Crowdsourcing site DesignCrowd.com smashes through $1M in projects, and sets sights for a lot more

DesignCrowd.com, a crowdsourcing sitefor everything from logo design to tattoo design and t-shirt design recorded amassive milestone in April 2011 by reaching $1M in payments to designers. The site's rapid growth has been made possible by its innovative crowdsourcing business model(that allows businesses to get 50+ designs and ideas from around the world in just hours) which differs from other crowdsourcing services and its community of 30,000 high quality designers from across over 57 countries including Australia,Canada,India and Mongolia.

"I am ecstaticthat we reached this milestone so quickly", said Alec Lynch, who founded DesignCrowd in 2008. "This is significant because it shows the disruptive nature of our service and reinforces that DesignCrowd as a leader in crowdsourcing and design. Another reason we're celebrating this milestone is the benefit that $1M has bought to our designers around the world. Over $1M has been paid to talented designers in developing economies. For example, in February, an Indian web designer made $10,000in his first 4 weeks on the site. That's twenty times more than the average wage in India." In a Crowdsourcing Case Study published by DesignCrowd, Arun Bhattacharya(the Indian designer mentioned above) says "DesignCrowd has given a great opportunity to designers like me to come up with their best designs and compete fairly."

One of the reasons DesignCrowd is different to other crowdsourcing sites is it pays participation payments to designers even if their designs aren't chosen. "We've fixed one of the key problems with crowdsourcing - fairness and sustainability. We pay designers participation payments because crowdsourcing doesn't have to be winner-takes-all." DesignCrowd has paid almost $200,000 to designers in participation payments whichAdam Arbolino (DesignCrowd’s Chief Technology Officer) sayshas helped them attract higher quality designers to the site.“The model works really well – everyone wins”, says Arbolino. “The more designers we have and the better those designers are, the more customers want to post projects in order to get access to these designers, which in turn increases the number of designers from around the globe who want to offer their designs, and it keeps going.”

While $1M in projects is a great achievement, Alec and Adam don’t see this growth slowing anytime soon. Lynch believes the site will have over 100,000 designers by the end of 2011 as the site’s popularity increases. “Our forecasts suggest we'll hit a run rate of $2M per annum in the next 3 months."