The Offshore On-demand & Unlimited Design Service – with Johnathan Grzybowski of Penji

People frequently associate outsourcing with some manner of staff augmentation or call center operations, but the industry covers basically any kind of work that can be done remotely. 

Specifically, this week’s guest hails from design outsourcing. Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji, joins Derek in a deep dive of their business model and the nuances of running a creative outsourcing agency. 

Penji

Johnathan starts by presenting Penji. 

“Penji is a creative subscription service where customers essentially go onto our website, sign up for a service, and immediately get paired with the top 2% of creatives in the world.” 

He describes it as “outsourcing to a degree, but at the same time it’s multiple team-based outsourcing.” 

He says that Penji essentially “gives you the creative resources of hundreds of different skill sets for the price of essentially one full-time employee.” 

To ensure that everything aligns properly, Penji assigns an art director to clients. 

“Our customers always get assigned a project manager or an art director that’s going to be able to help them with the art dictation to make sure that there’s a level of consistency and that their voices are consistently heard from there.

That art director’s job is to find the best possible talent for that particular business.”

Building client relationships in design outsourcing

Johnathan believes that good communication is key to producing good output for their clients.

“At the end of it all, clients just want to feel heard [and] understood.” 

Should they ever end up in a situation where the client is not satisfied, Penji is quick to adjust. 

“We have multiple people in that particular field. 

If the vibe isn’t right or they’re not hitting deliverables, we could easily find somebody that can replace that to [provide] a more pleasurable experience for the customer.” 

Of course, it isn’t always smooth sailing, but Johnathan always makes sure that expectations are established at the beginning. 

“It’s more or less setting the boundaries and knowing what those boundaries are and having a realistic and logical conversation that says, ‘Listen, this is what we can do, this is what we can’t do.’ 

That, to me, has been the saving grace of setting the right expectations to people.” 

Communication as a core value

Johnathan holds high standards for Penji designers, even during the hiring process. 

“[We put them] through a lot of tests to make sure this person is a good communicator.”

Again, he emphasizes that the core skill is being able to meet what the client is communicating and expecting. 

“I don’t necessarily think the quality is as important as making the person feel that you understand the work. I think there’s a little bit more leniency towards the absolute best quality. 

And you’d probably be okay with something being maybe 99% accurate instead of 100% accurate every single time if the person makes you feel that they respect your business.”

When they receive a project, Penji breaks it down into simple deliverables which they provide sequentially. 

“We rely heavily on the customer to provide that feedback [on the first deliverable], so we know what direction to move forward with. 

If you’re not providing revisions or at least any type of feedback, it’s really hard to receive something that you want if you’re not communicating.”

The role of AI in design services 

On the topic of AI, Johnathan primarily sees it as a tool, seeing no danger in their industry dissolving.

“From our perspective, no matter how good AI can be, I genuinely and confidently believe that there will still be a need for someone to tweak what needs to be done from AI.” 

While it does continue to advance, he thinks that the real challenge is fitting things to client requirements. 

“People are looking for specific things, that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve. 

I think the final deliverable will always be a hard design or at least a modified version of AI or something that they created on their own.” 

You can head on over to Penji’s website to learn more. Johnathan is also happy to answer any questions. Feel free to send him an email at [email protected]. 

As always, if you’re curious about what we do, you can shoot us an email at [email protected].