Design firm, template, or crowd-source? Bootstrapping a nice-looking startup.
If you're bootstrapping a startup, what's the best choice for handling some of the early design such as logo and landing page.
Has anyone had good results with 99design?
Is it better to just shell out for a designer you like? That seems prohibitively expensive before product/market fit is achived.
Both of these (as well as most of anything else) will change so many times... So don't sweat the small stuff.
My advice:
Good luck!
D
Templates all the way, but spend a small amount of time tweaking them so you don't look like every templated website out there.
We used a free Wordpress template for the landing page of FreeTrain.co which is enough for the MVP and use Podia for the product and course subscription, which looks great out of the box.
Strong copy, consistent use of a nice colour palette and other professional touches will make a templated website stand out.
And most users aren't as tech savvy as Indie Hackers, so won't even realise you've used a template anyway.
I tend to go with templates. It's super fast, flexible as hell and cheap. Given the right amount of effort and if you have an eye for it your templates will look like they've been designed by professionals specifically for your business. I work with both - $3000/page behance designers and templated solutions and I prefer the latter.
I've never used 99design, but I have heard good things. You seem to get good quality design.
Fiverr is an option if your expectations are not too high!
And if you have ongoing design needs, I read about https://www.manypixels.co the other day - it looks interesting, but I've not used them.
Then there's the DIY option! Check out logojoy.com and thenounproject.com :)
Good luck.