Juiiicy, the holy grail
In a world of a never ending Dribbble work inquiries
Any designer with more than 1000 followers on Dribbble has at least 10 work inquiries a week - and you can guess that the ones with +10K followers receive an insane amount of e-mails every day. It’s impossible to make 10 full projects per week, so designers have to learn to say “no”. And they have to do it a lot of times - some don’t even get to answer all the emails while others recommend fellow designers or partner with local agencies.
But last month something amazing was born - Juiiicy!
Created by Julien Renvoye, Jeremy Marc and Drew Wilson, Juiiicy is a private communiy for designers to share work inquiries. If you are a designer with more job inquiries than you have time for, or if you are a designer looking for work, Juiiicy is for you.
Their mission is to be the #1 site to find freelance work.
If you know what Dribbble is, you know it’s hard to get inside. Guess what, Juiiicy is a hundred times worst, and on top of that they kick out people they don’t think reach their standards. So you will only find the best of the best designers out there.
Here is the email this guy from the left, received from Juiiicy so you can see I am not making this up ;)
How does this work?
Once a designer post a job, the client receives an email with a link to Juiiicy where he can see all the activity related to the job, such as who applied, how much the designer that got hired charged the client, and so forth. Once a client hires one of the designers that applied to his job, he will pay the invoice on Juiiicy.
Juiiicy will split the money between the designer that got hired (87%) and the one that spread the word (7%). The Juiiicy team applies a fee of 3% to the final invoice and another 3% goes to credit card processing fees.
Using their own words, the objective is “to make it really simple for both the designers and the client”.
After the first week they had already 600 handpicked designers, 100 job posts and 914 designer applications. There was even one designer who got about $600 by posting one job in that week.
Considering he got 7% of the total invoice, the project budget was probably around $8600. I think $600 in one week for doing just a copy/paste is pretty impressive, don’t you think?
Design
They went for the flat UI trend and the site looks great. Cool animations and transitions, and a soft color palette. Julien posted on Dribbble some shots of the work in progress, and collected some valuable feedback from the community. It was great to follow the birth of Juiiicy, watching the idea evolving and feeling like I’m a apart of it too.
After you press those elipsis you would be able to see the message that this client sent to the designer who is posting the job.
Check this awesome video and see how the site works.
Privacy
I love the idea, but I think this concept might have a little problem regarding privacy.
Picture this: a potential client sent an inquiry to a specific designer because he likes his work and trusts him. It’s a private email, right? Where he praises the designer’s work, pitch his idea for a new awesome app and maybe send some links to a couple wireframes. Juiiicy members are encouraged to just copy/paste the emails, so they don’t spend more time. These private emails will then be visible to a lot of designers.
However, these designers will only be able to see the name of the company, or person who is searching for a designer. They will only see client’s email when they get the job.
Every Juiiicy member receive a daily email with all the new freelance opportunities and an email every time you have new Applicants with your Jobs Stats.
In this email you will know who responded to each of your posts on Juiiicy - if you click on the name of the designer you will go to his portfolio.
Because Dribbble inquiries now come in like crazy and sometimes you don’t know if they are serious, this platform is perfect as you only have the best gigs with big budgets sent to the best designers.
Everyone wins! :D
Have you tried Juiiicy yet? Do you have any other questions? Please Let me know you thoughts.
