh in our platform at design and uh now it's becoming a standard for many of other cast Solutions so let's say you have the right um um project request the right

team the right solution now it's uh it's about the way that you're going to be collaborating and if you ignore this part then you are missing about 50% of the of the of the result here because your collaboration really matters so you you wanted to make sure that you're are very specific and clear uh you're not providing wague feedbacks and comments uh we actually launched a campaign on this that going to share with you in a second you also want to make sure that you focus on the objectives and remind

the team about the main goals and you want to to make sure that you provide the feedback along the way and don't leave it to the last uh runs the sooner you can get involved the better would be um the other three points is that the feedback needs to be Consolidated we see it all the time that different point of contacts get involved provide conflicting feedbacks that creates a lot of frustrations and issues for the for the creatives um and for the for the point of contact you also want to make

sure that as much as possible visual visualiz your your thoughts or try to communicate with them visually because at the end of the day you are dealing with designers they need to see it uh rather than hearing it and also explaining the reasons behind making the logo bigger or moving it to the left and right that really helps them to get into the um parts that is in your brain so here's a uh funny campaign that we launched actually for for our creative

Community which was uh kind of interesting but the reason I brought this is that you don't want to communicate your feedbacks like this that make it pop or it's too much white space and so on because that's the those are kind of like the words or the keywords that is a little bit of a red flags for the creative Community usually and they they get a bit offensive about it so that's all uh at the end I just wanted to leave you guys with this that

think of good design as a turkey it takes time it's a process and if you really think about it as something that needs to be done fast and quick then the result won't be really good and delicious turkey and it's not just going to work out so that's all if you guys interested in trying designity uh we could offer you a three weeks trial we are so confident about our model that we don't even ask for any upfront payment or uh commitment you could just try

working with a team for three weeks and if you like it you could continue working and that's all [Applause]