

Ask HN: How do you hire freelance designers? - eduardordm

I've been trying to hire a freelance designer to build me a landing page for 3 days. I went to dribble.com and tried to contact exactly 21 designers. NONE of them answered to my emails. How do you people hire designers?
======
ssazesh
My experience with quality designers on dribbble is that they don't take on
very small jobs. They get hit up a lot so you have to appear worthwhile ($$$).
Here is the email I used to reach out and got 8 responses contacting 12
designers:

\---

Hi [name],

I'm the co-founder of [startup]. I saw your work on Dribbble - impressive! We
are looking to do a design overhaul and I wanted to chat to see if this is
something you would be interested in.

Would you have some time this week to jump on a skype call?

Thanks

\---

Your project could be too small for them to respond. Have you considered
99designs or using Elance, Odesk, etc?

~~~
eduardordm
I'll try 99designs. I don't like the way Elance works, it's feels way too
focused on getting me to signed up (and paying) instead of getting my project
to work.

------
fideloper
How do you format your emails?

If you have a site, you can create a careers page and keep a backlog of
developers/designers to have for when you need any.

Of course, networking is a great way to go, and also give you another source
of resume backlogs.

~~~
eduardordm
This is pretty much the standart e-mail I've been sending:

Hi X

I'm a startup founder in Y We have a product that is finished (functionality-
wise) but we are not designers at all. We used twitter bootstrap to build a
good of this app, which is pretty ok for now. Thing is, we can't get to build
a good welcome page. The welcome page is pretty much a login/signup page with
some text and screenshots in it. (see attachment)

I would like to know if you are available and if you could provide me some
quotation to build us a single welcome page containing a login and signup. You
would use twitter bootstrap and the html that is already there (we could
customize if required).

------
allbombs
what is your budget and timeline?

Can you ask your network vs cold call emails?

Maybe check out - <http://www.scoutzie.com/>

------
eduardordm
It's interesting, really. In this specific case, I find myself stuck in a
situation where maybe I'm an opportunity lots of people are waiting for, but
at the end, no one takes.

------
orangethirty
Shoot me an email, I might be able to help you with it.

