
Ask HN: Creative direction as a service? - fairpx
I&#x27;ve been designing products for large co&#x27;s and smaller Startups. And I run a design shop. Was thinking of a new service where I would offer creative direction to entrepreneurs for a 250&#x2F;mo subscription fee.<p>Basically when ever you need creative &#x2F; design help, you can ask for directions and advice.<p>Things like: what colors to use, why your newly codes webpage looks like crap, how to improve the UX of your landing page, etc.<p>I would then reply in 24h with clear and practical directions that you can pick up and implement.<p>Question is, would this service be helpful?
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shostack
I've been curious about the viability of this sort of advisory retainer model
for other areas. Has anybody tried something similar?

I think of it like a stripped-down agency model. From a customer perspective,
you have no long-term contracts or commitments, and you can get normally cost-
prohibitive expertise at a steep discount. The catch is that the execution
falls squarely on your shoulders.

But for a startup with a limited budget and lots of sweat to offer, in certain
areas that can be totally fine as the difficult part isn't necessarily in the
building but in making sure the right thing is being built.

To the OP, I have a few questions:

1\. How would you define your ToS so as to ensure profitability? I could see
people taking advantage if it were all you can eat and constantly asking for
answers on slightly different designs to make sure they had you making the
bulk of the decisions.

2\. Time=money in this case. How scaleable is this model? Or do you not plan
on it scaling to a large number and would be happy if you only had a
relatively small number of customers to pay the bills?

3\. What would your deliverables look like? Would you provide actual
sketches/comps? Detailed write-ups? Or just brief written responses to very
specific questions?

4\. To add to #3, if you limit it to answering questions, how will you keep
user satisfaction high if you get a lot of overly broad questions/asks that
you then need to push back on to keep the scope limited and profitable?

5\. 24h turnaround is nice in theory, but do you really plan on being
available during weekends and holidays? What if you get sick? If this is in
essence a productized one-person consultancy, how do you manage expectations
around that?

6\. In general, what's your game plan for needy customers? If you fire them,
you get a bad reputation. If you give in, you kill your margins. If you push
back, you risk churn.

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nerdponx
Isn't this just UX/UI freelancing with some marketing thrown in?

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fairpx
No its an advisory service. Im used to designing the UI and UX at a much
higher price point. The idea here is to offer a cheaper package where I would
provide instructions on how to diy.

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nerdponx
Interesting. I'm no entrepreneur, but I imagine this might be more useful if
available as a one-off instead of, or in addition to, a subscription.

