Home Articles 99designs founder Mark Harbottle sets new designs on Tweaky.com

99designs founder Mark Harbottle sets new designs on Tweaky.com

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So you wanted to add a Facebook link to your website and couldn’t find somebody willing to do it at reasonable cost, and in quick time? Or, for that matter, changing a logo, or fixing a broken link?

Such dime-a-day tweaks add up to a huge market that has simply not gotten the attention it deserves. At least that is the mantra of Tweaky.com, a startup that calls itself “the world’s first marketplace dedicated to minor web site customizations.”

Tweaky.com this week said it snapped up $450,000 in angel investment from the SitePoint Group, Leni Mayo and Mark Harbottle, founder of 99designs, a marketplace for graphics. Mayo and Harbottle are closely associated with SitePoint, which runs five web-based businesses spanning education, publishing, community, application development and crowdsourced marketplaces.

Disruptive force

Web site owners are fed up paying upwards of $150 an hour to a local web developer, or wading through quotes on freelance marketplaces for a better deal,” said Tweaky.com’s co-founder and CEO Ned Dwyer. “Tweaky.com now provides web site owners with a compelling, cost-effective alternative when it comes to customizing their web sites.”

Founded by Dwyer and Pete Murray, winners of 2011 Startup Weekend Melbourne, Tweaky.com (formally known as themepivot.com) has the potential to shake the existing market.

Tweaky.com is building a disruptive platform that has the potential to change the way we go about keeping our web sites fresh and up to date,” said Harbottle. “It’s further proof that you don’t have to go to Silicon Valley to build great products that compete globally.”

Tweaky is offering rates that start from $25 each, with 100% moneyback guarantee. It gets the work done by building a global marketplace freelance web developers, similar in some ways to the business model of 99designs.com. The design firm co-founded by Harbottle claims to be the No. 1 online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design, with a new design uploaded every five seconds and more than $35 million paid out to designers over the past four years.

Tweaky.com is now operating with dual headquarters in San Francisco and Melbourne, letting it target the huge American market while retaining its Australian roots.

The SitePoint Group, founded by Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz, is also behind 99designs.com, and Flippa.com, a marketplace for buying and selling web sites.

Photo caption: Pete Murray, Ned Dwyer and Mark Harbottle.