LogoMyWay – Designers Do It Their Way

Columbus, Ohio-based LogoMyWay.com is a community site that revolves around client-commissioned contests for crowd-sourced professional logo designs. LogoMyWay.com was started by veteran serial entrepreneur Joe Daley, who has built and launched around 50 online companies to date.

See here for our chat with Daley.

Connecting Logo Designers With Clients

One of the challenges Daley faced having started many websites or ideas was a real need to find good professional logos designed at a reasonable price for each of them – hence, LogoMyWay. “I thought it would be a great idea to connect designers from all over the world to clients needing logo designs. There are other logo contest sites but none that make it 100-percent mandatory to prepay all logo contests.”

“By having all contests prepaid the designers work much harder and produce much higher quality than other contest sites,” adds Daley.

Using LogoMyWay is simple. A client signs up to launch a logo competition, fills out a detailed contest brief explaining their business and the kind of logo their looking for, and sets a prize between US$200 to US$1,000 and the contest duration.

Response from LogoMyWay‘s designer community can be fast and furious. “Clients can expect to receive logo concepts within a few hours of launching their logo contest,” Daley grins. When logo entries are received from designers, the client then uses an administrative interface to decide on the winner. Each logo contest provides a free legal contract which gives the client full legal ownership of their new logo design, and the client will receive full working, vector-format files of the logo design for any corporate use.

The advantage of using LogoMyWay, says Daley, is being able to tap on the creativity of its pool of over 5,000 designers from all over the world, unlike using a traditional creative agency with a limited number of designers to work with. LogoMyWay works pretty much the same way as how Prova crowdsources advertising designs, or ArticleBuff does when it comes to article writing. Another advantage for clients is its money-back guarantee policy. If a contest does not receive more than 40 entries to choose from, LogoMyWay will fully refund the client.

Daley says it’s hard to tell what their biggest challenge was in developing LogoMyWay because they had so many hurdles to overcome. “The programming behind the site was very challenging and tedious. (We) always kept in mind that the site needed to be scalable, user-friendly and easy-to-use.” Once the site was built, Daley says, the challenge was to manage the fine balance between recruiting a goodly pool of designers while ensuring there were enough logo contests to keep them occupied. LogoMyWay has so far launched logo contests valued over US$600,000 in just one year, with its pool of designers creating more than 250,000 logos.

A 15-year Entrepreneurial Journey

Daley started his entrepreneurial journey by managing his family-owned restaurant after high school for seven years, and later moved to running an automobile window tinting business around 1995. During the winter months when the auto business was slower, Daley would toy with the idea of making money online.

His first successful website was an online greeting card site that quickly grew to be ranked as a top 10 most popular greeting card site in the world, with over 500,000 page views daily. That website soon became a launching pad for many more successful online companies that Daley’s built over the years.

Today, Logomyway is mostly self-funded by Daley – aside from a few small investors – with the money he’s accumulated over his entrepreneurial years.

Learning To Let Go

As an entrepreneur for around 15 years now and launching and building a phenomenal number of startups, Daley believes one of the most important things for entrepreneurs to learn is when to move on to the next project. “If you see that a trend has fallen off and one of your sites will probably never succeed, you better move on to the next project until you hit one that people are interested in.”

“I have seen too many companies in the past that continued to dump money and time into an online business that never had a chance to grow because the market was slowing down or gone completely.” Daley has an example of his own. He was CEO of SRC Technologies that built an anti-spyware application called Spybouncer in 2004. It sold over 120,000 copies at US$30 each, with sales reaching US$4 million in just a few years. However, when Microsoft and Google launched their own free version of spyware removal programs, sales pretty much came to a halt around 2007.

“Choose your business very carefully by doing research and tracking trends. When you think you have found your niche and the business is growing after your first marketing campaign, hit it hard and don’t give up on it.” His advice to anyone wanting to starting a business is to find something that you have a real passion for and love doing.

“Once you find it put a plan together and start building your business… Think things through before executing and never give up!”