Hi Sacha - I have observed and admired your work from a far, thank you for your question and nice to meet you.

TL;DR; We seek to commoditize design as a services and make design easy to understand and acquire, at the same time we want maximize the revenue designers yield for those services.

Building platforms and software is brutal and I have so much respect for all the sites you mentioned (including your Folyo). So I am not going to take time to criticize those who have tried something similar - at the end of the day we are all designers and I want to always be supportive of anyone who has the guts to build and launch something.

This is a relaunch for us. Two months ago we launched our first version and it didn't go so well. We made a bet that users would want to hire "hand-picked" "world-class" designers, but turns out most users cant tell the difference between a designer of your caliber and a designer one year out of school. That learning reminded me me of this classic clip with Saul Bass sharing the insight aesthetic is my problem and your problem, not the problem of business. Here are a few more learnings from our initial launch.

• User don't care if a designer is world-class, hand-picked, vlogs or was the head designer for Uber
• Users want to know the scope, price, timing and deliverable when they hire you
• Users will always go to price, but will happily pay for value once they understand value
• Designers tend to publicly overprice, and privately take deep discounts during negotiation
• Klout matters, but not in the way you would think.
• Design is still thought of as just aesthetics and making things beautiful (we of course want to help elevate design to a discipline that helps a company build a better business, not just look nice)
• No one reads much
• Most folks are dehydrated and need to drink way more water

What you will being rolled out over the next week is a reflection of the last 2-3 months of diving deeply into this problem and is a collection of mini bets and insights based on our learnings and experience. We appreciate everyones support and hope we can make our community proud.

Seriously.

Hi Cristian - we are approaching this in two phases - phase 1 launched last week where we are adding/inviting designers to the marketplace first followed by phase 2 which will be launching the public/consumer side of the site (hopefully sometime this week) - marketplaces are a bit chicken and egg so we needed to ensure we had a strong community of designers on the platform first.