
99design Founders Invest $460,000 In Tweaky.com - antr
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/07/17/99design-founders-invest-460000-in-tweaky-a-marketplace-for-minor-website-customizations/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29
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cperciva
While I'm sure tptacek will jump in to rant about the perils of less-than-a-
day-at-a-time consulting, I think this is a great idea. At one point last year
I had a CSS problem I couldn't figure out (I think it was about how to add
some space somewhere -- I managed to hack around it with HTML but I wanted a
"proper" CSS solution) and I would have happily paid for the 30 seconds of
thought it would have taken a CSS expert to solve it for me.

Instead, I inserted a <!-- This is ugly but I don't know how to do it properly
in CSS. Tell me how and I'll award you a $5 bug bounty --> comment and someone
sent me an email a few days later.

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peetahb
The design or css irc channels always have people in there willing to help.

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mnicole
As per a comment below, designers/people "don't know what IRC is." I agree
with you (and anyone working in web should understand its technologies -- past
and present), but that's an argument.

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richardv
I'm not being cynical, but are they purposefully holding back some of the more
important details on the "How it works" on <http://www.tweaky.com/>

I can't actually find the details on this. Is this an offline service, or are
you expected to provide access to your development server?

This is what I think it would say (which would scare the hell out of me)...

1\. Submit your brief

2\. We assign each task a $25 charge.

3\. You pick a developer.

4\. _You provide FTP details to your live production server_

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whatusername
Currently online.

Having talked to the tweaky guys last week -- they are aware of the potential
concern -- have some mitigations (encryption/etc) in place -- don't feel that
it's a massive concern of the target market -- and have prototypes of more
detailed technical solutions.

In short -- smart guys - and they have a strategy to deal with it if the
market says that random developer access to prod is bad. (And I think the
market for $25 tweaks is probably ok with that anyway)

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joshmlewis
This is an interesting idea but I'm afraid that their target market isn't
going to be the guys who know their FTP information and will have to at least
bug their existing site provider for it and who knows how long that will take.
Other than that getting their name out there to these people is even harder
because again the target market from what I've seen doesn't usually have a
clue to what's going on besides Facebook and email. Once they figure this out
though their market will expand greatly.

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dsirijus
Um, there's this "service" called IRC. They mostly do same thing, and you have
the opportunity to get "fixed" by the creators of the technology involved.

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noahc
Most people don't know about IRC. I know that makes your head explode, but
most of the designers I've talked to either thought it was a social chatroom
or have never even heard of it.

If designers, our counter-parts, don't know about IRC how is the pet shop
owner in Omaha, NE supposed to know about it when their designer bails and
wants to change "this one little thing" on their website?

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dsirijus
Yes, I blurted out. I was just pondering on the idea of frontending IRC
channels somehow to provide similar service.

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criswell
A "tweak" is basically their way of saying a half an hour's worth of work
(<http://www.tweaky.com/faq>). All those home page examples would be much more
than a tweak besides maybe "remove white space". I think it's misleading. It
would be WAY more than $150 to make all the adjustments to that example.

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illumen
There's a new service coming, but with $0 changes, and the developers are
charged $100/yr.

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ivanvanderbyl
Well done guys, great to see this going big after seeing you working on it for
months.

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drsim
Great idea, well executed with a very attractive pricing model. I do wonder
though how I can get my crappy, classic ASP table-layout site tweaked for a
fixed price of $25 for each change.

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wingerlang
> from $25

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laberge
Hah. Just saw Matt yesterday

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jacques_chester
I find it fascinating that an earlier version of this story -- which did not
namecheck 99designs -- has basically languished in the doldrums.

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inspiredworlds
nice work @nedwin. great to see it get off the ground from startup weekend
melbourne.

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jamespcole2
Congratulations guys

