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Australian entrepreneur Mark Harbottle took a rather strange decision in 1999 when he decided to go into business with Matt Mickiewicz, a Canadian who was in Year 10. But the move paid off in spades.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI was 26 and he was 16 (but) age didn\u2019t come into it,\u201d Harbottle says. \u201cI saw that he was a smart kid that knew what he was doing. He was making a few thousand dollars a week through his site. Matt put in a few thousand dollars to fund it and I put in $400.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The web developer business, Sitepoint, was hit by a severe downturn in ad dollars during the dotcom crash. Harbottle and Mickiewicz came up with the idea of providing high-quality content to web developers in print form.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOur customers were printing information off the web, so we thought, let\u2019s do something here,\u201d Harbottle says. \u201cThe idea was spawned through that. You could call it crowdsourcing, in a way. It was about working out what the customers wanted and responding to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe printed an on-demand book and it went gangbusters. We have about 60 books now.\u201d<\/p>\n
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SitePoint may have altered its business model to become a traditional publisher, but it was its continued online innovation that was to spark the launch of 99Designs.<\/p>\n
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The large community of developers and designers that gathered online at SitePoint\u2019s forum regularly played what Harbottle calls \u201cPhotoshop tennis\u201d in working on logos for fictitious projects, for a bit of friendly competition and to hone skills.<\/p>\n
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The dynamic changed when a small business owner asked the community to create branding for him.<\/p>\n
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Mickiewicz recalls: \u201cIt was a revolutionary way of outsourcing graphic design work and, quite literally, dozens of times better than the next best alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cAfter a while, when it was clear that this organic model had lasting power, we began charging each \u2018contest proctor\u2019 $10 to post a request for design work in our forums and we quickly started generating thousands in revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Harbottle adds: \u201cThere was just a huge groundswell of interest in the idea so we thought, \u2018We\u2019ve got to build a site for this, it\u2019s not right to have it in a forum.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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The site allows businesses to post design jobs online, with freelance designers competing with each other to create the best solution and claim the commissioned payment.<\/p>\n
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Five years since launch, more than $45 million has been paid out to 99designs\u2019 community. The business has 70 staff in Australia, the US, Germany, France and London and raised $35 million in funding in 2011<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Story continues on page 3. Please click below.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 2. 99designs Australian entrepreneur Mark Harbottle took a rather strange decision in 1999 when he decided to go<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47058"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}