Hiring a designer is a premature optimization

Professional designers are all about beating up any designer that does spec work on sites like 99designs. They're freaking out (rightly so) about it dropping the value of their work. Just like pro photographers are freaking about microstock sites like iStockphoto and the serious pro-am photographer that's happy to get $100 to shoot a wedding.

Take advantage of that.

Different markets have different design needs. Luxury consumer brands will be different from enterprise products.

I know an entrepreneur who spent about $5,000 on professional branding for a bootstrapped enterprise product. And the design did look very professional and creditable.

Two things went wrong:

1) He needed to build new landing pages, etc., on a regular basis, and these rarely looked as professional as the basic branding. So despite spending a lot of money, his site didn't look ultra-professional—at best, it looked competent. And that's not good enough to justify $5,000 in a bootstrapped startup.

2) He spent the $5,000 before proving that he could actually close sales.

In this case, I'd say that the $5,000 was spent prematurely. He could have purchased a lower-cost logo and spent a day browsing themeforest, and he would have wound up with something 80% as good for under $500. And that would have been enough to start e-mailing his industry contacts and trying to get his first sale. Getting that first sale was his biggest priority, because it would prove he had a real business.

So before deciding whether to hire a designer, ask yourself: Is looking professional the best use of your money right now? And what happens if you need to change your sales pitch significantly, or even pivot? Does your designer understand UX, advertising, copywriting, or do they just make logos and stationary? Can you afford to keep paying them? How bad are your own design skills?

True that... It depends on the nature of the app and the audience.

A lot of people disagreeing here, but let's face it, people are proving you wrong every day. A generic design can get you a long way at the start.

Take Paras' visual website optimizer[1] as an example. Originally built using simpla admin[2], you can still see a screenshot on his blog, it worked well, he's now paid for a designer.

Perfectly good when he started out. Craig's list has also been mentioned. There's a DNS service who's name escapes me that's had a god awful design for ages but people rave about their customer service.

Design is a differentiator, not a must have. Would Google have won if they'd have got a designer in?

The massive caveat is that you need to buy a template that is well written. If you don't you're in for a lot of cleaning up work. That means that you must at least be competent with html to inspect the source or be lucky.

To be honest Simpla Admin rocks and that intersection of the right look and quality underlying html/css does take some hunting.

Even a brief glance is not enough, one of the themes I bought I ended up spending a few hours rewriting bits of it because the performance sucked due to overuse of cufon and jQuery. I wish I'd spent another 15 minutes checking out the code as I ended up chopping up quite a bit of it.

[1] http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ [2] http://themeforest.net/item/simpla-admin-flexible-user-frien...

I don't understand why the OP is getting so much hate here. He is clearly talking about a specific kind of situation - a solo programmer with little money trying to build a web app - where design can be a costly overhead. It is also clear that he's talking about design in the sense of making things look beautiful, not in the sense of how things work.

Even more generally speaking, good visual design can be a powerful advantage but it's by no means necessary, especially on the web. See Bingo Card Creator, Visual Website Optimizer, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc.