This is the latest in a series of posts explaining the decisions we make at Dribbble that affect our users, as well as the results of those decisions (positive or negative).

Dribbble exists to help designers generate and convert leads. Our success depends on increasing both the number of designers who receive leads and the number of leads each designer receives. Designers will share their work, advertise their services, and transact through the platform only if they expect to land more clients as a result.

To monetize these leads – which is how Dribbble generates revenue – we spent much of the past year developing the essential features for clients to request design services and pay, and for designers to deliver work and get paid – along with new advertising products to help designers win more clients.

With that foundational work behind us, we’re now obsessing over the client experience.

We’re optimizing each stage of the conversion funnel, with a bias toward upper-funnel work that increases the number of clients who make contact with designers. We still have a long way to go to achieve the best-in-class experience we aspire to, but we’re chipping away – and increasing high-intent, qualified lead flow to designers along the way.

Just last month, for example, we had multiple releases that help clients search for designers and the services they offer, create an account (required to contact a designer), and compose effective Project Requests – learn more about those releases here.

Since then, we’ve introduced new features that make it even easier for clients to find and contact relevant designers – and for those designers to get proposals into clients’ hands faster:

• We now recommend designers based on the contents of a client’s Project Request. After contacting a designer, clients are shown three additional designers – highly rated, within budget, and available now – whom they can forward their request to with one click.
• Designers can now generate Project Proposals with AI. By using our “Write with AI” feature, designers can produce comprehensive proposals in seconds – helping high-intent clients move their projects forward faster.

The impact of this work has exceeded our expectations, and last week – the first full week that both features were available to users – set new records for us:

• More Project Requests were sent to designers, and more designers received Project Requests than in any previous week.
• More Project Proposals were sent to clients, and more clients received Project Proposals than in any previous week.
• More Proposals were accepted by clients, and more designers had a Proposal accepted than in any previous week.

More detail below on the thinking behind each feature and the early results we can attribute to them.

Recommendations

If a client sends their request to two designers instead of just one, the probability of receiving a response jumps from 65% to 90%, and they’ll get that response 25% sooner.

If they send it to three designers, they’re virtually guaranteed to receive a reply – and they’ll get it 50% sooner than if they had contacted just one.

However, until recently, two-thirds of prospective clients would contact only one designer. Before recommendations, clients had to identify suitable designers themselves and send a Project Request to each one individually – a time-consuming and often overwhelming process given the breadth and depth of talent on Dribbble.

Now, once a client sends a Project Request to one designer, we automatically recommend three additional designers who are relevant to the client’s request and can be contacted with a single click:

This feature improves the user experience for the client both by saving them time and effort, and by presenting the designers who are most likely to deliver high-quality work and exceptional customer service.

To make recommendations, we analyze the contents of the client’s request – including the budget – and the skills and specialties of the designer they found on their own. We then rank relevant designers based on:

• Their responsiveness to clients (response rate and time to requests).
• The number of clients they’ve worked with on Dribbble and the ratings they received from those clients.
• The types of projects they’ve completed on Dribbble.
• Their lead conversion rate (a weighted metric based on factors such as recency and transaction value).

Also, we only include Pro designers in our recommendations.

This is to ensure we’re directing clients to designers who not only have relevant skills, but who are also most likely to convert those leads. On every metric related to lead conversion, Pro designers outperform non-Pro designers – for example, their response rate is nearly twice as high, and they respond more than twice as fast.

Of course, by exclusively recommending Pro designers, we’re also adding more value to the Pro subscription.

As an aside, Pro has undergone many iterations over the past ten years. Following Dribbble’s reinvention as revenue-sharing marketplace, the value proposition of Pro is to maximize the number of leads subscribers generate and convert on the platform while minimizing their costs:

• More leads – higher search rankings for a subscriber’s profile, services, and design work, and inclusion in recommendations.
• Better conversion – advanced profile features to present subscribers and their work in the best light.
• No-fee transactions – Designer Platform Fee is waived.
• Lower overhead – free access to world-class products from partners like Webflow .

It remains completely free for designers to share their design work, offer services, receive client requests, and send proposals, but Pro gives subscribers more control over their lead flow, and a leg up on the competition – learn more about Pro here.

Since we we introduced recommendations ~2 weeks ago, the results have exceeded our (high) expectations.

25% of Project Request senders (i.e. prospective clients) have contacted at least one designer we recommended:

During that time, the average number of Project Requests sent by clients each week has increased by 20% – and the median doubled last week, indicating that the entire distribution has shifted upward:

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

Overall, the total number of Project Requests sent each week has increased by 38%:

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

Again, we’re only recommending Pro designers, so a greater share (a relative increase of +15%) of Project Requests is now going to them:

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

Since we’re funneling the incremental lead flow to a relatively small segment of our designer base, the number of unique Project Request recipients is increasing at a slower rate than Project Requests – while Pro designers now account for a larger percentage (a relative increase of +16%) of those recipients:

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

In addition to more designers receiving leads, those designers are receiving more leads:

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

While an increase in leads per designer is positive, of course, the unchanged median in the graph above indicates that the growth is concentrated in the upper tail – and the graph below makes clear it’s happening solely among Pro designers:

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

This could become an issue in the future: while Pro designers give us the best chance of converting client leads, there’s a risk they won’t have the capacity to serve all incoming leads – negatively impacting their responsiveness. So far, however, we haven’t seen a change to response rate or response time from Pro designers. Many are agencies capable of absorbing increased lead flow, but this is something we’ll be monitoring.

AI-Generated Proposals

In June, we introduced “Write with AI” to make it easier for clients (especially those composing their first-ever request) to quickly generate effective Project Requests. A blank Project Request is no longer as daunting for clients as it once was, and designers now have descriptive and well-organized requests to respond to.

We then enabled the feature for designers, helping them respond to Project Requests with thorough, well-structured Project Proposals in just seconds – improving both the client’s experience and the designer’s lead conversion:

• The client receives a proposal faster (and time-to-proposal – the period of time between a client sending a Project Request and receiving a Proposal – is critical to conversion).
• More comprehensive proposals mean less back and forth between designers and clients, which can be taxing for both sides.
• The proposal is much less likely to violate our Terms of Service and, by extension, put the client at risk or jeopardize the designer’s account standing.

To use “Write with AI,” a designer can either input something themselves and select “Improve What I Wrote” or they can select “Help Me Start” and respond to a few brief questions which will be synthesized into a comprehensive proposal:

In the ~5 weeks since we introduced the feature, 9% of Proposal Senders (i.e. designers responding to a Project Request) have used the feature to generate a proposal for a client:

Of these adopters, most prefer to improve what they already wrote rather than start from scratch (note: we didn’t introduce the “Help Me Start” path until Week 28):

So far, clients have been much more likely than designers to use “Write with AI” (on average, 20% of clients each week use the feature to compose Project Requests, and more than 60% of them prefer the “Help Me Start” path). That isn’t entirely surprising, however – most clients who use the feature are new to the platform and staring at a blank Project Request for the first time, while designers, who regularly receive requests and write proposals, are more practiced in articulating their services, and have the client’s brief to react to.

Even so, since releasing the feature, the number of AI-generated proposals sent to clients each week has grown by an average of 38% W/W – compared to 7% weekly growth for non-AI proposals:

Combined Impact

While it’s difficult to isolate the incremental impact of each feature, together they’ve combined to produce strong results over the past two weeks (beyond what I’ve already shared), including +30% Project Proposals per week, +30% Proposal Recipients (i.e. prospective clients) per week, and +17% Accepted Proposals (paid transactions) per week:

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

Last two weeks compared to the previous ten.

As always, we have multiple new features in development right now.

In the coming weeks, we expect to release the next versions of our Recommendations feature and search ranking algorithms – which will soon factor in each designer’s lead conversion rate – along with a brand-new AI-enabled product to help clients find the right designers faster than ever.

We’re well on our way to becoming the platform we envisioned when we began our journey a year ago. We’re acquiring new users at a record pace, transaction activity on the platform is setting new high-water marks each week, and more designers are advertising their services on Dribbble than ever before.

We continue to fulfill our company mission – to help professional designers earn a living doing work they take pride in – while positioning ourselves for long-term, profitable growth so we can continue fulfilling that mission in perpetuity.