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Palmer wrote that she needs “professional-ish horns and strings for EVERY CITY to hop up on stage with us for a couple of tunes.”The pay for  a “quickie rehearsal” and performance?  ”Beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch, and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make,” she wrote.

The post sparked a firestorm, as The Boston Globe reported Thursday, as several commenters accused Palmer of trying to get something for nothing. What made her request especially galling to some was that she recently raised $1.2 million from Kickstarter to fund her music.

The post and the blowback from it renews a debate over how ethical (moral?) it is to get free or near-free work out of people especially in these hard times.

One of the commenters on Palmer’s site, Chris Siebert, who described himself as a professional musician,  was clearly not amused:

With all due respect, your request for free labor sounds like a promotional gimmick dreamed up by a corporate republican who has no concept of the history of working people in this country …  you raised a million dollars through [K]ickstarter. That’s a lot of money. And the best you can do is come up with a scheme to take advantage of desperate musicians by reinforcing everything that’s wrong with the music business and the modern American economy?

Some said her request was so tone-deaf she must have written it on purpose to provoke the controversy.

Palmer did have her defenders among the commenters, one of whom pointed out that the Kickstarter campaign funded her new CD, not the tour per se. Others praised her for playing free concerts including for the Occupy Movement.

But the issue of wangling free or really cheap labor goes way beyond music. Unpaid internships in businesses of all types; the rise of user-generated content in media; and crowdsourcing across the board are all part of the same bigger picture.

And pushback as evidenced by the Palmer comments is likewise growing. For example,  Ryan Carson, founder and CEO Of Treehouse, assailed hackathon promoters for treating programmers as trained monkeys. If you doubt that this is a touchy subject just try asking an artist what she thinks about  99designs or a reporter about Journatic. Then duck.

As GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram pointed out in his post about Journatic, it’s important to maintain professional standards — including pay — but it’s also important to face facts — and the facts are that crowdsourcing, in some form, is a now a reality.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Zawezome

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Today, a blog post on High Scalability highlighted 99designs’ architecture, calling it the sort of reliable cloud infrastructure medium-sized ecommerce companies can parlay into running big workloads.

Melbourne, Australia-based 99designs has 12 technical staffers (eight developers, two devops people and two user-experience or “ux” designers) and runs no servers of its own, preferring to use the Amazon Web Services cloud for the heavy lifting. That decision has worked out just fine, according to 99Designs’ dev op Lars Yencken. In a recent blog post, Yencken wrote:

Our site sees hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month, generating pageviews in the tens of millions. Since we deal with graphic design, many of our pages are asset heavy — these pageviews fan out to some 40 times as many requests. Whilst there are many larger sites on the net, we thought this was enough to warrant sharing the way we do things.

99designs uses Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to route work around servers evenly; the Varnish web application accelerator to speed up the jobs once they’re allocated; Amazon’s S3 and mySQL database service for main storage;  and Memcached, MongoDB and Redis services for transient data of different types.

Yencken wrote:

Memcached runs locally on every application server, with a peering arrangement between servers, and helps us reduce our database queries dramatically. We log errors and statistics to capped collections in MongoDB, providing us with more insight into our system’s performance. Redis captures per-user information about which features are enabled at any given time; it supports our development stragegy around dark launches, soft launches and incremental feature rollouts.

The company also uses RightScale to manage its servers in the Amazon cloud, a la Zynga. It also uses Rackspace’s Cloudfiles as extra backup for disaster recovery.

However, challenges remain. Yencken said the tendency is to stockpile servers for peak times, meaning the company is overprovisioning its computing resources against the very tenets of cloud computing. What it should be doing, he acknowledged, is better automating and stress-testing its infrastructure so it can bring up servers faster as needed. “This would allow us to confidently reduce capacity when we have excess, rather than simply expanding,” he wrote.

Whatever the company is doing, it seems to be working. According to its web site, 99designs has hosted 118,887 contests in four years and claims 143,224 designers in its community.

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The “Occupy 99Designs” design contest, which launched Wednesday and will run until February 8, has garnered nearly 400 entries in its first few hours online. The winner will get $1,000 and, most importantly, a ton of exposure. According to the contest page: “This logo will live on occupy.com and @occupy on twitter. It will go on billboards, on TV, in magazines, on sidewalks, street walls, T-shirts, hats, postcards, on everything you can imagine — all over the world.”

Here’s more about what Occupy is looking for:

“We are challenging designers to think beyond the iconic Clenched Fist and create a new iconic symbol for resistance, solidarity and empowerment in the 21st century. It should appeal to a broad base and reflect the diversity of the 99%, while encompassing the values of the Occupy Movement – among them, integrity, justice, freedom, equality, compassion, community and true democracy.”

The Occupy.com logo contest on 99Designs (click to enlarge)

It may seem a bit funny that a movement that seems to be against all things corporate is looking for branding of its own. But in a way, it actually makes a lot of sense: There’s something to be said for fighting fire with fire, and having a more polished image would be a big step toward legitimacy for a movement that has been criticized for not having a unified message. And turning to a crowdsourced design site like 99Designs is more in keeping with Occupy’s message of being by and for the people than, say, commissioning a fancy custom design firm.

It makes me think of how in the Autobiography of Malcolm X published in 1968, the iconic activist wrote about why he dressed in tailored suits and ties: “In order to get something, you had to look like you already had something.” It looks like nearly 50 years later, the Occupy movement is trying to do the same thing in a modern way — on the web.

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Crowdsourcing startup 99designs recently received $35 million in venture capital and is currently advertising six positions in its Melbourne and San Francisco offices. These hires will see the team grow by about 20 percent and expand management capacity, paving the way for the creation of additional operations roles.

The business has a strong culture and a flat structure. How does 99designs plan to manage its expansion without compromising collaboration or culture?

Collaboration

The tight-knit business was originally run from Melbourne, Australia, and Vancouver, Canada, so communication has always been a focus.

Says CEO Patrick Llewellyn, “We have a long history of collaborating with people all over the world. [Parent company] SitePoint has been connecting [people and contributors] forever and a day from different parts of the world. That’s part of our DNA.”

Indeed, growth has actually boosted collaboration. Since the business moved out of its startup phase, Llewellyn and COO Jason Sew Hoy were given more operational authority. A more formal management structure was put in place in August of last year, and Llewellyn notes, “We’ve been more collaborative than ever.”

Collaboration tools that the team favors include instant messenger, Yammer and Campfire for development problem solving. Email is also essential, as are scheduled and spontaneous video conferences.

But people are crucial to the process: The outcomes of management’s quarterly strategy meetings are fed back to the staff by both team leaders and business leaders. “We get some pretty wild debates, but that’s a good thing,” laughs Sew Hoy. “It’s definitely the variety of the different viewpoints that creates a really robust strategy.

“It’s a pretty open communication model. Everyone’s encouraged to share ideas and make contributions,” he adds. “It’s designed to help everyone have a voice and feel like they’re being heard, but it also helps to guide some of the decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis.”

Culture

The pair see communicating culture as a major challenge as the business grows in the coming months.

“From a cultural and team management point of view,” explains Sew Hoy, “it comes down to having a core group of leaders that represent the business and who we want to be.”

He says that the focus on creating the right management positions and putting the right people in them “will essentially set the foundation for how we communicate and manage the team as it gets bigger.”

As Llewellyn reveals, “The most important thing in our hiring process is making sure that we hire people that we trust. Unless you trust someone, I don’t think you can openly communicate with them.”

The pair also requires staff to have a collaborative philosophy. “It’s got to be a core competency for everyone to be an excellent global communicator,” explains Sew Hoy, “regardless of whether you’re a support person, a developer, a marketer or someone in senior management.”

Recruiting candidates with great communication skills is only part of the equation, he says. “It also comes down to the expectations that you set early on with that person.

“We’ve got two people starting together today, so one of the things we’re doing is getting them to sit down and meet all of the people in San Francisco on video chat.” The team does this, he says, “just to make sure that there’s a little bit more interaction there than seeing that there’s a bunch of people there on our ‘About Us’ page, and to break down those barriers toward getting conversations started.”

Moving team members between offices is also central to ensuring cultural consistency. “We see that as an important investment,” Llewellyn explains. “Even before we raised the money . . . we brought over four people for South by Southwest this year from Melbourne, and a couple of those guys spent another two weeks in our office. We’ll continue to bring some others across to San Francisco and we’ll take people from San Francisco to Melbourne, so that we get that cross-pollination,” he explains.

Competitive advantage

Llewellyn believes that the travel potential within 99designs represents a competitive edge for the business, especially when hiring in the Melbourne market.

“I’m really excited about the opportunities that this will open up over time,” he says. “One of the things about hiring talented Australians is that there’s always a significant wanderlust. And I think that by having offices in two pretty cool cities, we can . . . use that as a competitive advantage in the hiring process.”

The business has already relocated its CTO from Melbourne to San Francisco because, “In terms of new technology, and where things evolve the fastest, San Francisco and the Valley is in the heart of that. So there were definitely going to be advantages to having a technical leader stationed over there,” explains Sew Hoy.

Such relocations — Llewellyn himself was originally hired in Melbourne, Australia — have presented new collaborative challenges. “I don’t want to pretend that we’ve got all the answers,” Llewellyn says. “We’re iterating and learning and finding that there are complexities that we haven’t thought through.” But, he says, open, trusting team communication is key to the business’s future.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user murielle

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Without taking on a dime of venture capital, 99Designs acquired a devoted customer base and logged millions in annual revenue. The consumer traction alone is notable, but in the age of Twitter, it doesn’t turn heads. The key differentiator for 99Designs is that it has paid its own way to profitability. From its February 2008 inception until last week, when it closed on a $35 million funding round led by Accel Partners, the company ran completely on its own reinvested revenue.

I sat down with CTO Lachlan Donald at 99Designs’ San Francisco headquarters to find out how the company bootstrapped its way through the early days and into profitability. Here are a few of my favorite tips from our conversation:

Spread the work around:

“We outsourced as much as possible. We had a policy of running absolutely no servers ourselves.”

Make it a family affair:

“We had my mom as our very first support person, which was interesting.”

Done is better than perfect:

“Get your ideas to market as quickly as possible, and watch what people do with them.”

Don’t be choosy about office space:

“[Our first office] was extremely cramped, but it was good. It brought focus.”

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The bundle includes several services that we’ve written bout previously, including:

• A six-month subscription to HipChat, a group messaging system
• A credit for using Twilio, a platform that lets you include cloud communications in your own apps
• A discount on a subscription to the Pivotal Tracker project management system
• A discount on uTest beta software testing
• A 90-day subscription to the UserVoice customer feedback system
• A featured listing on the 99designs marketplace for graphic design
• A six-month account on the BatchBook social CRM service
• A discount on InfoChimps‘ data collection services
• A credit toward the services of Trada‘s paid search marketplace
• The Zencoder API for converting video formats

The bundle comes with some interesting offers, including an analysis from FeeFighters on how to get a better deal on credit card processing. Also included are several books, publications and videos, including The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. An actual hardcover book — how retro!

The AppSumo Lean Startups Bundle is available for $99 through March 20. If you’ve been meaning to try some these services in your organization, this bundle is an affordable way to test them out.

Have you tried any of these services? How are they working for you?

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Having been in this situation myself, I know how hard it can be to explain what you want in a logo. I always end up saying words to the effect of: “Something … writey… Like with letters and stuff… yeah.” Not very helpful.

For those of us with small or solo operations, the time we’re spending with the designer really is money, and the more we go on like this, the more costly that visual identity becomes. So those embarking on visual identity projects this year will be pleased to hear of a new service launched yesterday.

Ready-made Logos

The 99designs.com Ready-Made logo store contains hundreds of logo designs that are all set to go — but for your business name. The prices start at $99, and buyers can expect to have their personalized logo ready — in both JPEG and EPS formats — in just 24 hours. You get the full source files, too, so if you want to tweak the design in future, you can.

If you’re worried about having a me-too logo that someone else in your space may already be using, you may be able to pay an extra US$100 to own exclusive rights to the logo. Of course, the only condition on this option is that no one else has already purchased the logo. You’re easily able to see if exclusive rights are available when you click on a logo to see the full-size version.

The site’s accepting logo submissions from designers at the moment, but they won’t go on sale until March. Still, it seemed like now would be a good time to check out what’s on offer.

My Name Here?

When I’m not up all night writing for WWD (just kidding!) I often write for my own hobby blog, which provides tips and tricks to help ordinary people live more sustainable lives. This site is currently using a standard theme, and I’ve been thinking for a long time that a logo would be a good idea. Once I had the logo, I reasoned, I’d perhaps have the site reskinned.

Getting my head around this challenge was proving way too hard. Would I have to go through a freelance site to find a designer? Should I ask friends? How much was this going to cost me, anyway? It was all too hard.

Fortunately, the 99designs.com Ready-Made site lets you browse by category and, not surprisingly, there was an environmental/green category with 92 logos in it. Some have obvious applications — food products for example, or water or travel services. But some are more generic, and could be applicable to a range of operations.

I found the search facility was a bit hit-and-miss, and I have a feeling more general searches are the way to go. My initial, ideal-world search for “eco services” returned no results, and “eco” returned just 14. “Sustainable”? Three results. A search for “green” widened the original category result of 92 logos to 274 because, of course, the search included a whole lot of results for logos that used the color green.

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a way to shortlist logos you like, which, given that I had 274 to choose from, was a bit of a pain. I’m hoping the 99designs.com team might be considering this functionality when they launch the actual sales service in March.

And as it turned out, some of these were more generic logos that could suit a wider range of uses — uses as obscure as a sustainable tips-and-advice web site. But all of them were professional and good looking, and many are shown in black-and-white and reversed formats so I could see how they’d perform in monochrome. As a person who had no idea what I wanted in a logo, and dreaded the task of having one created, it was actually exciting to find so many professional options so easily, and so affordably.

Have you eve had a visual identity created for your operation? How did you go about it?

Photo by stock.xchng user vertige.