NUMI's Design Service for Startups

More and more emerging startups are offering innovative goods and services we never knew we needed, constantly trying to be the best in the business. Due to this, building a startup has become a make-or-break sort of deal.

With an abundance of options for consumers to choose from when looking for all sorts of services these days, first impressions have become the key to pulling in consumers, and a good impression can be achieved with great design.

A startup’s image, followed by its brand equity, is utterly important to build and maintain, and with this, designers of high quality and reliability are constantly needed. Unfortunately, finding and hiring designers who match a startup’s vision without costing an arm and a leg is tricky.

A YC-backed startup named NUMI, founded by Agree Ahmed and Harrison Telyan, aims to empower startups with its subscription-based designer hire service, equipped with dependable, skilled, and versatile designers.

Freelance or Free Hires?

These modern, competitive startup days make good design non-negotiable, especially for startups just beginning to build their business. The process of hiring designers can be precarious, however, and finding a single designer who can do all kinds of early-startup design, such as product, brand, graphic, and web design, is grueling.

A startup’s founding team would often have to search through freelance websites to source, vet, and onboard designers for each kind of design, which not only makes managing the design team difficult but may also cost a bunch. Cases where all this hard work ends up going to waste can also happen, either by freelance designers quitting, getting fired, or even ghosting a startup. There are also chances of freelance designers not providing the best quality of work.

The alternative is spending more time and money on finding full hires or white shoe agencies, which may not be the most ideal option for startups that still need to spend their funds elsewhere.

One of the more manageable solutions to the designer hiring process issue these days is to search for designers through companies with productized services that specialize in finding designers for other companies, like Bunny Studio or Crowdspring, for example.

These companies allow startup founders to find more trustworthy designers compared to the manual search and scroll through freelancer websites since most, if not all, of these companies have designers who are already vetted. Thus, the responsibility and time spent on the hiring process by a startup is, at the very least, slightly reduced.

However, some productized service companies don’t offer multiple design services, and those that do still have different designers designated to different kinds of design jobs, meaning startups would still be required to hire multiple designers to cover all the necessary bases.

Bunny Studio has a subscription service with a whole team of designers, though they consist of writers, audio, video, and graphic designers. This service may be ideal for companies looking for a full design team but might not be too good of a match for early-stage startups that are only focusing on finding graphic designers. A full team may overwhelm funds, too.

NUMI, also providing a subscription-based service, does things a little differently.

Designated and Matched

NUMI’s designers are vetted, matched, and embedded into a startup’s design department based on its biggest design challenges. The productized service’s founders hand-pick a designer whose skills and experience best align with a startup’s needs, whether it be brand design, marketing websites, typography, or web dashboards.

Without any need for project managers in between, NUMI’s RISD* alum-mentored designers can directly collaborate with a startup’s department through Slack, Figma, or video, ensuring clear communication and execution.

NUMI’s designers can do unlimited designing, editing, and revisions with full designated design coverage until the startup’s design vision is reached. If a startup needs something outside of its assigned designer’s skill set, NUMI can match the startup with an additional designer.

*RISD: Rhode Island School of Design, a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island.

With NUMI’s designer hire productized service, startups are able to find designers who are reliable much faster compared to traditional searching and with only a 1/3rd the price of full-time hires and reliance on white shoe agencies.

NUMI has managed to provide designers to several startups, such as Windsor.io, Mobot, EarlyBird, and UberDuck, with three different subscription plans, including Creative at $1500, Design at $3000, and Design+ at 5000 per month.

With its features and services aimed at fulfilling the necessary needs of an early-stage startup, NUMI might be the perfect catch-and-match for startup founders.

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