By: Senior staff writer – Easton Ellsworth

TechStartups recently had a virtual sit-down with Angeline Vuong, community manager for crowdSPRING, an online marketplace for creative content. Behold …

TS: What is crowdSPRING?

AV: crowdSPRING is the creative marketplace. We offer a service where people can post a creative project (such as a logo design or web site), watch the world contribute ideas, and they choose the design they like the most.
TS: Who is its target audience?

AV: Our target audience is buyers who want great, customized creative content for their business. We primarily focus on changing the game for the small businesses and startups who may not have the budget to hire a design firm but want quality design work. With the launch of our newest service, crowdSPRING Pro, we’ve also opened up our site to larger companies and ad agencies who want to tap into a diverse talent pool of creatives from around the world.
TS. Why would people want to use it?

AV: For buyers, we offer a different model in finding solutions to creative needs that involves less risk than the typical design process. Imagine having access to 6,000 different designers, providing a global outlook on your brand! The buyer just submits a project with his/her creative brief, and creatives contribute actual ideas. The best idea, not portfolio or previous work, wins. We guarantee that you will get at least 25 entries to your project, or you are entitled to walk with a full refund. We also offer personalized intellectual property contracts, hold funds in escrow, and handle the payment / wrap up process so that buyers and creatives aren’t left to deal with the messy stuff, such as payment and file transfer issues at the end of a transaction. And, with buyer and creatives in over 130 countries so far, this is no small feat.

TS. How much does it cost?

AV: The amount you award is entirely up to you – just name your price. That said, there are different minimums within each project type to ensure that the winning creative is fairly compensated for his / her work. In the end, crowdSPRING also takes a 15% transaction fee on top of the amount you decide to award in a project.
TS. Can you give two or three quick examples of success stories where people used your site and got a great deal on crowdsourcing something creative for their business?

AV: I’ll let our buyers speak for themselves. Here is a post from Kim Dushinski of Mobile Marketing Profits on her blog, which highlights her satisfaction with crowdSPRING on getting her logo – http://mobilemarketingprofits.com/221/logo-design-chosen/
Eran Galperin, founder of software startup Octabox, holds our record for the most number of entries in a project (504!), and chose to post a project on crowdSPRING to get fresh ideas for his logo, even though he has in-house creatives – http://www.techfounder.net/2008/08/23/a-web-20-business-model-can-work-and-work-well/
TS. What are some competitors to crowdSPRING?

AV: There are freelancer sites, the most notable being elance.com and guru.com. They run more on the typical bidding model for freelance work, where more often than not, the cheapest bid, not the best idea, wins out. So you have to sort through hundreds of bids, review portfolios then hire someone and hope it turns out alright. With our model, by the end of your project, your entirely done and you have exactly what you want.
TS. What are crowdSPRING’s plans for the next 12-24 months?

AV: In the short term, we plan on making what we have now even more amazing, implementing new features that enhance usability and customization for both buyers and creatives. Then, in the near future, we’ll hopefully be expanding our service to include copywriting and dynamic content such as animation, music, and video. Stay tuned!
TS. What makes crowdSPRING different? Remarkable?

AV: We’re remarkable because we truly believe in what we do. More than anything, we believe in using the internet to help people and to connect with them in a human manner. If you come to our website, nothing is stuffy. We’re real people, and it shows through our copy and visual aesthetic. We’re constantly learning and sharing, as evidenced by our blog and forums. You can easily talk to co-Founders and developers as easily as you can to a fellow creative. crowdSPRING is building a true community whose members educate each other. We learn from them whether it is via feedback and suggestions or design tips, and we share our experiences as a start up in our blog with them. It may sound corny, but we’ve heard time and time again from creatives that they aren’t only on our site to make money, but also to learn and become a better designer.
TS. How are you marketing the site right now? What forms of traditional/new PR are you using?

AV: In a medium like the internet where there is a lot of noise, we find that the most helpful tool in marketing and PR is just word of mouth. Making sure that people have good experiences and tell their colleagues and friends is extremely important to us. We find people via social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook who are not only prospective buyers, but also people in the tech and new media field, designers, and basically anyone who likes to talk and share. We establish relationships with them, share helpful information, and in turn, they tell others about crowdSPRING when approached about finding creative content. We do have a PR firm that works on placing us in established publications as well, but some of the most fruitful efforts have resulted from us reaching out and talking to people ourselves.
TS. Any fun stories or crazy disaster stories (site crashed for a week, guy came into our office in a gorilla suit, etc.) would be fun too.

AV: We’re always having fun here! Seriously, we’re always challenging Chicago startups and new media-related people to ping pong tournaments. If you check out this blog post (The Benefits of Working at a Start Up) – http://blog.crowdspring.com/2008/08/27/the-benefits-of-working-at-a-start-up-2/ you’ll see that our basement office flooded. All of our power supplies were ruined, and the office smelled (and still smells) like old water. Sand was piled up in random places, and one of our developers flip flops floated across the office. What’s a company to do except suck it up, and have a photo shoot with our ruined supplies?
Ross, one of our co-Founders, and I have declared picture war against each other, meaning that we try and post embarrassing photos of each other throughout the site. If you comb the forums, you can find photos of me dressed as Pocahontas and Ross wearing a pirate’s eye patch. We’re always on the hunt to find the most ridiculous images! …and there was that one time, where crowdSPRING beta was supposed to launch, and we had six weeks to re-code and design the entire site. But you know, just the typical start up craziness!

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Thanks again to Angeline for sharing some of the human side of crowdSPRING with us. Best wishes to the cS team!

What do you like about crowdSPRING? Do you think it has a good chance at startup success?

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