The future of creative work online - Welcome to the new Scoutzie (YC S12) (opens in new tab)

This is awesome! When Scoutzie first launched, I thought "Why does this have to be limited to mobile designers?" - so it's really great to see that it has now expanded into more areas.

Right now, there is not one "marketplace" where a business owner can go to find the best designers, especially for websites. Without knowing their options, I've seen many businesses settle for a) a crappy site by their local yellow pages outfit b) the first result for "[my city] web designer" c) one of those do-it-yourself site builders or d) no website at all. A centralized directory of vetted designers makes a lot of sense for easier discovery.

One other thing that would make sense is an Airbnb-style rating system, so designers can start earning a verifiable reputation based on prior work that originated through Scoutzie.

Scoutzie is a great company to work with. Our project that went through Scoutzie hit some snags for many reasons which were completely outside of Scoutzie's control. Scoutzie promptly offered us a refund of the full amount remaining in escrow and declined our attempts at giving them back the fee portion of the refund. After the resolution of our Scoutzie contract the designer ended up signing a contract directly with us for this project which was of a much broader scope then our original project on Scoutzie. We continued the project and have produced a great product that I hope to share soon.

The Scoutzie founders were very nice and understanding people to work with throughout the whole process and I'm sure this new product will be a success.

PS: I'm glad the site works fine without Javascript enabled.

I like it, but I wish there was a way to see what kind of hourly rates they charge.

My initial concern with Scoutzie was that there was no way to verify that these "mobile designers" had actually tried and tested their designs in production vs. using a PSD device template; no app store links, no product websites. I think that this is an important aspect of calling yourself a mobile designer because you're dealing with physical interactions on a tangible interface. I also made some suggestions to the UI and general "categories" designers would find themselves in. Despite what I felt was constructive criticism by someone in the field, I've actually avoided commenting in Scoutzie threads since then because Kirill thought it appropriate to respond to me by telling me I was just jealous I didn't get in because I was a bad designer.

He later apologized, but I bring this up only because the quality curation aspect previously spoken to is non-existent, even though that was supposed to be a selling point and something that set them apart from their competitors. I was excited about this because I feel that every other site in this market is oversaturated and makes it more difficult to connect designers to gigs. To the same point, both iterations of the website have been awful both in design and usability, losing my trust in the founders' abilities to curate to begin with.

Now that it seems anyone of any talent or skillset are allowed in, I don't see how it's any different than Dribbble, Behance, Coroflot, Zerply, 99designs, or even personal portfolios. I fail to see value in this site over any of the aforementioned, especially because you're taking part of my potential income (and planning on airing my personal rates) in the process. What is the benefit here?

One of the better things I could do for my reputation is avoid associating it with something called "Scoutzie".

The founders may want to drink their own champagne, and hire a designer for their own site. The bizarre gray textured box that expands upon hovering over the dropdown was an immediate turn off within seconds of visiting the site.

Any design related platform should expect an inordinate amount of aesthetic & UX criticism, so I don't think this comment is out of line.

To offer something constructive, I would suggest developing an overall theme to the thumbnails (e.g. tight cropping on a detail, bringing in the color palette). This will give the homepage a higher level of aesthetic consistency. Your homepage is the most vital marketing piece in regards to convincing high quality talent to get on board.

I used them and had a really bad experience. Our designer was very bad - not Scoutzie's fault necessarily. However, their refund is actually around 70%. They do not refund their pretty big Scoutzie fee. Their customer support is also pretty arrogant..

congrats, scoutzie. bug report here.

chrome, mountain lion. clicking back/forward button gives a page of json

1. go to home page 2. select iphone 3. on iphone page, select ipad 4. go back twice (to homepage) 5. click forward 6. page of json

this happens in other cases too, like just going back. but above is totally reproducible on my setup

I like the idea. It'd be great to see more designers in the mix, but I suppose that will happen over time.