| Different markets have different design needs. Luxury consumer brands will be different from enterprise products. I know an entrepreneur who spent about $5,000 on professional branding for a bootstrapped enterprise product. And the design did look very professional and creditable. Two things went wrong: 1) He needed to build new landing pages, etc., on a regular basis, and these rarely looked as professional as the basic branding. So despite spending a lot of money, his site didn't look ultra-professional—at best, it looked competent. And that's not good enough to justify $5,000 in a bootstrapped startup. 2) He spent the $5,000 before proving that he could actually close sales. In this case, I'd say that the $5,000 was spent prematurely. He could have purchased a lower-cost logo and spent a day browsing themeforest, and he would have wound up with something 80% as good for under $500. And that would have been enough to start e-mailing his industry contacts and trying to get his first sale. Getting that first sale was his biggest priority, because it would prove he had a real business. So before deciding whether to hire a designer, ask yourself: Is looking professional the best use of your money right now? And what happens if you need to change your sales pitch significantly, or even pivot? Does your designer understand UX, advertising, copywriting, or do they just make logos and stationary? Can you afford to keep paying them? How bad are your own design skills? |