First off, it's wrong to call this a "startup" because thats not what I want this to become.<p>Im starting a small scale service, to help me understand design better. It's one of those things, "You don't understand what hypothermia is until you're actually facing it" (Reference from the movie <i>The Guardian</i>)<p>It's essentially a design/code service. I make custom-designed portfolio's and landing pages.<p>So here's how its supposed to run: People can sign up, and enter their name, email, age, occupation, and a 100-word description of themselves. Then, I select the one that seems most interesting, and design a portfolio/landing page for that person. I design it, and code it. So yea, Invite-only.<p>This is not free. Neither is it too costly, because making money isn't my motive. The price can be anywhere between $20 to $40 for each portfolio (including the coding)<p>Is this the best way to go about learning how design works? I'm looking for something small scale and not too flamboyant.<p>Shoot me an email with your opinion here: mail at arsalanbashir dot com.<p>Thanks, cheers!
A couple of thoughts:<p>1. What exactly are you trying to understand about design? Are you trying to learn "designing for a client"/the business behind it? Or are you trying to find projects for you to practice css/photoshop skills?<p>2. Basically, you're holding a contest for people to present themselves as the most interesting person to you, just so they have the right to pay for your services. It seems a little audacious. Unless you can prove that $20-40 for your services is such an incredible deal that it is worth the effort, I think it would be hard to attract signups. Offering a free portfolio--that's a different story.
I must admit that I am not sure whether I understand what you plan to do, so let me try to rephrase it: you want people to fill out a profile to describe themselves, and then you use it to build them some kind of MySpace profile page, just hosted somewhere else? I could imagine that there are a few people willing to pay for that, if you host the page at a nice location (e.g. their own domain). Not sure whether this will help you learning about design though.
I see where you're going with this but who is that target audience? Technical people? Non-technical people? And at that price, how different could the result be for me vs anyone else?<p>If I'm an active technical person and I don't have a blog, my profile page on github is a reasonable landing page. If I'm less technical, maybe LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter, at the very least it'll give an indication of my personality.