At Scandinavia Publishing House we have especially used 3 online tools to improve our product development and made it cheaper.

99designs.com

At www.99designs.com you can create a contest and have graphic designers from all over the world bring their proposal to the table. This means that you are no longer dependent on a single internal or external designer to hit the perfect cover design within a reasonable time frame. Now you can describe what you want, post it and have multiple people submit their entry that you can then evaluate and give feedback on. Within 7 days you’ll have a great design for sure. The price for one project (a cover design for instance) starts at US $299.

Before we had outsourcing to scale our business – we now have crowdsourcing. Let the crowd do the work. They learn from the debate or each other, they are cheap and you only have to pay the one you like the best – and none if you don’t like any.

See an example of how we used 99designs.com at Scandinavia: Link

Fiverr.com

At fiverr.com more than 3 million people are offering their expertise for the simple price of $5. Well, that’s where the services starts – often you pay more when you want additional services made, but it’s still in the cheap end. We use this service quite a lot. In fact I like to have one fiverr job going on every day – gives me the feeling that I get something done, without doing it myself. Also, i need to wrap my head around an idea and send it off – all the time – and that’s a great exercise. The fact that I don’t need to do the actual writing, programming or design myself makes it manageable. Then I can focus on planning and giving feedback.

See an example of how we used fiverr.com at Scandinavia: Link

Trello.com

This is also a great online tool, although completely different from the two above. Trello is really just an online todo list – with the possibility to become an easy-to-learn project management program. When you first create a profile, your first ‘board’ is created. On this board you have 3 lists: ToDo, Doing and Done. You can then create tasks (called cards) in the ToDo list and move them to Doing and Done once you complete the cards task. See a short introduction video here: Link.

We now use Trello to manage our product development, production, order flow, employee goal setting and a lot of other projects. It has given us a better control of the details and the big picture at the same time.

See an example of how we used trello.com at Scandinavia: Link

The post 3 online tools to do better, cheaper and faster product development in publishing appeared first on Sph.as.