How beneficial is LinkedIn?

Trust the opinion of the designer, don't make it a free for all of feedback from everyone and your mother. Thatis how bad logos happen. Work with them to decide the best one based on your business goals. They will appreciate you asking their professional opinion on the design.

Do in-depth competition research. Find people doing exactly what you do and call/email and ask for pricing. Make sure you have exact specs for the "job" mapped out and use the same exact details for everyone you call. If you can't find anyone at all who does what you want to do you should dig deep and find out why nobody does it. There are probably good reasons.

I've been using UW for a few years. It is very useful but you have to be careful. Lot of unreliable people out there. Over the years, I've narrowed a couple of people I keep using. And have excluded others. Few things: 1- It's best to give clear instruction. I tend to build GSheet on what I need, interact a lot of Skype at the beginning 2- If you are searching for mails, do use email verification services. I find that people I work with tend to have a 95% success rate but, at the start, best to be on the safe side rather than burn your mail server (bounce rate need to be low) 3- Focus helps but if you are testing things out, you could use a platform like Reply.io to test out a few verticals and see what works or what doesn't work. 4- It feels your target markets are a bit too generic. Using UW, you'd have too wide a net. There are various ways to narrowing things down, from geos to title to company size or even keyword in company profile. Again, what is possible is to set a filter and share it with UW. Hope it helps, UW etc... are useful and best in my experience than the products out there. But it is a bit of work (no pain no gain). Happy to set up a call if you see value (am rather new to Clarity so not too sure how it works!). Best, H

You'll find that to be the case on any outsourcing site. Focus on the reviews and comments left on a designer's profile. This will give you an idea of the quality of their work before contacting them. Further, check out LinkedIn and search for "freelance designer" or "freelance graphic design" and sift through the results. Good luck! They're out there!

I heard of a startup that recently launched called http://sketchdeck.com that has become pretty popular for fundraising decks. Happy to do a dry run of your pitch with you in a call.