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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
>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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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".
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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
>
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadCafe. Sriracha HOT chilly sauce.
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.
[0] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/01/09/photo-essay-apple-a...
That does not seem to be your initial question…
Sorry, the “Cafe.” in my post should read “cf “ but it got autocorrected.
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).
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.
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 think your last two paragraphs comprise one of the most succinct and on point descriptions of the current major pathology that I've seen.
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.
You got tricked. You got scammed. Whether it was through their excessive incompetence or their active malice. You should name and shame.
The new design looks like a random free template. It‘s ok, at best.
You are a victim here! Don‘t you see it?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064809 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxgOY2Ms-YI
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.
The photos on https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-voyager2 are good. Put them on the home page.
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.
And because I like to do free QA testing, here's a bug :) 1. Go to https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions. 2. Click the first "Read Instructions" button. The URL changes to https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions/voyager2/v2 . 3. Click Support -> Product Instructions. 4. Click the first "Read Instructions" button again. The URL changes to https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions/voyager2/instructions/... which shows "Page Not found".
Try reading that image from the website on your smartphone. It's very hard to see what's going on.
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.
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.
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 photos on https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-voyager2 are good. Put them on the home page.
Sidenote: these are actually computer-generated, not photos. Good right?
>And because I like to do free QA testing, here's a bug :)
Ah, good catch! Thanks! Fixed now.
You look at the data. If you think the increased sales are due to the site redesign vs some other variable - well there's your answer.
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 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.
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:
https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/11/#simplifying-to-ju...
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.
Like any campaigns, newsletters, ad buys etc?
How do you know the new design is the the correlated cause of the revenue influx?
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.
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.
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.
People hate changes to their workflow.
Warm greasy potatoes with a bit of crunch are always good.
In 30 minutes? Not good fries.
Consistently mediocre (3/5, thoroughly passable) is the value prop of fast food.
I even went to the current winner of ‘best fish and chips’ that year, in Whitby. Argh.
I mean, yes, but still, I want my potatoes crunchy, not soggy and oily.
Infact Thailand burgers are VERY salty...
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore-hear...
Taiwan has burger king burgers with peanut butter on them...
https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805
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.
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.
I am not so sure, they are turning system preferences into an iPhone app on macOS.
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.
I'd love to get an example of what you mean?
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The other day I had to cross a little tunnel and I couldn't put on the light on the phone until I rebooted it -_-'
Wonder if OP could A/B test the two designs?
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.
[1]: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-...
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.
I hope this was two decades ago because people absolutely should know by now that doing this has the potential for a huge impact.
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.
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.
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)
Pesky morals.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
Actually almost everyone I ever worked with was like that.
All the exceptions were agency/consulting people.
Their job is bleeding people dry. Period.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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 is still using time ineffectively. If they are working on something other than what needs to be done, that is the same as doing nothing.
How many hours did they charge for that? I would imagine that it would take more time to commit 8 times than to actually change this…
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:
https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/pull/745
I think if you're happy with this, then OK. For me, 2 hours is an awful lot of work for this.
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 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:
https://mtlynch.io/freelancer-guidelines/
> "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.
Doing their jobs well for their own boss means getting as much cash from you as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-orange-juice-test/
It's just not a business where a project can succeed despite an adversarial partner. Both sides need to grow together.
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?
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?
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.
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!"
! 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Man, you’re really overpaying if you think an Indian designer would be $60/hr.
That would be more than the annual salary of a senior FAANG engineer.
I primarily code in Python so that's why the weird domain name.
[0]: https://www.cameronsworld.net/
[1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/07/#tinypilothttpstin...
Where are they?
[0]: https://shuffle.dev/
> 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'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.
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.)
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'm pretty such I could have had the whole project finished within a couple of weeks for around $5k
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
After much creative destruction, we're back to inserting classified ads next to the stuff people are reading to pass the time.
Did you miss the part where it led to a very large increase in sales?
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.
but at least that mechanic probably would have done the re-gassing first.
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.
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 :-)
That's the biggest take away here. Unless you have a unique need, use an off the shelf solution.
That's why. It also tones the "customer nitpicking every detail" way way down, when you can only pick from set choices.
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.
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.
It's a better bet than paying $40,000 for a basic website, what about maintenance. What happens when he needs to update the site ,?