I just mention this because for a thread this large, it is unusually good. (And yes, we're still going to solve this paging business and then there won't be any more of these annoying notices.)
You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt, let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use microservices and..."?
Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and interesting. And, just as fixing bugs is tedious and boring, tweaking designs is tedious and boring.
I've been on both sides for a lot of years, and I have to keep a sharp eye on myself to keep from spinning my wheels on distractions.
Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb.
I was ready to fire the agency the moment the author mentioned they were going off script and building whatever they wanted. This was a huge, blinking red flag for me. Why would you keep paying someone when they're doing work you didn't ask for, doing work that doesn't align with your goals, and ignoring what you say?
That seems to be the point where sunk cost fallacy strikes hard in the post to me. They had paid $X for "80% of the first milestone of work" and that sunk cost locks them in to everything else that happens. They seemed too fearful from that point onward that if they fired the agency and brought in a new agency or freelancer that they would start from square 1 and do all of the previous work (and spend) over again.
The sunk cost fallacy suggests that sometimes is better for you if you should just accept existing losses, accept you've already sunk those costs and won't get them back, and move on. I don't know what their contract looked like with the agency, but an 80% of a logo design sounds like a perfect deliverable that you can safely fire the existing team and take the 80% deliverable to a new designer, not start from scratch, and ask them to do a final polish step. I would have cut losses there, but of course it is much easier to armchair quarterback from hindsight and different perspectives than if you are in the middle of it fighting that gut feeling that you've already invested so much and can't "afford" to cut losses.
This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”.
Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.
Agile and scrum are in practice such nebulous terms that while I don’t doubt that you have had good experience with the particular version of these concepts that you yourself use, the agency could well consider itself to be using the same concepts - yet here we are.
The older I get, the more I come to understand that the problem with projects is people, not methodology. 30% of IT projects still fail, despite “agile” now being widespread.
The first value of the agile manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. Unfortunately, most implementations throw this one out first.
I agree that there's a lot of wiggle room, but there's still some ground rules, like being iterative, not having to plan for everything beforehand, deliver smaller things little by little, not being a perfectionist and turning the review process into a living hell.
But you are 100% right about the problem being people. The problems I see with agile are always because people try to find escape hatches in the process. Designers want to prepare every single detail before developers start working and hate iterating because fear of the "original vision" being a mistake, product owners don't want partial stuff in the beta channel so everything has to be in its final state, product owners don't know or don't want to reduce scope so developers end up with impossible sprints, developers want a perfect definition finished before starting work, so zero chance to iterate...
I also agree with people throwing out individual/interactions and picking a heavy-handed process instead :(
> 30% of IT projects still fail, despite “agile” now being widespread.
That's a very optimistic statistic, unless "fail" is defined to be something other than "the opposite of success".
IOW, a fail is any project that goes over time, over budget or delivers under scope.
If you're defining success as "well, we delivered eventually, and we delivered 80% of the requirements, and it only went over budget by 20%", then, sure, only 30% of IT projects "fail".
Ok, by that measure I guess over 90% of projects would fail. Which would probably be unfair in most cases, because unlike this project, where the scope as defined by the client was 100% clear from the start, most clients when starting out with a project can't really say exactly what they want, so the scope creep is not only driven by the agency, but also (sometimes mostly) by the client.
> most clients when starting out with a project can't really say exactly what they want, so the scope creep is not only driven by the agency, but also (sometimes mostly) by the client.
Most clients know exactly what their goal is ("To increase market recognition", "to increase conversion rate", etc). The scope creep can only happen in a requirements phase[1]. Once a client has signed off on exactly what will be delivered, and what the payments milestones are there's no wiggle room for the agency to continue experimenting.
If you're skipping the requirements phase because "agile"[1], then the work will be over budget, over time and under the scope.
There's very few projects that actually require the exploratory-driven process that agile uses. If you have one of those projects then farming the management of it out to an agency is exactly the wrong thing to do.
[1] There may be multiple requirements phases. For example a large "need to revamp our website" project can be split into multiple serial projects, each with their own requirements phase.
[2] I.e. We'll figure out what is acceptable to the client with constant feedback.
I think the goal is not to eliminate "failure", but reduce it. Failure will always exist but it always requires interpretation. Thus the credos of "failure is learning experience", "don't be afraid to fail" etc.
It's a very abstract term. To put in simpler terms you will always have some outcome mismatch and generally your goal should be to reduce it. But if you do not have outcome mismatch, then you should push the line so that you can look ahead and understand future areas for improvement. Or you can just stay content if "market" is not chasing you.
The problem as I see it is that projects often start without a vision, or even clear goals; even if there is a vision, it ends up getting lost and forgotten in a sea of feature requests.
Not only should we be asking if a project has achieved its original goals once it’s finished, we should be continually assessing progress against those goals throughout the life of the project - yet few projects I’ve worked on actually do this, even when I’ve explicitly requested it.
only 30%? I'd have guessed that most IT projects at least fail to achieve goals if they don't crater completely. the bigger the projects, the more they resemble interplanetary collisions.
Well, that’s according to the PMI. Finding the link will simply lower my level of happiness for the day, but you should be able to Google it (sorry).
The thing is that as far as I can tell, “success” is measured post-hoc, so all sorts of shenanigans might have taken place in order to determine that a project was “successful”. Having worked with my fair share of corporate project leaders, I’m quite certain that the actual number of failed projects would be much higher if measured by the original criteria used to justify the project in the first place.
Helmuth van Moltke (1880): "No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force." It applies to software projects too, especially large ones. The enemy is the real world (or our lack of understanding of the real world.)
If we look at the original requirements every single project is a failure. If we look at the strategic goals and keep track of all trade offs maybe 30% is a fair guesstimate.
Scrum is really for low-trust environments where management fundamentally don't trust the developers to deliver - whether because the developers aren't experienced, not very good at self-management, or too easily distracted by shiny things, or because you're an archetypal MBA type who distrusts any underling who might be smarter than you.
If you trust your developers (whether in-house or contractors) to do the job you can pretty much let them manage themselves with whatever kanban-ish system that works for them. If you don't, you have a ready methodology that gives you meetings upon meetings and two week deliverables and every little thing broken down to the smallest unit under the guise of "empowerment".
While this is definitely true (I've worked in both kinds of environments), I think the scrum process isn't for low-trust per se, but for managing expectations, especially if you have a larger IT organization. Your direct product owner needs a way to determine how long the development of features can be done, so that they can coordinate and manage expectations with other product owners and other stakeholders (management, customers, etc). I see it as a way to abstract away the individual developers and dev work.
And you probably know that there's a BIG portion of developers who aren't as self-organized or disciplined. You mentioned the shiny things distractions, I think that was a factor in the original post. The other being mismanagement on the agency's side, where they allowed their designers to go out of scope. And I'm not even convinced it's mismanagement, because they turned a $7K project into a $46K project, a 6.5x increase in their revenue off of some small side project.
That's not entirely wrong, but Scrum is also great for high-trust environments where you want to have deliverables from sprint one.
And it is actually more useful when things are flipped, and the team doesn't really trust the client/customer/manager. Which is often what happens more frequently.
But you're totally right that Scrum can get kinda heavy on the meetings side. Which tends to be the rule, not the exception. The only times I had this exception it was when we had a technical person working on the requirements, though. No designer or product owner making nebulous Jira tickets.
> Which is why it's the product owner's responsibility to prioritise.
The company didn't seem to have issues prioritizing the authors tasks into no mans land. So they seem to have that part down great already. However I find the consistent two week deliveries early on a bit disturbing, in my experience two weeks is exactly one sprint and fixing deliverables to that time window means that you can't really do any agile planing with it, your team just has to accept that this work has to be done and can't give random work that seems to pop up every now and then the attention it deserves. To be really agile and allow your sprint planing to reflect that you shouldn't promise anything in time spans less than two months.
> I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile.
Probably not. Larger relatively successful design / marketing agencies are - based on my experience - poorly run, poorly managed, and poorly led. This gets exasperated by high turn-over (read: good people leave, dead weight stays behind).
Training, etc.? Not a priority. Revenue, it's all about revenue. They're "creatives", not business problem-solver types and presume mess and excessive friction are unavoidable.
Even if they're using agile, it's up to the customer to ask for deliverables that they care about if they want them.
Of course it would be much better if the agency were honest, but if for seven months the deliverables were only "promises", then it's definitely not agile...
Which absolutely makes me think this was a well thought out con designed to prey on those types of fears and maximize the value extracted from the mark.
Those lottery phone scams out of Jamaica which target the elderly in the US are almost the exact same scam as what was described here.
Promise something, get them to send money, don’t deliver, tell them you need more time/more money. Keep repeating until the mark walks away.
Maybe "well thought out con" is a little strong here. I see it as more likely the consulting firm has learned this behavior over time and it has rewarded them well. I imagine that if they're normally dealing with large contracts, those companies footing the bill are probably easier to string along like this. Just do enough and promise enough that they keep you on and only budge when they get more serious about potentially terminating the contract.
Also they finished the work in a brisk sprint-like pace towards the end, knocking out the pages in record time. I think that was more indicative of the actual effort required to finish the work, not all the hours they billed. There is a perverse incentive when the client has a retainer to bill hours and make up excuses to line their pockets. They finessed the author and preyed on his naivety
I agree, and it takes force to break them out of this behavior. I know of a guy, who forced the contractors to break down the wall they just built because they didn't let him inspect the place behind the wall before enclosing it, as promised in the contract. He knew that if he lets this slide, they'll keep doing it.
An analogy here would be forcing the agency designers to completely delete any speculative redesign work, without any backups, to force them to focus on the logo, and send a strong signal that I don't care about the redesign, and won't be paying that work.
> I think you're attributing malice to what was more than likely routine mismanagement.
I wouldn't call it mismanagement. Many agencies thrive despite regularly delivering these types of experiences. It's a conscious choice they can easily rationalize because of the money.
This agency turned a one off $7k job into $46k by smooth talking and scope creeping an actual developer. I'm sure they're absolutely killing it doing the same to non-technical folks.
I'm sure some do have that attitude but I don't believe, for most, that they're choosing to operate that way.
TinyPilot is clearly successful and growing. Any smart agency would nurture that relationship, deliver a great product, and secure an ongoing relationship.
By contrast, there's a huge amount of reputational risk in allowing things to spiral. They've walked away with more today but imagine for a moment the damage that would have been done were they named in this article. It doesn't take much for a brand to turn toxic and things to implode.
Easy for an outsider to say, though I’d imagine it’s a perfectly reasonable precaution to be cautious in the first post they make. Also he’d then not need to worry about what he exactly says in the post or mince his words/self-censor.
Yeah my read is they were having some internal issues and were overloaded. On top of that they hadn't done many projects like this.
Management threw it out to the floor and the floor ran with it like every other job. Feedback went to management but the people doing the work didn't really understand that this client was not like their other projects.
I've been on the other side of this where one bigger client changed the game and we didn't adapt as we were used to things at a different scale. We didn't clean up the mess we inherited fast enough. We didn't put enough resources on the projects and we failed to live up to expectations. We were used to smaller tasks with more limited scope.
Yep. It's not a situation where they're an indeterminate way through building a custom app using a custom framework and you really do lose everything if you start again, it's a case where an agency has designed and handed over a logo and some very conventionally-designed mockups which any competent freelancer with knowledge of Vue should be able to implement on your platform, and revise as requested. And they're citing lack of availability, so it's not even rude to walk away with the deliverables you paid for.
The sunk cost fallacy is perhaps the most useful thing you learn in business school. eg. Do I want to pay $9,600 to get the job finished. What would it cost if I hired someone else to finish it ?
The same thing if you are going to a concert and lost your tickets, do you want to pay $200 to go to the concert (not taking into account that you've already lost $100, you could have lost that $100 on whatever) eg. you are paying 200, not 200+100.
You are right
But it's not always a clear cut. Sometimes trades have "artistic integrity" for a lack of better words. Carpenters, architects and also programmers - The client tells them what to do, but they usually want some freedom to leave their mark.
I call this the being too nice mistake. It is like the customer that would watch an employee spit in their food and say thanks to them. Effective leaders do not fear confrontation.
In this case it might be a case of being intimidated by a big agency. Isaac telling him that he was their smallest client had a "you're lucky we are willing to work for you" feel.
This feels even more dubious because if I figured out the correct company, they're fishing in the freelancer threads quite a lot. They know what they're offering to HN readers.
This would be first red flag for me. If someone from the getgo positions himself as doing you a favour, switch - it is not going to get better. At best its uncontrolled ego problem, at worst its a scheme to dry you up.
You're correct, and I expect the real issue is that working that was was completely foreign to WebAgency.
They typically are employed by businesses who are looking for a very specific result: a good website that works well.
Their team wasn't setup to, and didn't know how to just deliver a simple logo.
The correct answer would have been for WebAgency's CEO to say, "We'd love to work with you, but we're not really setup for this type of project. If you'd like to have us take on your whole website, here's what that would look like. Otherwise, I don't think we're a good fit."
If it's not part of the agreed upon scope and they didn't ask for permission, I see no obligation to pay them. They can put the logo in context, sure, but if they end up spending more time on the sketches for that context than the logo itself, that isn't what you ordered.
I think that at the time, the agency upsold the author and they went along with it; after that, sunk cost became a factor. I do believe this is what most agencies will try, upselling I mean.
That said, clients can also be problematic; I recall one where the client paid a fixed amount per two-week sprint, but then really started to stretch out how much work was done within that sprint by basically not signing off on tasks and reporting new features to be added as bugs. It's another case I think of a party not being firm enough about scope.
> Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and interesting. And, just as fixing bugs is tedious and boring, tweaking designs is tedious and boring.
My god, that explains why modern designs and user interfaces suck so much. That, and the fact that many designers work off their gut feelings and personal subjective preferences, rather than systematic and evidence-based study.
Remembered me of a rumor (or fact?) that almost all Windows 10/11 designers use Mac. And it shows: the end results broke all the UX Windows users were used to.
Graphic design has been a Mac stronghold for basically forever. I remember them being the only exception to the Windows only” rules most companies had for a very long time.
Also as a Windows->Mac switcher myself, I’m not sure breaking Windows UX is a bad thing.
Don't you wish there was a vibrant ecosystem of commercial OSes, each providing a different choice regarding the UX or other aspect you want to prioritize, each being financially viable based on their merits and not getting crushed by a monopolistic gorilla ?
You'd have options to go to when Microsoft makes choices you don't agree with.
There's LineageOS. Not sure it is worth the effort to switch just for this though.
Which is also the solution for "OS gorilla". Use Linux. You have a vibrant ecosystem of distros, they work (as much as any OS), and you are free to mix and match. No need to stick to OS that changes under your feet with no recourse.
I'm fine with there being a vibrant ecosystem of open source OSes, each providing a different choice regarding the UX or other aspect I want to prioritize. The monopolistic gorilla is there but the only really effect it has is that other commercial developers like to only support the monopolistic gorilla.
My interest in commercial OS es is on the support/ contracting parts. For instance if tomorrow Sony wants to make a non Windows VAIO machine and look for a partner with an OEM program, open source OSes are out of the picture.
They could take a LTS somewhere, pay another specialized company for additional expertise, but the would be no way to have an actual contract with the leading entity, and have any weight on the direction the OS will be developped (MS is also bigger than any single OEM, but they will still try to keep the majority of OEMs happy and not pull the rug under their feet. Ubuntu for instance doesn’t have such strong incentives)
We’ve had that. Turns out it just shifts the battleground from “I want my company to control the world” to “I want my ideas to proliferate through the whole world”.
Not only do we end up with https://xkcd.com/927/ (15 standards), but we end up with massive amounts of work being essentially trashed because it’s in one of the tiny tiny fragments that gets passed over.
Maybe I’ve just gotten old, but I’d even compromise by making the “power user” the most targeted demographic again. Power users want things to work well, they want the ability to use hardware and software on their terms and for all sorts of things the creators may have never intended, and they want to customize anything that they choose to.
Remember how XP’s theming engine was trying to win users back from all the replacement “shells” like litestep? Or how macs had wild extensions like one that could rotate the mouse cursor as it followed the point? Or mouse-based gesture applications? Or generative art screensavers? Or websites dedicated to showing of the beautiful artistry of user-created desktop UIs where each was entirely distinct from the other (even on Windows!)?
Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb.
Not that it matters in this context but wasn't it the other way around? Didn't Donato Bramante try to sabotage Michelangelo by convincing Pope Julius II to give him the Sistine Chapel comission, assuming that Michelangelo would fail (due to his lack of experience in fresco painting) and ruin his reputation in the process?
So Donato Bramante was more a consultant recommending an overpaid design agency hoping to benefit from their failure.
I was actually thinking of "The Agony and the Ecstasy," which is on somewhat shaky historical accuracy footing.
Rex Harrison whacking Charlton Heston with a stick because he's slacking on the ceiling is how all project managers should handle both devs and creatives. I hear that's how Larry Ellison does it.
Yeah I sort of rolled my eyes at all the logo redesigns (especially as these seem to have come first in the process) but it seems Author was fine with it. It’s an impressive read because Author (and Isaac to some degree) seem quite even keeled in dealing with everything.
I know we don't know costs, but per the article it's about a month's revenue, and I assume it's pretty profitable. Not the first hire either, so the difference between 7k and 46k total over several months is not a lot in a way.
I think we do know costs in this case! The author is very open about the finances of his products. And in this case, while he did start generating profits from tinypilot in 2021, those were only around 17-18k$ IIRC. So this is still a massive expense for the business I'd guess!
I used to think this whole pattern was just Chasing the Shiny with a heavy dose of aversion, but something I noticed was that on a redesign, the management tends to give you the benefit of the doubt for a while. There’s a brief period where everything is easier socially before the ugliness starts up again.
Getting a redesign approved can be the difference between having a long project on your resume and people asking you why you job hopped so much.
I love fixing bugs. Sometimes more than writing new things. Seeing the system health increase as I delete old code, add new tests, and increase performance is very satisfying.
I hate fixing bugs, but I love having fixed them more. It's the same sort of relationship I have with playing hard games, like Elden Ring, or whatever.
The actual search for the problem, and sometimes even the implementation of the fix, can be really frustrating, but that is a vital part in the absolutely ecstatic feeling I get from having actually Fixed The Thing.
This makes a lot of sense, I feel like this is more of a management issue, it should be the responsibility of the manager to keep everyone working on what is initially planned.
They kind of addressed this by saying that they try to keep management billing hours quite low. Perhaps this low percentage would have been "enough" had the size of the project been bigger? Although, I think it'd be fair to argue that the designers should have been "trained" (i.e., with time not billed as "management" for a client's project) to stick to the project scope a bit better.
I get it though: my only experience has been with internal, full-time employees, and I see is given a fair amount of latitude to do exciting things and to experience small failures. It's a different mindset for external contractors, it seems.
The agency would normally allocate 5% of the budget to management, but Isaac made the decision (since the budget was so small) to completely eliminate that.
The budget ballooned to 6x its planned size and the management allocation was the same percentage of that as of the original budget: 0%.
Rather ironic, since that latter budget probably is sufficiently large not to eliminate management completely. (~$350 vs ~$2000 for mgmt)
> a lot of technical debt ... let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure etc.
For me, I'm the dev who says: "This codebase has a lot of technical debt. Let's get rid of all of the containers and VMs and kubernetes and artificial servicification, take it off the cloud, and refactor it into smaller programs which do the work efficiently and which can be built and run on basically any machine(s) and cooperate peacefully."
I think it's important to establish clear goals before reaching out to freelancers and agencies. The agenda from each one is different than yours.
I learned to get the team focus by writing a brief (commonly used for Brand Managers in big companies) to keep focus on the deliverables. That helps to avoid these type of issues.
It's a pet peeve and a common problem in software development, where developers don't want to do the work that is asked of them because it's not challenging enough (yay another REST API in front of a database), so they add complexity themselves - new, more difficult languages like Rust or Scala (not as much of an issue anymore I think), excessively complex architectures like microservices, DIY infrastructure configuration like k8s, etc.
See also magpie developers. It's not that the new technologies are not great, it's just that in most cases it's not what a client needs, but what the developers want to do. They will have a solution and look for a problem to match.
I mean I'm not innocent of that, I'm looking left and right for problems where I could use Go to solve them with because I enjoy it. But I am aware of the risks.
Anyway the comparison is apt because it happens with developers; I've seen it happen firsthand at multiple projects, and in almost ALL of those, after the consultants left, the company moved back to their own technology, picked something off-the-shelf, or did yet another rebuild.
I think the comment was fair; Too often have I witnessed clueless and/or conniving salespeople recommend businesses to move onto Azure or other cloud services when there was very little to gain from it, yet it meant that the cost compared to hosting their very simple ERP software on metal would bankrupt them in the first bad month.
> have to keep the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt, let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use microservices and..."?
Also known as the "oh look, a shiny thing" development paradigm.
Following through the example, if assembly language works well, then there's no justification to do it in C. One needs to find (valid) reasons to justify such decisions.
The tipping point would be when you can come up with a compelling answer for the question you laid out. You don't just rewrite it in C as a reflex to that question.
I recently left a boutique agency of 5 years and I can definitely resonate with this one. Our agency aimed to catch big fish, and we did, but since they are hard to land we'd pick up small jobs in the meantime, just like the project that you're describing here. In my perspective, this isn't someone deliberately ripping you off. I imagine they intended to ship at the cost they quoted, but the team didn't adjust their working style to match your price point.
All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill and wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as they typically would on a larger project. Those variations are an expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k customer treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount.
The reality is, small jobs like this are effectively make-work projects for an agency. They typically don't pay enough to be an effective use of time for the agency, but are a way to stay in the black between higher value projects. Small customers become "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is landed. The team members being swapped out as they are needed elsewhere and newly joining team members then need to re-contextualize and regain momentum, all on your dime.
Your takeaway is correct, don't be a small fish for an agency. If they're busy they won't take your work, and if do show interest, they are desperate for work.
>All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill and wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as they typically would on a larger project. Those variations are an expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k customer treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount.
Oh, huh.
I was thinking about this as I did the writeup. It didn't feel at the time that they were spending excessive time on the logo variations, but I went back to the notes I took on our first call and realized how out of line all that early work now feels relative to their 30-40 hour initial estimate of the rebrand.
It wasn’t scope creep it was a scam. Shady contractors in every industry pull stuff like this.
They didn’t deliver what you actually contracted for until you put your foot down because that was the hook — they couldn’t keep taking your money if they gave you what you wanted.
For anyone else reading this the best move would be to shut it down as soon as a single minute has been billed for out of contract work: “Hey this is not what I contracted & I won't be paying for any out of scope work.”
Here's the thing I don't get. Did you not have some guarantee of completed work? When they quoted you the $7k, I could see building timeline flexibility into that quote, but I have a hard time imagining building so much flex into the contract in terms of budget that they can hold your work hostage to where you sign the retainer contract. It seems like you should have had some sort of legal recourse to hold them accountable to delivering the promised work in a reasonable time frame before you went the retainer route and found yourself on the hook for an extra $40k. Was there not?
Also, I was surprised by how much you let Isaac get away with. He admitted he badly mismanaged the project, and made decisions that lead to that mismanagement with out consulting you. He badly blew his estimates for you, and was pretty clear that it was his fault. I would have pushed him to eat much more of the losses than he did.
Yeah, it's more of a "highest bidder mentality". That they don't have any experience with hourly billing should have been a massive red flag as that means they need to be very conscious in how they approach the project. That they used this simply as an excuse to deprioritize the project is what caused the problems.
The agency I worked for used to offer a "special" for a brochure site. Basically it was a "website-in-a-day" deal. Customer comes to the agency in the morning, meets with designer and manager, and they agree a design (preliminary work has already been done on a logo). Customer goes for lunch, and the design is handed to two devs. Around 4PM the customer gets sight of what the devs have done, and goes home. The devs work on until say 8PM, and probably put in a couple of hours the next day.
Of course, there was then snagging; it wasn't really a one-day job. The whole deal was pretty inexpensive. We used Drupal with a custom theme.
I don't know whether we made money on these projects, but we did end up with a string of long-term customers.
1) Did you pay everything up front or was it a 50% up front and 50% on delivery basis?
2) Did you manage any deliverables on a google sheet (dates, owner etc) or something similar?
>The reality is, small jobs like this are effectively make-work projects for an agency. They typically don't pay enough to be an effective use of time for the agency, but are a way to stay in the black between higher value projects. Small customers become "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is landed. The team members being swapped out as they are needed elsewhere and newly joining team members then need to re-contextualize and regain momentum, all on your dime.
Man. That 3rd paragraph resonates so well with me/my employer. We're an industrial automation company. Family owned. Started from the owner's shed and grew to what we are now. We were built on smalltime clients and our product quality got around through word of mouth and are now at the point where we have massive multi-million dollar clients.
We still support the little guys though. And we get more little guys under our umbrella every year. I think there's still a part of our company that recognizes we have roots in helping the farmers automated their cleaner processes. We also have the nearly identical issue that our OP is bitching about: we're married to these massive clients and we fill the gaps with the little projects. But when the timing is getting tight, the little guys are who loses out.
I'm starting to see the cracks. Clients who built our foundations are losing out on support and growth opportunities. We're more concerned with the next mining project or new facility build than we are selling small guys upgrades and ongoing modernization. It's fine as far as the pocketbook goes but I feel like we play a dangerous game allowing our work schedules to be dictated by the big guys. Eventually they all grow to realize the same thing: the controls part is crucial enough to the business that it needs to be brought in house. Once that happens our value falls off quickly. It's only bad because we're losing our core for the opportunity to play puppet to some truly massive clients.
I feel like I'm getting a bit lost in the weeds, but really my point is just how I haven't really thought clearly about what the perception of our business must be to the clients, both big and small. We play a critical service role among many industries but we also run the risk of alienating the business that's virtually guaranteed to be there in hopes of marrying ourselves to somebody who only needs us now, and probably not tomorrow.
If retaining the small clients is a business goal, you should have a (small) dedicated team devoted to them, that knows how to work in the way that these small clients need.
Don't you think that'd become the "B-team" pretty quickly, though? I think it might fall apart. What might also work is something more like the "pro bono" model of lawyers? Make it a marketing thing, maybe see if the big clients would want to get in on the PR benefits of helping the little clients, maybe rotate your rockstars through the smaller projects and help develop less-experienced talent that way?
It has the risk of being a B-team but it's also a good way to onboard new hires. You get a much higher turnover rate of new things to try, do, and learn. One place I worked did communications generation (PDF letters etc), we had massive clients and 300 hour projects and we had 3 hour simple letters. Churning those small ones out was the best way to get me to learn when I signed up. Just as long as someone sensible and experienced is watching. And some people just don't gel well with project marathons - I'm definitely a sprinter who loses focus on huge projects despite my years of experience. I'd rather do a lot of small ones.
It eventually got sold to a bigger more respectable company and those 300 hour quotes crept up north of 1000 hours and it was impossible to finish any job in under 10 hours but that's another story about internal red tape.
Other way around, in my experience. We run a team of ~20 at our studio—the "A-team" all want to work on the smaller projects because they're usually more interesting, they have more control, they get to move faster, etc.
As the owner of a control software company, your explanation about big companies bringing things in-house matches our experiences perfectly, and instead of assuming that they will never be able to bring things in-house due to the niche and a lack of experience, it has inspired me to put some more thought into how to solve this problem as we grow by focusing on having teams dedicated to dealing with and keeping our smaller recurring clients (i.e. have A and B teams as suggested).
> Eventually they all grow to realize the same thing: the controls part is crucial enough to the business that it needs to be brought in house.
I think that creates a narrow operating area for almost all agencies - they need to operate in a narrow gap between "work that isn't valuable enough, so nobody pays for it" and "work that is so important for the business, that they bring it in house".
And you get to play outside this envelope only by finding clients so slow that it takes them years to realize they need an in house team. Now you have a different problem - working for a slow client doesn't push you to get much better.
Yeah, I like the suggestion, I'll preface in saying I'm not in a "Decision Maker" position at my company though so ideas are only so good.
Ultimately it's a management issue. Internally among the techs/engineers we've talked about it but management keeps pushing to satisfy the client and the temporary compromises we make at one moment start to become permanent mainstays of how we operate. I don't have any confidence that if we had a "B-Team" or "Sub-branch" that when a big enough project came along they wouldn't just poach the needed labour and destroy the separation between them.
You could almost say we operate with an "A-Team" and "B-Team" as we have techs split primarily between the Mining and Agricultural clients but they take our techs often from the Agricultural side to fill in on needs of the mining side. There's no shame.
I've been at a small agency that's grown into a midsize agency over the last decade+.
Everything about this story rings true, and the author's conclusions are absolutely on point.
Now our agency is at a place where we can say no to work like this, both because we have a solid client base that supports us financially without projects like this, and because we've learned that no matter how good our intentions, neither we nor our clients are going to be happy with the end result.
All that said, my bigger question is: does the new website bring in more business than the old?
It's certainly better designed, but looking at the copy and IA, I'm not entirely sure that the new site is going to convert better than the old.
To me, the old version was distinctive and unique, while the new looks like basically every other SAAS site designed since the year 2020.
1) How would the old design perform during that time period
2) How would a hypothetical $7k design perform during that time period
#1 is of course why a/b-testing was invented, while #2 is even more speculative. But we don’t know how much of the 66% can be attributed to the new design.
Also the earnings chart shows a clear upwards trend, so 72k is not really an outlier. Fwiw, I liked the previous design better. No idea how the codebase looked like though.
I've worked at small agencies for the better part of a decade and couldn't agree more with this summary.
A lot of the comments seem to take the view that this was some deliberate ploy to overcharge. In reality, it was just poorly managed.
> Small customers become "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is landed.
My guess would be that when quoted, the project was expected to be completed by a certain date. Because the team failed to adapt, the project overran, new projects took over leaving this one to languish.
As a small business owner myself, this resonates. I would love to be in a position to be able to confidently pay money to other professionals to make problems go away.
Unfortunately, my overall experience has been that hiring any “expert” in a field that I am not also an expert in has a 50% chance of working, and a 50% chance of blowing up in my face and creating more problems.
I recently attempted to get a new accountant to help me handle some business growth. It was a person from a well regarded local firm, initial meetings were good, and then they proceeded to deliver none of the agreed-upon work, take 2-3 weeks to respond to emails (multiple times, I had to call their office and schedule an in-person meeting just to get a response), and then de-prioritize my business relative to other clients so badly that I wasn’t able to submit my taxes until June.
If anyone can successfully build a service that lets me reliably pick professional-services providers with the same level of confidence that I pick an AirBnb (not 100%, but pretty good, with an expectation for reasonable mediation and fallback coverage if the offering is radically different than what’s described), I would happily pay a 20% premium on those services versus the existing “ask friends for referrals and cross your fingers” status quo.
If it’s anything like the market for home services, the middleman service will be even worse than dealing with vendors directly: a middleman adding a layer of indirection but little value.
Depends on how much work you are having done. On a remodel you need a GC unless you have a lot of time and expertise to hire all the trades and such yourself. They really do provide value.
Is this an example of the Market for Lemons? If I hire a developer I have a pretty good idea what to look for (and to a lesser degree, a designer, as I have worked with enough designers to know how the good ones work). But I would have no idea what makes for a good accountant or corporate lawyer or plumber, so would need to depend on referrals and a certain amount of blind trust.
I am building this for M&A and investor due diligence. DueDilio is an online managed marketplace focused on due diligence. We connect business buyers, sellers, intermediaries, and private investors with pre-vetted due diligence service providers. Our large and growing network of verified independent professionals, boutique, and mid-size firms specialize in finance, legal, technology, commercial, and other key areas of business diligence.
We've connected clients with accountants previously with good results.
As someone who have been on both sides of the table I can completely resonate with your statements. But I think that there is an expectation by small business owners that every expert will completely understand their business and will deliver exceptional results from day 1. So I think there should be some learning curve with very clear results expected on each and every step.
Is answering email at least this week exceptional? What learning curve a small business accountant has even? It’s not a factory with amortizing equipment, worker schedules, rolling production and distribution of expenses. I work with accountants all my life, and for small businesses it’s a matter of loading contracts, bank statements, invoices and salaries into an app, sorting expenses by legal category and that’s it. There is nothing to learn in a small business accounting, it is entry-level for this job title.
As someone who has worked at a content agency for a decade, let me just say: I feel really bad that this happened to you, and that scope creep is real.
I almost feel like you needed to ask for three separate things: A brand identity, a marketing strategy refresh, and then (finally) a website redesign. That all three were combined into one process likely caused this problem to drag on. The agency had its problems, but to be honest to me as someone who is familiar with this space, it sounds like they were combining a lot of disciplines into one project without considering that it would have been better to chew smaller bites.
There are times where you do need to bend the rules. At the beginning of the pandemic I sort of broke protocol to get a COVID-19 landing page on a client’s site online because I knew that it would take weeks done the normal way and possibly would have led us to charge the client for something that a skilled designer only needed a couple of hours to build in WordPress. While the landing page wasn’t perfect, it held up for nearly a year, and showed that we were taking things seriously at a time we needed to. A lot of agencies aren’t wired for doing right beyond billable hours, so be mindful of the risks.
Either way, I feel bad that you paid so much for a site that looks way better but doesn’t feel like $46k worth of work.
Don’t feel bad. The end result was positive. Sales increased enough that the cost will be made up in a few months. Person actually made out well considering the effect of the work.
It's not at all guaranteed that increase in sales was due to the redesign.
But yeah considering that revenues have only gone up, might as well just call it a cost of doing business. Learn from it and move on. (It sounds like this is exactly what he's doing.)
But imagine how much further he would be ahead if they came in at time and on budget. He arguably lost half a year of positive benefits because they dragged their feet for so long.
- They decide they want to go outside so it can get done "quicker" by "professionals."
- It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's primary resolution.
- It takes 6-10 months of "clean up" to make the site usable.
- Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site.
- My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because the entire team over there has turned over since the project inception.
- We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on their own.
- Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months.
We are an early stage startup. We've burned through almost 20% of the revenue we've ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully, finally, we've grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who will I hope put an end to this madness.
A tale as old as (Internet) time - I've seen this cycle happen, too.
Tangentially, I have to wonder to what extent misapplication of Agile, and similar, project management processes is to blame.
You'd think for most relatively simple sites, like we're talking about here, it ought to be planned once and built once, but something about the mindset that the goal posts can be moved during planning and development seems to drag everything out at length.
I think that's pretty backwards. Non-agile is how you get these things being rebuilt every other year because by the time it's built the requirements that were originally gathered are obsolete.
Wow this one is spot on. Had exactly the same experience as a contract PM working with Marketeers who lived in fairy-land.
Two hilarious moments:
1. A big fuss was made of a launch of a new site, marketeers demanded that we had plenty of extra servers for the demand. On launch day I had the live stats of visitors and it occasionally flickered to above 0.
2. We finally needed to refactor and do some maintenance to the duct-taped code that had resulted in years of 'everything is urgent' 'one extra feature by tomorrow`. When I told the Head of Marketing they were doing this vital work, she couldn't understand that because no new graphics or UI were being produced that they were doing actual work - "But I can't see any new work"
It was not worth the small fortune in daily rates they were paying me
Founder / CEO. A lot of people will respond "no the founder needs to back off and let the marketing team do its job" but on a decision to allocate 50% of the annual marketing budget, the CEO should be involved.
I suppose it depends on the expertise of the the founder or CEO in question. On balance, something that takes 50% of budget absolutely should involve oversight greater than a single team or executive, but I'm not sure to what level without knowing more about the team dynamics at play.
There are plenty of engineer founder types who have all sorts of opinions on how infrastructure spend should be divvied up...they're probably on average more well informed there than they might be on the value of good consistent branding and website. On the flip side, a sales-heavy type might have strong opinions on how much engineering is spending on keeping the ship afloat, but that doesn't necessarily make them right.
Of course it's possible to be conversant within multiple modalities, so I am just talking to the average here.
Let's not get into ideals, but: The different stakeholders in the website should agree on it, rather than just one of them deciding - as marketing is just one of a website's purposes; it's not merely a marketing tool.
Perhaps it's my own bias but through the lens of founding and running a SaaS business, but the website often just IS marketing, while the core offering(s) are hosted somewhere else and have their own team/owners/stakeholders. It's certainly different if your product is a physical good or service, but I'm reading the GP's comment as 'tech startup = software company'.
"Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry-picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when it didn't at all]" looks good on a résumé.
Your managers may not understand much, but they can understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at) before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may matter when promotions are available.
That's at least as true in bigco as in startups and small companies.
> For most of the project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially-complete tasks. The cost of reassigning half-done work and spinning up a new vendor would be almost as expensive as starting over from scratch.
The original project budget was 7k, and you ended up spending 46k, for something that didn't really deliver on what you asked for originally.
It is really hard to imagine that it would have been more expensive to start over. It seemed clear by the middle of the story, that web agency wasn't doing what you were paying them for, at which point you increased the amount you were paying them in hope that would somehow change things, and then were shocked when they behaved exactly the same as they had before.
There's times when starting over is more expensive, this seems like the polar opposite of that and a clear example of sunk cost fallacy.
Yeah, I think the article lacks of a single, clear statement on why things it went wrong. It gets caught up in myriads of little reasons which I think distracts the author from arriving at a painful insight.
His shortest section, left towards the bottom of the page, seems like an accidental example of rationalizing the sunk cost fallacy.
> Firing WebAgency and searching for a replacement would have burned 30-60 hours of management time. And there was no guarantee that I’d find someone better. For most of the project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially-complete tasks. The cost of reassigning half-done work and spinning up a new vendor would be almost as expensive as starting over from scratch.
The author also mentioned that there is a cost to selecting an alternative firm and managing them. Also, I'm not sure the author would have learned the same lessons outlined in this blog post had they not seen the process through to the end.
There always is - that is why the sunk cost fallacy is so attractive. But still, this seems one of the most clear cut example of the switching costs being worth it, i have ever seen.
I'm doubtful that the author learned the correct lesson even by the end. I suspect if a similar thing happened again the author would fall victim to it again.
> That is very expansive, for a $100 a lot of teenagers could make it
These are the $4 devs. Look, a teen coder can hack up a storm. But I distinctly remember a brilliant friend of mine taking a gig in college and not understanding why the small business who contracted him was pissed he’d rebuilt their site in Silverlight. He wouldn’t make that mistake now. But he doesn’t charge what he billed then either.
Sorry but I'm in a few communities with VCs, designers that aren't even 16yo.
In the Rust or Deno communities: https://lcas.dev/ is very young for example.
Digital Agency Owner Here... I have to say, this is difficult to read and it gives a bad name to other agencies.
- I think the first "mistake" was not having it as a fixed price. We spend a lot of time up-front defining the scope and get sign off before committing to the work. After that, we roll it through the relevant departments. We take the risk on for bugs/issues (that are within scope) and do the project as a fixed price. Anything out of scope is a different conversation but will always be priced additions.
- This agency got the best of both worlds, hourly rate and no risk on their side.
- I disagree with some of the comments on here about agencies not being your "friend", a "good" agency will treat you like a partner and be focused on helping you meet those goals, regardless of if there's more money to be made. Ultimately, our job is to make you look good and reach goals. If we don't do that, we don't need to exist.
- They should have said no at the beginning. We turn down clients and it's hard to do sometimes, but ultimately you're setting everyone up to fail. Honesty is key for all parts.
- The onus should be on the agency, not on you. If there's issues with the build, that's the agency's problem not yours. That's why the initial scoping is so important.
- A good agency IS better than a freelancer(or freelancers). You have a team of people conducting the work, pulling in the right people at the right time, expertise and experience of doing this day-in-day-out, what to avoid etc. On top of all that, ensuring it runs on time (it's in our interest to do so). A rolling freelancer is incentivised to keep the project running as long as possible, but on top of that you're limited to a knowledge of one.
- The CEO unfortunately took full advantage of the situation here. This is a short-term approach that may work for a few clients but after that, the word spreads. There's few things you can keep hold of these days, your name and reputation is one of them. I'd advise actually naming this agency as the anonymity will only promote them to keep doing it.
Sorry this happened to you and I admire your positive approach to the situation, sometimes what's done is done and you have to learn and move on.
Fixed price upon scoped deliverables is the way for such a small project, when using new freelancers always use fixed to trial how they are, then possibly move on to hourly. On those freelancing websites you can cap hours so they don't overbill for out of scope stuff, this is a rough experience but not that uncommon especially for first time.
I agree with most, especially that OP left the tap open. No risk for an agency and de facto unrestricted costs for OP.
With one exception of a blanket statement:
> - A good agency IS better than a freelancer
If there is a single freelancer:
- There is a single person responsible. If it gets diffused, it may easily end in an unending project, as no one is incentivized to finalize the project.
- The number of people working on the project is capped at one. You won't ever get charged for two people talking with each other.
- For a single freelancer, they may be some "sanity check" regarding the cost. For any well-known agency, it wouldn't raise one's eyebrows if you said [This Well Known Agency] charged you [any number] $. Logo design alone could have costed OP $50k.
For me, the 3 key downsides to a single freelancer is:
* You’re totally dependent on a single point of failure. If they get ill, go on holiday or simply disappear, take on another project or go full time somewhere else, then you’re left in the lurch - particularly post-live when you may need additional support/amends/bug fixes.
* I’m yet to find a single freelancer that can project manage, UX, design, write copy and build to a high standard in all areas. You’ll probably need several freelancers.
* Lack of code review. Usually an agency will have several devs on their team, so there should be some form of code review whereas this is less likely with a single freelancer.
As the agency owner, how would you have felt reading this if the author had named the agency?
It really bugs me how people take a "protect the innocent" approach to these articles when in reality they should be saying loud and clear who the offender is.
Obviously you never want that to happen to your own agency and would like to think any responsible CEO / owner wouldn’t allow these situations to happen (don’t get me wrong, I appreciate mistakes do occur - but this smells very different), so unless they suffer some consequence, they’ll do it to the next unsuspecting client and keep doing so.
I disagree. (1) There is evidence that his company may profit from the redesign, and (2) he risks being sued for even the slightest mischaracterization in his blog, which requires tens of thousands to defend (at least). I don't see the point in risking the family business over this. Both parties learned a lesson. Perhaps the WebAgency will decide never to have hourly clients again.
Respectfully disagree. There is only one side that suffered the consequences, and it's not the agency. There is no incentive for them to change anything.
I find it odd that there are people here who believe that the agency regrets anything,
Or that it learnt anything more than "yes this really works for us to maximize revenue and we can get away with it".
(I do guess it's better to not name them though -- because naming them risks making actually well behaved agencies or freelancers nervous about working with the client in the future?)
This reminds me of when I worked for a B2C company in the healthcare space. We hired a freelance designer to redesign our checkout flow and we wanted it done in time for Black Friday, which was by far our biggest day of the year.
Of course the project ran long and we crunched so that we could ship the redesign exactly on Black Friday. I think we shipped the Tuesday before (because Thanksgiving) and everything seemed normal. Black Friday rolls around and we go into the office and they have our internal dashboard monitors set up with our Black Friday unit sales counts. Spoiler alert: it did not go well. We were something like 25% off of our goal and 10-15% off of our previous year's sales. Exec team is freaking out and they order us to revert the design change ASAP in the early afternoon. We do and sure enough, we see our sales start to increase.
Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did.
Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive overload (taking into account everything else they have to learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design achieved “don’t make me think”, and any changes, even improvements, reset that.
Have to admit, when I saw the two screenshots, I thought the OP's problem would be exactly that, not the agency process. Original design not great but has a big picture of a hardware device, an unmissable order button and some explainer videos. New design much more visually appealing, but looks like a different company, potentially even a different class of product and whilst the order button isn't exactly difficult to find, it's not shouting as loudly to act.
The bottom of the post mentioned that sales have increased by 40% with the new design. It will probably take some time to know if that sticks, but it seems like it works from that point of view, even if it was maybe overpriced.
The 40% increase is ~$18k a month based on the numbers in the article. That means that redesign pays for itself in three months. That's the type of "regret" that I want.
God, I wish this were printed on the wall of every software design office. Mediocre designs are fine if people know them, because they learn to work around the rough edges to the point where they often don't notice them. But a new design (probably also mediocre!) requires way more cognitive load. Tech as an industry is horrible on this front.
Just to pick on one example: Android. Google absolutely loves changing the settings and UX on each major version. People use these controls so much they eventually get habituated... until they change and have to go hunting around and learn the new workflows to get back to par. Each one of these redesigns probably wastes millions of cumulative user hours.
> Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me.
Honestly, I feel like the only way of working around this is having multiple different interface options available.
For example, the new Reddit look is more app-like and certainly has improvements to the user profile pages and whatnot. Yet for certain types of browsing content, or wanting to do it without your browser slowing down as much, the old interface is still available:
https://www.reddit.com/
https://old.reddit.com/
Many out there will stop using the site the day when the old interface goes down and for now can just use the old one despite the new one being available - thus allowing them to stick to the user experience that they're used to.
Of course, not many out there want to deal with something like this on the development side, such as CRUD systems that would need to move fields around, add new business process steps etc. There, maintaining two separate versions would be a massive pain.
I would argue that the most important factor when considering old reddit vs new reddit UI/UX isn't a matter of preference based upon performance, certain content, or habit. Old.reddit is actually just better for the end user experience overall and new reddit UI is better for Reddit's ad revenue.
Many times a user not wanting to switch to a new UI isn't based completely in effort/adaptability but a history of experience with product life-cycles weighing more towards business objectives over time. e.g. Facebook calls users lazy for not trying out "improvements" and blame old soccer moms for being inflexible when they're just trying to extract more money. Not that businesses spending effort to get more money doesn't make sense, because it does, but businesses love to lie about this common user complaint.
The fact that new reddit defaults to showing only a few comments on the post, followed by recommending 20 other unrelated posts, just shows how badly aligned that design is with their goals.
Reddit is a glorified web forum. Period. Making comments hidden and difficult to browse basically negates 50% of it's function (the other being media + content discoverability).
I imagine it's quite well aligned with their goals of getting increased user engagement metrics from increased clicks to read stuff from casual browsers to the site, and convincing regular users they should download the app
Of course it's extremely badly aligned with their regular user's goals of reading comments, but that's solved by using the old.reddit urls if not the app, whilst the casual browser coming in from Google or a link gets the full on contempt for users' desire to actually read threads UX until they've bumped the user engagement metrics up by clicking on more stuff.
old design is easier to process. not sure if its just me but seems like the new design wants to tell me what's important and I have to fight it spending precious brain cycles
That's because more often than not you're not the target audience. Growth > retention in many cases, so it's more important to give a good first experience than a keeping a good continued experience.
I have a rule now that when designing a page, any "money screens" get at least 1.5X to 2X the estimate. I define a "money screen" as anything that leads a company to land a client or land a sale, things like checkout flows, signup flows, etc. Usually that extra time gets sucked up in A/B testing setup and setting up a staggered deployment per region that the biz operates.
Whenever customers push back I tell them the story of Knight Capital [1]. You pay extra for extra assurance that you won't loose a shit load of money in the future.
In the early 2000s I was a professional day trader and Knight was a market-making firm. EVERY single person I dealt with was an absolute crook, happy to break rules and do disgustingly horrible things to enrich themselves, because they were truly incompetent traders.
People crave consistency. McDonald’s isn’t popular because it’s good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is the same you’d get in Pigeon Forge, TN.
Wow, you are very lucky if you've never had really bad fries. I've been to places and had undercooked fries, burnt fries, fries with almost no potato in them, soggy fries. McDonald's fries are very okay but they are always okay. They are very rarely hot though, usually quite old, but at least not stone cold like KFC fries (in the UK and Europe we have fries instead of mash with fried chicken). The fries in Belgium are by far the best, but there are some great ones here in Germany.
UK chips are my favourite in the world, but they are qualitatively different in every way. I always get annoyed when other countries claim to copy fish and chips but serve them with fries. There isn't anywhere else in the world that you can get chips like that, so inevitably the fish and chips that try and copy it are always disappointing. I know it's controversial, but are supposed to be soggy and oily, not crunchy. It's supposed to be like eating oily potatoes. There is a reason why fish and chips is so renowned and loved, and the chips are a big part of it. They are the best in the world bar none. I only didn't mention it earlier because people find it quite offensive, because they are so much different from other chips.
I understand everything you're saying, but I somehow keep reading it as "they're supposed to be bad, that's why fish and chips are so loved, they're the best in the world at being bad".
I mean, yes, but still, I want my potatoes crunchy, not soggy and oily.
I don't know where Santa Monica and Pigeon Forge are. But traveling around Asia... McDonalds doesn't taste the same between Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand.
I wonder if that's particular to Asia, because I've noticed McDonalds is the same as the US in Latin America (gringo safe space), aside from a couple extra menu items
It is beautiful. Do it. Works best with sweetish-savory items. I first stumbled upon it when I put peanut butter & Sriracha on an omelette filled with pork sausage, bacon, and browned onions / mushrooms.
Not on things that makes people feel like they can find what they are looking for. The Apple drop down menu hasn't changed its place since the original Mac OS.
The UI skin might change a bit from year to year, but the UX of Key components haven't changed much for 40 years.
Used to work at AppleCare special programs support in Ireland, and when we did change something like hide certain menues in the Server appbecasue we wanted to disincentive usage of parts that were going to be depricated, all hell brekas loose with the older sysadmins calling in furious over having to read change notes. Thing is Apple makes sure to communicate a lot of these changes in emails sent to users, in change notes, and in popups, and people just refuse to take notice.
Or when Final Cut Pro X changed it's library management. There were good reasons for these changes, but people at first hated them since it disturbed an otherwise uninterrupted workflow. But when these changes are made, it's usually for a very good reason based on user feedback.
This did however highlight a serious behavioural issue with the users. Some users rarely update, so they never get the incremental changes, and instead opt to jump 3-5 major release versions which breaks everything. This in turn makes the user wary of ANY updates as they now associate it with breaking everything and changing everything. Which is a problem that they would not have if they did follow best update practices.
I saw the exact same issue at HPE, Nikon, Salesforce, Microsoft, when I worked there.
The UI/UX design of the System Preferences hasn't really changed since Snow Leopard imho. Cant speak to much about before Snow Leopard as that predates my personal experience.
Very true. This is why I rage quit Using Windows at Windows 8... adn barely accept the horrific state of Win 10. Im particularly pissed off about having system preference settings in at least 4 different places that are all counter intuitive.
I really liked windows 7, and was grumpy about first using Mac OS, but what won me over was that I didn't have to fight the OS in finding what I was looking for in settings.
Also the reason why I like Linux and BSD. there is a standard to where you find the setting files.
This is a good example of why some people have zero business being anywhere near management. They win the birth lottery and have it easy all their lives by sheer luck, but when a decision has real consequences - this happens.
Anyone in the trenches could tell you that rolling out a huge change to a money-making project on a "round" date is suicidal. They just have no idea of what they are doing in the first place - just playing darts - and it usually works due to the ants killing themselves, to make it all happen. Because health insurance.
"But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%."
Should have put this in the beginning of the article.
As for all the issues mentioned in the article, trust me on this, it's always like this. I've been that "small client" hiring externals at all tiers: mechanical turk, freelancers, agencies.
You ask for A but get B. You agree on a timeline but none are respected. You can put your foot down but that does absolutely nothing, they don't need you. You're more like a hobby on the side.
Wow yeah I missed this. Read through most if it and was looking to see if anyone else had already commented my thinking:
“And the new design is WAY worse in every way!”
Honestly it’s hard to tell what it even is with the new design: SaaS product? Contract agency? Flight tracker?
I found the first design to be significantly clearer. I wonder how the author distinguished between revenue increase coming from natural growth vs. the redesign.
Yeah I'm a little surprised he regrets it. I guess he assumes that a freelancer would have done the same work since his takeaway says so. He may have indeed gotten "service normally reserved for large companies despite my limited budget".
For those unaware, the blogger left a high-paying job at Google 4-years ago [1] to start his own business and over those last 4-years, unfortunately, hasn't really made any money/profit [2]
His blog is a treasure trove of insights and lessons learned along the way.
I find it hard to feel bad for him. Big N jobs are cushy but there's so much operational headache. Not that owning your own business is much better in that regard, but at least you feel like you're accomplishing something.
I think OP intentionally offloads some work to others, to focus on his managerial role of his company. Not like he can't do it himself (after some learning processes) to certain degree, but it takes time and his time is more precious than potential financial cost.
Well he did build a website like this, but thought (incorrectly) that a professional designer/marketer (which is not what a Google engineer specializes in) could build something better.
As the owner of a digital product agency, this is really hard to read. It is such a shame that an agency would do this to you. I know you felt like they "did their best", but by setting you up with unrealistic expectations out of the gate they essentially guaranteed that everyone was going to walk away unhappy. Besides, when you go to an agency communication/transparency/team of experts is what you are paying for! You're paying for accountability! There really are good agencies out there that care about their customers and bend over backwards to deliver what they promise, but they are hard to find. For the size project you were looking at though, I do agree that a freelancer could have been a better option, but you'll run into some of the same challenges. Finding good freelancers can be just as hard as finding a good agency.
The agency shouldn't have taken the work to begin with -- the part where the lead admitted that he killed project governance entirely was a bit of a painful moment. Agencies are optimized to work at a specific scale, and it's risky for them to scale up or down for a specific project; in this case, their client fell through the cracks because they were using him as fillable hours and didn't ride herd on their designers. Considering they were working outside of the SoW, those were disputable invoices, but that's cold comfort when you don't have the free cash flow to take this to legal.
The difference in size between companies imply different operation trajectories. If you are their smallest customer, you are bound to be deprioritized and treated as second-class. If you are their biggest customer, you may well destroy them with procurement and governance processes.
Yeah, I don't think the agency is blameless here, but I also don't think they're malicious or dishonest. I think they just overestimated their ability to scale down their workflows to a project smaller than their typical gig.
Well they know they've done an awful job, you know it too, but they happily kept the $45K. If they were as honest as you say, they would have refunded some of it.
That's exactly what does not leave my mind! It would have been a question of honour for them to stomach it and deliver close to the original estimate.
Everything else leaves me with a sore feeling, that it, while eventually not a scam, at least a careless, profiteering way to handle this, on the back of the customer. I hate this agency :-)
It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency. They ripped you off =/ No two ways about it.
> I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match. I was used to working with individual freelancers, and WebAgency was accustomed to larger clients.
...I think that is a very forgiving, but utterly self-doormatting, perspective on the issue. This was an incompetently managed agency who kept bullying you because you let them. At $175/hr, even as their smallest client, you deserved waaaaaaaaay more professionalism. IMHO the biggest lesson to be learned here, that you didn't really talk about in the blog post, is not to let someone -- agency or employer or freelancer or otherwise -- fleece you over like this. Isaac kept stalling and not delivering and mis-spending your contracted funds. You should've demanded a partial refund or threatened to sue. Their behavior wasn't acceptable, but you just kept saying "it'll get better...". It never does.
Sorry to be so harsh, but you kept trying to defend their "best intentions". No, they just didn't take you seriously, and then they failed your project and dragged you down with them. Nobody should be paying for an agency like that, especially for $175/hr. What a rip-off :(
You did mention that you probably would've seen better results from a freelancer, and that's probably true -- especially from a place with some bare accountability, like Upwork where there's reviews.
> I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me.
From the article:
> They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.
The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.
I don't think this is universally true. Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told and in a consultancy it has to be billed somewhere. Here, a client was cost a lot of money. But it might not have been directed by a manager!
At large corps like MSFT and APPL, this behavior is often lauded by the hacker community because it leads to wonderful things like PowerToys and GraphingCalculator.
It's one thing to factor in employee overhead -- whether it's "20% time" or vacation time or healthcare or just plain inefficiency -- into your pricing model. It's another thing entirely to take a client's contracted hours to pay for something they never asked for -- repeatedly, even when asked to stop. It's both a difference in degree and in expectations between paying for a monthly service vs paying for billable hours. If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work.
There's also a pretty big difference between spending a LITTLE extra time on a side project vs not even finishing the actual project because your side project became the main focus. This is probably OK: "Hey, here's that finished logo you asked for. By the way, we had plenty of extra hours left, so I spent an hour on this new design mockup... doesn't it fit in much better with the new logo? What do you think, should we consider expanding the project scope to pursue this, or drop it if you don't like this direction?"
That's not what this agency did. They were more like "Ohhhhh yeah we still haven't had time to finish your logo. We need a few more months while we figure stuff out internally. Sorry, you're just not a high priority for us. But hey, one of our designers took half your hours and made this, check it out! Yeah, I know it's not what you wanted, but the logo person is busy. But check it out anyway! C'mon! By the way, if you paid us more, maybe we'd take you more seriously." What bullshit, lol... =/
> If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work.
Additionally, if he was “such a small % of their total revenue” it should have been nothing at all to eat the inappropriately high costs on this project.
> Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told
I don't believe this is true for adhoc work. There's often pressure to get a job done under time under budget to maximize profit. It's one reason I much prefer working for a service based company as there IS room to do what you want and push boundries.
I did it plenty when I was working as part of a contracting house where “every hour is billed to a client”. There’s plenty of room to spend time making crazy tools to automate your work or provide internal/external/personal value.
Sometimes these rogue gambits pay off and return multiples of value…sometimes they just waste massive time.
But I can say that I was absolutely a rogue project-doer in an engineering body shop.
> It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency.
I've learned to keep things vague. I'm even careful about writing complimentary stuff; usually, if I have had a hand in it, I generally try to avoid directly naming.
I am very careful about writing non-complimentary stuff; even if I have documented proof. In these cases, I may keep it to direct personal experience, and avoid directly naming the guilty parties. I've found that people don't heed warnings, so I'm not actually doing anyone a favor.
Lawyers in the US can get awful indiscriminate, when it comes to dragging people into court, and I have found that most organizations have many teams; not all of which may be bad/good.
They're meant to be serving him. Instead, he was serving them, propping up their sizeable enterprise at the expense of his own (solo with meagre profits ~$20k/y).
The boost in sales since could've been achieved with a modest revamp or be entirely unrelated.
I don't think anyone at his scale should be paying $175/hr for custom illustrations especially when they look like the placeholder illustrations used in every startup template these days. For something specific like illustration, don't trust a random hire from the agency - go via UpWork or similar and find a freelancer whose portfolio you can vet in advance.
He should've used a well-designed Shopify theme for $300 and instead put money towards product photography. That'd get it 90% of the way comfortably and he'd have $40k+ still in his account. (I say this as a 20+ year web designer whose career has been eaten by platforms and templates.)
1000% agree. A lot of web dev is insanely overpriced. Find a good cheap template and save tens of thousands. I guarantee you an agency will not be 100x better than for the 100x price difference. Web is one of those "make once, use often" industries that we don't really know how to price yet, but $175/hr is definitely not right.
Agencies aren't selling you superior talent. They're preying on your ignorance. Most of the best web stuff is free, made by people who are either passionate about their craft and want to give it away, or else have to prove the value of their labor because they were born in a poorer country and merit is all they have to prove themselves with. When you work with an agency, all it means is that you're too scared (or don't know how) to vet design and dev work accurately, so you're paying extra for the illusion of quality. Trust me, you're not going to get that. You're just ripping yourself off.
I know nothing about this area, but I'm surprised the redesign improved sales by 40%.
Also, I get paying for logos and branding, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in.
How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or revamping the store logic or something? Is there a big telemetry backend, maybe? (I'm actually asking why this is hard, not trying to be snarky.)
>I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in.
Oh, how I wish it could just be 90s style HTML and CSS! I'm forever trying to get back to that.
The website is a static site, but it's built with Gridsome[0], a now-defunct Vue-based static site generator. I wanted to be able to write blog posts and documentation on the site in Markdown, and Gridsome was the easiest way I knew to do that, but in retrospect, it was a big mistake.
And there shouldn't be that much JS, but there ends up being an annoying amount for managing the shopping cart. At first, I just had buy buttons that took you directly to the Shopify checkout page. And then I added support for buying a quantity other than one. And then users kept asking for a way to support VGA, so I added VGA-to-HDMI adaptors as an optional add-on. And so a shopping cart seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't be that complicated, but there's been a lot of complexity over the years. If I had to do it over again from the very beginning, I'd have just made it a Shopify template.
>How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or revamping the store logic or something?
The refactoring was mixed up in the theme migration. We had a lot of code that was like `class="header-image"` and then a CSS class would add a bunch of CSS rules. They didn't like that, so they spent a lot of time rewriting the CSS to use more utility classes like `mx-1`. That way, they can change things at the theme level, and it filters down into all the elements without having to change each class. I think it was a useful refactoring, but it wasn't worth the cost at the time.
This sounds like every accidentally toxic (maybe sometimes no accident) contractor relationship I've ever seen.
The initial energetic kick off, the slow decline into unimportant details, lowered enthusiasm, and unreturned messages, and so on. Often driven by lack of clear scope from the client & a vendor whose enthusiasm far outpaces even the loose scope restrictions provided.
In this case, sure, the author bears some responsibility but from their account they seem to have gone in with a relatively clear scope.
The thing that really makes it all not smell quite right is that the pace of work didn't even get significantly better when the author agreed to a retainer contract, only when they cancelled it with a month still prepaid for work to be done. So the vendor, perhaps not completely or intentionally predatory in it's practices, moves quickly to get the client out the door without making too much of a fuss.
This is the unfortunate state things can arrive at even with the best of intentions, so hopefully that's all it was here too, but it still doesn't reflect well on then vendor. A disciplined contractor will work a bit more to keep a client on point and aware of progress towards goals vs. budget remaining, estimates for going out of scope, etc.
I can't remember seeing a website redesign in my entire life that didn't make the site worse. Many sites have gone down the tubes due to redesigns while always blaming the failure on something else. Kudos for at least having the self-awareness to realize that your redesign didn't help.
To first order, there's (usually) only one site metric that really matters, and that's page load speed. Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it's so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty. Meanwhile the also-rans with busy pages (remember Yahoo leading the search space? Digg leading link aggregation?) are now near forgotten.
> Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it's so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty.
Craigslist and Google's site speed enhances their success, it isn't the cause of their success. Their content is what the user wants. Giving it to them fast is a huge bonus.
I don't want to see shit fast. I want to see good stuff fast. If I have to, I'll wait to see really good stuff.
> Meanwhile the also-rans with busy pages (remember Yahoo leading the search space? Digg leading link aggregation?) are now near forgotten.
Yet Amazon, with an incredibly busy page thrives. Because the content is what matters.
We're talking about the site design. The stuff actually in the site is a separate issue. Most redesigns afaict make the site slower, which is the wrong direction. The content presumably stays the same either way.
Case in point: plenty of HN readers click on the comment thread but not TFA. I believe that a lot of the time, that's due to dread of some godawful slow loading page contaminating their browser with tracking cooties and who knows what.
> Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it's so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty.
Yes, you were talking about site design and you were wrong.
Craigslist doesn’t thrive because it’s a fast site. It thrives because it has great content and is also fast. Craigslist with awful content would not thrive.
If you can give me super content medium fast, I'll take that over medium content super fast. It's really only at the extremes do things start to differ (ie shit content or snails pace slow & glitchy).
Of course, the ideal setup is super content super fast, which is why Craigslist is probably never going to do a major rebrand. They already have plenty of startups constantly nipping at their heels, so they may as well maintain the super fast advantage they have over them to cement their status. Their only real threat would be a super speedy, super pretty, site that somehow launches full of good content.
I think Facebook Marketplace is thriving but mainly because it inserts itself into people's other behavior, maybe not because people think it's the best platform for exchanging goods. In fact, it could really use some of the moderation features of Craigslist.
After much creative destruction, we're back to inserting classified ads next to the stuff people are reading to pass the time.
Thanks for sharing your story; as a developer/designer (more developer than designer; love C, no love for JavaScript), I hear stories such as yours practically everyday.
What I really wanted to say is that I love your aviator gopher and the designer should have at least taken a shot at incorporating your gopher in the logo.
I mocked-up a negative space [almost] one-colour logo with a close-up of a stylized gopher nose and teeth wearing aviators on a CRT green background with a brighter green cursor reflecting in the glasses. That ties in your history for continuity, modern pilot with aviator glasses, a cursor for remote control, and the green background as a nod to the past.
Growing up on green and amber CRTs, I'm a huge sucker for retro designs, and try to incorporate Rand Paul's philosophy wherever I can, which captures the essence of a company in a clean and easily recognizable design.
I'll take the blame for dropping the chipmunk. I wanted the logo to appeal more to businesses, and I felt like the chipmunk came across as too playful, so I told them not to bother preserving it.
Ah - thanks for having a look and responding with a nice comment. I suspected what you wrote after I posted, since I have many people asking for the the next iconic "f" or "G" or Apple, and I usually tell them that the logo should instantly recognizable as your own (for whatever that's worth). Paul Rand's (I think I wrote Rand Paul above!) "Thoughts on Design" is a great short book where he says, "...[a design] is not good design if it does not co-operate as an instrument in the service of communication."
Above all, it's important that you love your new design (you mentioned that you do), which is great and positions you for growth in your target areas as opposed to "preaching to the converted," which is what I think you're implying with the chipmunk.
I love the airplane/shell prompt thing in the new logo, though. Having never seen TinyPilot before this, I had no attachment to the chipmunk, and I agree that the change moved from hobbyist to business vibes.
Quirky Original Graphics -> Corporate Memphis, CHECK!
Distinctive Colours -> Generic Shades of #0000FF, CHECK!
Crisp Headline -> Something Generic, CHECK!
Sharp image of distinctive looking device, makes you curious, looks like a unit! -> Generic Graphics, CHECK!
And more...
They ruined it!
What a shame it was so good, so perfect before.
The redeeming thing about the new design, if any, is that if you want to sell the company or get investment it might add some value as it makes it look more like a "tech" investment.
I have to disagree with you. The site went from a basement project look-and-feel to something much more slick and credible. I'm with you right up until the point where people are paying for TinyPilot out of the business account; then the brand credibility really matters.
Touche! Probably why slack went from edgy logo to looking like an Atlassian product line. Didn’t get fired for choosing X. I might be wrong then in that light. But I would personally have been more drawn in by the OG design.
When I say the redesign I audibly groaned. Just another bland, featureless, nothing website. While I certainly don't agree that the old one was "perfect," it at least had some sort of character.
I wish the OP had shared conversion rate rather than overall sales. It's hard to say that 40% higher sales wasn't the result of something completely unrelated to the redesign.
> Isaac... felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency’s difficulty scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot’s budget. Their typical client has a retainer in the range of $20-40k per month.
I think Isaac nailed it. It's just a different mindset between providing a full-service development group and doing a focused update of a site for a small business (very small... one might say "tiny" :)
But I think this was foreseeable by the agency, and they should have considered very carefully whether they could achieve what their client wanted before accepting the work (or gotten the client to buy into a larger scope up-front).
BTW, these TinyPilot devices are very cool. I did a pikvm build to try something, but if I needed something like this for a real use, I'd probably get a TinyPilot.
Yeah, I know a couple agencies like that and they have the good sense to politely point tiny-budget projects to other—usually fledgeling—agencies. Mid-five-figures minimum or you'll be gently redirected to another company or a freelancer or something.
Previous agency hack here of many years (many agencies). Do not take anything communicated to you from businesses like this at face value. Ignore the tone. The Isaac's of this world are not your friend. In fact, they likely personally orchestrated the scenario and tailored the ongoing narrative. I realise how cynical this sounds, but I'm certain your Isaac would agree.
Agencies (and Isaacs) have a place. They are useful for large orgs where certain expectations and business/operating aesthetics are demanded. Agency workflows and billables have evolved specifically for this climate of largesse. Buyer beware.
Not surprised! One of my first jobs was interning at a digital agency, and I really hated it. I'm probably completely biased, but I'd never hire them for anything.
One of their big sales pitches was that they didn't offshore any of the work, it was all 100% local. But they'd hire a bunch of interns to do the work, and pay them next to nothing.
In fact, the coding assignment for the interview was a client's new website. On the day I started, my first task was to finish up my coding assignment so they could sent it to the client.
Being an intern I was slower, and produced lower-quality work. All my forms would submit using GET requests instead of POST. If I had to modify how the CMS worked, I'd just modify core code instead of making an add-on. I'm sure that caused confusion when the next upgrade wiped the custom code!
And apparently it was one of "the good" digital agencies...
This is interesting to read, because it seems both client and vendor had trouble managing boundaries due in large part to a contingency-focused or future-focused decisionmaking style. Some would call it bait-and-switch on the vendor's part, but this was speculative territory for them too, and pretty obviously so based on the blog post.
The need to constantly work in favor of anticipation of future events effectively locked out their ability to execute on established agreements, creating an oscillating wait-and-see pattern.
It's rare to see this happen on both sides of a business agreement. However if these two sides came together again I'd expect to see a similar pattern, not that I'd blame anyone. To work around such an obviously favored perception would require a very difficult change in individual psychology with a lot of focus on practicable alternatives.
A very thorough writeup op, thanks for sharing it.
A few weeks later, WebAgency called a meeting to share updates, but they hadn’t made any progress on the logo or branding. Instead, they spent the whole meeting showing me design ideas for the website.
“To be clear, the project is still a rebranding and not a redesign, right?” I asked.
I'm sure the quote isn't verbatim from your meeting with, but I'm guessing your tone with them was similar. It sounds like you were speaking to them like you're both working at the same company, for the same boss, which isn't the right tone, IMO.
You hired these people, so you should really be talking to them like you're the boss. Basically, dictate where their work is going. If it sounds like they're going off-track, that's your money they're wasting, so tell them, "This doesn't look like what I asked for.
Contrary to the author's assumption about disincentives, it seems like terminating the contract may have been why all the work suddenly got done. That's when the author went from a customer to a potential threat. If the agency hadn't completed the work (including the "no charge" fixes after the contract ended), I'm guessing we wouldn't have gotten a pseudonym for the agency and project lead.
If they thought I had a wide reach with my blog, why wouldn't they do good work from the start?
My other blog posts about freelancers [0, 1] are to say that they did a good job and other people should hire them, so I'd imagine if they were thinking about the writeup, they'd want it to put more effort into making sure it's positive.
Those things are not mutually exclusive: I'm sure they intended to do good work from the start and they were scared of a bad review after they botched the job. When you terminated the contract they obviously wanted to minimize the damage.
The sibling comment captured what I would have written, so I'll just note that this submission has ~10x more points/comments than the one about having a positive experience hiring an editor.
A breach of contract liability. Once they had the money they will have to show something in court to justify keeping it -- if you were to dispute that requested work was not completed.
As a German person, this and so many other stories about customer - business relations gone awry or lost in miscommunication, I sometimes want to scream at the monitor, "why the hell wouldn't you get that in writing???"
The same goes for many work situations where the boss suddenly lowers the pay or fires someone for not filling in last minute for another employee calling in sick on a weekend. How is that possible? Don't you Americans value written contracts?
I am often annoyed by the amount of paperwork needed to make my life go smoothly, from work to private matters to whatever - but the times I was glad I could just point to a written and signed, extremely detailed contract which is the only thing that matters should things ever get in front of a judge, easily make up for the tedious writing and reading of contracts beforehand.
I don't think 'suction' wanted to imply it'd be about nationality, but rather about culture. Germans are known to be very orderly and doing business with Germans often becomes very (!) contractual. And they will happily slap you the contract around your ears, should you miss/neglect the one or other point, that has been written down.
Source: I am from Germany and knew people, who did business with Germans, and that's exactly what they said.
Loaded question fallacy [1]. Can't say yes or no without putting myself in a bad light.
I know I was the one who brought it up (and I'm sorry), but I won't make further comments about the "German standards of doing business", because I suspect it'll not lead to any productive discussion.
OK, apology accepted. To address your url, I am not sure how the disastrous execution of the Berlin airport construction is a counterpoint to my claim that there is very little legal work going on here (and surely other EU countries) without detailed, written contracts.
Whoever was at least partly responsible for the Berlin problems was or will be sued, be penalised, and have to suffer the consequences of their mistakes or shortcomings. Because whoever worked on it had to sign binding contracts. This isn't the wild west, after all.
>work situations ... Don't you Americans value written contracts?
No, certainly not for employment.
Employment in the US is, by in large, "at will." This means either the employer or the employee can terminate the relationship for any [non-illegal] reason or no reason at all. Literally at any time.
In practice this means the employee just has to deal with the whims of the employer.
> We’d never discussed custom illustrations, but it seemed like a small amount of work, so I let it go.
> “To be clear, the project is still a rebranding and not a redesign, right?” I asked.
It's a very interesting post, but when I read quotes like the above, it seems like such a strange way to deal with an agency you have hired to perform work for you. Think about if this was about a remodeling job for your house instead of a website. If you saw the workers suddenly start repainting a different room or redoing the trim when it wasn't in scope would you "just let it go"?
I just want you to know: You're not alone. I worked at a company that had a similar experience with a highly regarded web design firm. Only difference is we did our own implementation from their designs. Working with them as an IC was even worse because they knew I wasn't the one signing their checks.
Some anecdotes:
* their new designs actually made our metrics WORSE.
* Some of their design work didn't cleanly translate to responsive web code very well, so I wanted time with one of their designers and try and come up with some quick solutions to try an adapt it to something you can actually implement. Web design firm didn't like this and we were forced to play a game of telephone between a project manager... which as you can imagine racked up a bunch of billable hours.
>Only difference is we did our own implementation from their designs. Working with them as an IC was even worse because they knew I wasn't the one signing their checks.
Oh, that makes me feel a little better about letting the agency take on the dev work instead of doing it in-house like I'd originally planned. I feared that there'd be a lot of miscommunication and confusion if my company's dev team had to resolve design issues with the external agency's designers. From your experience, it sounds like I was right to worry.
I liked your original design. Simpler, to the point, and lower contrast so my eyes don't bleed.
Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web page takes even for these "professionals". Yet another profession that pays way better for way less work than mine (scientist).
I'll second this; the new design both lacks strongly differentiating features from countless other tech companies, and lacks strong objects to focus my attention on.
Having a picture of the product was both endearing and reassuring. The new site could just be another rebrand for a reseller of cheap Chinese schlock.
That was my immediate impression as well: no differentiation. The new site does look modern and it inspires more confidence, but the old brand had a clear personality that should’ve been preserved in the spruce-up.
I like the original one better too. Theres a picture of the product at the top instead of an abstract diagram, and it reads as more honest + less sterile.
> Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web page takes even for these "professionals". Yet another profession that pays way better for way less work than mine (scientist).
Opinion from a web dev who has great respect for scientists: Our work isn't easy, but what you're seeing here is less reflective of the difficulty of the task than the insane variability in web dev pricing. This same body of work from the blog post could've been anywhere from a totally free template (it honestly kinda looks like one) to a $25/hr freelance job to this ripoff $175/hr agency, or even $150k+ if some inexperienced startup in-housed it and gave it months of back-and-forth stakeholder meetings. It's crazy how much variance there is in the cost and pricing of simple web projects. It's pretty much just pulling a number out of thin air and finding someone willing to pay that. It's very much a "what the market will bear" pricing model rather than "how do I recoup my education/training/equipment/etc. costs" model... i.e., it's a speculative bubble pricing with no real relationship to costs that I can see.
Certainly I think my profession deserves a livable wage, like any other. However, while my work is difficult, it's not any more so than a scientist's, or teacher's, or truck driver or park worker or garbage collector or landscaper. But more so than the difficulty, again, is the variability.
Over the last 5 years, some clients were paying me $20/hr, others $35/hr, others $150/hr (I actually had to negotiate that down because I felt like we were ripping off our clients... but my partner wouldn't budge much because it would impact his hourly rate too, sigh). That last job was at an ripoff agency similar to the one in the OP's blog post... I was getting paid that mostly to move pixels up and down a page (adjusting whitespace between paragraphs) on a simple Wordpress theme. Meanwhile, the $35/hr job had me working on everything from SQL to CDNs to in-memory caches to maintaining LAMP and email servers -- skills that were orders of magnitude more difficult than what I was doing for the Wordpress agency. There is no rhyme or rhythm to how anything in this industry is priced beyond "this is what we think customers will pay".
It is, I think, one of the great tragedies of capitalism that so much wealth and labor value is locked away in growth bubbles that invest not in social good but speculative ROI. If our society were saner, teachers, civil servants, vets, etc. would be better off than CEOs and mid-level tech management. But nope, so much wealth goes to people who ultimately contribute little to nothing to society at large. Who cares if Google launches a 7th chat app? It's all just a big ol' worthless bubble of pyramid schemes. What a waste of human potential.
Today I work at a solar manufacturing company because I at least believe in the social good of its output. If I were to switch to tech proper, I'd probably make 2x-3x the money even though my skills would be largely the same. But I don't want to do that because it feels... dirty, like I'm contributing to the overall decline of our ruthless trickle-up society, working on worthless projects that only serve to make venture capitalists richer at the expense of regular working people. When I hear my peers in big tech arguing about total compensation and stock valuation even though they already make like 5x median wage... I don't envy them, I just feel sorry that they're so detached from reality. When this bubble bursts it's going to be a eye-opener for our society, and I hope it causes a moment's pause and forces people to ask, "What the hell were we doing from 1990 to 2020? Why did we spend three decades chasing advertising bubbles while everything was crumbling around us?"
I hate to be blunt but you got scammed. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but I feel like you're approaching this the wrong way if your first reaction was to schedule a call with the scammer and amicably discuss where things went wrong.
My first instinct, would be to amicably discuss reimbursement of at least parts of the bill, which in my experience an honest agency would consider especially when they outright admit (hopefully in writing) that the work and management of the project was subpar. And in the event that this doesn't work, I'd explore my legal options.
Neither this rebranding, nor the redesign work you got is worth 46k.
Also the only mention of a contract I could find was at the end when discussing termination. It's one of the conclusions you drew, but it's crazy that the scope, deliverables and timetable were not clearly defined, especially if you are paying upfront.
Anyway props to you for publishing this, it's very useful knowledge.
>I hate to be blunt but you got scammed. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but I feel like you're approaching this the wrong way if your first reaction was to schedule a call with the scammer and amicably discuss where things went wrong.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or if it's just easier for me to empathize with the agency having worked with them face-to-face, but I still think the events are explainable without assuming the agency was dishonest. Hanlon's Razor and all that. I think they overestimated their ability to scale down their workflows to a project of my size, and the rest was just a consequence of that incorrect prediction.
>Also the only mention of a contract I could find was at the end when discussing termination. It's one of the conclusions you drew, but it's crazy that the scope, deliverables and timetable were not clearly defined, especially if you are paying upfront.
Part of the problem was that the boundary between "rebranding" and "redesigning" is subjective. I suppose I could have said, "You're only allowed to change fonts, colors, and the logo, but you're not allowed to adjust layout," but that felt too restrictive. I agree with their argument that we should adjust the design a little bit to fit a new brand.
And if I wanted to, I could have scoped back down to a rebrand in December. In retrospect, that's what I should have done. But I felt like even though the designs went beyond the scope I asked for, they looked pretty good and they were 80% done, so we might as well just use them.
With regards to the difference between branding and web-design, it's fairly clear cut in my eyes. They should have been the ones guiding you and helping you understand that boundary as design professionals. Defining your brand identity and guidelines should have been their first priority, given what you asked of them, long before any development work.
I'm no expert myself, so take it with a grain of salt but I've been learning a lot about branding for my own company[0]. It's pretty much the same process everywhere, if you're interested in learning more and seeing how a project typically goes I'd recommend watching The Futur's "Building a Brand" on youtube[1], it's a great series and gives a good bird's eye view of the process. (It depicts a large project, but from what I've seen small projects follow the same process with less polish and back-and-forth.)
I wonder if you considered whether this agency pulls this exact playbook intentionally and repeatedly?
I don't think they are made up of honest people in the first place.
My personal guess is that this is a perfected game that they play with all their customers:
1. Give a reasonable quote
2. Start the project on a reasonably productive cadence
3. Scope creep, deliver items that are outside of what the customer wanted but proves work is being done. Withhold any deliverables that would end the project.
4. Repeat step 3 until the customer gets fed up
5. Customer terminates the contract, quickly finish the deliverables in the 30 days and wrap it up with a nice bow to reduce the chance of getting sued. Customer got what they wanted – sure, it was over-budget, but we delivered!
This company played you, and it was difficult to read the article because of how I wanted to tell you to stop being so forgiving to them through each step of the process. I think there is a time and a place to be a demanding customer.
I am shocked you had a "postmortem" with Isaac, and that you even said that Isaac was candid! I absolutely disagree: all he had for you was excuses and bullshit. Isaac's kindness, to me, all seems like part of the plan. He's there to make it look like they gave it an honest try.
I don't know why you aren't at your lawyer's office writing some sternly worded letters.
You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale.
In this comment:
> There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today.
I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with.
Design companies seem to want to make customers feel like they are unskilled / unable to make design decisions for themselves, but maybe this is all experts? And I can say I have had very stubborn customers in the past, and it was good for everyone involved to have a customer that knows what they want and expects it, even if the designer doesn't really like the results as much as their own ideas.
>You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale.
Yes, definitely. In my experience, the smaller scale makes it easy to manage, so you can nip problems in the bud more quickly.
>>There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today.
>I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with.
Yeah, I think it's important to be vigilant to some degree, but some people are effective at suggesting useful improvements. TinyPilot's in-house devs, for example, will frequently suggest improvements to designs or architecture that will cost more up-front but will reduce costs long-term, and I love those kinds of suggestions.
If the agency had a history of suggesting improvements and correctly estimating the cost of implementing them, then I'd be more open to their suggestions. But their track record was consistently to expand scope and run late, so I wanted to constrain scope as much as possible.
To be clear, I agree with your assessment and I would not recommend an agency unless you are a huge company as well. It's a mis-match of interests and goals.
The work I did as a web programmer for an agency (freelance) was similarly imbalanced with many "leaders" telling me what to do, (ie, project lead heavy, 1 designer, 1 programmer) and it was a mess and I won't bother with it again.
I think the key is not to hire anyone to do website design.
Hire graphic designers to make logos, illustrations, and come up with a color palette. That's the kind of stuff that can't possibly take weeks and weeks.
The author doesn't need a website design, this site is totally fine with a generic SquareSpace/Wix template.
Get your logos and illustrations and drop them in, and set your colors and fonts accordingly.
Custom website design is complicated enough that it can get into its own little version of development hell, and most small businesses don't need anything that a simple generic page can't handle.
Some feedback from a person who is the target audience of your product:
https://tinypilotkvm.com/illustrations/tinypilot-overview-il... is the most prominent image on your site and of little value in my opinion. Rather than have a sketch that looks like it very well could just be a stock image (and my brain is trained to ignore this type of image), I recommend having actual photos that show the same scene. A photo of the device hooked up to a real server (and with neat cabling if you want to impress me). A photo of a laptop showing what the software actually looks like.
Slow down the screenshot carousels a bit. They go too fast for me to be able to see what is going on. And if there isn't already, have a page with screenshots of all of the key features of the product. That's what I would want to see to evaluate what the product does.
Others have already mentioned this: the old logo was better. You can tell it was made with love. The new logo - this is a common theme - might as well be a stock image.
I appreciate the feedback, but the hard part about feedback like this is: how do I identify who's right? Half the people in the thread are saying the old design is better, and half are saying the new design is better.
If I could flip a switch and try the design you're describing and see how it affects sales, I'd try it, but taking professional photographs and redesigning the site is several thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of management time.
The data aren't entirely conclusive. My sales increased but I can't prove it was due to the new design.
I could A/B test the old design against the new, but my sales volume is low enough that it could take weeks before we get compelling results for any experiment.
It's easy to come up with lots of ideas for design improvements, but it's much harder to actually implement them and then measure the results.
The biggest problem is that the device's box looks 3d printed, and I associate that with "hobbyist/prototype" automatically. I would also prefer to see the real device over stock art, but if a picture of the device evokes unreliability, then removing the real photo may have helped for this reason.
I've been looking at case changes for a while, but it's hard to ditch 3D printing. As we iterate on the hardware the physical layout changes every few months, so it's great being able to update the 3D printed case design in a few days.
That said, 3D printing with the material we use is pretty slow and expensive. We eventually have to move to either plastic injection molding or some type of metal.
I usually get positive feedback about the case material, but I can see how it looks different from other network devices people view as high-quality.
I'm not crazy about the image, either. I think it's okay not great.
I was hoping the design agency would take more of a lead in creating a concept that conveyed what the product does, but it mostly fell to me.
"KVM over IP" is a hard concept to represent visually. If you already know what a KVM over IP is, then we can just show you a photo of ours, but if you've never heard of one before, the illustration has to do a lot of work.
Even on a regular laptop screen, it took a little too long for my eyes to grok what I was looking at. My initial impression from the photo is that this company is selling some SaaS and not a physical device.
In my opinion, the original page with the picture of the actual device made it much clearer what you were getting.
For the OP, perhaps use a color for the device's housing? Assuming the costs are the same, a cute little blue box would make it stand out in photos and give it more character than its current generic black. In illustrations, you could make the scene in black and white and have the device be blue, for example. To me, the goal should be to make that little box seem magical and unique.
First thing, thanks for your post, it has been really interesting.
I would like to ask how you made the correlation between the new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your product is a very good one and would have expected that your intended target, if anything, is less sensible to site design[0]:
>But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an all-time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the redesign.
[0] I mean it is not like you are selling fashion accesories, if someone wants/needs a Tinypilot they actually want/need a Tinypilot, and they shouldn't be sensible to the looks of the site (and BTW they would probably also want to see a picture of the HDMI/VGA adapter)
>I would like to ask how you made the correlation between the new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your product is a very good one and would have expected that your intended target, if anything, is less sensible to site design
Yeah, I tried not to lean too hard on this because I don't have rigorous evidence that the redesign caused the improvement. But anecdotally, it seems like it did.
Usually when the website sees a significant uptick in sales, I can usually tie it to a particular event (e.g., a new review, new product launch), but nothing notable happened in May or June except that we finished the new designs, and they were some of our strongest months. It could just be that we're growing over time, so maybe the same thing would have happened either way.
One other change to the website that I feel like is well-supported by this point was changing how we present our products. We used to show four products in our catalog, but in November, we simplified the website to show only our flagship product, and it was almost an overnight doubling of sales that's persisted ever since:
>One other change to the website that I feel like is well-supported by this point was changing how we present our products. We used to show four products in our catalog, but in November, we simplified the website to show only our flagship product, and it was almost an overnight doubling of sales that's persisted ever since:
This is much more correspondent to the "mental model" I have of the majority of your customers, they want/need a Tinypilot , and they get a Tinypilot (as fast and as directly as possible), no matter how the site looks.
Maybe there is a coincidence of some kind, something else that increased the visibility of the site or the knowledge of the device existing at the same time of the site redesign.
completely unrelated to your post, but just wanted to say thanks for your work on the rebooting of nyt’s ingredient parser. I use it in my project here: https://github.com/cookwherever/cookwherever (site is currently down due to the server being physically moved from our house lol). If you are interested in talking more about how i’m using it I would love to share :)
For what it's worth, the new site does look a lot better. A good read, might come in handy to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Key takeaway I think is the one about avoiding being somebody's smallest client if you can
Exactly. I doubt it was malice, I mostly suspect an agency used to large clients with no experience or methodology with small ones. A lot of what was set up for his website was stuff that only makes sense if the project is huge.
Let's say you want to set up a framework and it takes you XL amount of hours. That XL amount of hours is worth it if the website has 15,000 products and 75 pages of content. But if there's only one product and two pages, it's not worth it.
Same goes for the management time that crept into the budget. 20k extra on a 1 million contract is nothing and I would say expected. But on a 7k project? That's huge.
If the company has a lot of internal processing in between each step, it eats up a lot of the budget. Daily stand-up meetings, agile rituals, pull requests, handover to a QA department and bug fix rounds. Again, this makes sense for a large project but not for a small one.
Most companies that are used to a formula that works will not change for one customer.
If I had a metaphor, it would be this: If you want to travel 1500 kilometres, it makes sense to take a train. Boarding will be slow and the train will start out slow. But overall, you win. On the other hand, if you're only traveling 500 meters, it's a bit of a stretch. It is better to take a truck or a car.
The problem here is that the company was a train and promised safe travel to the next station 500 meters away. Were they being malicious? I doubt it, they probably made the train trip safe. They probably don't know the details of trucking and didn't recommend it.
Should they have recommended going with a smaller company? Maybe. But I don't know if I would consider that malicious. If anything, they should have been more transparent about their internal methodologies and ways of working so that the client could have properly consented to what he was getting into.
I agree. In particular the logo is truly excellent, IMO. It feels like the devs know what they are doing but are interested in producing quality, not in budgeting for OP. Meanwhile the management didn't care about squeezing him.
Wow, as lifelong web developer, you really got fleeced. This reads like a list of rookie mistakes to be honest, but not just on your side. Agencies should know when they're too big for a client, and they often do. It avoids exactly this kind of dissatisfaction.
And yes, they made money, but the hit to their reputation is usually not worth it if you're their smallest client. I dare say they probably didn't even do it on purpose, they just didn't have the bandwidth to actually care about your project.
I've been looking at Scrum more closely recently, and I think this would have been a good use case for it (with you as a stakeholder). This goes toward your point of doing things one step at a time. Scrum sprints are short and deliver value consistently. Looking back, I wish I'd had to use it stringently while I was still working at startups; I believe we would all have been much better off.
I respect the tone of this blog post. I pause to think how I would word this experience if it happened to me. Since it hasn't, I don't really know how I would react. However; having this cool composure to think through why things ended up as they did and how it could be improved in the future is something I hope to aspire to.
"We just didn't fit" is a fantastic conclusion.
The ego is one helluva thing, and a hurt ego with negative self talk can lead one down silly paths. OP is cool as a cucumber.
The decision to anonymize the agency is understandable, but I wonder about the systemic effects. Right now the reputation cost is born by all agencies, leading to a tragedy of the commons for shoddy delivery.
But encouraging authors to name names would drag them into a public dispute they don’t need, and disincentivize the many valuable lessons that are in here. (THANK YOU! 90% of people wouldn’t have pushed through the discomfort to share their learning).
What is a system of public discourse that threads that needle? I’m sure “Isaac” feels a little bad, but has ”don’t pitch clients we can’t service” shot to the top of his priority list? But again, I don’t want to put more onus on the author who’s already gifted me a lot of hard earned knowledge.
Can anyone give an anecdote about how costly (time and money) it is to pursue legal options in this kind of situation? I hate net-negative strategies, but (anec)data would be really helpful to many of us in the future.
I'll take a contrarian position here. You paid for professional services that you could afford, you got them, and they made you more money. It's the definition of a good investment and a successful project.
Will also add that based on the happy conclusion of your story the title is almost clickbait — and highly effective clickbait at that, since you've now gotten 1000s of targeted HN eyeballs. I can't imagine how much that would have cost you!
Always love your writing, mtlynch. FWIW, I really do like the redesign. The logo is great, as are the illustrations. They obviously had a talented bunch, even if mismanaged. This is one of my fears with hiring freelancers, and why I really haven't done it so far. I could use the help, but I feel like it'd suck my time and wallet to get the results I'm after. Probably just haven't talked to the right one yet, if such a thing exists.
I worked as the dev lead for an ad agency in the past it always came down to sales under pricing, not listening to the team about what they thought costs would be. Like, "oh yeah, we can definitely build this complicated ecom site for $10k!" -- no way, mumbled the team. What you spent was pretty typical for a "$10k" project. And then frustrated clients would be due to PMs not being truthful about what the situation really is, spewing the same BS that sales sold them on.
Maybe that was the point, and the business model -- taking advantage of your clients? I wouldn't put it past them, at least when it came to the ad agency I worked for. It wasn't my favorite place to work, that's for sure. Constantly being over budget and past deadlines sucked.
Towards the end of my venture there, I almost always recommended using Shopify for any ecom project, to stay within the project's budget, instead of WooCommerce, Spree, or Magento (never again). Even if 9/10 times it didn't happen that way, I still made the recommendation.
But these days, a very simple ecom site could even be built by offloading onto Stripe Checkout, though I'd still probably go with Shopify to future-proof on product catalog growth.
Yeah, I agree about the talent, and that's something I didn't talk about in the post. I thought their design and engineering work was really good. If they had just kept pushing junk on me, it would have been an easier decision to walk away early. But they clearly had good people, and I wanted to figure out a way to work with them.
Most commenters think of this as an honest/dishonest situation on behalf of the agency. A different approach (and the one I'm reading it as) is that 'Isaac' operates as a seller that likes to make 100k per customer or project in any given time.
Not committing to each project, or actually listening, when the customer complains Isaac makes a few adjustments and continues business as usual.
He only cares about that 100k in a few month's time for a project. So now that he got only half of it he probably thinks he did the client a favor.
EDIT: the product is a life-saver for servers, kudos to the developer(s)
> Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency
More people should do this. Many agencies, if not most, prioritize new customer acquisition. If you're not their biggest customer, their priority is to do as little work as possible and inflate the cost (partially why they love retainers).
Very often a customer like this would be relegated to junior employees in an agency anyway. You can get a freelancer with a lot more experience, and still save money.
I worked at agencies for about the first 5 years of my career, and left to freelance when I realized I was already doing most of the work... but someone else was making most of the money.
One being a low budget fixed costs agency: Here it was literally all about how quickly can you get it done. The code they outputted was terrible and often done by people who had very little knowledge of best practices. On a technical level this company had the lowest skilled people I worked with, once even asked me how to do an else if, I answered, "Oh you just do else and then put an if like you would normally do with an if." This was not clear enough for them.
One being a high cost enterprise level counsultancy agency: Here I probably did the best technical work but lowest product quality. The Agency prided itself on doing good technical work and doing BDD so they only did what brough value. Mostly I was bored, the work was slow paced as the company and clients cared that deadline and estimates were kept so things were overestiamted to give a solid buffer and then client charged for the hours used to develop it. Which often meant by the end of the sprint it was a case of sitting around doing nothing.
Overall, both cared about one thing. Time.
Personally, I much rather be an inhouse dev at a small company. Get to work without caring about time so much and care about the product.
I've worked at an agency my entire career (nine years so far)
Looks like there was poor project management and internal communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated.
For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn't be started until everything design wise was completed (we do branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the UI is on the same train of thought).
But yea, I wouldn't recommend hiring an agency unless you want to be hands off or having x amount of budget
You pretty much nailed it. Also can’t really hire a US based agency with US salaries and expect a rebrand to be cheap. OP also went though a ton of design rounds which is just throwing money away. It should have been capped in the contract to something much lower, like one or two designs.
I worked as a freelancing web designer a long ago and I always earned around 1k Euro for a whole project including everything or 500 Euro for little programming stuff, of course usually business projects. At one point I was beginning to hate those jobs.
Everytime I read those stories, and that happens from time to time, I just ask myself: what did I wrong?
(answer is easy: I'm a good technician but the worst salesman)
The trail of scorned developers is littered the sad understandings of "Oh, I could've easily made way more money if I was just a little more unethical".
you didn't want much. It's not about sales it's about "I want that and if you cant afford that you are not the right customer for me".
Thing is that for 1k€ I wouldn't even think about a website.
But thank you that you did give up ... gives some other webdesigners the opportunity to say "hey go fy with you 1k€ ... I want 5k" (no offense)
Sounds about right. OP could have gotten someone at his beck and call to design his site for 15 dollars an hour. Instead he got some well-reviewed shyster. "Our other clients pay 40k a month." GTFOOH.
I think in part the problem is that he is an owner working with an agency, i.e. they're all employees all the way to the top.
like this agency said, "we usually work with larger clients", i.e. we expect that all interactions across companies involve people for whom it's just their job.
BUT, they got (what seems like) the actual business owner on one side, not some dissinterested executive.
Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that.
One of the other surprises from the postmortem was that Isaac said that I was the only client that ever did code reviews for the code the agency was writing. It sounded like they'd had checkbox-style audits in the past for security/compliance reasons, but no other clients had asked for reviews just for the sake of keeping quality and maintainability high. That also hints that they're not normally dealing with owners or stakeholders who'd care or be able to recognize code quality.
Honestly, the old site comes across as way more “real” to me and I think he should go back.
I appreciate that they’re getting their enclosure done with 3D printing but going for a highly refined website design while 3d printing your enclosure seems like a mismatch in quality expectations. (I think the new site comes off as an attempt at a refined modern design but is very “light” or lacks real personality or depth)
I think the old site and the 3d printed enclosure of the product are the perfect match.
If anything I take it as a positive signal when a company has an "amateur" website. If they are successful without a fancy modern-looking site, then it means that the product must be decent enough to sell itself, and the business owners are presumably putting their energy into the product & service and not just appearances.
I have no idea if this is true in general, but it seems to hold up in my own experience.
I feel the same way, I’d be much more likely to buy from the old website.
The new site brings me slightly closer to asking myself “is this real? Is this a scam” because it lacks authenticity and ends up looking like yet another generic web whatever point O website.
The new version of the website breaks some fundamental - and easily fixable - rules of web design: No changes to links on hover, and dropdown menus don't appear on hover, only on click. If OP reads this, really recommend fixing that. It should be easy.
Also, agreed with those who are saying that it's OK to stand up for yourself as a client. It's hard managing clients as an agency, and it's good to have empathy for people you work with, but that doesn't mean you can't push back on added cost or expanded timelines.
Frankly, when someone tries to charge you more for something that is within the scope of work you already paid for, you can simply say no. Likewise, when someone tries to charge you for something you didn't agree to pay for, say no. That is maybe what needed to happen here.
>
Why didn’t you just use a Shopify template?
If I could go back to when I first created the website, I would have made it a simple Shopify store with a custom theme.
That's the biggest take away here. Unless you have a unique need, use an off the shelf solution.
Like try to explain to a non technical person how to deploy a website on AWS with a real domain.
Zryo is actually cheaper than Wix if you just need to put up a static site. Yeah I can do it for free on S3, but it's easy to design my Zryo site and it looks nice.
I don't find any wix templates that would be anywhere near as good as what he has now. And trying to customize the wix/shopify template stuff to work exactly how he wants it is not trivial either.
It's really mostly his frontpage with the bad line/vector graphic that is the problem and what made the design seem bad and the whole story seem so outrageous at first. When I actually visit the site all his other pages look very good and clean. Of course I still think that the agency basically architected this situation and it amounts to a scam in my opinion, practically holding his work at ransom and then demanding that he pay more. I don't think that they ever intended to finish the work for 7k.
I think the biggest thing that could’ve been done differently here is hiring through a platform. If you hire through a platform there is a third-party that controls that both parties behave as they should. All agencies and freelancers have tons of incentive to do good work and make the client happy. They basically live off their reviews. Also those platforms have escrow, milestone payments and many more useful things. I know people hate the 30% extra, but in my experience those 30% are actually worth more than the 70%.
A good book on these kind of situations is "Skin in the Game - Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
WebAgency never had an incentive to make you happy…
I've hired from Upwork quite a bit, and I think the problem is that the clients have excessive power and abuse the freelancers/agencies. The platforms typically side with clients in financial disputes, and clients know how damaging a negative review is, so they force the agencies/contractors to do work beyond the contract. The result is that the talented agencies leave the platform as soon as they're successful enough to leave. The result is that the quality of agencies/contractors on Upwork is lower than what you can find outside the platform.
I understand. Good point. This indeed creates a bit of a problem. I might have not needed any work above Upwork level. However I still would avoid scenarios where agencies don’t have enough skin in the game, you said something along those lines in your article anyway.
These days when I build a website, I design them with the mindset that I want to subtlety troll the web design zeitgeist. As such, most of my designs these days are inspired by resources like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/
Let’s look at how I applied those towards my sites:
https://legiblenews.com/ is just a mother fucking website, with dark mode. It’s responsive, accessible, and fast. So fast that it’s unofficially the fastest news website on the planet https://legiblenews.com/speed
https://www.thingybase.com/ is full of childish sketches that I made on my iPad Pro. Each sketch took maybe 30 minutes. It’s fun. It’s whimsical. It’s a website that’s not taking design too seriously, but it works, is fast, and is usable. It’s also modal free, with the exception of the Rails deletion confirmation dialogs that I’ll be replacing with an undo.
And finally my absolute worst designed website is https://www.imageomatic.com/, which is alpha at v0.1, is a super lame sketch with a handwritten tagline.
I am trying to prove a point that people overthink design. What matters is if the product is useful, usable, and if the design looks authentic to the people and company behind it.
Inauthentic design is when small companies throw gobs of money at their sites or applications trying to make their websites look like a billion dollar company, like Stripe.
Authentic design is when a small company, like mine listed above, don’t try to pretend they have a huge design budgets. Inevitably when small companies pretend they have a big design budget, they end up with something that starts looking janky over time because the funds and people needed to maintain it aren’t there.
I like your philosophy. In fact, I think it helps in more than one way. When I'm comparing multiple projects, and they all have the same bland "MicroGoogFace" looking style, I feel like I've wondered into OpenAI's secret bot farm pumping out generic copy & paste versions of the same thing. When I see a page deciding to be unique with their design, I'm more drawn into giving them a deeper look.
By the way, I like your news site, never heard of it before, thanks! And for your thingybase, have you looked into adding something like PaperCSS [0] to try the whole "sketchy" look together? Although you may be opposed to adding any css libraries lol I don't know.
Yeah, I looked at that but don't want to go full-on pencil & sketch for the design of the thing. I'm actually planning on switching the CSS framework from Bulma to Tailwind because its much easier to deal with.
Kinda weird that their conclusion contradicts the whole post.
> If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t. But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an all-time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the redesign.
A simple website redesign increased sales by 40-66%, but you wouldn't do it again? Is the fact that it took longer and cost a few thousand dollars more than expected really that bad? That describes literally every software project in existence.
Agencies as a rule, and I cannot understate this, are always trying to find a way to extract more money from you. It is the core of an agencies work. Most of their thinking and brain power go to extracting money from their clients. They achieved their goal spectacularly.
Realistically, they never would have taken you on as a client for 15k. It would be barely worth their time. Their goal was always to extract about 40-50k from you. And at the end of the day it looks like they did some pretty good work, so hey, you achieved your goal too, just at a much higher than desired price.
Huge respect for your TinyPilot project (especially for the free version of the software over at https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot), but I think you were ripped off and not enough care/attention was given to your page :-(
I'm not trying to be one of those people who say, you gave too much money for something I would create in 2 weeks with only 4k, but I'm trying to give a friendly advice to a fellow software engineer :-)
Two things that should be fixed in revision 2.0 of your page:
- If we select the "Product" option from the top menu, we're taken directly to the order page for the TinyPilot Voyager 2. If we go to the root page for the products (https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/) we get a page not found!!!
- Although you're also selling something else, the TinyPilot Pro software (over at https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-pro) this isn't visible in the "Product" selection or from the main page. Maybe you should rename this selection to "Products" since you have at least 2 things you sell. The page for buying the software is only referenced from the Voyager2 page and from nowhere else.
>If we select the "Product" option from the top menu, we're taken directly to the order page for the TinyPilot Voyager 2. If we go to the root page for the products (https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/) we get a page not found!!!
Are you talking about if you manually change the URL? I don't think anything links to the /product/ route.
>Although you're also selling something else, the TinyPilot Pro software (over at https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-pro) this isn't visible in the "Product" selection or from the main page. Maybe you should rename this selection to "Products" since you have at least 2 things you sell. The page for buying the software is only referenced from the Voyager2 page and from nowhere else.
Yeah, we intentionally focus on the Voyager and bury everything else. We used to have a product catalog, but it made users confused about what they were supposed to buy ("Do I need to buy the hardware and software separately?").
We consolidated down to a single product, and it roughly doubled sales:
I've worked on the other side of this and it's the end result of any large agency that starts chasing the bigger clients. More and more time, effort, and money is spent on the ideation/thinking/design side to the point everything else just grinds to a halt. For executives on both sides it's great. For anyone who hasn't to _do_ something, it's at best pointless, and at worst poisonous to every other activity.
As the author said, hiring a freelancer with specific goals is a much better route.
Oof, this pains me personally. That $46k pricetag just about matches the salary I was earning in my first full time job while still attending college more than a decade ago. I was a web developer and between a designer, a content gatherer/editor, and myself, we banged out one or two complete websites a month. These were no simple sites either - dynamic, Drupal based, custom theme, stage/prod, self-hosted order forms, newsletters, other interactivity and even training the owners how to use Drupal.
Not to undermine the effort that has been put into, but it's interesting that we used to churn out such redesigns across multiple webpages & logo, within a matter of weeks and mostly as a single developer taking help / feedbacks from another, if needed. This was at a product startup early in my career.
I'm not implying that this entire project was a scam, but it's interesting how two different flavours of working styles can bring out so much difference in efficiency.
Great post Michael!
We talked about this on our last call and I shared similar sentiments at the time.
We made a similar mistake on Server.pro a few years ago. Our first hire was a designer that had no coding experience. Costed us 130k, 2 years and terrible CSS that is finally getting replaced 5 years later.
And our users did not like the design as much as our last one, which also uses bootstrap.
No problem, keep at it!
Michael is extremely industrious in his blogging. Several front page posts the last months.
I run an software / creative agency in South Africa (creationlabs.co.za) that works with clients ranging from tiny to large corporates. What I've found is that the direction of the blame very much depends on which side of the fence you're sitting. One the one hand the client blames the agency for being opportunistic, while at the same time the developers get frustrated at what may seem like a never-ending list of unreasonable expectations.
That's not to say that this is what happened here, but in both situations the problem comes down to a lack of effective communication.
The agency here should have communicated from the start how many hours they can reasonably expect to spend on each phase of the project with the given budget, and then provided continuous updates to allow Michael to understand how much time he had remaining to complete the project. Opaque processes, coupled with a lack of transparency and communication is how projects like this leave a sour taste, or worse, fail entirely.
On a personal note, I'm gobsmacked at both the hourly rates as well as the total project hours discussed in this article. A website like this should have taken a fraction of the time. And if outsourced to a professional team in another country, a fraction of the price too.
Unrelated to the website discussion, the last link showing it is still negative profits after spectacular revenue increases is scary. This looks like a great product at a great price point, with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?!
>This looks like a great product at a great price point, with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?!
In short: the chip shortage.
The biggest expense right now is hardware engineering. We couldn't continue manufacturing our PCB because one of the components sold out, so we had to redesign with different components. That's been expensive (about $60k so far).
And then to avoid redesigning further, I've had to stockpile components for 6-24 months, so a lot of money is tied up in inventory.
The redesign work is wrapping up, though, so I'm hoping to have significantly lower expenses in the second half of the year.
With the takeaway I would agree with finding a sole freelancer, or a small team 1-3 rather than an agency. Freelancers often scale to agencies to make more money off bigger clients that can deal with scope creep and huge bills.
I've done freelance work similar to that (redesigning w/ bootstrap), and I found having a set price for the completed work has worked well for me.
On tracking, I worked with a consultancy a while back and had to use self-tracking tools like toggl, and it was a dealbreaker for me. I absolutely hate tracking (billable) time, some places do it down to the minutes, it's madness IMO. It was frustrating because a problem could be solved in 2 mins, but required 1hr of research/experimentation, when do you start the timer? Oh and you have three other clients, and whenever you context switch you gotta quickly do it in the tool so it tracks the right client, etc. it warps the brain IMO and stifles creative play/thinking, especially when you're docked for not having enough billable hours, even though in a normal full-time job things would be swell. After I left, I had to readjust to not always think about my time per task and felt relief and clarity again to solve problems with an open-ended mindset.
I think devs should resist this micro tracking tools, they're used by agencies to exploit their employees and their customers—IMO it's no different than an amazon warehouse tracking their employees every move/micro-break.
Edit: Like others have mentioned here, name and shame, they scammed you! Lesson learned, but 46k is a lot of money, and for a lot of small businesses that could have been enough to tank the owners financially, so you may potentially help out others by attaching their name.
Maybe there's something I missed in the article, but to me, it read like a case of sunk cost fallacy.
> Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked.
> By December, we were three months into the project. WebAgency was 95% done with TinyPilot’s new logo. All I wanted was to change some rounding on the corners and eliminate the border. I expected it to be a couple of hours of work.
> All I needed was a couple more hours of work. But I didn’t get them.
One of the biggest challenges with creative work is to have a concrete idea of the direction you want to take. It seems as though by the time he was given the rebranding drafts, OP already had that vision . His only issue was that they were only 95% done. But designers work with existing brands all the time. Why couldn't the rebranding be completed by another designer with OP's express guidance?
He had already observed and acknowledged patterns of misbehavior from "WebAgency" that one must watch out for when working with contractors. What justified giving them a little more money to complete the work (multiple times), rather than paying for a new designer, if not sunk costs?
I personally like the way the original web site looks and feels better.
But the tell is in the dollars. Has business gone up since the new site has shipped? If sales go from 45K/mo (or whatever they are now) to 50K/mo with no other attributable changes for a year, then the 46K paid off.
I didn't see anything in the article that addressed what (if any) impact this painful journey has actually done for his earnings.
See the retrospective call summary is insane to me. I wouldn't be able to do anything besides offer a partial, if not total, refund. I literally, fundamentally, do not understand how people can brush off such major mistakes with "Yeah, sorry, that was a misstep on my part."
I've only worked with a handful of clients so far, but the number one thing I care about most is providing an honest service. I estimate rough timelines for each major task in my head, then add a few hours depending on complexity. If I go over that limit, I'm usually working on that task for free until it gets completed (unless there's some major flaw that is causing the slowdown, like previous developer bugs or slow responses from client). The client never sees this process, but in the end they see tasks being completed in a fair timeframe.
If I'm noticing events are causing me to slow down on a client's work (by like a week, let alone the several months OP had to endure), I quickly communicate with the client to let them know & have us work out a plan.
These aren't things that make me feel like I'm doing something unique in this space, because they just feel so simple & basic to how any working individual should conduct themselves. If OP was dealing with a fresh in the field freelancer, still wet behind the ears, then sure, I guess I can see how things can get away from you in your first project. But this is supposed to be an agency with big clients? And they had this many "missteps"?
Insanity. Actual insanity.
I'm not trying to rag on "Isaac" too hard here, I'm more trying to word my confusion on whether or not this is the norm for other freelance agencies. I hope not, because the recount reads like a shameful state showcasing the lack of care in this industry.
From the article: “The real issue, [WebAgency CEO] said, was that I was their only hourly client. I would always be at the mercy of long-term retainer clients pre-empting my project.”
— and —
From the article: “They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.”
___
That’s bait-and-switch in my opinion and might very well be illegal.
My suggestion would be to immediately stop talking about this to random people on the internet and speak to an attorney specializing in contract law. Prepare a brief covering what you did in the blog, have copies of any emails, specs, contracts, etc. — and have them clarify if there was a material breach of contract that would warrant damages and/or any evidence showing the web agency committed illegal acts.
I would also be very careful about identifying the company, since they might file for legal damages. If the CEO’s first name is real, I would immediately remove it from your blog and the reference to finding them on HN to make any claim you did identify them harder.
On what grounds would their case not be thrown out immediately? Regardless of how well known their lawyer is. Also, the agency might as well close up shop if they sue as they(incl. CEO & most staff) would never be hired again as agency or individuals given the whole nature of the internet.
Keyword is “truthful” — not saying the OP is lying, but mistakes, misunderstandings, etc. happen all the time, especially in stressful situations. Further, winning in court is not free and anyone is legally allowed to bring lawsuit against another; they even have a name and laws against them in many jurisdictions:
My point is OP given the situation should speak to an attorney.
As for your points, they’re specific to the US, set of assumptions, etc — which you didn’t even clearly articulate in your comment and created what appears to be a throwaway account to respond to a single comment. Impressive.
The new design is right in a lot of ways but I cannot stop thinking how honest and friendly the old design looks. I would also prefer the old, cute and more unique logo instead of the trendy plane icon.
Wow. I closed my web services shop cuz I couldn;t find more work. My one client and I parted ways cuz I was too expensive ($100 an hour) to keep building their aws webapp to monitor patients weight and blood pressures (also they paid me about 8 months late).
Totally appreciate the post-mortem and lessons learned at the end and I hope there will be NO next time for you.
I've worked at an agency like that for a loooong time in my past. It's shocking that a website that looks like a cookie-cutter template that you could buy for $50 on websites like WrapBootstrap could cost a THOUSAND times as much.
It is absolutely ridiculous. This guy was ripped off by a combination of wilful malice and sheer incompetence.
Anyone would be better helped by going onto a website like Fiverr with your pre-selected paid-for Bootstrap template and tasking a designer from India or Pakistan whose work you like with the simple one-price task: "Take this template and personalize it to my product."
The total costs shouldn't amount to more than $1000 to $2000, including taxes. And, honestly, you'd have a far better-looking result than... this thing. It looks like it was designed by amateurs, really.
I could set that entire page up in less than 3 hours. Easily. Responsive and all.
I'd say the author is being generous to the agency and Isaac.
There is easily a version of this where the agency has landed on an excellent strategy for milking 7K for 6x their spend.
At best (generously assuming the agency's retro is all true) the CEO, Isaac has been greedy or naive in taking on work they clearly weren't set up to deliver.
He is making so much money and forgot the reality. He received a $2,000 website at best and kept dumping money to the "agency". It is sad people are getting scammed like this and think it is normal.
The solution: hire designers who can code. It will save you a lot of time and money. They can design and code with Webflow at the same time. The front-end of this project should’ve taken 80-100 hours at most — including custom illustrations & graphics.
P.S. I do that sort of thing if anyone’s interested.
hey since looking at your site, i have seen about 10 of your TinyPilot ads.
I am certainly not in the market for one of these and probably not that many other people who viewed the article site are, so i suggest you dial back on the retargeting budget following this hacker news traffic, save yourself some money.
The hacker news readers who are in the market have already seen your best piece of marketing for the product today, this article.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm paying per click, so I think that should still work fine, but I'll speak with TinyPilot's marketing freelancer about this.
I think the new design is cleaner and looks more professional. Changing the color scheme, fix the fonts, fix the logo and make the design less dense could have had the same effect for less effort.
My main criticism is that site lacks written content and I still don’t know what a KVM is or why I need one.
Is it just me who finds the old website design much better than the redesign? The new redesigned website seems to lack character that the old website had.
> I’m not trying to bash the agency here, so I’ll just call them WebAgency.
Wow after reading this, I'd love to know who this WebAgency is so I can stay away.
Alternatively I'm thinking of starting my own WebAgency and charge $7k to change button colors from green to limegreen.
To learn the value of a contract, it cost them $46,000.
But it is a very valuable lesson. Unfortunately, you either fuck over in business or get fucked over. I'm sure a lot of individuals make an effort to be sincere, at least most of the time.
They lacked self-confidence, and WebAgency engaged in aggressive commercial techniques. You must be firm if you want equitable treatment, particularly if you are hiring a larger agency to complete the work. Or you may get a gorgeously dressed and well-groomed salesman who will take you out to dinner, treat you to wine and supper, fuck you raw, and not return your call the next morning.
Sign the agreement. But also take notes from this treatment if you wish to succeed financially.
As a designer-turned-developer, I find this topic and the comments amusing. I don't think there's much question that the agency in question treated the client terribly, and should have been fired post haste and early.
That said, you couldn't pay me enough to get involved with design again in any way shape or form. The reason, as reflected by the comments and experience, is greatly increased customer expectations of the design process, number of expected mockups/choices, iterations, content changes, scope creep, etc. Even for small projects like the OPs, it's has ballooned to such an extent that many times it's practically impossible to know if something is going to take weeks or even years.
10 years ago when I last did design, if this author approached me I'm confident that I could have delivered a significantly better end result in far less time and at a cost similar to the original estimate. However, I would have be up front at the start (and in the contract) about maximum iterations and time spent before triggering the hourly rate. This most of the time anyway, worked pretty well to set the client's expectation to what I needed to match their estimate. I do understand that this wouldn't be palatable to most businesses anymore because it means having to be more trusting and flexible about the end result. Yet in almost all cases, I was able to please the companies I worked with and do it mostly on time/budget. Indeed, they sometimes had to compromise a bit but the end result as measured by revenue and traffic was almost never disappointing to them.
I'm a big believer of listening carefully and delivering not what "I" want, but what my customer wants. That said, I also believe business should be open to the advice of design (and other) professionals, because that is what they spend all their time doing. If you're fighting stuff like color/font/design choices with your designer to the extent that you have to go through a million changes, you've either picked the wrong designer or you might also consider the possibility that you might not be effectively communicating your opinions and/or that they might not make sense.
This sounds unexpectedly familiar to the experience of refurbishing my flat. Goal post moving, postponements, delays, pay in advance and job unfinished, etc.
My take is that you were too flexible and the agency took advantage of that to extract as much as possible. Also the payment strategy (per hour) is not in your favour. For these clear projects (same in constructions) it's best to arrange a fixed price. That of course does not solve all problems because they will cut corners and deliver average work but at least you can hold them accountable and refuse further payments until a certain milestone is completed.
Thank you for the detailed article and good luck with your projects.
It would be great if there was a matching service that:
was not upwork or similar - just a simple listing. I don't want to advertise and market, I just want to get a part time job with like 10 hours a week where I fix react components or even per line of code.
does not take a huge chunk of the interaction profit (most of these services want a percentage, I think that's ok as long as it's less than 1% and not exceeding $100)
I'd imagine the person that hired this company would have rather had some moonlighter help him through - $7-8k would have been amazing for someone like me. I'm not really a designer but I can do some limited design work or create backends.
Quote: "I found them through a Hacker News monthly freelancer thread."
It's almost inconceivable to go so far off track, but finally conclude a freelancer would have been better when that was their first step. WTH is "WebAgency" who doesn't have time for small clients doing in a freelancer thread??
They should be outed here for wearing sheep's clothing. But the client is happy cos it's all free advertising, so who are the sheep?
There is a reason why successful startups seldom order contract work especially early on.
Design is kinda different, yet most startups tend to have some competency and capability in that field(some frontend engineer more on the artsy/design side). If you did, you could have easily said that you are happy with the results and can take it from here, ask for source files. Since you pay by the hour and their game became to drag this it would be great to introduce a threat like that (even as a bluff).
Suddenly someone will realized that due to constraints(finding new agency would be costly) he became critical element of your business flow and will exploit that.
Something about the mikado method that makes it one of my favorite tools is that you can often get partial credit for an idea that doesn’t completely pan out.
I’m building a prototype for switching the framework we use to another one. In the process of trying to reach feature parity, I’ve been pulling out bits of logic that are coupled with the old framework and putting them into other libraries. At the end of this we’ll have better feature parity between services even if I end up abandoning the framework change. By moving the code around I may find solutions to the functionality we need that the framework makes very difficult to implement.
"Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency" - as a freelancer, this warms my heart :-) For a project of this size and nature, a one-man orchestra would definitely be a betterr choice.
However, to be fair, I must note that similar problems may happen with a freelancer (myself included). Self-management is hard, and I tend to underestimate, which leads to delays and/or working late.
Clear and frequent commucation is not as hard, but requires a good habit. You may or may not get it from either agency or freelanced.
“How long is a piece of string?” their lead designer asked. -- sounds like a red flag to me!
To OP: you're too charitable and optimistic towards people in a business context. If an agent has an incentive to milk you for money the odds are that they will. Math and history say and prove so.
It's not even about the money per se. We all know sometimes projects balloon over budget but you had a very clear and small scoped project and yet you failed forcing your contractors to stick to target.
IMO your mistake was:
(a) Not calling out "Isaac" early enough and making a meeting to re-establish ground rules and produce a crystal-clear short list of priorities (you seem to have produced similar document -- kudos for that);
(b) Not demanding the first delivery in maximum two weeks after the conversation;
(C) Accepting business contract that doesn't allow you to put financial pressure if you are unhappy with the results.
I believe you mostly arrived at the same conclusion but in case you haven't -- you are not friends with these people. The "but we had this or that problem" flies only once, or, if you are feeling very generous, twice. After that you either threaten to sue or just cut your losses and leave.
---
Your generic "we were just not a match" aphorism is setting you up for a similar occurrence in the future. Get rid of that mindset. It applies when dating or making friends, yes, but it absolutely does not apply in a business setting. You negotiate terms and when one side fails to stick to the terms, there must be consequences.
I think you got scammed big time, I mean, nobody who is doing big projects and has a lot on their plate is going to post on "HN: Who wants to be hired?"
I think the sad thing is the contrary to some people's opinions, this is not limited to small "cowboy" companies, it can happen from the smallest to the biggest and it is a mixture of competence, management, desire for profits etc. as it is in most companies.
The biggest difficulty is that you are paying a premium for intangibles when you talk designs and branding. If you absolutely know that your current brand is useless then anything is better than nothing but also you probably don't have to do very much to get better before the returns are diminishing.
Otherwise for design work, although the result might look "OK", it is hard to see how they would justify the money, although of course they will just like Tropicana justified their failed redesign.
I would normally say that you have to know enough about something to pay somebody else to do it well but here the OP does seem to know roughly what is going on so it might just come back to a more formal kick-off process and not getting caught up in the excitement that you just start and worry about it later. Clearly this company could have done a good job so it is not about ability, just management and scoping it properly.
Curious what others think of the icon progression? There was an article a week or so ago about how all cool/crazy/distinctive logo designs trend to boring sameness.
The end design looks like something I'd expect to see on the Delta app I download when I fly and promptly redelete afterwards.
My person favorite, for reasons I don't understand, is the center icon in the first column. I don't know why. I just like it's distinctiveness.
I prefer it pre-colour too. I have no idea why they thought the ones that scream 'messaging app' were a good idea. The face ones are weird.
I think there's two jobs involved really though, and (as an armchair expert who's never done it) that ideally you do the first one of roughing out an idea for what it should look like yourself. The second job is refining it, tweaking the edges, weight, choosing exactly the right colour, etc.
Again as someone who's never had the luxury of having to do it, I think I'd request those things separately on Fiverr/Upwork/whatever and not pay a lot for it. 1) Here's some info about my company, give me 25 distinct rough sketches for a logo; 2) I like this logo, please be designery and refine it for me. You could even break (1) up and hire 5 people to give you 5 each or whatever.
I think someone else in the thread from a design studio said it best: (roughly) "You pay a design firm to filter through all the designs and present a maximum of three to the client." The three should be wildly different, tested to some degree, but each compelling in their own way. Then you take the one that resonates with the client and tweak.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with the parent that something "fun" was lost in the transition from the original logo to the new one. From the mock-ups, I can tell that the client definitely wanted to maintain the green cursor, which is good, but likely trusted the designers to know the market for remote KVM (which I've used for years), which doesn't conjure a physical plane - more of you being a pilot - in control. It's possible the client wanted to keep the logo really simple to make it 3D-printable.
What's done is done, but just for fun, I mocked-up a logo [0] (posted on another response as well) that reflects the original character of the company in a modern format - at least to me. Corporate branding is critical, and nailing the logo has traditionally been a difficult task.
While the OP says in the post that he's not a rube, this whole post makes me wince and shouts "rube". There's no reason in today's day and age to spend this much or take this much time on a website "redesign", especially if you're a small business or one-person shop selling basically a consumer item. Agile methodology is key. Iterate quickly. Design / test / build quickly and iterate. Any long-term web design project is at high risk of being a waste of time and money. This has been an accepted best practices approach, especially for fast-moving projects for decades.
It does seem like he learned his lesson and at the end he talks about how basically an iterative approach with lots of deliveries and low-cost testing is the best approach. And yes, it's the best-practice. But then again he learned an expensive lesson that if he had asked others about, would have gladly told him. Sometimes people need to learn lessons on their own with their own expense to realize that best practices apply to them, too. I find the lack of acceptance of methodology and best practices approaches very sad.
This reminds me of a former employer of mine. It was a small company with an internal team of three developers who worked on the main product. The CEO had a relationship with a design consultant agency that she had been using for years. Every few months, they would sell her on the idea that the company's site needed a new design and she would oblige every time. After all, according to them, the current design is the reason why the site isn't reaching its potential in new traffic, and the web changes all the time, so a new design is always the key to solving that problem. Utter crap. And what's worse, after the design was completed, it would still be handed off to one of the in-house developers to actually implement, so it took time away from actually improving the product, which was what really needed the help. Needless to say, the consultant's relationship was an expensive time-suck (and looking at their site now, apparently it still is)
I don't understand why you went with a time & material contract. You could have easily gone with a fixed price contract for the logo redesign. Since this would have meant that the risk of scope creep is on the side of the agency, they would have most probably delivered only ehat was agreed on and they would have minimized the time for meetings.
If you hired a mechanic to regas your car's AC, and they give the car back with a full realignment, detailing, etc, all at prices you wouldn't have ever paid in the first place, you would be driving away without even thinking of paying, probably to the nearest ombudsman or law firm.
but at least that mechanic probably would have done the re-gassing first.
I've been on both ends of a scenario like this, as a client and also as the manager. Both situations suck, but they happen.
I actually really like the redesign, one thing I'd change is make the blue color a little less cold and a bit more inviting - but current one still works well.
However, the amount of money it cost is absolutely ridiculous.
I think design improvements can help even if styles change. For example, if you look at Apple's ads from 20-30 years ago[0], they look dated, but they're still better than what I'm capable of creating today with my limited design skills.
$175 an hour lol. I know senior designers/programmers who work for a fifth of that in Europe. Perfect English, 5+ yoe
I never understood why companies pay hundreds per hour to anyone. You can get equivalent talent for much less, if you know where to look.
As somebody who feels really guilty for letting a project go even 30% beyond an estimate, this was a comforting read for sure.
I build websites for small-scale clients, often who are just starting out. After a lot of hard lessons, I make sure to communicate as soon as I can even when it was just a “soft” deadline. I had a project go 40% over the estimate and had to charge the client for it to keep my bills paid (it mostly due to scope creep, managed poorly).
After reading this post, it feels like those lessons are especially worthwhile as the business world comes to realize the value in the boutique/freelance contractors. Also helps me get over the mistakes, which weren’t nearly as bad in comparison.
This is the rule and not the exception. It seems software always takes much longer and costs much more than you think it will. The smaller the task, the better it can be estimated, and the less likely you are to veer off into crazyland.
The best solution I know would be to hire a team and use agile methodology to focus on the most important things first, breaking them down into small tasks. The team might be people you hire, or it could be people from an agency, but the project needs a strong, hands-on leader who is committed to the goal. I have never known a toss-a-big-solution-over-the-wall approach to work really well. Those projects can vary from annoying to completely dysfunctional.
> Why didn’t you just refuse to pay them until the work was done? ... If I had insisted on milestone-based payments from the beginning, WebAgency likely would have declined the project. They saw me as a small client who could grow, but nobody wants to work with a tiny client who’s as demanding as a huge corporation.
That would have been for the best, right? Someone savvier than me might have realized here the point above about "avoid hiring a vendor as their smallest client". They're offering a different fee structure than for their other clients, but it's still not appropriate for your needs.
>WebAgency tries to keep project management to less than 5% of billable hours. At my scale, 5% would be too limited to provide any tangible benefit, so he eliminated project management entirely.
???
Excuse me, what?
How did he think that eliminating project management entirely would be a good idea?
The same applies within large companies. If you’re within a business team, and you’re requesting work from a design team/engineering team/data science team, you’ll face the same issues with scope creep + churn + competing priorities etc.
I wouldn’t blame agencies for being bad, this is people being people plus a bit of other things. Anticipating and steering around/against these dynamics has been one of my biggest career learnings over the last years. The author has some good suggestions for how to do it — if you work in a large company, take another look and ask yourself if they don’t also apply to your work!
I have worked in and out of consulting and agencies for many years and I have a simple rule for hiring them when anyone asks:
1. Are you going to be one of their three biggest clients? If not, find a smaller agency.
2. If you can't find an agency small enough to be one of their three biggest clients, you want a contractor, not an agency. Put them on retainer for more than 50% of their time.
Firms will bend over backwards for their largest clients because they do a poor job of tracking that it is costing them money when they need to fix a mistake. They just see one of their biggest clients is unhappy and they will lose them.
I am _baffled_ at the cost of websites these days. The company I'm currently at asked for a redesign of their site, and the team was told that their $7k estimate for costs was "too optimistic".
Yes, I have definitely remained out of touch since the very first version of CSS. Yes, I hail from the days when you could do it all in a text editor and Javascript was optional. Yes, I've never paid attention to SEO and all that marketing stuff. But $46k?! And he initially even estimated $15k?!
I'm either missing something major (very possible!), or the industry is scam.
@mtlynch what tool/service do you use to enable the "TinyPilot’s in-house developers report their hours at the end of each working session" part of your business's workflow?
The screenshot in the blog post is from Deel, the platform I currently use to pay freelancers. I don't really recommend Deel overall. They make it hard to see aggregate hours over different periods.
One of TinyPilots devs reports their hours through TopTracker, which is better than Deel but still not great.
I wish there was a simple paid SaaS that just lets freelancers report their hours easily, but I think all the platforms that do it are aimed at bigger orgs or are tied up with payment platforms.
I feel sorry for your experience. Glad you took it with stride.
I always try to understand the business model behind agencies. What they do is selling hours or teams. The more, the better.
I worked with so many agencies, for quite some it is almost like a meme: "Oh, your website/service/code is so crappy, we did not expect that! This means additional efforts you have to pay for."
If you ever hear degradations like this, run! It won't get better, even if you pay for. They will always come up with another reason to charge for more hours.
In the same vein as companies "not wanting to be a company's biggest client" there's a reason for not being a company's smallest client as well, as this shows well.
You end up hitting scaling issue the agency hasn't hit before, and they're learning on your dime. That scaling could be technical, but also organizational and procedural. Your org may be big enough to have specific legal/regulatory issues to contend with, but the agency has never dealt with those before, for example.
I understand people will almost always be 'learning' in some capacity on every project. "Hey, we're constantly learning! This is great!". I recognize it, but don't always think it's something to celebrate. You'll usually be better off working with an agency that's dealt with your size project/org before.
Please name and shame. Is it something like Coalition Technologies from LA? They are doing the same thing by hiring $3/hour employees from 3rd world countries and charge six figures.
When I was working on a website for my stepdad, I had to keep re-iterating to him that he should monitor metrics before going off with any re-design. Often he would call wondering if something could be re-designed, something I taught him is that unless it's going to help bring customers and money in the door, it's not worth it.
I get tons of "customers" like this. They want a website that is a reflection of their business. I always tell them the same thing, base your decisions about redesigns in the numbers, let the metrics tell you when it's time to redesign to increase engagement/click through/etc.
Interesting. This is one of those things where experience just really helps. A friend of mine is a Creative Director at a firm and I asked her for advice for a startup I funded and she explicitly advised against an agency at the stage it was at. I'm pretty sure she'd advise against this as well. Instead, a single contract freelancer is probably a better play than an agency for this.
Over time, I have come to value my network very highly. Definitely helped me avoid a lot of missteps.
What is the best payment-structuring model to best align the interests of the person requesting the work, with the person doing the work, while also de-incentivizing things like scope creep and simply "one requirement ends up taking too long and should be considered for dropping prior to completion"?
Is it half upfront, half on delivery?
Is it fee-per-milestone?
Is it hourly rate?
Is it some hybrid of the above?
When a requirement must be dropped, who pays for the hours already sunk into it? Would it be both parties? (by charging half the normal rate)
I hired someone to create a basic one-page landing page on WordPress, my suggestion was: buy any theme and just change the logo/text/colors. Three months later, they just published a page that only has the hero section and an empty footer...
The problem: there was no deadline imposed and payment was done per month.
Solution: Define a VERY STRICT scope/tasks list and (short) deadline. If the deadline feels too short, reduce the scope instead of extending the deadline.
I have never seen or heard of a "web agency" doing anything for a reasonable amount of money or in a reasonable timeframe. The whole business idea behind a web agency seems to be scamming customers out of the maximum possible amount of money. I would never even consider hiring one. For something like this you hire a solo freelancer. Fraction of the money, done way quicker, and you don't end up paying the gigantic overhead of the agency.
Great article, thanks for those useful takeaways. I find that every website I have ever worked on has gone over budget and over scope, it's super frustrating. Mostly it happens because the client doesn't know what they want or keeps changing their mind, but it seems like you did know what you wanted and were pretty steadfast about. Either way, super impressed with how you managed to share a shitty experience in an objective, non-bitter way! :)
I disagree with the cheap developers point. I've just hired a Pakistani designer/web developer team. They were committed, fast, cheap, wrote high quality code, and delivered more than what was agreed at the start.
It was a closed price project though, which I think is a better way in general to get a better deal for everyone involved.
It wasn't perfect. But I can fix the rest.
How cheap? $950 for a new logo and branding guide plus two responsive html pages with custom graphics.
What you needed was a professional logo design. An agency might well be the best place to get that done, although they may well use a subcontractor.
After that, everything else could be done by a middling freelance designer with Squarespace. No web dev required.
I don't necessarily think the agency had especially ill intent, but the way they work is clearly not accommodating of clients with restricted budgets and they should probably not have taken the job to begin with.
The benefit of an agency for most companies is that they don't have to keep hiring new freelancers or contractors every few months. They are outsourcing all of that, and the associated overhead, to the agency. Training and managing a team of specialists is not trivial, especially if they are far removed from the focus of the company so nobody really knows how to go about hiring or managing said specialists.
Maybe there's a distribution of talent and skill in orgs, and it's nearly impossible to see if your new business partner will be great or terrible unless you have expertise in what they do...which you most likely don't if you're hiring them.
Further, how do I know if the web designer or plumber or mechanic is overcharging me, diagnosing problems I don't understand, or doing work that's not really needed?
My old business partner and I did some freelancing on the side, and it was shocking to hear clients say an agency quoted them $40k when we figured it would cost $8k. The author is right that agencies aren't always the way to go. You're paying for a lot of administrative overhead, and the owners and managers are most likely pocketing most of the money while paying overseas developers $10/hr.
“He felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency’s difficulty scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot’s budget. Their typical client has a retainer in the range of $20-40k per month. TinyPilot was buying only 40-60 hours per month, which they typically reserve for maintenance rather than new development.”
I call this bullshit. They had certainly designed in the past for smaller budgets, as they were smaller themselves.
What I learned about doing projects: it’s all about deliveries and milestones. Agree on them, write them down and then enforce them. Don’t continue without getting the previous milestone delivered (at least 80% or so).
And if you don’t get what you agreed on, pull the plug. Even if you just have the slightest feeling of doubt, that something is not right. Quite often there is something very wrong already.
Parts of this sounds similar to what happened to my (small company) job.
We signed up for a small 20 or 40K design project. Landing page and pricing page. In the weekly meetings, the designer would present all this out of scope work to us. "Heres the new blog design" Is this a thing they do on purpose?
Can we have the fonts and logos please?
And yes, all the people doing the actual work were green and/or overseas contractors
First of all, I'd ignore all the haters in this thread. A lot of people on here are badmouthing the final output when in reality they're wannabe co-founders in the second year of their CS degree. They say they can produce a better output with less cost, I wouldn't be so sure about that.
At the end of the day you made a torturous, exhausting investment that seems to be making fantastic returns for you. So at least you can sleep well knowing that!
The part that sounds fishy to me is that at the very end of the 'rebranding' work he suggested that their you use their in-house developer to integrate the design rather than yours.
As a developer I'd be pissed if my employer gave me some 80% done design mockups and told me to go integrate it into a codebase I'm unfamiliar with. Especially if I wasn't consulted or given the codebase before hand.
They then marked the largest task as a one week job then took five weeks to complete it. It sounds like they used the developer as a scapegoat and continued to tie up all the design loose ends in those five weeks. That would explain why the developer started doing some minor bug-fixes within the first few weeks rather than 'doing the thing' because 'the thing' wasn't ready yet. I could be wrong, but if this is true, my heart goes out to that overworked developer. Hoping you're making the big bucks buddy.
We used a design agency as well for one of our product logos. Come to find out, they just ripped off the Noun Project svgs, added some color, and called it a day. A lot of the agencies I’ve seen typically have enough templates already so it’s to the point now that you just fill in some blanks, choose a color palette, add relevant graphics and you’re done.
I read through the post, is there something about how to make sure this doesn't happen? How to catch yourself falling down that slope? They suggested using Freelancers instead of agencies, and that seems like good advice in this context, but I am looking for frameworks that make sure this doesn't happen even in a different situation
None of this is specific to a website redesign. If you have a small project, don't hire someone that does big projects. Full stop. I learned this lesson helping my father run his business long ago. There's a threshold where the business model changes from delivering a quality product to sucking as much money out of the customer as possible.
This bit was the surprise to me that it was a new lesson to someone who posts on Hacker News. It's a lesson that 'conventional' project people haven't learned but it's Agile 101. It's the absolute basis and core of agile - don't do everything all at once, progressing together and delivering at the end. Instead do the first thing all the way through, and then the next thing.
Doing it has many many benefits:
You can stop at any time and have something useful
You get to decide whether subsequent things you thought you wanted were actually right and can add/remove/change them
You get to take learnings from earlier things and use them when doing later things[1]
As client (stakeholder) you get actual deliverables so you can judge actual progress, with no room for 'fudging'
[1] This is important and not talked about much with Agile. If you do Waterfall you do your design all at once and don't get a chance to learn any lessons. If you do Agile, you build the first thing and learn some more about your problem and the solutions. You are then better prepared for the second thing, which leaves you even better prepared for the third thing etc. This includes even changing what you thought you were going to do for later things.
Worked for agencies, agree with the conclusion - don't look for an agency if you have a project under 50k$ - this kind of work is too low margin for a full agency (with the whole pipeline of sales, PM, team effort, then their internal cost like HR and finance, etc. etc.).
Such small projects are contractor/freelancer level work.
Even from a general customer serivce prespective, this sucks massively. Working in web development myself, everything is agreed upon before work to start - not with the agency deciding to include additional items.
It's incredibly shameful from this agency - they really owe a massive apology and should refund for the non-requested parts tbh.
There is a perverse incentive when the client has a retainer to bill hours and makes excuses to line their pockets. Why tolerate this behavior? The customer is always right, force them to stick to the contract or break away and take them to court if they are working on things outside of your contract and billing you.
> I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match.
Sounds exactly like how people rationalize abusive behavior from their partner. "It was my fault he hit me" etc.
That's because they did abuse you and ripped you off.
I've never had an experience with an agency that was better than hiring individuals. You end up paying a 20% markup + dealing with organizational headaches in exchange for skipping the pain of finding and vetting individuals with the right skillsets.
The initial shortcut ends up creating way more problems down the road.
I like the redesign, but it looks like any other template out there. I don't see how this could not have been done by 1 person within a week (excl. content - content can take more time). I sometimes do this for fun and would have charged 500 bucks + some theme/icon/graphics expenses.
think the CEO of that company is active on HN. might be able to advise you of your options or you could reach out to a lawyer like Gabe Levine, the same lawyer in the famous "F*ck you, Pay Me" talk by Mike Monteiro. he may have some advice.
> Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked
Not trying to be corky, but six weeks and the logo look like an airport booking service? I mean, a pilot should be a person, not a machine. I don't really know where the designer got that inspiration, but it's just not right.
Well written and an interesting read. Thanks for posting. My reaction is "WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOING?" haha.
I am not in the position to spend 46k on... anything but I would like to think I wouldn't be duped in the same way. All this "you're a small client" stuff is BS imo.
Kind of unrelated to the original article, but I feel like I’ve had this problem on a smaller scale. something I’m excited to use is DALL-E 2. I borrowed a friends access and tried to use it for my personal website redesign. It did everything I wanted and more. saved me $2K
This agency was very unprofessional. The fact that they kept working out of scope even though you had to remind themselves not to is a huge red flag. And also the fact that they kept reminding you that you were their smallest client?? Suspicious how often that came up...
what i like to do is work with agencies for a limited trial period. i give them a couple of easy, medium, and hard tasks, and see how they fare. based on their performance, i hire them or move on to someone else.
This helps me test the hypothesis that this is the right group for the job.
That said, I don't know if that would have helped OP. It seemed like timing (End of year is always a slowdown due to holidays, and Feb-April are when other clients start ramping back up) was not on their side, but breaking things down into more bitesized work could have helped. Most of the work I saw was mockup/design work, which is more creative/subjective than your typical "Make button do X" kind of task.
Michael, congrats on your product/market situation! Your new website is very good, it nicely communicates "tiny" branding, I could just put it in my pocket :) Thanks for making an effort to describe this case and what you learned
Plenty of comments calling out the design as "worse".
Bottomline: "But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%."
Nobody talks about the inflated prices for that kind of work with close to zero effort and required knowledge. A Community College student would have done that 3 pages website in 3 days at most and would looks 100x better. win-win.
Even though I don't quite agree with everything in your postmortem, I do want to thank you for reflecting and sharing your experience. It's not easy to admit mistakes in public and open yourself up for criticism. Cheers!
Sometime ago here I posited that America was business friendly because you could decide to simply not pay a company you weren’t satisfied with and usually have no consequence. This is exactly a scenario where that would be useful.
The part where he talks about paying 100% for something that's 80% done but 0% usable hit very hard. As a web agency owner, and multi-decade web builder I've been in this position too many times with sub-contractors.
This sounds like EVERY agency I have ever worked for. I am sure there are good agencies out there and others have had better experience, but the few agencies I have worked for would have considered this scenario a success.
I've run into this phenomenon so many times playing entrepreneur that I gave it the name Alan's Law: getting paid to do a job has little to no influence on an entities ability to do said job.
This is why I only use Upwork for design and assets. If I don’t like something I throw it out and am not too bent out of shape about it. Quality is only marginally less than hiring someone.
I could have knocked that entire thing up in three days, including building it. You just got a shitty agency. But an agency is never cheap. You'd of been better off with an individual.
Please dont hold back on naming this company, the leadership is clearly inexperience, lack of.. creativity, communication, business etiquette, user experience, user interface design...
The only degradation I feel is that, in the previous design, I could see what I was buying within the first fold. I find the illustration in the new design to be a bit too abstract.
This is so typical for some business to waste money and charge higher price. Like health care industry. As a dev, I also designed logo and webpage myself.
First mistake in my eyes is hiring from an Internet forum instead of a professional service.
Granted, I don’t have a personal website and nor have I hired a website freelancer. So, heap on the salt.
Sorry that you went through all this. I can tell how frustrating it was and it doesn’t feel good to be scammed. It’s generous of you to share your experience like this and maybe educate someone who might’ve been getting ready to make a similar error.
It’s interesting how the author decides against hiring a cheap developer, but in the end still tries to get good service for cheap (i.e. hires a company that works with larger clients, expects them to offer same kind of service to him).
Also:
> If I had insisted on milestone-based payments from the beginning, WebAgency likely would have declined the project.
How to make a ton of bullshit if you’re not a bull: take the least important feature and throw ten people at it who refer to themselves as “creative”. Should it be light purple or foggy morning green? We need to consult a vet.
Your site was what a site should look like, and redesign turned it into yet another ctrl-w nonsense. Personally I would ask why would you do that even if it costed $50.
the white and green (button) --- does that meet a11y contrast guidelines?
I would say for a b2b company design probably doesn't matter too much. I think minor things like font choice probably affect a consumer discretionary brand much more than you...
he is a marketing genius to me, writing stuff that catching eyeballs that might end up selling more his devices, I feel the postmortem of the website project is really not the point(or true goal here) at all.
yes except after the reading Tinypilot image is all over the page, that's why I call him a marketing genius, it's not talking about the product, and it is actually aimed for the product(exposure of it)
Yes that's the goal of every single blog post from a business owner that gets posted here. It's all marketing designed as helpful advice about running / starting a business
I don't want to rub salt in the wounds here, but that design is extremely mediocre. The primary mistake here imo was to think you needed professional web design in the first place. You didn't.
Professional web design is best suited to companies with a strong brand or websites with complicated UX/UI that needs wireframing. You're just a small business selling KVMs D2C. That doesn't need anything fancy.
There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out there you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even better) than this. In recent years I've used them almost exclusively to generate some initial logo ideas then either made minor alterations myself (where needed), or paid someone a little to do it for me.
Similar things can be said for web templates. There are some really good customisable templates for simple sites like yours out there today. I don't know why you'd pay someone for something so simple, especially when the design is so generic and forgettable (no offense).
I don't mean to be so critical. The design isn't bad. The site looks clean and it's pleasant to use. It's just insane to me that your main takeaway here was that you should have hired a freelancer instead of an agency.
>There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out there you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even better) than this. In recent years I've used them almost exclusively to generate some initial logo ideas then either made minor alterations myself (where needed), or paid someone a little to do it for me.
I've tried AI logo generators and didn't like the results. Last time I tried was 3-4 years ago, so maybe they've gotten better.
>Similar things can be said for web templates. There are some really good customisable templates for simple sites like yours out there today. I don't know why you'd pay someone for something so simple, especially when the design is so generic and forgettable (no offense).
Even with a template, there's still a lot of work. Someone has to sift through all the templates to find a good one. Then I still have to pay developers to adapt my existing content to the new theme. And in my experience, template code tends to be pretty bad. Tons of inline style rules so that the page looks good in exactly that configuration, but it's not flexible.
If I had to do it again, I'd still rather work with a freelancer than search for a template and adapt it to my site.
I'll rub a little aloe in that wound. I actually like the redesign. The illustrations are great, and overall it's a big improvement over the original. Worth the price? Perhaps not, but at least you have a better website now, and more experience dealing with agencies.
Thanks for the aloe! Yeah, that's how I feel as well.
I was expecting people to not like the new design but it's been surprising to hear how many people prefer the old design and logo. I think the new one is way better, and it's not even close. Not perfect, but certainly an improvement.
But I would definitely hire a freelancer to do some visual clean up time to time.
As site content is updated, I can already see evidence of site feel reverting back to 'mom and pop', 'maintained by webmaster' look in some sections / pages.
I run a similar sized software business and found generatepress.com. I set up a wordpress site using their visual builder tools and pre-made components, hosted on wpengine.com so everything is always up to date. Took a few weekends, but this is more than adequate these days. Logo came from upwork.com
I also feel your pain. I've had a bad experience with a top python/django agency that turned out to have a CEO "incubating" several startups to compete with Amazon, while also running an agency. I got bad vibes early but kept pressing on, and learned my lesson the hard way.
That's not their brand, at least not in the past 5 or so years. I've had significant success with Fiverr, many of which are not the cheapest. Certainly you can find the cheapest if that's what you want, but that's on any freelance platform.
If you have more money than time, you’re not going to start shifting through templates, configuring stuff, dealing with bugs, updating it, generating strange AI logos etc.
Probably worth $50 when time is money but all I got were results I could have duplicated in GIMP, as someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with GIMP. It looks it just picks a font and an icon?
Highly disagree. Usually developers are utter crap in design and cannot do it appropiately in context (he makes <40k per month with the website).
The design is okay and due to the inefficiencies he spent too much. But with a better process in place he would have gotten a very good deal from that agency.
"I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an all-time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the redesign."
You would be wrong. Enough clues were left.
Look at the retrospective blog posts - OP started work with design agency in October 2021. So look at September 2021 'freelancer/seeking freelancer' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380660)
search throw using unusual words from blog post. read likely posts. stop for some air. click through website of likely candidate. hold breath. check CEOs name. not the same but...
Elementary my dear Watson. Ele-flipping-mentary.
CEO takes the time to post in freelancer thread. They can write a comment to give us their side and hopefully announce the full return of all monies to OP.
Because the popularity of this post is soaring like a plane or weather balloon.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I've never put clients on retainer for more than a fraction of the typical work-hours per month... which I only really know after I'm well past their first project. The point of a retainer is to square off enough time and resources to be on call when the next project comes up and the one after that. I don't think it's at all the appropriate way to handle a resource crunch on a one-off project.
I do shy away from design-only work for one time clients, although ten years ago that was typical of my business. From an art director's perspective there are certain red flags on both sides of this. I would never present that many logo options to a client, or engage in constant back and forth over the options until we had internally narrowed it down to a maximum of 3. Clients are not designers and presenting them with too many choose-your-own questions tends to lead them to micromanaging - what I call client vanity logos - and inevitably (though paradoxically) they are less happy with the results than if they are presented with a few solid choices from the get-go and dissuaded from injecting too much of their own design aesthetic. The reason is that they come to believe they could have done it better themselves. Whereas if it is done for them professionally, they will comfort themselves knowing that this is what the professionals think and they got the pro opinions they paid for. This is something I learned very early on, when I started at an ad agency at 15. (We also learned that two of the three you present should be slightly flawed, to drive the customer to the design strategy we had already settled on but give them the illusion of choice. I don't really waste time with that anymore, but it's still a tool in the kit).
I'm not blaming the OP for any of this, or saying they're especially picky. In my experience it really comes down to the quality of work and quality of advice they're getting from an agency, and an agency should know how to deal with it.
Another red flag is that each portion of the job should have been estimated individually beforehand. That's really essential to preventing time overflows and also to dissuade micromanagement. Instead, it sounds to me like this entered a loop focused on the logo which sucked up more time than anyone expected, and they allowed that to be a driver. They probably no longer liked the project, and as a result, the final product lacked coherence and vision.
As a designer & developer myself, I agree, the rebranding and new bootstrap template would take a week to deliver at most for ONE person. I'd charge ~$2,000 USD for something like this (30 hours at $75/hr).
It's not easy to find individual, most of them just disappear into a sunset: their PC died, parrot got sick, payment didn't went through, money didn't make their way to their bank account, and so on...
The noteof logo doesn't look like it would scale to small size very well. The gap between the top left corner of the N and the other elements seems too small.
99designs is another option, albeit at a higher price point (but still far below OP's budget). I was very satisfied with the logo and redesign I got there. Got to see a lot of options before settling on the designer we chose.
A logo is nothing on it's own. Many agencies, like the one in the article, push a 'rebranding' that should include a brand/style guide on how to use its components, thereby justifying the price. If OP didn't receive such a guide he definitively got ripped off.
I worked at WebAgency (not this one, another one) for 13 years, as a developer, designer, and in leadership roles. In my current role I'm on the other side of the table, dealing with contractors we outsource some of our product work to.
Your experience felt really familiar to me, symptomatic of badly managed projects I've been on both sides of. To be honest, it felt familiar in a way that evoked some emotional feelings I have from working on those kinds of projects for so long! Very few people want to rip off a small business owner, or to have a client feel like they've been swindled. Glad I'm out of that game.
What I'd like to add is that this can seem predatory, like Isaac was taking advantage of you, trying to wring you dry. That may be true (I don't know), but the same thing can easily happen when everybody has the best of intentions.
It is up to a PM to pump the breaks if they see designers or developers burning billable hours on things that won't help the project succeed. The Project Manager turnover you witnessed, and the CEO backfilling for them, happens surprisingly often. There's a lot of churn with PMs at these agencies, at the ones I worked for it felt like we could never keep them around. Since the harried CEO usually makes a horrible replacement for a full-time manager, it's not surprising he dropped the ball in this case.
In theory, it's also up to the designers and developers to manage their own time, but those folks are also often under pressure to be billing ~40 hours a week. If there is nothing for them to do but sit around, and your project is still active, I could see them filling their days working on unbidden ideas "to help you out". Again, I have no idea what happened in your case, but I have seen that before.
At the place I spent most of my time, our version of Isaac would have probably have refunded you a lot of that money, if indeed they really were busy with big clients (my guess is that's probably a line he gave you). It's a feast or famine business, and in feast times we refunded hours generously, both because we lived off referrals, and because we genuinely did not try to bleed our customers dry. It just worked out that way sometimes...
I will say that I think your takeaways from this experience are right on. I would also add that you shouldn't have to be the de facto project manager, but in practice that is the safest way to make sure you get what you want.
Meaning: schedule check-in meetings, find out what people are going to deliver and when, post up in their Slack, etc.
Good companies will appreciate your involvement, as long as you're not acting like a maniac, and when I think back to the most successful projects I worked on as a contractor, they all had some highly active contact on the client side.
I've been through this exact same story during my home remodel with a ~~contractor~~ handyman. The problem as far as I can tell is that when you pay someone hourly there is exactly zero incentive to make those hours go away. I don't believe people intentionally try to abuse the setup, it is just doomed to be a common outcome because of the structure. If you pay someone hourly they want to spend those hours doing their best work to maximize the quality of the referral they'll get when they're done. It's too easy to forget that timeframe (i.e. budget) is part of what most people care about during a project. And for better or worse most people do prefer "better late than never" to "rushed and shoddy" so it's probably a fair bet for contractors to implicitly make.
I also empathize with the author in terms of "why didn't you just do this and that" and the whole sunk cost fallacy. It's really easy to be on the outside and give the obvious retrospective advice that you should have fired X and switched to Y once you saw a few red flags. But that too, even if it makes logical and financial sense when you model it out still involves risks. There's no guarantee the next agency will be any better than the current so you're making a bet priced at the cost of treading while getting the next agency spun up. And ultimately humans are involved. It sounds like the issues with the project were being communicated and responded to during the project lifecycle so there's hope that the miss-steps will be corrected.
It's really hard. The silver lining, in my case and the author's, is that hopefully, despite the issues, all said and done you'll get a return on your investment. For me I simply don't want to lose money I'm not in the housing market to make money, I just need a place to raise a family.
The hard advice takeaway: if you have a budget and expectations about how a project will be delivered, you ABSOLUTELY NEED those codified in a contract. Shop around until you are willing to find someone who will agree to share the risk and deliver on a statement of work for a fixed cost. I understand in a competitive market this is hard because contractors and firms can easily go find "other" work. But the more pressure the better. Try structuring the project to have diminishing returns or financial penalties for being delivered late. Handymen or otherwise hourly arangements have their place for small jobs on the order of 1 or 2 days max 1 week of work. But hourly doesn't buy you any executive function: which is needed to manage hourly work. Keep in mind, in most cases, if these hourly people were skilled at executive function then they'd own a contracting firm, manage a team, and be profiting...
The whole experience has really made me wonder why any startups pay salary before they're profitable. Because as many know, this happens all the time internally with full time salaried employees too. No incentive complete work until the very last moment necessary. Deadlines and punishments for not meeting them are incredibly important. I mean I get it, a salary says "I need you around for this much because otherwise my business doesn't work" so it emotionally makes sense and I'm not saying the industry should stop doing it. BUT, I also have a seen a lot of work be dished out to salaried employees when it could have otherwise been structured as a 5k or 10k contract with a statement of work and payment remitted upon completion. I'm surprised you don't see more of that blend. I guess SASS is kinda a stand-in but still.
$46k for those changes holy fucking shit. I’ve charged less than this to design a whole 200m² house. I built a detailed 3d model, secured all the permissions and technical approvals, produced 30 A1 drawings, written a 200 page spec, coordinated engineering, tendered to contractors negotiated the tender, visited the site every two weeks for two years to check they were building it correctly and signed off on thier invoices to the client. This is a normal amount of work for that fee in my industry, am I an idiot?
Also if I agreed to a fee of £7k and tried to charge a client £46k without agreeing a new scope of work with a new signed appointment contract I would probably be struck off and fined £20k by my professional regulator.
Haha, software development doesn’t have licensing. I got downvoted for suggesting it should, so it’s unlikely to have it in the future either, unless it becomes government regulated. Which would be its own disaster, and why I think industry licensing should be a thing.
Am I out of touch? I think about 30-40k does not sound unreasonable for something like this. You have a redesign, with UX people improving your shopping and cart page + implementation + updating your maze of weird bootstrap theme to the new redesign.
tbf the agency's original "how long is a piece of string" response to website is probably fair here
Some companies really do want to a/b test their shopping cart to death, and have 40 iterations of their logo with roundtable meetings in between, and that stuff can genuinely take many man months and in the case of the a/b testing might even be time and money well spent. I'm sure some of the agency's regular clients spend $400k on getting e-commerce sites which are only a bit more complex overhauled and think they'll see value from it
But 46k is definitely unreasonable for something you've estimated at 7k, and 38 billable hours to refactor a Bootstrap template for a minimalist website with about 10 pages doesn't sound like efficient work.
Yeah, its not great, but I dont think its unreasonable. Id expect it more in 25-30k range, 7k sounds like fairy tale. Lets say you have two designers working 40 hours on this over 3 months, thats quickly 20k just there, before any implementation.
Dont joke about untangling Bootstrap from your css architecture, I’ve seen that take 6 months to get out from.
$7k doesn't sound like a fairytale, it sounds like a pretty standard ballpark for a logo and custom hero graphic, a discussion about order of homepage sections, and a cart flow with a radio button to select a product from. Easy to spend more time revising it, but that's a situation where the client should feel they're the one spending that budget. The fairytale is doing it with a $46 template and a $7 logo, but even those can have happy endings when the sought-after design is uncomplicated...
And whilst I'm sure there are complex apps and huge sites which are horrendously sensitive to untangling Bootstrap especially where pixel perfect preservation is required, we're talking about implementing three brand new pages of standard layouts plus a handful more black-on-white text pages with existing standard layouts and the new header, font and button carried over. Implementing that in 38 hours is not fast work.
I agree, I don't see it as outrageous at all. Agencies often charge too little then get scope creeped into overrunning their own labor, so smart agencies charge good money and write tight language in contracts to avoid it. It's very easy for a project that seems simple to solve to become a massive undertaking.
I would’ve thought that the product photo was a strength of the offering (proof of legitimacy given designed hardware is expensive and shows commitment). But the redesign hides it away and uses illustrations like every startup’s MVP site! Seems insane.
You certainly are not an idiot, if you managed to do all that work up to professional standards.
You didn't say how much you charged for that job, so it is impossible to give assessment there. But it is almost certain you charged way too low.
From what I can gather, you provided a lot of services there. It's not so much the designing and the 3D model that counts, but all the services you describe, that are really, really valuable. Because you provide a total package and one that is facing regulatore/legal.
Two years of site visits alone would amount to ~50 trips. This alone would be worth 20k at least, since you also are bound for that time and cannot leave town etc. Hard to say without further details…
I work for a very expensive electric utility consulting firm... and I guess now I'm impressed by how much work we can actually do for 50k. This is so silly that it makes me feel like an idiot too.
Maybe I am because I should switch careers, I’m visually literate; pretty sure I could do graphics as good as that. I’m also computer literate I’ve used bootstrap, I know how it works. I also code python well enough to understand how create my own decorators and where might be a good place to use yield and I know how to use git. Put up my own website using Jekll AWS, wrote some jekll plugins in Ruby. Dabbled in Arduino ESP PIC Etc etc
Edit: Basically it feels like I currently do an order of magnitude more work for the same money.
It's highly region dependent. In my city the work you're describing would go into the six figures(assuming you the design-architecture-engineering firm are paying the contractors).
Having worked for an ad agency (and for a consulting firm) AVOID THEM UNLESS YOU ARE A LARGE ORGANIZATION WITH A BIG BUDGET.
They are not going to watch costs for you. They are not going to have their "best people on it" (unless, maybe, you are their biggest client). And everyone working on the project is looking to get their billable hours in. The entire motivation of the organization is to bill as many hours as they think the customer can pay for.
I met a lot of great people in those companies, but I do not miss my time working in them.
If you look at the earlier mockups, they were just as good if not better. I also think they chose the wrong logo from the earlier mocks.
If you are smaller team/org/business, I'd highly recommend just move as quickly as possible with the agency. Less opportunity for scope creep from them and let the creatives rock and roll. They will, without a doubt, want the project done as fast as possible. They will also produce the same work in 1 vs vs 2 vs vs 3 months.
If you are bigger team/org/business, usually you are buying the "process" or "experience". So it's all mute and a team thing.
If you are looking for both, you'll fail like they did here.
I have seen many outsourcing projects with my coachees and with founders, I've managed my own and cancelled several when I was called in to fix them.
The key to this kind of work is to understand:
The agency is not your buddy, they have very different goals than you have. Too often do I seen people who have nice chats with the agency over a coffee. They are not your friends.
You need to write the contract to align the incentives of the agency as much with yours as possible. For example: I see hourly billing, and bug fixing counting as billed hours. How has the agency an incentive to keep bugs low if it makes them more money? Agency has low retention, new people are slower, slower means more money for the agency. How has the agency an incentive to keep people on the project?
[Edit] You might think this is obvious, but I have seen unaligned incentives in mostly every outsourcing project I've looked into and was asked to fix. Tip: Do not take the developers they give you/have on the project. Interview all of them and reject the bad ones. As a new customer, they will not give you the best but those available (currently not on project/rejected by other clients)
I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I assume the people working with me are honest and they're motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for their time, and I assume they'll use their time effectively. If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don't try to fix it with different policies.
I agree that there are payment schemes that will cause even honest people to do poor work (e.g., if I paid someone per kLOC, they'd probably write more bloated code), but in general, I'm not worried about someone deliberately sandbagging a job if I'm paying them by the hour.
Paying by the hour is not perfect, but no payment scheme is. With milestone-based billing, you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope, and I don't want to waste time on that. It also incentivizes delivering the minimum quality work to meet the milestone and move on rather than focusing on high quality.
The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to rack up billable hours. If that involves building an amazing piece of work, then that's fine. But if it can be done by blowing off the client and feeding them bullshit, then that's fine too. I watched consulting companies bilk literally millions of dollars out of a household name company by simply lying to people that didn't know any better.
I really respect your philosophy of assuming people are honest. I used to be that way, too. But after working with contractors and consultants and people overall, I think most people will do what they're told, while others will actively game the system. I've found that if you're tough in the beginning and let them know that you're not to be gamed, then you won't have any issues. Business is business.
In any case, "Isaac" was completely full of shit. He knew exactly what was up. He approved all those hours - especially the dev hours that were spent on nonsense bugs.
I know I sound harsh, but I believe everyone can excel if you get past their bullshit and accept only their best.
In my last year of college, a couple friends and I ended up working on implementing a vehicle-to-infrastructure communications demo for the department of transportation. We were doing it for a grade in a special projects class, but we were working with a consulting company that was being paid by the DOT to implement the demo. Toward the beginning of the project, the consulting company folk were very concerned about giving college students any non-trivial amount of scope, and were talking about how they would hedge all their bets by implementing everything themselves and only use our stuff if it panned out.
The demo itself consisted of about a dozen different scenarios. The scenarios were all basically some form or another of geofencing, and it made sense to make a simple framework to get 90% of the way, then specialize for each scenario. The consulting company didn't see it that way, and instead wanted to treat each scenario as a separate unit of work.
Fast forward to the end of the semester, and my friends and I demoed our framework for the professor, and a Motorola radio rep. It all worked and we got A's. It was like 400 lines of python. A couple weeks before the DOT demo, we started seriously trying to integrate with the consulting company's stuff, and it was laughably bad.
The consulting company knew they dropped the ball, but figured the three of us could just scramble to finish it all on top of our framework. The Motorola rep chimed in and pointed out that we already got our A's, and that the consulting company was getting paid $500k. They ended up paying us something like $20K, and it only took us a few hours to implement all the scenarios on top of our framework. The demo went well, and we ended up directly helping the DOT demo it a few more times over that summer.
Bit of a dangerous thread to comment on, but I own a small agency and while ultimately billable hours is how we make our money, the overhead of getting new customers is also incredibly high. The key way for us to be successful is to build long-lasting relationships where each side feels they continue to their money's worth.
We mainly work for small and medium-sized businesses so typically it wouldn't fall exactly under the radar if we're not producing.
That all being said, I've been on the other end of this with agencies and freelancers and I would concur that you should treat these relationships as adversarial until trust is built.
I actually had a big long response to your approach pointing out how damaging of a mindset that is for design projects, but I think this is more relevant.
I worked as a nightclub bouncer for well over a decade. I learned that you can gauge how confident a bouncer is by how friendly and warm they are to people they might have to fight later that night, and by how calmly they respond to people challenging them, physically or otherwise. If you're genuinely confident you can handle the odd bad actor appropriately once they reveal themselves, you don't need to assume every interaction is a potential battle, and everybody benefits. It creates goodwill and encourages understanding when mitigating your own inevitable inadvertent transgressions.
I learned that people who openly talk about their toughness are, without exception, trying to convince themselves more than anyone else. They can't help trying to turn every potential confrontation into supporting evidence for their argument. These people can't help trying to proactively win situations that aren't competitive and unlikely to ever be dangerous. Not only does that causes a lot of collateral damage, but the combative attitude is much better at creating self-fulfilling prophecies than discouraging bad behavior. However, without exception, they believe they're responding rationally to the dangers of the world. It's an exhausting, often self-defeating, anxiety-inducing way to live.
> The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to rack up billable hours.
This is only true if the contract doesn't have a maximum budget. Often, the goal is actually to reduce billable hours because there is a maximum amount that can be spent (cost-wise) and you need to make sure you have enough hours left to actually finish the job on time.
Well in this exact case; the agency quite successfully structured things so that the billable hours were grown significantly beyond what was originally contracted...
Yes, definitely. I just wanted to point out that you should really include maximum amounts in job-based contracts. A professional should be able to accurately guess how many hours it will take.
I have a client that had an estimated max. budget of 11 hours for a project. I just finished the task in 4 hours.
The estimated budget stemmed from the first project, but I had told the client that a lot of tasks would be much quicker because we had built the base in the first part.
Why would I try to rack up the hours and endanger the relationship? Client is happy to have the service this quick and for a very reasonable rate. I am happy, as the chance for future business is very high. Without the hassle from new biz efforts.
It's not at all true that the only goal of a T&M consultancy is to maximize T for any given customer. When you do that, you burn customers, and most consultancies (at least, the ones whose names aren't lit up on the sides of buildings) are extremely dependent on word of mouth and referrals for business.
The normal problem here is simple: the bread and butter of a lot of consultancies are a small set of big "house accounts", where both the consultancy and the client are on the same page about the value being generated and the price tag assigned to it. That's as it should be! Nobody is "full of shit" just because one client puts a 10x price tag on work you feel should be valued at 1x.
That doesn't make WebAgency OK. They mismanaged the engagement --- they shouldn't have done it at all, because they don't have the project management or the engagement structure to do a good job for 1x clients. When they realized they couldn't deliver a satisfactory project for the 1x client, they should either have terminated the engagement and refunded the payments to date, or finished it gratis and eaten the cost; the vendor should, in most circumstances, own the delivery risk.†
But for a lot of clients, and, importantly, disproportionately the clients a consultancy should want to serve, this whole saga is meaningless. The dollar amounts involved aren't high enough to micromanage, and all they care about is the outcome. It's of course still possible to burn those house accounts --- but burning a house account is a very big deal and well-run consultancies will freak out if it's happening.
This is a live-and-learn situation for everyone involved. If you're set up to deliver agency work to 1,000 person clients, you need to be very wary of picking up gigs from tiny sole-proprietor clients, because even when you get into things with the best intentions --- and I take 'mtlynch at their word that that's exactly what happened --- circumstances can fuck everything up, and a small client is going to feel that fuckup in ways an ordinary client won't.
I think 'mtlynch has exactly the right takeaway from this: if you're a small shop, you probably want to err on the side of engaging other small shops for consulting work, rather than agencies, unless that agency can really convince you that they've done the work to rig their business for delivering to small clients.
† Here it's tricky, because WebAgency was screwing up due to turnover and increased workload from their real clients, so delivering the work gratis would have impacted house accounts, and nobody is going to let that happen; meanwhile, 'mtlynch doesn't want them to cut bait and give him his money back, so both sides are limping along in an unproductive stalemate. It's a thing that happens!
> because even when you get into things with the best intentions --- and I take 'mtlynch at their word that that's exactly what happened --- circumstances can fuck everything up
The web agency didn't just mismanage the project; they dragged him down the rabbit hole of upselling everything. He wanted a simple redesign - that they agreed to - but instead got a constant upsell to the point of where they were redesigning virtually everything. It wasn't just, "Hey we don't have time for this", it was, "Hey, if you just pay us more, you'll get everything you didn't even know you wanted." If they were so overwhelmed, how did they have the time to figure out what to pitch him?
As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business.
Broadly speaking, it's not economically feasible for an agency to take contracts that pay $7k (or even $25k, for that matter - I've written about this here https://bonner.jp/posts/the-co-op-consultancy/). So if they can do you a favor, in their minds, by fixing your whole website instead of just three pages - and if you're willing to pay for it - then everybody wins. Right?
That's the difference between a business relationship and being a friend: you may keep your mouth shut when a friend is being imposing, taking too much for granted, because you value the relationship. You would never remain silent in a business context when somebody is spending your money. It's business. They understand.
On my jobs, I'm explicit about what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do. If my client needs to scale, I'm going to talk them through options for caching and horizontal & vertical scaling. But if my client seems to be dragging their feet on customer development and making poor business decisions about which features to prioritize, well, that's not my role in this relationship.
That said, I would never lead a client into a project backwards the way this agency did. Because I do value the relationship! In that I want you to come back, and pay me more money later. Not because we're friends. That's business honesty.
This situation is definitely your fault - but only because you and your agency had different assumptions about the rules or norms of your relationship. Your agency poorly communicated their intentions, and you allowed that to happen out of a misplaced sense of friendly obligation.
> As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business.
I don’t know. It’s a blurry line at best. If an agency dev team is really noticing that bug fixes are billable hours and that’s causing them to relax their code quality standards since they’ll be paid for bug fixes anyway, how is that not dishonest? Perhaps it’s possible for them to not be aware that what they’re doing is in bad faith, in which case you might argue that they’re “being dishonest with themselves” instead of “being dishonest with the client,” but it seems like a distinction without a difference.
You didnt hire people. You hired a company. That abused your good faith.
Also, 'If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire', appearantly not? They clearly where not using their time, your money, effectively.
I don't think the problem here was in using their time effectively. Or, at least, it wasn't the high-order bit. Looking at their task breakdown, there weren't outrageous items like "10 hours - change a button color." The times were a little higher than I'd expect for devs who do this all the time, but not egregiously so.
I think I overspent on this project, but I attribute it more to poor communication and poor management than the devs working too slowly.
"You don't fit our usual workflow so no further work will be done unless you pay us a retainer like the big guys do" is simply not a good faith position to take half way into a project.
They gave you just enough extra attention to hook you in at the start, then kept stringing you along for more cash, with a few token deductions to make it seem like it was all just very unfortunate. (Note: They would not have made those deductions if you hadn't called them on it.)
Then when it was clear there was no more money on the table they finally did the work - which, conveniently, left you with a positive impression.
They did not do the job you originally asked them to do. They did a job they decided they wanted to do - and charge for - because... why? They're not organised and professional enough to deliver what they were asked to?
It's a classic case of actions speaking louder than words.
Some questions to consider:
1. Would you have hired them if you knew they were going to cost nearly seven times more than your budget?
2. How much would a website redesign have cost if you'd asked for that in the first place?
3. Do you think that work would have been done in budget, or would it have exploded far beyond it too?
4. Would a different agency have acted in the same way and presented the same problems?
>> "You don't fit our usual workflow so no further work will be done unless you pay us a retainer like the big guys do" is simply not a good faith position to take half way into a project.
Good contract would have made this claim by the agency both immediately not material, a breach of contract - and in my opinion, may even be a type of fraud called bait-and-switch, which is illegal.
That's fair enough, I dont' think this is on the devs. At least not entirely, but I'd argue that a company that can't maintain budget and scope & is off by _that_ much on the first estimate is not very effective either & should be 'fired' as a company.
And then there is the sunk costs which are not so easily dimissible...
That being said, it is a nice and fresh website. And congratz on the success with the product! It's something I've been 'dreaming' of, find a nice niche product and make it well. No BS.
I don't think number of commits is a meaningful metric.
They billed two hours. It sounds like it's a one-line change, but getting it to play nice with CI is a little more complicated. It was very similar to this change, so two hours felt reasonable:
Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000?
> you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope,
This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold payment when delivery isn't up to your standards, and you are protected contractually. With pure time & materials it's much harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they didn't work the hours they billed for.
OP, I hope you aren't rethinking it. You'd certainly be justified in doing so, but I think it would be a mistake. There are most definitely people out there that fit your description:
> I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I assume the people working with me are honest and they're motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for their time, and I assume they'll use their time effectively. If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don't try to fix it with different policies.
I've worked with many of them. I myself try to live that way as well, often costing myself non-trivial time and money to ensure that my client gets what I sold them.
Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic misery. Not worth it.
Yeah, I agree. This experience hasn't affected how much I try to defend myself from dishonest employees/contractors. I think the prevalence of dishonest/malicious people is so low and screening is so costly/ineffective that it's not worth it.
>Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic misery. Not worth it.
Yes, 100% agree. When someone tells me, "I've put so many controls in place to make sure you can't do X," it's so adversarial that my first though is, "I'd really love to find a way to do X." But if they tell me, "I'm trusting you not to do X because that will cause Y negative consequence for me," then I'm inclined to honor that request because it doesn't feel like we're adversaries.
I dont think anyone is suggesting you micromanage your consultants, that is obviously the wrong approach and defeats the purpose of hiring consultants.
This is a bussiness arrangement. Normally this works by you saying some things you want over some timeframe, and letting them work on it.
The part of this story where things go off the rails, is that by the middle of it, it was clear the agency wasn't delivering on their deliverables or really making progress. Most people would make some sort of change at that point, either terminate or set modified expectations - definitely not blindly give more money.
Its really not about trust, its about whether or not they do the job. There could be many reasons why the job doesn't get done, many might not be malicious - but these people aren't your friends. You are buying something from them, if they dont have the goods, then they dont have the goods and its not a sign of lack of trust to move on.
>Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000?
Honestly, no. I think I certainly made mistakes on this project, but I don't think trusting devs to use their time effectively was the problem.
>>you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope,
>This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold payment when delivery isn't up to your standards, and you are protected contractually. With pure time & materials it's much harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they didn't work the hours they billed for.
The problem is that agencies know that, so if I approach competent agencies demanding a milestone-based contract for $7-15k, they'd just tell me to get lost. They don't want to take a risk on some small client demanding the moon before they'll release payment.
I'm sure there are desperate agencies who will agree to contracts that put them in a weak position, but I expect their work will be lower quality than the agencies that protect themselves.
> so if I approach competent agencies demanding a milestone-based contract for $7-15k, they'd just tell me to get lost
Yep, exactly that.
And, for a dev agency (I'm not as familiar with how design would want to structure this), you'd either need _very_ detailed and specific requirements before we consider quoting the project, or we're going to need an up-front discovery phase (that will run a few thousand dollars anyway) to produce those detailed requirements and specifications, before we can even give a quote.
Fixed bid projects do feel like they create much more of an adversarial relationship than a collaborative one for working on a project, and when we make fixed bids we _definitely_ price a lot of the risk into the bid (and we're up front about that).
If a contractor told me to "get lost" over a $15k contract for a three-page rework + redesign; I'd just respond "gladly".
That is a dead simple ask and something that could easily be handled by one front-end dev + one designer in 1-2 weeks of half-time work. That easily covers their salaries (in LA, at least) + 30-50% overhead. You would probably pad that out to a month for other jobs + unknowables; but I would be absolutely shocked if an agency quoted anyone any more time than that for such a basic and trivial task. For a first time contract, that's a pretty good deal to entice word of mouth referrals + potential future work.
This isn't work that needs discovery or intricate scoping. It's basic work that anyone with web development experience can scope out and that a shop focused on that definitely has extensive experience on. Better than that, if you review his original scope guidelines, he makes it clear he specifically doesn't want any more work done than those three pages. All of the complicated work (logo redo + rebranding) he was talked into by the agency, along with random things like additional color palettes, extended page attributes, etc.
Well, I was talking about dev work rather than design work.
A 3 page build for a marketing website is probably very well scoped for the dev work (if the designs are done).
If the designs _aren’t_ done, though, and the fixed bid includes the client signing off on the visual look and feel, then… that’s not a tightly scoped requirement.
Could we do the dev in that budget? Almost certainly, I cannot imagine it taking longer than that for a handful of marketing pages.
Will I sign a fixed bid contract, if I don’t have a design and requires the client to sign off on the final look and feel in order to be complete? No, that would be insane.
> and the fixed bid includes the client signing off on the visual look and feel
He came to them specifically because he liked other work they had done and wanted something similar. Are there still vagaries between integration and specific brand tweaks? Sure. But don't pretend this is a major corporate rebrand or anything. The only discovery is his tastes.
If it's that big of a worry: make visual sign-off milestone one. Add a 10-15% upfront deposit and you both will know in a week or so whether it's right to move on with minimal loss to both parties.
Either way, he'd be much better off than 6mos+ of work at 450% of his original budget.
> He came to them specifically because he liked other work they had done and wanted something similar.
Right, but, for the third time, I was providing my input for a dev agency (not design agency) perspective. I was generally providing another perspective of input on fixed bid contracts.
I’m sure you can make fixed bid projects work with design agencies, and I agree that it will ensure the risk remains with the agency (but also that it’s possible that you end up spending more than with a carefully managed T&M project.
But, again, I’m not an expert at working with design agencies, and I’m not making any recommendations about the best way to work with a design agency.
I'm on a T&M contract right now where we are having the stupidest of disputes.
T&M with a SOW full of deliverables. Client asks us to do a ton of work outside of scope. We inform the client it's out of scope, but that we are happy to perform the work as part of the T&M. Can't get anyone to push through a CR "because it's T&M so it doesn't matter." Client has been paying all along. Getting to the end, client doesn't want to sign off on completion of the project because we didn't do the SOW deliverables (per our previous alignment). They already paid so I don't actually care if they sign off on the work, but it's stupid for everyone involved.
My favorite protection for this kind of situation is having a Single Point of Contact clause, that basically says: "ultimately, we take direction from X person and only X person".
This helps in a couple of different ways. Occasionally, you'll get conflicting requests or instructions from a client. When that happens, I usually just push it to the single point of contact and ask how they want to proceed.
But it also helps in the scenario you outlined, because I make sure any approvals for "outside the scope of SOW work" gets approved to be worked by the single point of contact, along with any relevant disclaimers about total project budget and estimate.
Then, when you come to time to evaluate the project progress the single point of contact has clear language that they've approved with whatever associated cost warnings.
You're getting a little beat up here...I'm not piling on, I am actually interested, because I need to reinforce my skill in this area, do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting?
I do appreciate your honest assessment of your project. One of my investors is pushing me to build a team of outsourced workers; it seems suboptimal to me to say the least. I find the clues you share in retrospect to be helpful. Thanks.
>do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting?
I don't try to assess character because I don't think you can effectively. And I know others disagree with me here, but I don't think the agency I hired was lacking in character or behaving dishonestly.
At the end of the day, if I'm hiring someone for $100/hr, they need to produce output that's worth >$100/hr to me. I'm a developer, and I have a sense of how long things would take me. I hire other freelance developers, so I see how long tasks take them relative to their rate. So if someone is charging a high rate but delivering work very slowly, I'd let them go, regardless of whether that's their real speed or if they're padding their numbers.
My typical strategy is to just hire and fire quickly. I don't do interviews, and I just hire someone for a small job (5-10 hours) and see how they do. If they do well, I give them a larger task and then keep going up after a few weeks. I wrote a bit more about my hiring process a different post:
i'm not fond of commenting on hn-as-marketing-channel posts, even if it's within the bounds of the guidelines, but here goes...
> "I don't try to assess character because I don't think you can effectively."
> "My typical strategy is to just hire and fire quickly. I don't do interviews, and I just hire someone for a small job (5-10 hours) and see how they do."
to restate, you can't assess character in a few meetings/interviews, as there's just not enough data (it's well within the honeymoon period of any human relationship). humans are quite good at assessing character over the long term however. your "typical strategy" is employed, or at least should be, to mitigate the inability to assess character in the short run.
but, you didn't employ that strategy in your situation. fire fast would have been after they didn't deliver the first set of assets--you'd give them one more chance (with fair and direct warning), and after that, they should have been gone. instead, you kept at it for many more months. you failed to manage your own project, and that's really the bottom line learning here, not all the other stuff you wrote about. by the time you did fire them, you had enough data to assess their character and fired them based on that, rather than employing your fire-fast strategy.
that's not to try to condemn you in any way, as management is ambiguous and surprisingly complex (NP hard), but you left a gaping management hole that the agency filled with their own priorities and goals. i've been on both sides of this coin, and one of the unobvious inefficiencies of outsourcing is the need for twice the management (on each side). your solution to just hire a freelancer would work, not because it's a small project and you'd be "rightsizing", but because it'd make it obvious and necessary that you'd be actively managing the project.
I think outsourced success depends heavily on choosing capable & honest people and your ability to carefully manage them (give a little rope, see how they do, and then decide whether or not to continue).
Have two TinyPilot's...Great product, well supported :-)
Sorry to hear about the Website redesign issues. Taking into account the initial budget you were targeting for, it looks like a scenario that required Gerry Weinberg, "Orange Juice Test" before anything else.
I'm sure there's a dev who could have done the same work faster and cheaper, but they're extremely hard to find. Everyone wants to hire a frontend dev who can design and code. They'd either be outside my budget or they'll only take jobs from people with a personal recommendation.
There's also the problem that until you hire them, you can't distinguish between a talented developer and someone just pretending to be one. I might go through 10 expensive developers over a year before I find one who's actually capable of delivering the project in two weeks.
Do you have a recommendation for where I'd find someone who can do this job in two weeks to the same level of quality?
Philosophy, costs, timelines, and justifications aside - I’m curious if, in your experience, many “competent” developers have this sort of design experience in their wheelhouse?
Has anyone approached you about an acquisition? At 50k+ MRR and those margins on hardware you really shouldn't be losing money. Imagine there's a small (or big) hardware company with in house employees to do what you're outsourcing at a much lower cost.
I agree with you. I have written plenty of contracts and statements of work, and it's so important to get those right and make sure there's a true meeting of the minds and that they strike the right prject-specific balance between detail and flexibility, but there's no substitute for both sides being a little bit reasonable.
It's just not a business where a project can succeed despite an adversarial partner. Both sides need to grow together.
I've been seeing stories like this about out of control software projects as long as I've been working as a developer (so since about 1992). The conclusion is always that the root cause is either malice or incompetence - but it's awfully suspicious that software is conspicuously alone in attracting this much incompetent malice. Of course, we hear stories like this about general contractors, but they're the exception rather than the rule - for the most part, when somebody hires somebody else to build a house, they get a house and it costs mostly what they were quoted up front and takes mostly as long as they were told it was going to take.
While I guess nobody would take time to write about a software project that went exactly as predicted, my experience is that those are the exception rather than the rule, and the cases where a software project was accurately quoted in advance are relatively trivial projects.
I can understand why the people who are writing the checks want software projects to be predictable, but in 30 years of practice, I've never figured out a way to accurately predict them, nor have I met anybody else who could. I've met a lot of people who accuse me (and software developers in general) of malicious incompetence for not being able to foretell projects in advance, I have yet to meet one who rolls up their sleeves and says, "here, let me show you how to estimate this stuff accurately" except in very abstract terms like "first write down every task you're going to do, then write down how long each task is going to take, and then add up those numbers and voila! Estimate complete!"
Heck no building a house or renovating anything is always way more expensive than the initial offered price. Hence the rate for fixed price building of houses is so much more than regular pricing. Somehow build always take way longer and so many if not all contractors leave problematic results.
> for the most part, when somebody hires somebody else to build a house, they get a house and it costs mostly what they were quoted up front and takes mostly as long as they were told it was going to take.
! Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price increases.
You can get close to original scope and original pricing, but for me it's always involved the implied threat of litigation. Note this is the only sector of business life where I've had to be this confrontational.
(Work with individual trades has been not bad at all, but this has tended to be tightly scoped projects with relatively simple dependencies).
> software project was accurately quoted in advance are relatively trivial projects.
Even simple software projects tend to have much deeper interdependencies between work items, and bigger nonlinear combination of work impacts, than other domains. If someone changes something small on the fly in a normal construction project, and a pipe is in a slightly different place-- it's usually no big deal. It may involve a little bit of rework.
> Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price increases.
Our experience with looking into GCs for a kitchen remodel was that their premium was so outrageous and their ideas/plans so mediocre that we were much better off just doing it ourselves.
All the specialist contractors and laborers who actually did the work were basically fine, easy-enough to work with, charged reasonable rates, and did good work.
I think we paid about 1/2 what the cheapest GC wanted (some were way higher) and used much better materials than any of them were calling for in their initial plans they used for their bids. I can only assume their entire market is people with so much money that they don't give a shit what it costs as long as they don't have to do any work themselves. "$15,000 to save me some googling and phone calls? Sure, seems reasonable"
Speaking loosely, I would say that there are two kinds of people: those that optimize within a framework of rules and those that optimize the framework so they can relax inside it.
My experience is a lot of web agency people are the second kind. They have a cozy business where a happy client is worth more than a bilked one. They can be (occasionally) generous on the margins because the overall structure is good for them.
I would never look at someone coming to me with a $7k contract thinking "maybe I could stretch this out to several months and $40k." It's not worth the heart burn. I've only ever seen that scenario when a client couldn't be talked out of scope creep.
Unfortunately this agency was the other type. They're bad for the whole industry because trust is such an important factor and it's a challenge for clients to know who is happy to make a bunch of money for an honest hour's work versus who wants to cheat the already generous system.
> For example: I see hourly billing, and bug fixing counting as billed hours. How has the agency an incentive to keep bugs low if it makes them more money?
More importantly, why is a bug on code they haven't even delivered yet considered your responsibility. This is not billable hours, this should be included in the original feature hours. If he were requesting a new feature and calling that a bug, sure. But it sounds like they were the one's introducing new features against his protests.
Slightly tangentially, this is why I refuse to do work with companies that strictly bill hourly. Give me a project estimate with strictly defined scope. Split the deliverables up into three-five milestones (so either party can cut and run if things are not going to plan) with partial payments on milestone completion. Hourly billing comes after for support contracts and supplementals.
I was a consultant for a while and this is true. We usually had one or two empty suits per project that survived by getting buddy buddy with the clients. It was kind of a symbiotic relationship with the superstar devs. The superstars did nearly all the work and the buddy buddy devs helped keep the clients happy. But ultimately you're paying a lot of money for someone to be your buddy.
> Tip: Do not take the developers they give you/have on the project. Interview all of them and reject the bad ones.
This is really good advise and probably will save many people months of headaches. You wouldn't just hire someone random HR throws your way, why do that with an agency you've never worked with before?
> why do that with an agency you've never worked with before?
I don’t see how this works? You ask agency for a developer for your project, you get a developer for the project. Will you just withold payment if they don’t use developers you like?
No, you go "I'm sorry but we're paying you for quality work and the dev you assigned us is clearly a junior dev. If you do not have the capacity to do this job then we would have preferred you simply stated this up front" and then you don't "withhold payment", you make it a contract condition and you terminate the contract and find someone else.
It has nothing to do with developers you _like_, but with developers who are going to deliver what has to be delivered in the timeframe set out in the contract. If an interview shows they're not going to be able to, then the company did not provide you with developer to do the work, they provided you with someone who can't do the work.
The agencies I've worked actually all let me interview the dev(s) before the contract was signed. If someone didn't seem a good fit we would either get another candidate or renegotiate rates.
This was for augmenting an existing team though, things are different if you outsource a whole project.
outsourcing is usually done so leadership has somebody to blame if their idea fails. Same reason companies like McKinsey exist, usually some exec just uses them as the way to actually implement what they want without directly fighting via internal company politics. If it succeeds, they take credit. If it fails, blame the contractors/consultants
With how templates, design, and code work on the Internet now looking at a portfolio does little to reassure people of capability.
I run a web design company myself, and the best customers to work with are ones that are decisive rather than needing to be sold an idea for design. Also great are customers that realize that design can be changed later or that precedent in functionality, message, and content rank foremost above site design.
With any web dev project it's best to plan what can be done in short phases rather than in huge project launches. We learned from the chaos in Healthcare.Gov (not our project of course) that huge product launches overwhelm teams, face huge delays, and also can result in chaotic deployments.
Great leaders that are decisive, studious, considerate, accountable, and calculatedly adventurous are the best customers and I enjoy working with them, also written agreements/contracts are essential to being on time and on budget.
In "WebAgency's" defense though, their illustrations do better depict the use of your product, despite perhaps the images not being very flattering.
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome on our end as a web design company is marketing, as compared to other companies (larger agencies that do web design). They spend a lot on marketing, and thus that is what makes them even more expensive to hire. These large companies also retain developers and split them across projects, so accountability and focus are at times not as good as what a dedicated development team and project manager could provide.
The #1 tell for the risk involved in dealing with a design project is the complexity of the proposed solution. It doesn't not seem that this project was meant to be that complex.... I was shocked by the $45k price tag. It's at least a good thing that I guess the company looks quite profitable.
I might be charging my customers way too little on the other hand though... :P
And what is the solution? Essentially at the end of the day you want to design: effective labour as service. If only it was this simple we would have it already. Not saying you should not put important clauses into contract to perhaps later have some backing in court, but...
Essentially, I think it's good to not treat business parties as friends. However, I would put a lot of attention into this relationship to increase common/shared understanding. For as long as we think we have common understanding and somehow at the end of the day I makes me very unhappy -> I might give it a one more try and do another session of explaining, but finally I will just switch if it happens to often.
Good consulting companies that are able to think long term realize that good employees doing good work, getting good reviews, and getting recommendations are the key to a sustainable business. Getting fired is expensive. A consultancy that checks all those boxes is going to be expensive though. Maybe more expensive than just hiring your own.
I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on Tailwind CSS) template generators which will produce results superior to the pages you received.
Sure, you'd need to hire someone to do the logo and the custom icons, but I am certain that would not cost you anywhere near $46k.
Furthermore, I cannot comprehend how this actually happened even if you shared all the details. Holy shit, for $46k you could have gotten the spaceship-equivalent of a design from someone who actually loves what they are doing.
Mate, $46k is annual salary for A LOT of people. In the amount of months that it took for them to "finish" the project, a junior dev could have picked up design chops and done a 10x better job at this.
Just wow....
ALSO A QUICK EDIT:
If anyone needs design work done (best I can do is a checkout page with a bunch of unstyled ordered lists) my pricing starts at $40k per 8 months, which is a lot less for what the author's company was charging him.
In my opinion, you're not paying $175 for a good looking page. You're paying that premium for an expertise in what will convert, how to build a funnel, and what to measure. I can pay a guy $60/hr in India, and get something that looks decent.
Except the name of the game for agencies is to book a big expensive project and farm it out to entry level employees (dev and designers) with just enough supervision to be better.
Then have a fun enough office to try and keep people around in an extremely high turn over industry.
It is what almost everyone is doing unfortunately who gets big enough to carry a team.
The best designers and developers also don't tend to want to do contract work like this.
I don't know where you got the idea that this agency has any experience in design conversions or building funnels, but I won't dismiss your comment entirely.
From a design standpoint, my biggest gripe is with the first two sections on the landing page design. I mean, it quite literally looks like either the site is reselling (drop-shipping) or it's a knockoff scam. At no point did I get the impression of "brand identity" or "this product looks trustworthy".
Which means that the primarily source of sales for this product is word of mouth (reputation), and to be fair I wouldn't be surprised if this agency just realized that themselves and exploited the whole idea.
If reputation is how you get sales, then why give a shit about building a brandable design. A design that actually converts and is possible to measure in long-term.
> I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on Tailwind CSS) template generators which will produce results superior to the pages you received.
Well he had a 32% increase (vs. the previous month) in June [1]. I'm not sure how the increase was calculated but I don't think see how you can attribute 40% to the redesign - the graph is already up and to the right ;)
I do not as global warming has caused my servers to dissolve into ash particles. You can try to find me in your favorite code editor (I live there now), but alas...to answer your question - if you are genuinely curious about the type of work I can do, please see Cameron's World[0] as it best reflects my approach to brandable (and sustainable I guess) web design.
I'm more impressed honestly, that people are willing to pay $400,- for an remote KVM device.
Whats your overall margin? I would assume that you are able to build it for $100,-?
But yes i think you did not had enough experience working with agencies. They oversold you as the sales people usually do and than you fix their issues. You should have stoped as soon as it was clear that they lost some agreements when moving from the nice ceo to the developers.
I was working for a company who was doing development for other companies. The team setups are cost optimized. Like the dude who smokes weed every day and only gets 45k / year salary but is sold as a fulltime senior developer. Or the working student who has 2 years frontend experience but 0 years <insert your JS Framework of choice> experience who might get sold as junior or normal developer.
Or people who are part of your project for 2 month, the company knows that they will go on maternity leave and they just replace one but neither tell you that or really assume thats just fine. Its not fine. They need again time to onboard and it costs you money.
All of this is more or less shitty, but the companies going to contractors normally offload all of software developer hiring, onboarding, teaching etc. So its a tradeoff. A trade off companies have to decide on.
But i would never ever do this as a small company as you are, ever. And i only did this with a small company who was having 5 employees with a very clear target architecture and specific goals. And they also tried this shit on me with the 'i have someone who doesn't speak that well german or english and is not that good but we can offload him on that project' and i spoke up after 1 week because i'm not paying for someone i can't communicate issues clearly. Red flag alert was there immedidatly.
Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I've never seen it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients tripping over themselves to hire us.
That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to time just for portfolio or on the prospect of a "foot in the door" for a bigger account and we actually struggled mightily to scale down. We were used to large teams of dedicated specialists and didn't have geneslists who could wear all the hats at once. I'm wondering if this agency had the same problem.
Another sign that we are in tech bubble. The guy was asking for the redesign of 3 pages + a logo. Landing page, shopping cart and checkout for one (!) product he sells. This is such a standard, run off the mill application why wouldn't a decent agency have something ready in their drawer where they just have to adjust the CSS to make it look unique. How isn't this process completely tried and figured out after 30+ years of ecommerce?
> Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k
These times are way overdue to end and it seems like they are ...
Probably the opposite actually. The first victims of a recession will be consultants. The agency in question is probably used to much bigger clients, but was willing to do something much smaller because the sales pipeline dried up. And then they brought a heavyweight approach to a tiny project and failed.
The heavyweight approach is absolutely mandatory when dealing with larger corporate clients or when you're trying to really bring something unique. You may be surprised who hires agencies for this kind of stuff, because past agencies had keystone accounts worth millions per year from giant tech companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. They don't ask to put a template on WooCommerce, they ask how to find, engage and retain new customers and differentiate themselves from everyone else.
No we did it almost all in-house. It's a pretty competitive space, there's like 20 A-list agencies that operate at that level and 100 others a notch or two below. We frequently ended up working on site with clients, we couldn't hide anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=3
I just mention this because for a thread this large, it is unusually good. (And yes, we're still going to solve this paging business and then there won't be any more of these annoying notices.)