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Eva Missling is the founder and CEO of 12designer GmbH, a young company based in the heart of Europe, Berlin. After more than 8 years in the design industry, she currently uses her experience as founder of an online marketplace where customers with design demands meet the right creatives to get the job done; it doesn’t matter if it is about naming, slogans, logos, websites or multimedia clips. Quick facts about 12designer.com: more than 7400 registered creatives, 1100 accomplished projects, 250.000 € business volume and available in 5 languages - English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

1) Which 3 main trends does 12designer.com tap into?

First the idea of crowdsourcing itself, that remains to be understood in a practical way by many of our main targets, start-ups and SMEs. The delegation of tasks to the crowd is translated concretely, in the case of 12designer, into a platform where customers can obtain creative solutions, such as logos, flyers, websites, multimedia clips, or naming, slogans, and more. Then, our online roots make internet the natural place to deepen the tendency of building relations and achieving results through it. Taking into account that we are a young and small company, too, we also understand our customers as partners. Third, we offer a real enhancement of cost-effectiveness for entrepreneurs, by giving them the ability of having more professional solutions than those given by their nephews or neighbors, for a price that they can pay. It is about bringing new people to a market that virtually didn’t exist before, not only on the side of customers, but also of talented designers that are starting their professional careers.

2) What is your unique selling point in the market (compared to 99designs, crowdSPRING, etc.)?

Compared to our main competitors, I can mention some advantages. For instance, we offer more than just design projects. Start-ups looking for a name can do an online XXL brainstorm session with us, in order to find the right one. Sound and multimedia creations are also possible: radio spots, computer games effects, screencasts and webvideos, all that can be done on our platform! We support 4 more languages besides English: German, Italian, French and Spanish. It means that, despite a geographically united world under the internet, we are able to reach out groups with different cultural backgrounds, and, as a major European crowdsource marketplace, we do understand European client needs better. Finally, and most important, we keep a close contact to them and our creative community, what has ensured a level of satisfaction that we want to keep in the next stages of our development. If there is someone out there not satisfied, I’ll be happy to be in touch and talk about any shortcomings that may have happened.

3) Which challenges have proven most successful? Why?

The most successful? I would say the launch of 12designer itself. We had a demand much higher than we thought just in the beginning of everything, when we planned to maintain for a while a German version only. We realized, though, that it would be our chance to develop further and launch a Spanish and English version for the website, which happened only two months after. With that, we would give a worldwide channel to our platform and also tap into the market of my sponsor Grupo Intercom, Spain. We became market leaders there in a matter of a couple of months.

4) What is your revenue model? Do you plan for other revenue streams?

We have recently introduced a Freemium model, after a completely free period gave the platform credibility. It has been a success so far. Right now, we have the free 12basic option, that limits the number of participants of a project to 12, and 12plus, paid, with unlimited participation and advanced options such as privacy. A 12premium project option is also on the way. As this will keep us busy for the next months, we don’t plan to have another revenue stream in the near future.

Try it for free: To strenghten their positioning as start-ups’ partner, 12designer is going to offer on the 15th of July the possibility for everyone  to create projects with advanced features for FREE. No fees will be charged. An excellent opportunity to try it out!