LogoTournament

Thank you to our customers, staff, and our top-notch design community! These 10 years wouldn't have happened without you. I browse LT daily, and I'm continually amazing by the unique and creative work that our designers come up with. Here is to another 10!

I signed a non-disclosure, and have met multiple times with a large marketplace that is interested in aquiring LogoTournament. This included being flown out to New York to meet with their parent company's acquisition team.

The terms of the deal was weighted towards privately held stock over cash, which made me uncomfortable as I had no control over the value of the stock. Due to reservations on both sides, the deal did not proceed. The entire process was super stressful and very distracting, but also very exciting.

I have decided to continue building & running LogoTournament independently as it's what I really want to do.

LogoTournament was featured in an article that was syndicated in the Washington Post, PC World Magazine, and CIO Magazine.

I went to my local convenience store and picked up five copies of July's PC World Magazine, and turned to page 30 and there it was: a 1/2 page review of LogoTournament with a great review.

The site is currently experiencing double-digit month over month growth.

After losing part of my savings and mind with Google Adwords, I began to experiment with some other PPC channels. I tried FB Ads which was still pretty new, and had limited interface and functionality. After a number of experiments, it started to work. I had really started to focus on it, to the point that I was running a daily profit & loss statement and putting every single dollar I earned back into FB ads.

"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face." -Mike Tyson

My master plan for launch is: 1) Adwords. 2) Profit! After $1800 of adspend, I have earned a whopping $60 in "earnings" after paying out designers. I had a fair amount of Adwords experience with some e-commerce niches in Canada, but I'm getting absolutely clobbered in the highly competitive global logo market.

On a happier note, I do have a handful of real customers -- and they're really, really happy. I'm no longer artifically supplying the customer side, so the Two-Sided Marketplace is alive.

As a side project, I have been able to spend evenings & weekends designing the entire site & process. Although I have about a decade of Front-end web development & design experience, my PHP/MySQL skills aren't my strength or primary interest. After some false starts, I end up hiring a programmer on the other side of the world who compliments my skill set very well. After 4 months we have a simple, feature complete site ready to go.

I quickly setup a MVP with VBulletin Forum Software, and sent some very personalized invites to a small and curated list of designers. To my absolute surprise, the response was overwhelming. I'm currently supplying the customer side of the marketplace with my own logo projects and those of people I know.

I frequent a number of different design forums, and recently came across some threads where designers were holding impromptu logo contest for a small prize. Shoe-horning a logo contest into forum threads was hard to follow, but seeing multiple ideas from multiple designers was game changing.

I think it would be great if there was a dedicated and easy to use website to use for logo contests, for everyone — not just technical forum users. After brainstorming many names, I register an available domain: LogoTournament.com