[HN Gopher] I Regret my Website Redesign
___________________________________________________________________
I Regret my Website Redesign
Author : mtlynch
Score : 1137 points
Date : 2022-07-21 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mtlynch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mtlynch.io)
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of
| the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did._
|
| I hope this was two decades ago because people absolutely
| should _know_ by now that doing this has the potential for a
| huge impact.
| jessermeyer wrote:
| Was there ever a follow up to help determine why? Were repeat
| customers returning and panicked when they saw a new, and
| unexpected, layout change?
| MaxPengwing wrote:
| Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the
| years, but this is the reason why they do it.
|
| People hate changes to their workflow.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| 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.
|
| Infact Thailand burgers are VERY salty...
| spcebar wrote:
| I wonder if this is an intentional choice to adapt to the
| tastes of local markets?
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I would assume so, Singapore for some reason HATES salt.
| They don't put salt on fries from mcdonalds, so you
| always end up with a bag of soggy fries.
|
| https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore-
| hear...
|
| Taiwan has burger king burgers with peanut butter on
| them...
|
| https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805
| tillinghast wrote:
| Throw some sriracha on that BK PB burger and that would
| be _magnificent_.
| exikyut wrote:
| * _Adds "peanut butter and sriracha" to list of
| improbable combinations to investigate_*
| goodoldneon wrote:
| McDonalds' fries are actually good. But point taken
| beckingz wrote:
| They're hot fries.
|
| Warm greasy potatoes with a bit of crunch are always
| good.
|
| In 30 minutes? Not good fries.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| I'm a sucker for thin, salty fries. I know they're low
| quality but my mouth enjoys them
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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.
| beckingz wrote:
| I've eaten some potato based food crimes in my day.
| Agreed that Belgium has consistently good fries
| everywhere.
|
| Consistently mediocre (3/5, thoroughly passable) is the
| value prop of fast food.
| lostlogin wrote:
| What they do in the UK is horrifying. The soggy oily mass
| that you eat with a prong thing.
|
| I even went to the current winner of 'best fish and
| chips' that year, in Whitby. Argh.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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.
| rolisz wrote:
| But unfortunately not true in other countries! In Hong Kong
| the menu is very different and even the fries are
| different!
| ridgered4 wrote:
| You can eventually learn to use a bad UI, but you'll never
| learn a constantly changing one.
| valleyer wrote:
| Quite to the contrary, Apple makes gratuitous changes to the
| UI of their OSes on an annual basis.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over
| the years, but this is the reason why they do it.
|
| I am not so sure, they are turning system preferences into an
| iPhone app on macOS.
| killion wrote:
| That is why I was hoping the article would have the conversion
| rate of the website before and after the redesign.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| There is a graph at the bottom that shows the conversion
| before and after the redesign.
| killion wrote:
| Thanks! Sorry I had missed that.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| blt wrote:
| Android 12 was a complete disaster.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| This is why I hate all these websites that keep A/B testing.
|
| Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design,
| completely disorienting me.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > 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.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| 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
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| 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.
| deaddodo wrote:
| 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).
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| TrickyRick wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-
| case-...
| mgav wrote:
| 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.
| papito wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| I live through this every 2 years:
|
| - Marketing team decides they want a new site.
|
| - I tell them when/how we can schedule it.
|
| - They decide they want to go outside so it can get done
| "quicker" by "professionals."
|
| - It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to
| work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of,
| it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's
| primary resolution.
|
| - It takes 6-10 months of "clean up" to make the site usable.
|
| - Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even
| after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site.
|
| - My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because
| the entire team over there has turned over since the project
| inception.
|
| - We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly
| or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on
| their own.
|
| - Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months.
|
| We are an early stage startup. We've burned through almost 20% of
| the revenue we've ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully,
| finally, we've grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who
| will I hope put an end to this madness.
| lacrosse_tannin wrote:
| Do we work together? haha
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > We are an early stage startup
|
| It's no different at massive corporate behemoths.
| debacle wrote:
| But these kinds of mistakes can kill an early stage startup.
| corrral wrote:
| "Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry-
| picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when
| it didn't at all]" looks good on a resume.
|
| Your managers may not understand much, but they can
| understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at)
| before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may
| matter when promotions are available.
|
| That's _at least_ as true in bigco as in startups and small
| companies.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > - Marketing team decides they want a new site.
|
| That's your problem right there. And the fact that their
| decision is the company's decision.
| awad wrote:
| Ideally, who should decide what the public face of the
| company should be if not for marketing?
| einpoklum wrote:
| Let's not get into ideals, but: The different stakeholders
| in the website should agree on it, rather than just one of
| them deciding - as marketing is just one of a website's
| purposes; it's not merely a marketing tool.
| s17n wrote:
| Founder / CEO. A lot of people will respond "no the founder
| needs to back off and let the marketing team do its job"
| but on a decision to allocate 50% of the annual marketing
| budget, the CEO should be involved.
| zebraflask wrote:
| A tale as old as (Internet) time - I've seen this cycle happen,
| too.
|
| Tangentially, I have to wonder to what extent misapplication of
| Agile, and similar, project management processes is to blame.
|
| You'd think for most relatively simple sites, like we're
| talking about here, it ought to be planned once and built once,
| but something about the mindset that the goal posts can be
| moved during planning and development seems to drag everything
| out at length.
| qrohlf wrote:
| As a small business owner myself, this resonates. I would love to
| be in a position to be able to confidently pay money to other
| professionals to make problems go away.
|
| Unfortunately, my overall experience has been that hiring any
| "expert" in a field that I am not also an expert in has a 50%
| chance of working, and a 50% chance of blowing up in my face and
| creating more problems.
|
| I recently attempted to get a new accountant to help me handle
| some business growth. It was a person from a well regarded local
| firm, initial meetings were good, and then they proceeded to
| deliver none of the agreed-upon work, take 2-3 weeks to respond
| to emails (multiple times, I had to call their office and
| schedule an in-person meeting just to get a response), and then
| de-prioritize my business relative to other clients so badly that
| I wasn't able to submit my taxes until June.
|
| If anyone can successfully build a service that lets me reliably
| pick professional-services providers with the same level of
| confidence that I pick an AirBnb (not 100%, but pretty good, with
| an expectation for reasonable mediation and fallback coverage if
| the offering is radically different than what's described), I
| would happily pay a 20% premium on those services versus the
| existing "ask friends for referrals and cross your fingers"
| status quo.
| soco wrote:
| Upwork? I have okay experiences with people there - not perfect
| but in range with your stated confidence levels.
| dpedu wrote:
| Oof, this pains me personally. That $46k pricetag just about
| matches the salary I was earning in my first full time job while
| still attending college more than a decade ago. I was a web
| developer and between a designer, a content gatherer/editor, and
| myself, we banged out one or two complete websites a month. These
| were no simple sites either - dynamic, Drupal based, custom
| theme, stage/prod, self-hosted order forms, newsletters, other
| interactivity and even training the owners how to use Drupal.
| DBCerigo wrote:
| @mtlynch what tool/service do you use to enable the "TinyPilot's
| in-house developers report their hours at the end of each working
| session" part of your business's workflow?
| mtlynch wrote:
| I've never found a great solution for this.
|
| The screenshot in the blog post is from Deel, the platform I
| currently use to pay freelancers. I don't really recommend Deel
| overall. They make it hard to see aggregate hours over
| different periods.
|
| One of TinyPilots devs reports their hours through TopTracker,
| which is better than Deel but still not great.
|
| I wish there was a simple paid SaaS that just lets freelancers
| report their hours easily, but I think all the platforms that
| do it are aimed at bigger orgs or are tied up with payment
| platforms.
| hvs wrote:
| Having worked for an ad agency (and for a consulting firm) AVOID
| THEM UNLESS YOU ARE A LARGE ORGANIZATION WITH A BIG BUDGET.
|
| They are not going to watch costs for you. They are not going to
| have their "best people on it" (unless, maybe, you are their
| biggest client). And everyone working on the project is looking
| to get their billable hours in. The entire motivation of the
| organization is to bill as many hours as they think the customer
| can pay for.
|
| I met a lot of great people in those companies, but I do not miss
| my time working in them.
| [deleted]
| TIPSIO wrote:
| It's really not that simple IMO.
|
| If you look at the earlier mockups, they were just as good if
| not better. I also think they chose the wrong logo from the
| earlier mocks.
|
| If you are smaller team/org/business, I'd highly recommend just
| move as quickly as possible with the agency. Less opportunity
| for scope creep from them and let the creatives rock and roll.
| They will, without a doubt, want the project done as fast as
| possible. They will also produce the same work in 1 vs vs 2 vs
| vs 3 months.
|
| If you are bigger team/org/business, usually you are buying the
| "process" or "experience". So it's all mute and a team thing.
|
| If you are looking for both, you'll fail like they did here.
| danielunited wrote:
| The solution: hire designers who can code. It will save you a lot
| of time and money. They can design and code with Webflow at the
| same time. The front-end of this project should've taken 80-100
| hours at most -- including custom illustrations & graphics. P.S.
| I do that sort of thing if anyone's interested.
| A7med wrote:
| You got scammed
| pdimitar wrote:
| To OP: you're too charitable and optimistic towards people in a
| business context. If an agent has an incentive to milk you for
| money the odds are that they will. Math and history say and prove
| so.
|
| It's not even about the money per se. We all know sometimes
| projects balloon over budget but you had a very clear and small
| scoped project and yet you failed forcing your contractors to
| stick to target.
|
| IMO your mistake was:
|
| (a) Not calling out "Isaac" early enough and making a meeting to
| re-establish ground rules and produce a crystal-clear short list
| of priorities (you seem to have produced similar document --
| kudos for that);
|
| (b) Not demanding the first delivery in maximum two weeks after
| the conversation;
|
| (C) Accepting business contract that doesn't allow you to put
| financial pressure if you are unhappy with the results.
|
| I believe you mostly arrived at the same conclusion but in case
| you haven't -- _you are not friends with these people_. The "but
| we had this or that problem" flies only once, or, if you are
| feeling very generous, twice. After that you either threaten to
| sue or just cut your losses and leave.
|
| ---
|
| Your generic "we were just not a match" aphorism is setting you
| up for a similar occurrence in the future. Get rid of that
| mindset. It applies when dating or making friends, yes, but it
| absolutely does not apply in a business setting. You negotiate
| terms and when one side fails to stick to the terms, there must
| be consequences.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| The logo of the cute squirrel was replaced by some airplane clip
| art? Where is marketing in all this? Bad choice. A re-redesign is
| in order.
| crikeyjoe wrote:
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Props to you for hanging it all out there man. We all fuck up,
| the hardest lessons are the ones that stick. You won't do this
| again!
| ivraatiems wrote:
| The new version of the website breaks some fundamental - and
| easily fixable - rules of web design: No changes to links on
| hover, and dropdown menus don't appear on hover, only on click.
| If OP reads this, really recommend fixing that. It should be
| easy.
|
| Also, agreed with those who are saying that it's OK to stand up
| for yourself as a client. It's hard managing clients as an
| agency, and it's good to have empathy for people you work with,
| but that doesn't mean you can't push back on added cost or
| expanded timelines.
|
| Frankly, when someone tries to charge you more for something that
| is within the scope of work you already paid for, you can simply
| say no. Likewise, when someone tries to charge you for something
| you didn't agree to pay for, say no. That is maybe what needed to
| happen here.
| alberth wrote:
| My heart goes out to this guy ...
|
| For those unaware, the blogger left a high-paying job at Google
| 4-years ago [1] to start his own business and over those last
| 4-years, unfortunately, hasn't really made any money/profit [2]
|
| His blog is a treasure trove of insights and lessons learned
| along the way.
|
| Highly recommend for others to read.
|
| [1] https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
|
| [2] https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-4/
| DeltaCoast wrote:
| Thanks for linking!
| wafriedemann wrote:
| Wait what. He worked for Google and is not able to build a
| website like this himself?
| mtlynch wrote:
| I did a lot of Python and C++ at Google. I'd be able to
| implement a nice ETL pipeline for the website, but Google
| didn't pay me for my design skills.
| nickstewart wrote:
| I've worked at an agency my entire career (nine years so far)
|
| Looks like there was poor project management and internal
| communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking
| reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated.
|
| For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum
| (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn't be
| started until everything design wise was completed (we do
| branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the
| UI is on the same train of thought).
|
| But yea, I wouldn't recommend hiring an agency unless you want to
| be hands off or having x amount of budget
| dawnerd wrote:
| You pretty much nailed it. Also can't really hire a US based
| agency with US salaries and expect a rebrand to be cheap. OP
| also went though a ton of design rounds which is just throwing
| money away. It should have been capped in the contract to
| something much lower, like one or two designs.
| wafriedemann wrote:
| I like the redesign, but it looks like any other template out
| there. I don't see how this could not have been done by 1 person
| within a week (excl. content - content can take more time). I
| sometimes do this for fun and would have charged 500 bucks + some
| theme/icon/graphics expenses.
| repler wrote:
| It looks like this project happened at the early days of COVID.
|
| There could be dozens of reasons for the ways this played out on
| the agency side of things.
|
| You could very well have kicked this off a year earlier or a year
| later and gotten different results.
| bawolff wrote:
| > For most of the project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially-
| complete tasks. The cost of reassigning half-done work and
| spinning up a new vendor would be almost as expensive as starting
| over from scratch.
|
| The original project budget was 7k, and you ended up spending
| 46k, for something that didn't really deliver on what you asked
| for originally.
|
| It is really hard to imagine that it would have been more
| expensive to start over. It seemed clear by the middle of the
| story, that web agency wasn't doing what you were paying them
| for, at which point you increased the amount you were paying them
| in hope that would somehow change things, and then were shocked
| when they behaved exactly the same as they had before.
|
| There's times when starting over is more expensive, this seems
| like the polar opposite of that and a clear example of sunk cost
| fallacy.
| hitekker wrote:
| Yeah, I think the article lacks of a single, clear statement on
| why things it went wrong. It gets caught up in myriads of
| little reasons which I think distracts the author from arriving
| at a painful insight.
|
| His shortest section, left towards the bottom of the page,
| seems like an accidental example of rationalizing the sunk cost
| fallacy.
|
| > Firing WebAgency and searching for a replacement would have
| burned 30-60 hours of management time. And there was no
| guarantee that I'd find someone better. For most of the
| project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially-complete tasks.
| The cost of reassigning half-done work and spinning up a new
| vendor would be almost as expensive as starting over from
| scratch.
| frozencell wrote:
| That is very expansive, for a $100 a lot of teenagers could
| make it.
| somishere wrote:
| Previous agency hack here of many years (many agencies). Do not
| take anything communicated to you from businesses like this at
| face value. Ignore the tone. The Isaac's of this world are not
| your friend. In fact, they likely personally orchestrated the
| scenario and tailored the ongoing narrative. I realise how
| cynical this sounds, but I'm certain your Isaac would agree.
|
| Agencies (and Isaacs) have a place. They are useful for large
| orgs where certain expectations and business/operating aesthetics
| are demanded. Agency workflows and billables have evolved
| specifically for this climate of largesse. Buyer beware.
| mxben wrote:
| Is it just me who finds the old website design much better than
| the redesign? The new redesigned website seems to lack character
| that the old website had.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The logos look like stocklogos from Freepik - indeed I think
| Freepik has better ones. And $7k - yukes.
| J1859 wrote:
| This was painful to read. I'm sorry you had to go through that.
|
| The price is extortionate in my opinion, you should have 100%
| used a good, solo freelancer.
|
| And I'm shocked at how long they took to deliver that. This whole
| thing could have been done in a 2 weeks, a month maximum.
|
| Take it as an expensive life lesson and I hope your business does
| so well that many years into the future, you laugh about this
| whole incident.
| andix wrote:
| What I learned about doing projects: it's all about deliveries
| and milestones. Agree on them, write them down and then enforce
| them. Don't continue without getting the previous milestone
| delivered (at least 80% or so).
|
| And if you don't get what you agreed on, pull the plug. Even if
| you just have the slightest feeling of doubt, that something is
| not right. Quite often there is something very wrong already.
| lobocinza wrote:
| That reminds me that I should charge way more than I do.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I worked at WebAgency (not this one, another one) for 13 years,
| as a developer, designer, and in leadership roles. In my current
| role I'm on the other side of the table, dealing with contractors
| we outsource some of our product work to.
|
| Your experience felt really familiar to me, symptomatic of badly
| managed projects I've been on both sides of. To be honest, it
| felt familiar in a way that evoked some emotional feelings I have
| from working on those kinds of projects for so long! Very few
| people want to rip off a small business owner, or to have a
| client feel like they've been swindled. Glad I'm out of that
| game.
|
| What I'd like to add is that this can seem predatory, like Isaac
| was taking advantage of you, trying to wring you dry. That may be
| true (I don't know), but the same thing can easily happen when
| everybody has the best of intentions.
|
| It is up to a PM to pump the breaks if they see designers or
| developers burning billable hours on things that won't help the
| project succeed. The Project Manager turnover you witnessed, and
| the CEO backfilling for them, happens surprisingly often. There's
| a lot of churn with PMs at these agencies, at the ones I worked
| for it felt like we could never keep them around. Since the
| harried CEO usually makes a horrible replacement for a full-time
| manager, it's not surprising he dropped the ball in this case.
|
| In theory, it's also up to the designers and developers to manage
| their own time, but those folks are also often under pressure to
| be billing ~40 hours a week. If there is nothing for them to do
| but sit around, and your project is still active, I could see
| them filling their days working on unbidden ideas "to help you
| out". Again, I have no idea what happened in your case, but I
| have seen that before.
|
| At the place I spent most of my time, our version of Isaac would
| have probably have refunded you a lot of that money, if indeed
| they really were busy with big clients (my guess is that's
| probably a line he gave you). It's a feast or famine business,
| and in feast times we refunded hours generously, both because we
| lived off referrals, and because we genuinely did not try to
| bleed our customers dry. It just worked out that way sometimes...
|
| I will say that I think your takeaways from this experience are
| right on. I would also add that you _shouldn 't have to be the de
| facto project manager_, but in practice that is the safest way to
| make sure you get what you want.
|
| Meaning: schedule check-in meetings, find out what people are
| going to deliver and when, post up in their Slack, etc.
|
| Good companies will appreciate your involvement, as long as
| you're not acting like a maniac, and when I think back to the
| most successful projects I worked on as a contractor, they all
| had some highly active contact on the client side.
| bachmeier wrote:
| None of this is specific to a website redesign. If you have a
| small project, don't hire someone that does big projects. Full
| stop. I learned this lesson helping my father run his business
| long ago. There's a threshold where the business model changes
| from delivering a quality product to sucking as much money out of
| the customer as possible.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| > 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.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I've worked at a few agencies.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Kinda weird that their conclusion contradicts the whole post.
|
| > If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't. But despite all the
| missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I
| expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it's
| been closer to 40%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an all-
| time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the
| redesign.
|
| A simple website redesign increased sales by 40-66%, but you
| wouldn't do it again? Is the fact that it took longer and cost a
| few thousand dollars more than expected really that bad? That
| describes literally every software project in existence.
| samoppy wrote:
| gerdesj wrote:
| "Isaac proposed a rebranding rather than a full-blown redesign.
| That meant focusing on fundamentals like a new logo, color
| scheme, and fonts"
|
| The brief was for a website redesign and not a rebrand. Then it
| went south.
| sendfoods wrote:
| any details on how Tiny Pilot KVM works technically? As far as I
| understand, it's pretty hands-off. No configuring ports or ssh
| keys.
| pier25 wrote:
| Jesus...I would have charged like 10% to do all that work and
| still be happy about what I got paid.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Never miss an opportunity to advertise your product!
| kennydude wrote:
| Even from a general customer serivce prespective, this sucks
| massively. Working in web development myself, everything is
| agreed upon before work to start - not with the agency deciding
| to include additional items.
|
| It's incredibly shameful from this agency - they really owe a
| massive apology and should refund for the non-requested parts
| tbh.
| bagacrap wrote:
| the white and green (button) --- does that meet a11y contrast
| guidelines?
|
| I would say for a b2b company design probably doesn't matter too
| much. I think minor things like font choice probably affect a
| consumer discretionary brand much more than you...
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| The only degradation I feel is that, in the previous design, I
| could see what I was buying within the first fold. I find the
| illustration in the new design to be a bit too abstract.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| 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
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading! I'm glad you found it helpful.
| saiojd wrote:
| 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.
| orzig wrote:
| The decision to anonymize the agency is understandable, but I
| wonder about the systemic effects. Right now the reputation cost
| is born by all agencies, leading to a tragedy of the commons for
| shoddy delivery.
|
| But encouraging authors to name names would drag them into a
| public dispute they don't need, and disincentivize the many
| valuable lessons that _are_ in here. (THANK YOU! 90% of people
| wouldn't have pushed through the discomfort to share their
| learning).
|
| What is a system of public discourse that threads that needle?
| I'm sure "Isaac" feels a little bad, but has "don't pitch clients
| we can't service" shot to the top of his priority list? But
| again, I don't want to put more onus on the author who's already
| gifted me a lot of hard earned knowledge.
| orzig wrote:
| Can anyone give an anecdote about how costly (time and money)
| it is to pursue legal options in this kind of situation? I hate
| net-negative strategies, but (anec)data would be really helpful
| to many of us in the future.
| Lapsa wrote:
| seven months? "Don't hardcode price into order_spec.js" for
| $438.40? Michael, are you hiring?
| kizer wrote:
| I could have done this for like $50...
| Tengiono wrote:
| I'm more impressed honestly, that people are willing to pay
| $400,- for an remote KVM device.
|
| Whats your overall margin? I would assume that you are able to
| build it for $100,-?
|
| But yes i think you did not had enough experience working with
| agencies. They oversold you as the sales people usually do and
| than you fix their issues. You should have stoped as soon as it
| was clear that they lost some agreements when moving from the
| nice ceo to the developers.
|
| I was working for a company who was doing development for other
| companies. The team setups are cost optimized. Like the dude who
| smokes weed every day and only gets 45k / year salary but is sold
| as a fulltime senior developer. Or the working student who has 2
| years frontend experience but 0 years <insert your JS Framework
| of choice> experience who might get sold as junior or normal
| developer.
|
| Or people who are part of your project for 2 month, the company
| knows that they will go on maternity leave and they just replace
| one but neither tell you that or really assume thats just fine.
| Its not fine. They need again time to onboard and it costs you
| money.
|
| All of this is more or less shitty, but the companies going to
| contractors normally offload all of software developer hiring,
| onboarding, teaching etc. So its a tradeoff. A trade off
| companies have to decide on.
|
| But i would never ever do this as a small company as you are,
| ever. And i only did this with a small company who was having 5
| employees with a very clear target architecture and specific
| goals. And they also tried this shit on me with the 'i have
| someone who doesn't speak that well german or english and is not
| that good but we can offload him on that project' and i spoke up
| after 1 week because i'm not paying for someone i can't
| communicate issues clearly. Red flag alert was there immedidatly.
| jmull wrote:
| > Isaac... felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency's
| difficulty scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot's
| budget. Their typical client has a retainer in the range of
| $20-40k per month.
|
| I think Isaac nailed it. It's just a different mindset between
| providing a full-service development group and doing a focused
| update of a site for a small business (very small... one might
| say "tiny" :)
|
| But I think this was foreseeable by the agency, and they should
| have considered very carefully whether they could achieve what
| their client wanted before accepting the work (or gotten the
| client to buy into a larger scope up-front).
|
| BTW, these TinyPilot devices are very cool. I did a pikvm build
| to try something, but if I needed something like this for a real
| use, I'd probably get a TinyPilot.
| corrral wrote:
| Yeah, I know a couple agencies like that and they have the good
| sense to politely point tiny-budget projects to other--usually
| fledgeling--agencies. Mid-five-figures minimum or you'll be
| gently redirected to another company or a freelancer or
| something.
| richardkeller wrote:
| I run an software / creative agency in South Africa
| (creationlabs.co.za) that works with clients ranging from tiny to
| large corporates. What I've found is that the direction of the
| blame very much depends on which side of the fence you're
| sitting. One the one hand the client blames the agency for being
| opportunistic, while at the same time the developers get
| frustrated at what may seem like a never-ending list of
| unreasonable expectations.
|
| That's not to say that this is what happened here, but in both
| situations the problem comes down to a lack of effective
| communication.
|
| The agency here should have communicated from the start how many
| hours they can reasonably expect to spend on each phase of the
| project with the given budget, and then provided continuous
| updates to allow Michael to understand how much time he had
| remaining to complete the project. Opaque processes, coupled with
| a lack of transparency and communication is how projects like
| this leave a sour taste, or worse, fail entirely.
|
| On a personal note, I'm gobsmacked at both the hourly rates as
| well as the total project hours discussed in this article. A
| website like this should have taken a fraction of the time. And
| if outsourced to a professional team in another country, a
| fraction of the price too.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I would have offloaded the incomplete assets to someone on fiverr
| by the middle of the second month
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| hurry! Ask the WebAgency for a 50% refund or their name will be
| the HN frontpage.
| mountain_peak wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your story; as a developer/designer (more
| developer than designer; love C, no love for JavaScript), I hear
| stories such as yours practically everyday.
|
| What I really wanted to say is that I love your aviator gopher
| and the designer should have at least taken a shot at
| incorporating your gopher in the logo.
|
| I mocked-up a negative space [almost] one-colour logo with a
| close-up of a stylized gopher nose and teeth wearing aviators on
| a CRT green background with a brighter green cursor reflecting in
| the glasses. That ties in your history for continuity, modern
| pilot with aviator glasses, a cursor for remote control, and the
| green background as a nod to the past.
|
| Growing up on green and amber CRTs, I'm a huge sucker for retro
| designs, and try to incorporate Rand Paul's philosophy wherever I
| can, which captures the essence of a company in a clean and
| easily recognizable design.
|
| Edit: here's just the gopher for the curious:
| https://imgur.com/a/OEk8IUL
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| I'll take the blame for dropping the chipmunk. I wanted the
| logo to appeal more to businesses, and I felt like the chipmunk
| came across as too playful, so I told them not to bother
| preserving it.
|
| Your mock up looks pretty cool!
| wlonkly wrote:
| I love the airplane/shell prompt thing in the new logo,
| though. Having never seen TinyPilot before this, I had no
| attachment to the chipmunk, and I agree that the change moved
| from hobbyist to business vibes.
| mountain_peak wrote:
| Ah - thanks for having a look and responding with a nice
| comment. I suspected what you wrote after I posted, since I
| have many people asking for the the next iconic "f" or "G" or
| Apple, and I usually tell them that the logo should instantly
| recognizable as your own (for whatever that's worth). Paul
| Rand's (I think I wrote Rand Paul above!) "Thoughts on
| Design" is a great short book where he says, "...[a design]
| is not good design if it does not co-operate as an instrument
| in the service of communication."
|
| Above all, it's important that you love your new design (you
| mentioned that you do), which is great and positions you for
| growth in your target areas as opposed to "preaching to the
| converted," which is what I think you're implying with the
| chipmunk.
| dlandis wrote:
| > We'd never discussed custom illustrations, but it seemed like a
| small amount of work, so I let it go.
|
| > "To be clear, the project is still a rebranding and not a
| redesign, right?" I asked.
|
| It's a very interesting post, but when I read quotes like the
| above, it seems like such a strange way to deal with an agency
| you have hired to perform work for you. Think about if this was
| about a remodeling job for your house instead of a website. If
| you saw the workers suddenly start repainting a different room or
| redoing the trim when it wasn't in scope would you "just let it
| go"?
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Curious what others think of the icon progression? There was an
| article a week or so ago about how all cool/crazy/distinctive
| logo designs trend to boring sameness.
|
| The end design looks like something I'd expect to see on the
| Delta app I download when I fly and promptly redelete afterwards.
|
| My person favorite, for reasons I don't understand, is the center
| icon in the first column. I don't know why. I just like it's
| distinctiveness.
| OJFord wrote:
| I prefer it pre-colour too. I have no idea why they thought the
| ones that scream 'messaging app' were a good idea. The face
| ones are weird.
|
| I think there's two jobs involved really though, and (as an
| armchair expert who's never done it) that ideally you do the
| first one of roughing out an idea for what it should look like
| yourself. The second job is refining it, tweaking the edges,
| weight, choosing exactly the right colour, etc.
|
| Again as someone who's never had the luxury of having to do it,
| I think I'd request those things separately on
| Fiverr/Upwork/whatever and not pay a lot for it. 1) Here's some
| info about my company, give me 25 distinct rough sketches for a
| logo; 2) I like this logo, please be designery and refine it
| for me. You could even break (1) up and hire 5 people to give
| you 5 each or whatever.
| mountain_peak wrote:
| I think someone else in the thread from a design studio said
| it best: (roughly) "You pay a design firm to filter through
| all the designs and present a maximum of three to the
| client." The three should be wildly different, tested to some
| degree, but each compelling in their own way. Then you take
| the one that resonates with the client and tweak.
|
| Unfortunately, I have to agree with the parent that something
| "fun" was lost in the transition from the original logo to
| the new one. From the mock-ups, I can tell that the client
| definitely wanted to maintain the green cursor, which is
| good, but likely trusted the designers to know the market for
| remote KVM (which I've used for years), which doesn't conjure
| a physical plane - more of you being a pilot - in control.
| It's possible the client wanted to keep the logo really
| simple to make it 3D-printable.
|
| What's done is done, but just for fun, I mocked-up a logo [0]
| (posted on another response as well) that reflects the
| original character of the company in a modern format - at
| least to me. Corporate branding is critical, and nailing the
| logo has traditionally been a difficult task.
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/OEk8IUL
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| I've never had an experience with an agency that was better than
| hiring individuals. You end up paying a 20% markup + dealing with
| organizational headaches in exchange for skipping the pain of
| finding and vetting individuals with the right skillsets.
|
| The initial shortcut ends up creating way more problems down the
| road.
| saos wrote:
| This one of the reasons why I hate working with agencies.
| Simpletons that say "yes" to anything and charge a fortune for
| trash
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| It's super smart to turn a project disaster into free advertising
| for your website! I hope your gambit pays off.
| account-5 wrote:
| I think the old site looks much better than the new one. I'd
| definitely not be paying for any of that.
| hollaur wrote:
| wow. dying that _this_ design / "aesthetic" (If you could call
| it that) cost $46k.
| goatcode wrote:
| >I'm not trying to bash the agency here
|
| He should be trying to do so.
| normalhappy wrote:
| Wow. I closed my web services shop cuz I couldn;t find more work.
| My one client and I parted ways cuz I was too expensive ($100 an
| hour) to keep building their aws webapp to monitor patients
| weight and blood pressures (also they paid me about 8 months
| late).
|
| Totally appreciate the post-mortem and lessons learned at the end
| and I hope there will be NO next time for you.
| RadixDLT wrote:
| Please dont hold back on naming this company, the leadership is
| clearly inexperience, lack of.. creativity, communication,
| business etiquette, user experience, user interface design...
| shudza wrote:
| Rekt.
| shortformblog wrote:
| As someone who has worked at a content agency for a decade, let
| me just say: I feel really bad that this happened to you, and
| that scope creep is real.
|
| I almost feel like you needed to ask for three separate things: A
| brand identity, a marketing strategy refresh, and then (finally)
| a website redesign. That all three were combined into one process
| likely caused this problem to drag on. The agency had its
| problems, but to be honest to me as someone who is familiar with
| this space, it sounds like they were combining a lot of
| disciplines into one project without considering that it would
| have been better to chew smaller bites.
|
| There are times where you do need to bend the rules. At the
| beginning of the pandemic I sort of broke protocol to get a
| COVID-19 landing page on a client's site online because I knew
| that it would take weeks done the normal way and possibly would
| have led us to charge the client for something that a skilled
| designer only needed a couple of hours to build in WordPress.
| While the landing page wasn't perfect, it held up for nearly a
| year, and showed that we were taking things seriously at a time
| we needed to. A lot of agencies aren't wired for doing right
| beyond billable hours, so be mindful of the risks.
|
| Either way, I feel bad that you paid so much for a site that
| looks way better but doesn't feel like $46k worth of work.
| allenu wrote:
| A few weeks later, WebAgency called a meeting to share updates,
| but they hadn't made any progress on the logo or branding.
| Instead, they spent the whole meeting showing me design ideas for
| the website. "To be clear, the project is still
| a rebranding and not a redesign, right?" I asked.
|
| I'm sure the quote isn't verbatim from your meeting with, but I'm
| guessing your tone with them was similar. It sounds like you were
| speaking to them like you're both working at the same company,
| for the same boss, which isn't the right tone, IMO.
|
| You hired these people, so you should really be talking to them
| like you're the boss. Basically, dictate where their work is
| going. If it sounds like they're going off-track, that's your
| money they're wasting, so tell them, "This doesn't look like what
| I asked for.
| tristanb wrote:
| I could have knocked that entire thing up in three days,
| including building it. You just got a shitty agency. But an
| agency is never cheap. You'd of been better off with an
| individual.
| thih9 wrote:
| It's interesting how the author decides against hiring a cheap
| developer, but in the end still tries to get good service for
| cheap (i.e. hires a company that works with larger clients,
| expects them to offer same kind of service to him).
|
| Also:
|
| > If I had insisted on milestone-based payments from the
| beginning, WebAgency likely would have declined the project.
|
| Sounds like it would have been a good outcome.
|
| Of course it's easy to say all that in hindsight.
| sbmsr wrote:
| what i like to do is work with agencies for a limited trial
| period. i give them a couple of easy, medium, and hard tasks, and
| see how they fare. based on their performance, i hire them or
| move on to someone else.
|
| This helps me test the hypothesis that this is the right group
| for the job.
|
| That said, I don't know if that would have helped OP. It seemed
| like timing (End of year is always a slowdown due to holidays,
| and Feb-April are when other clients start ramping back up) was
| not on their side, but breaking things down into more bitesized
| work could have helped. Most of the work I saw was mockup/design
| work, which is more creative/subjective than your typical "Make
| button do X" kind of task.
| xwdv wrote:
| Sometime ago here I posited that America was business friendly
| because you could decide to simply not pay a company you weren't
| satisfied with and usually have no consequence. This is exactly a
| scenario where that would be useful.
| y42 wrote:
| 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)
| NomadicDev wrote:
| 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".
|
| Pesky morals.
| frankzander wrote:
| 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 1kEUR 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
| 1kEUR ... I want 5k" (no offense)
| mynameishere wrote:
| 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.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| 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)
| ren_engineer wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| deaddodo wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| >The agency is not your buddy
|
| 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.
| christkv wrote:
| I'm dealing with this right now where it's clear one of the
| engineers is burned out and needs to be cycled off the project
| for awhile.
| winternett wrote:
| 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
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > they have very different goals than you have
|
| 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!"
| mlyle wrote:
| > 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.
| corrral wrote:
| > 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"
| interactivecode wrote:
| 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.
| roguas wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| 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.
| boesboes wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| 8 commits to disable console logging in production?
|
| 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...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I think you're being very generous.
|
| "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?
| O__________O wrote:
| >> "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.
| boesboes wrote:
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| > I think I overspent on this project, but I attribute it
| more to poor communication and poor management than the
| devs working too slowly.
|
| 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.
| belter wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-orange-juice-test/
| matt321 wrote:
| >> motivated to do their jobs well.
|
| Doing their jobs well for their own boss means getting as
| much cash from you as possible.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| 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.
| ElemenoPicuares wrote:
| 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.
| treve wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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!_
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| 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.
| sdoering wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| atwood22 wrote:
| > 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.
| ErrantX wrote:
| Well in this exact case; the agency quite successfully
| structured things so that the billable hours were grown
| significantly beyond what was originally contracted...
| atwood22 wrote:
| 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.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _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/
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Thank you
| clairity wrote:
| 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.
| mgav wrote:
| 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).
| jrumbut wrote:
| 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.
| j4pe wrote:
| As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned
| incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly
| pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those
| incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business.
|
| Broadly speaking, it's not economically feasible for an
| agency to take contracts that pay $7k (or even $25k, for that
| matter - I've written about this here
| https://bonner.jp/posts/the-co-op-consultancy/). So if they
| can do you a favor, in their minds, by fixing your whole
| website instead of just three pages - and if you're willing
| to pay for it - then everybody wins. Right?
|
| That's the difference between a business relationship and
| being a friend: you may keep your mouth shut when a friend is
| being imposing, taking too much for granted, because you
| value the relationship. You would never remain silent in a
| business context when somebody is spending your money. It's
| business. They understand.
|
| On my jobs, I'm explicit about what I'm going to do and what
| I'm not going to do. If my client needs to scale, I'm going
| to talk them through options for caching and horizontal &
| vertical scaling. But if my client seems to be dragging their
| feet on customer development and making poor business
| decisions about which features to prioritize, well, that's
| not my role in this relationship.
|
| That said, I would never lead a client into a project
| backwards the way this agency did. Because I do value the
| relationship! In that I want you to come back, and pay me
| more money later. Not because we're friends. That's business
| honesty.
|
| This situation is definitely your fault - but only because
| you and your agency had different assumptions about the rules
| or norms of your relationship. Your agency poorly
| communicated their intentions, and you allowed that to happen
| out of a misplaced sense of friendly obligation.
|
| But hey, the new site does look great.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned
| incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly
| pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what
| those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do
| business.
|
| I don't know. It's a blurry line at best. If an agency dev
| team is really noticing that bug fixes are billable hours
| and that's causing them to relax their code quality
| standards since they'll be paid for bug fixes anyway, how
| is that not dishonest? Perhaps it's possible for them to
| not be aware that what they're doing is in bad faith, in
| which case you might argue that they're "being dishonest
| with themselves" instead of "being dishonest with the
| client," but it seems like a distinction without a
| difference.
| fourseventy wrote:
| Ya but your philosophy cost you $47k for work that could have
| been done in 2 weeks by a competent developer...
| dieselgate wrote:
| 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?
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| soperj wrote:
| At least then you'd have that person for the future.
| treis wrote:
| 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.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| 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.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| 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.
| ncallaway wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| ratww wrote:
| I have also worked with several honest people who were
| motivated to do their best, in the most effective way.
|
| Actually _almost everyone_ I ever worked with was like
| that.
|
| All the exceptions were agency/consulting people.
|
| Their job is bleeding people dry. Period.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _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.
| whatinthef4747 wrote:
| ncallaway wrote:
| > 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).
| deaddodo wrote:
| 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.
| ncallaway wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > 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?
| Aeolun wrote:
| > 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?
| sally_glance wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Nothing worse than being on a project where everyone is
| hostile to one another.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I can imagine one thing: a project that is overbudget and
| past deadlines.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Correct, though I'd argue if your new resource is
| hostile, it will not be productive for either party to
| work together.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| 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.
| jrumbut wrote:
| 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.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| The only thing that really sticks out as improved is the logo.
| branding is everything. maybe that new logo is worth the $46K it
| took to get there.
| fleddr wrote:
| "But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might
| justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase
| sales by 10-20%, but it's been closer to 40%."
|
| Should have put this in the beginning of the article.
|
| As for all the issues mentioned in the article, trust me on this,
| it's always like this. I've been that "small client" hiring
| externals at all tiers: mechanical turk, freelancers, agencies.
|
| You ask for A but get B. You agree on a timeline but none are
| respected. You can put your foot down but that does absolutely
| nothing, they don't need you. You're more like a hobby on the
| side.
| mrcartmeneses wrote:
| 40% increase in sales is phenomenal. If that's down to the
| redesign and not because of existing trends then it was money
| well spent
| dcow wrote:
| I've been through this exact same story during my home remodel
| with a ~~contractor~~ handyman. The problem as far as I can tell
| is that when you pay someone hourly there is exactly zero
| incentive to make those hours go away. I don't believe people
| intentionally try to abuse the setup, it is just doomed to be a
| common outcome because of the structure. If you pay someone
| hourly they want to spend those hours doing their best work to
| maximize the quality of the referral they'll get when they're
| done. It's too easy to forget that timeframe (i.e. budget) is
| part of what most people care about during a project. And for
| better or worse most people do prefer "better late than never" to
| "rushed and shoddy" so it's probably a fair bet for contractors
| to implicitly make.
|
| I also empathize with the author in terms of "why didn't you just
| do this and that" and the whole sunk cost fallacy. It's really
| easy to be on the outside and give the obvious retrospective
| advice that you should have fired X and switched to Y once you
| saw a few red flags. But that too, even if it makes logical and
| financial sense when you model it out still involves risks.
| There's no guarantee the next agency will be any better than the
| current so you're making a bet priced at the cost of treading
| while getting the next agency spun up. And ultimately humans are
| involved. It sounds like the issues with the project were being
| communicated and responded to during the project lifecycle so
| there's hope that the miss-steps will be corrected.
|
| It's really hard. The silver lining, in my case and the author's,
| is that hopefully, despite the issues, all said and done you'll
| get a return on your investment. For me I simply don't want to
| lose money I'm not in the housing market to make money, I just
| need a place to raise a family.
|
| The hard advice takeaway: if you have a budget and expectations
| about how a project will be delivered, you ABSOLUTELY NEED those
| codified in a contract. Shop around until you are willing to find
| someone who will agree to share the risk and deliver on a
| statement of work for a fixed cost. I understand in a competitive
| market this is hard because contractors and firms can easily go
| find "other" work. But the more pressure the better. Try
| structuring the project to have diminishing returns or financial
| penalties for being delivered late. Handymen or otherwise hourly
| arangements have their place for small jobs on the order of 1 or
| 2 days max 1 week of work. But hourly doesn't buy you any
| executive function: which is needed to manage hourly work. Keep
| in mind, in most cases, if these hourly people were skilled at
| executive function then they'd own a contracting firm, manage a
| team, and be profiting...
|
| The whole experience has really made me wonder why any startups
| pay salary before they're profitable. Because as many know, this
| happens all the time internally with full time salaried employees
| too. No incentive complete work until the very last moment
| necessary. Deadlines and punishments for not meeting them are
| incredibly important. I mean I get it, a salary says "I need you
| around for this much because otherwise my business doesn't work"
| so it emotionally makes sense and I'm not saying the industry
| should stop doing it. BUT, I also have a seen a lot of work be
| dished out to salaried employees when it could have otherwise
| been structured as a 5k or 10k contract with a statement of work
| and payment remitted upon completion. I'm surprised you don't see
| more of that blend. I guess SASS is kinda a stand-in but still.
| gorkish wrote:
| It's kind of strange that it wont let you join the waitlist if
| you are logged into an existing openai account.
| nkotov wrote:
| We used a design agency as well for one of our product logos.
| Come to find out, they just ripped off the Noun Project svgs,
| added some color, and called it a day. A lot of the agencies I've
| seen typically have enough templates already so it's to the point
| now that you just fill in some blanks, choose a color palette,
| add relevant graphics and you're done.
| unleashit wrote:
| As a designer-turned-developer, I find this topic and the
| comments amusing. I don't think there's much question that the
| agency in question treated the client terribly, and should have
| been fired post haste and early.
|
| That said, you couldn't pay me enough to get involved with design
| again in any way shape or form. The reason, as reflected by the
| comments and experience, is greatly increased customer
| expectations of the design process, number of expected
| mockups/choices, iterations, content changes, scope creep, etc.
| Even for small projects like the OPs, it's has ballooned to such
| an extent that many times it's practically impossible to know if
| something is going to take weeks or even years.
|
| 10 years ago when I last did design, if this author approached me
| I'm confident that I could have delivered a significantly better
| end result in far less time and at a cost similar to the original
| estimate. However, I would have be up front at the start (and in
| the contract) about maximum iterations and time spent before
| triggering the hourly rate. This most of the time anyway, worked
| pretty well to set the client's expectation to what I needed to
| match their estimate. I do understand that this wouldn't be
| palatable to most businesses anymore because it means having to
| be more trusting and flexible about the end result. Yet in almost
| all cases, I was able to please the companies I worked with and
| do it mostly on time/budget. Indeed, they sometimes had to
| compromise a bit but the end result as measured by revenue and
| traffic was almost never disappointing to them.
|
| I'm a big believer of listening carefully and delivering not what
| "I" want, but what my customer wants. That said, I also believe
| business should be open to the advice of design (and other)
| professionals, because that is what they spend all their time
| doing. If you're fighting stuff like color/font/design choices
| with your designer to the extent that you have to go through a
| million changes, you've either picked the wrong designer or you
| might also consider the possibility that you might not be
| effectively communicating your opinions and/or that they might
| not make sense.
| kypro wrote:
| I don't want to rub salt in the wounds here, but that design is
| extremely mediocre. The primary mistake here imo was to think you
| needed professional web design in the first place. You didn't.
|
| Professional web design is best suited to companies with a strong
| brand or websites with complicated UX/UI that needs wireframing.
| You're just a small business selling KVMs D2C. That doesn't need
| anything fancy.
|
| There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out there
| you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even better)
| than this. In recent years I've used them almost exclusively to
| generate some initial logo ideas then either made minor
| alterations myself (where needed), or paid someone a little to do
| it for me.
|
| Similar things can be said for web templates. There are some
| really good customisable templates for simple sites like yours
| out there today. I don't know why you'd pay someone for something
| so simple, especially when the design is so generic and
| forgettable (no offense).
|
| I don't mean to be so critical. The design isn't bad. The site
| looks clean and it's pleasant to use. It's just insane to me that
| your main takeaway here was that you should have hired a
| freelancer instead of an agency.
| [deleted]
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out
| there you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even
| better) than this. In recent years I 've used them almost
| exclusively to generate some initial logo ideas then either
| made minor alterations myself (where needed), or paid someone a
| little to do it for me._
|
| I've tried AI logo generators and didn't like the results. Last
| time I tried was 3-4 years ago, so maybe they've gotten better.
|
| > _Similar things can be said for web templates. There are some
| really good customisable templates for simple sites like yours
| out there today. I don 't know why you'd pay someone for
| something so simple, especially when the design is so generic
| and forgettable (no offense)._
|
| Even with a template, there's still a lot of work. Someone has
| to sift through all the templates to find a good one. Then I
| still have to pay developers to adapt my existing content to
| the new theme. And in my experience, template code tends to be
| pretty bad. Tons of inline style rules so that the page looks
| good in exactly that configuration, but it's not flexible.
|
| If I had to do it again, I'd still rather work with a
| freelancer than search for a template and adapt it to my site.
| porter wrote:
| I run a similar sized software business and found
| generatepress.com. I set up a wordpress site using their
| visual builder tools and pre-made components, hosted on
| wpengine.com so everything is always up to date. Took a few
| weekends, but this is more than adequate these days. Logo
| came from upwork.com
|
| I also feel your pain. I've had a bad experience with a top
| python/django agency that turned out to have a CEO
| "incubating" several startups to compete with Amazon, while
| also running an agency. I got bad vibes early but kept
| pressing on, and learned my lesson the hard way.
| knubie wrote:
| I'll rub a little aloe in that wound. I actually like the
| redesign. The illustrations are great, and overall it's a big
| improvement over the original. Worth the price? Perhaps not,
| but at least you have a better website now, and more
| experience dealing with agencies.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the aloe! Yeah, that's how I feel as well.
|
| I was expecting people to not like the new design but it's
| been surprising to hear how many people prefer the old
| design and logo. I think the new one is way better, and
| it's not even close. Not perfect, but certainly an
| improvement.
| pcurve wrote:
| I think the design came out pretty nice.
|
| But I would definitely hire a freelancer to do some
| visual clean up time to time.
|
| As site content is updated, I can already see evidence of
| site feel reverting back to 'mom and pop', 'maintained by
| webmaster' look in some sections / pages.
| javier2 wrote:
| I also think the redesign is way better, especially the
| product page and <<buy frame>> with prices.
| rexreed wrote:
| Why not Fiverrs?
| mtlynch wrote:
| I talk about this at the bottom:
| https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/#why-didnt-you-just-
| fi...
| rexreed wrote:
| I see cheap $4/hr developers, but I don't see anything
| specific about Fiverrs. Are you lumping them in together?
| mtlynch wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I don't mean literally $4/hr, but just any developer
| whose distinguishing feature is being cheaper than most
| other developers.
|
| I thought that was Fiverr's brand.
| rexreed wrote:
| That's not their brand, at least not in the past 5 or so
| years. I've had significant success with Fiverr, many of
| which are not the cheapest. Certainly you can find the
| cheapest if that's what you want, but that's on any
| freelance platform.
| koshergweilo wrote:
| > There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out
| there you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even
| better) than this.
|
| How have I never heard of these. Which ones are good though? I
| couldn't find any free ones
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| There aren't any good ones. Everybody who recommends these
| must not have any sense of branding or design whatsoever.
| theden wrote:
| This one looks good https://logomaster.ai/ not free but you
| can make one for < $50
| javier2 wrote:
| I am gonna disagree, this looks like ok money spent. A bit
| expensive, but I know for sure I am unable to do that UX and
| design myself.
| ThalesX wrote:
| If you have more money than time, you're not going to start
| shifting through templates, configuring stuff, dealing with
| bugs, updating it, generating strange AI logos etc.
| ls15 wrote:
| Even if the alternative is dealing for months with a design
| agency that is creating a three-page website?
| ErrantX wrote:
| I'd say the author is being generous to the agency and Isaac.
|
| There is easily a version of this where the agency has landed on
| an excellent strategy for milking 7K for 6x their spend.
|
| At best (generously assuming the agency's retro is all true) the
| CEO, Isaac has been greedy or naive in taking on work they
| clearly weren't set up to deliver.
| system2 wrote:
| He is making so much money and forgot the reality. He received
| a $2,000 website at best and kept dumping money to the
| "agency". It is sad people are getting scammed like this and
| think it is normal.
| incogitomode wrote:
| I'll take a contrarian position here. You paid for professional
| services that you could afford, you got them, and they made you
| more money. It's the definition of a good investment and a
| successful project.
|
| Will also add that based on the happy conclusion of your story
| the title is almost clickbait -- and highly effective clickbait
| at that, since you've now gotten 1000s of targeted HN eyeballs. I
| can't imagine how much that would have cost you!
| epolanski wrote:
| That only worked because op had another 39k to throw at the
| problem.
|
| Imagine if he did not, and he ended with no redesign and no
| money and needing to find a lawyer..
| sbf501 wrote:
| Unrelated to the website discussion, the last link showing it is
| still negative profits after spectacular revenue increases is
| scary. This looks like a great product at a great price point,
| with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?!
| bradgessler wrote:
| These days when I build a website, I design them with the mindset
| that I want to subtlety troll the web design zeitgeist. As such,
| most of my designs these days are inspired by resources like
| https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and
| http://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/
|
| Let's look at how I applied those towards my sites:
|
| https://legiblenews.com/ is just a mother fucking website, with
| dark mode. It's responsive, accessible, and fast. So fast that
| it's unofficially the fastest news website on the planet
| https://legiblenews.com/speed
|
| https://www.thingybase.com/ is full of childish sketches that I
| made on my iPad Pro. Each sketch took maybe 30 minutes. It's fun.
| It's whimsical. It's a website that's not taking design too
| seriously, but it works, is fast, and is usable. It's also modal
| free, with the exception of the Rails deletion confirmation
| dialogs that I'll be replacing with an undo.
|
| And finally my absolute worst designed website is
| https://www.imageomatic.com/, which is alpha at v0.1, is a super
| lame sketch with a handwritten tagline.
|
| I am trying to prove a point that people overthink design. What
| matters is if the product is useful, usable, and if the design
| looks authentic to the people and company behind it.
|
| Inauthentic design is when small companies throw gobs of money at
| their sites or applications trying to make their websites look
| like a billion dollar company, like Stripe.
|
| Authentic design is when a small company, like mine listed above,
| don't try to pretend they have a huge design budgets. Inevitably
| when small companies pretend they have a big design budget, they
| end up with something that starts looking janky over time because
| the funds and people needed to maintain it aren't there.
| NomadicDev wrote:
| I like your philosophy. In fact, I think it helps in more than
| one way. When I'm comparing multiple projects, and they all
| have the same bland "MicroGoogFace" looking style, I feel like
| I've wondered into OpenAI's secret bot farm pumping out generic
| copy & paste versions of the same thing. When I see a page
| deciding to be unique with their design, I'm more drawn into
| giving them a deeper look.
|
| By the way, I like your news site, never heard of it before,
| thanks! And for your thingybase, have you looked into adding
| something like PaperCSS [0] to try the whole "sketchy" look
| together? Although you may be opposed to adding any css
| libraries lol I don't know.
|
| [0] https://www.getpapercss.com/
| bradgessler wrote:
| Yeah, I looked at that but don't want to go full-on pencil &
| sketch for the design of the thing. I'm actually planning on
| switching the CSS framework from Bulma to Tailwind because
| its much easier to deal with.
| 0898 wrote:
| I run a community for agencies (Agency Hackers).
|
| I wonder if a flat fee would have been the way to go here? Was
| that something you looked at?
|
| Also, this was an interesting post, and I would love to have you
| talk to our community about it sometime if you're up for it.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| so the question is, is it really that hard to start from scratch?
|
| You could have the top tier upwork freelancers for 60-100 USD per
| hour
|
| fully dedicated to your project
|
| Would it really be more expensive than a spaghetti touched by 10+
| people at an agency?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Sunk cost fallacy in action.
| SicSemperUranus wrote:
| Wow, as lifelong web developer, you really got fleeced. This
| reads like a list of rookie mistakes to be honest, but not just
| on your side. Agencies should know when they're too big for a
| client, and they often do. It avoids exactly this kind of
| dissatisfaction.
|
| And yes, they made money, but the hit to their reputation is
| usually not worth it if you're their smallest client. I dare say
| they probably didn't even do it on purpose, they just didn't have
| the bandwidth to actually care about your project.
|
| I've been looking at Scrum more closely recently, and I think
| this would have been a good use case for it (with you as a
| stakeholder). This goes toward your point of doing things one
| step at a time. Scrum sprints are short and deliver value
| consistently. Looking back, I wish I'd had to use it stringently
| while I was still working at startups; I believe we would all
| have been much better off.
| FrancizHam wrote:
| Hi Matt,
|
| First of all, I'd ignore all the haters in this thread. A lot of
| people on here are badmouthing the final output when in reality
| they're wannabe co-founders in the second year of their CS
| degree. They say they can produce a better output with less cost,
| I wouldn't be so sure about that.
|
| At the end of the day you made a torturous, exhausting investment
| that seems to be making fantastic returns for you. So at least
| you can sleep well knowing that!
|
| The part that sounds fishy to me is that at the very end of the
| 'rebranding' work he suggested that their you use their in-house
| developer to integrate the design rather than yours.
|
| As a developer I'd be pissed if my employer gave me some 80% done
| design mockups and told me to go integrate it into a codebase I'm
| unfamiliar with. Especially if I wasn't consulted or given the
| codebase before hand.
|
| They then marked the largest task as a one week job then took
| five weeks to complete it. It sounds like they used the developer
| as a scapegoat and continued to tie up all the design loose ends
| in those five weeks. That would explain why the developer started
| doing some minor bug-fixes within the first few weeks rather than
| 'doing the thing' because 'the thing' wasn't ready yet. I could
| be wrong, but if this is true, my heart goes out to that
| overworked developer. Hoping you're making the big bucks buddy.
| _ynmi wrote:
| I think I found them, might be heartbeat
|
| [link redacted]
| juniorholmes wrote:
| jer0me wrote:
| What makes you think that?
| nerdawson wrote:
| The author chose not to name them.
|
| Attempting to find that information and then publicly sharing
| it feels in poor taste, regardless of your opinion of how
| things went.
| _ynmi wrote:
| I didn't "attempt to find" them. I was considering working
| with this agency and the designs are eerily similar.
| nerdawson wrote:
| So, you've dragged the company into this, potentially
| tarnishing them in the eyes of everyone seeing your
| comment, based on a hunch?
|
| You didn't see a reference in their work examples for
| instance, they just happen to look similar?
|
| Firstly, I think if the author chose to keep it anonymous
| we should all respect their decision.
|
| Secondly, I find it incredibly inappropriate to be throwing
| out company names like this without any proof.
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| Poor taste is stringing along your client and fleecing them
| for every penny.
|
| That said, I'm not convinced this is the company.
| adenozine wrote:
| 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.
| pfalke wrote:
| The same applies within large companies. If you're within a
| business team, and you're requesting work from a design
| team/engineering team/data science team, you'll face the same
| issues with scope creep + churn + competing priorities etc. I
| wouldn't blame agencies for being bad, this is people being
| people plus a bit of other things. Anticipating and steering
| around/against these dynamics has been one of my biggest career
| learnings over the last years. The author has some good
| suggestions for how to do it -- if you work in a large company,
| take another look and ask yourself if they don't also apply to
| your work!
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I feel sorry for your experience. Glad you took it with stride.
|
| I always try to understand the business model behind agencies.
| What they do is selling hours or teams. The more, the better.
|
| I worked with so many agencies, for quite some it is almost like
| a meme: "Oh, your website/service/code is so crappy, we did not
| expect that! This means additional efforts you have to pay for."
|
| If you ever hear degradations like this, run! It won't get
| better, even if you pay for. They will always come up with
| another reason to charge for more hours.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| This is obviously a submarine for TinyPilot
| drudolph914 wrote:
| Kind of unrelated to the original article, but I feel like I've
| had this problem on a smaller scale. something I'm excited to use
| is DALL-E 2. I borrowed a friends access and tried to use it for
| my personal website redesign. It did everything I wanted and
| more. saved me $2K
| lxe wrote:
| > I'm not trying to bash the agency here, so I'll just call them
| WebAgency.
|
| Wow after reading this, I'd love to know who this WebAgency is so
| I can stay away. Alternatively I'm thinking of starting my own
| WebAgency and charge $7k to change button colors from green to
| limegreen.
| Graffur wrote:
| Well written and an interesting read. Thanks for posting. My
| reaction is "WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOING?" haha.
|
| I am not in the position to spend 46k on... anything but I would
| like to think I wouldn't be duped in the same way. All this
| "you're a small client" stuff is BS imo.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I have worked in and out of consulting and agencies for many
| years and I have a simple rule for hiring them when anyone asks:
|
| 1. Are you going to be one of their three biggest clients? If
| not, find a smaller agency.
|
| 2. If you can't find an agency small enough to be one of their
| three biggest clients, you want a contractor, not an agency. Put
| them on retainer for more than 50% of their time.
|
| Firms will bend over backwards for their largest clients because
| they do a poor job of tracking that it is _costing them money_
| when they need to fix a mistake. They just see one of their
| biggest clients is unhappy and they will lose them.
| skilled wrote:
| 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.
| duckmysick wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Where are they?
| gabrielizaias wrote:
| Here: https://tailwindui.com/templates
| mushufasa wrote:
| how does one contact you?
| skilled wrote:
| fartingwizard[at]hhhhhsssshssss[dot]dev
|
| I primarily code in Python so that's why the weird domain
| name.
| GingerMidas wrote:
| Professional, nice.
| mushufasa wrote:
| do you have a professional portfolio page or website?
| skilled wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://www.cameronsworld.net/
| [deleted]
| swalsh wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Based on the sales graph, it sounds like they didn't even
| accomplish that much.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| 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.
| skilled wrote:
| 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.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| > I can pay a guy $60/hr in India
|
| 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.
| bbreier wrote:
| wait what? 50 weeks * 60 / hr * 40 hr weeks = 120k yearly.
| what senior faang engineer is making less than that?
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Ones in India.
| codegeek wrote:
| "In India"
| gtm1260 wrote:
| He says he got a 40% increase in sales, so I imagine that takes
| the edge off a little LOL!
| yellow_lead wrote:
| 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 ;)
|
| [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/07/#tinypilothttps
| tin...
| whenlambo wrote:
| "Development: Items in my cart can have a negative quantity" --
| 2.32 hours?!
|
| "Development: allow console.log during development but not
| production" -- 2.01 hours?!
|
| Total rip off.
| NomadicDev wrote:
| See the retrospective call summary is insane to me. I wouldn't be
| able to do anything besides offer a partial, if not total,
| refund. I literally, fundamentally, do not understand how people
| can brush off such major mistakes with "Yeah, sorry, that was a
| misstep on my part."
|
| I've only worked with a handful of clients so far, but the number
| one thing I care about most is providing an honest service. I
| estimate rough timelines for each major task in my head, then add
| a few hours depending on complexity. If I go over that limit, I'm
| usually working on that task for free until it gets completed
| (unless there's some major flaw that is causing the slowdown,
| like previous developer bugs or slow responses from client). The
| client never sees this process, but in the end they see tasks
| being completed in a fair timeframe.
|
| If I'm noticing events are causing me to slow down on a client's
| work (by like a week, let alone the several months OP had to
| endure), I quickly communicate with the client to let them know &
| have us work out a plan.
|
| These aren't things that make me feel like I'm doing something
| unique in this space, because they just feel so simple & basic to
| how any working individual should conduct themselves. If OP was
| dealing with a fresh in the field freelancer, still wet behind
| the ears, then sure, I guess I can see how things can get away
| from you in your first project. But this is supposed to be an
| agency with big clients? And they had this many "missteps"?
|
| Insanity. Actual insanity. I'm not trying to rag on "Isaac" too
| hard here, I'm more trying to word my confusion on whether or not
| this is the norm for other freelance agencies. I hope not,
| because the recount reads like a shameful state showcasing the
| lack of care in this industry.
| sarahlwalks wrote:
| This is the rule and not the exception. It seems software always
| takes much longer and costs much more than you think it will. The
| smaller the task, the better it can be estimated, and the less
| likely you are to veer off into crazyland.
|
| The best solution I know would be to hire a team and use agile
| methodology to focus on the most important things first, breaking
| them down into small tasks. The team might be people you hire, or
| it could be people from an agency, but the project needs a
| strong, hands-on leader who is committed to the goal. I have
| never known a toss-a-big-solution-over-the-wall approach to work
| really well. Those projects can vary from annoying to completely
| dysfunctional.
| alangibson wrote:
| I've run into this phenomenon so many times playing entrepreneur
| that I gave it the name Alan's Law: getting paid to do a job has
| little to no influence on an entities ability to do said job.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Huge respect for your TinyPilot project (especially for the free
| version of the software over at https://github.com/tiny-
| pilot/tinypilot), but I think you were ripped off and not enough
| care/attention was given to your page :-(
|
| I'm not trying to be one of those people who say, you gave too
| much money for something I would create in 2 weeks with only 4k,
| but I'm trying to give a friendly advice to a fellow software
| engineer :-)
|
| Two things that should be fixed in revision 2.0 of your page:
|
| - If we select the "Product" option from the top menu, we're
| taken directly to the order page for the TinyPilot Voyager 2. If
| we go to the root page for the products
| (https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/) we get a page not found!!!
|
| - Although you're also selling something else, the TinyPilot Pro
| software (over at https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-pro)
| this isn't visible in the "Product" selection or from the main
| page. Maybe you should rename this selection to "Products" since
| you have at least 2 things you sell. The page for buying the
| software is only referenced from the Voyager2 page and from
| nowhere else.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| > _If we select the "Product" option from the top menu, we're
| taken directly to the order page for the TinyPilot Voyager 2.
| If we go to the root page for the products
| (https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/) we get a page not found!!!_
|
| Are you talking about if you manually change the URL? I don't
| think anything links to the /product/ route.
|
| > _Although you 're also selling something else, the TinyPilot
| Pro software (over at
| https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-pro) this isn't
| visible in the "Product" selection or from the main page. Maybe
| you should rename this selection to "Products" since you have
| at least 2 things you sell. The page for buying the software is
| only referenced from the Voyager2 page and from nowhere else._
|
| Yeah, we intentionally focus on the Voyager and bury everything
| else. We used to have a product catalog, but it made users
| confused about what they were supposed to buy ("Do I need to
| buy the hardware and software separately?").
|
| We consolidated down to a single product, and it roughly
| doubled sales:
|
| https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/11/#simplifying-to-ju...
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > I don't feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money
| out of me.
|
| From the article: > They were so excited about the project and
| got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they'd
| spent redesigning the blog.
|
| The management directed the designers to do that work, to see
| if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt,
| that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.
| runnerup wrote:
| I don't think this is universally true. Developers (myself
| included) often just do what they want regardless of what
| they're told and in a consultancy it has to be billed
| somewhere. Here, a client was cost a lot of money. But it
| might not have been directed by a manager!
|
| At large corps like MSFT and APPL, this behavior is often
| lauded by the hacker community because it leads to wonderful
| things like PowerToys and GraphingCalculator.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| > Developers (myself included) often just do what they want
| regardless of what they're told
|
| I don't believe this is true for adhoc work. There's often
| pressure to get a job done under time under budget to
| maximize profit. It's one reason I much prefer working for
| a service based company as there IS room to do what you
| want and push boundries.
| runnerup wrote:
| I did it plenty when I was working as part of a
| contracting house where "every hour is billed to a
| client". There's plenty of room to spend time making
| crazy tools to automate your work or provide
| internal/external/personal value.
|
| Sometimes these rogue gambits pay off and return
| multiples of value...sometimes they just waste massive
| time.
|
| But I can say that I was absolutely a rogue project-doer
| in an engineering body shop.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Good point, if youre billing every hour you can just
| squeeze the client. I've never worked in a place like
| that so I can't comment on what it's like.
| solardev wrote:
| It's one thing to factor in employee overhead -- whether
| it's "20% time" or vacation time or healthcare or just
| plain inefficiency -- into your pricing model. It's another
| thing entirely to take a client's contracted hours to pay
| for something they never asked for -- repeatedly, even when
| asked to stop. It's both a difference in degree and in
| expectations between paying for a monthly service vs paying
| for billable hours. If you're an agency and your dev went
| wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the
| client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one),
| you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better
| structuring their work.
|
| There's also a pretty big difference between spending a
| LITTLE extra time on a side project vs not even finishing
| the actual project because your side project became the
| main focus. This is probably OK: "Hey, here's that finished
| logo you asked for. By the way, we had plenty of extra
| hours left, so I spent an hour on this new design mockup...
| doesn't it fit in much better with the new logo? What do
| you think, should we consider expanding the project scope
| to pursue this, or drop it if you don't like this
| direction?"
|
| That's not what this agency did. They were more like
| "Ohhhhh yeah we still haven't had time to finish your logo.
| We need a few more months while we figure stuff out
| internally. Sorry, you're just not a high priority for us.
| But hey, one of our designers took half your hours and made
| this, check it out! Yeah, I know it's not what you wanted,
| but the logo person is busy. But check it out anyway!
| C'mon! By the way, if you paid us more, maybe we'd take you
| more seriously." What bullshit, lol... =/
| runnerup wrote:
| Honestly you hit the nail on the head here:
|
| > If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random
| stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless
| you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the
| costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their
| work.
|
| Additionally, if he was "such a small % of their total
| revenue" it should have been nothing at all to eat the
| inappropriately high costs on this project.
| bzxcvbn wrote:
| And "I've got a lot of my plate but let me see if I can
| squeeze you in" is one of the most obvious ploy of
| salespeople.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Don't change the design. It'd bloody annoying.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| What you needed was a professional logo design. An agency might
| well be the best place to get that done, although they may well
| use a subcontractor.
|
| After that, everything else could be done by a middling freelance
| designer with Squarespace. No web dev required.
|
| I don't necessarily think the agency had especially ill intent,
| but the way they work is clearly not accommodating of clients
| with restricted budgets and they should probably not have taken
| the job to begin with.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| $175 an hour lol. I know senior designers/programmers who work
| for a fifth of that in Europe. Perfect English, 5+ yoe I never
| understood why companies pay hundreds per hour to anyone. You can
| get equivalent talent for much less, if you know where to look.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Where do you recommend looking?
| O__________O wrote:
| From the article: "The real issue, [WebAgency CEO] said, was that
| I was their only hourly client. I would always be at the mercy of
| long-term retainer clients pre-empting my project."
|
| -- and --
|
| From the article: "They were so excited about the project and got
| carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they'd spent
| redesigning the blog."
|
| ___
|
| That's bait-and-switch in my opinion and might very well be
| illegal.
|
| My suggestion would be to immediately stop talking about this to
| random people on the internet and speak to an attorney
| specializing in contract law. Prepare a brief covering what you
| did in the blog, have copies of any emails, specs, contracts,
| etc. -- and have them clarify if there was a material breach of
| contract that would warrant damages and/or any evidence showing
| the web agency committed illegal acts.
|
| I would also be very careful about identifying the company, since
| they might file for legal damages. If the CEO's first name is
| real, I would immediately remove it from your blog and the
| reference to finding them on HN to make any claim you did
| identify them harder.
| cafetree wrote:
| This is so typical for some business to waste money and charge
| higher price. Like health care industry. As a dev, I also
| designed logo and webpage myself.
| __derek__ wrote:
| Contrary to the author's assumption about disincentives, it seems
| like terminating the contract may have been _why_ all the work
| suddenly got done. That 's when the author went from a customer
| to a potential threat. If the agency hadn't completed the work
| (including the "no charge" fixes after the contract ended), I'm
| guessing we wouldn't have gotten a pseudonym for the agency and
| project lead.
| mtlynch wrote:
| I'm not following. What threat did I pose to the agency after
| they had all my money?
| werds wrote:
| hey since looking at your site, i have seen about 10 of your
| TinyPilot ads. I am certainly not in the market for one of these
| and probably not that many other people who viewed the article
| site are, so i suggest you dial back on the retargeting budget
| following this hacker news traffic, save yourself some money. The
| hacker news readers who are in the market have already seen your
| best piece of marketing for the product today, this article.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! I'm paying per click, so I think
| that should still work fine, but I'll speak with TinyPilot's
| marketing freelancer about this.
| rexreed wrote:
| While the OP says in the post that he's not a rube, this whole
| post makes me wince and shouts "rube". There's no reason in
| today's day and age to spend this much or take this much time on
| a website "redesign", especially if you're a small business or
| one-person shop selling basically a consumer item. Agile
| methodology is key. Iterate quickly. Design / test / build
| quickly and iterate. Any long-term web design project is at high
| risk of being a waste of time and money. This has been an
| accepted best practices approach, especially for fast-moving
| projects for decades.
|
| It does seem like he learned his lesson and at the end he talks
| about how basically an iterative approach with lots of deliveries
| and low-cost testing is the best approach. And yes, it's the
| best-practice. But then again he learned an expensive lesson that
| if he had asked others about, would have gladly told him.
| Sometimes people need to learn lessons on their own with their
| own expense to realize that best practices apply to them, too. I
| find the lack of acceptance of methodology and best practices
| approaches very sad.
| pattle wrote:
| Stories like this make me think I should get back into
| freelancing.
|
| I'm pretty such I could have had the whole project finished
| within a couple of weeks for around $5k
| globalreset wrote:
| This is what reliably happens if you give one person project to a
| team. Seen this multiple times internally.
| lawn wrote:
| > I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this
| project. I don't feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze
| money out of me. We just didn't match.
|
| Sounds exactly like how people rationalize abusive behavior from
| their partner. "It was my fault he hit me" etc.
|
| That's because they did abuse you and ripped you off.
| rkangel wrote:
| > "Structure for serial, incremental results"
|
| This bit was the surprise to me that it was a new lesson to
| someone who posts on Hacker News. It's a lesson that
| 'conventional' project people haven't learned but it's Agile 101.
| It's the absolute basis and core of agile - don't do everything
| all at once, progressing together and delivering at the end.
| Instead do the first thing all the way through, and then the next
| thing.
|
| Doing it has many many benefits: You can stop at any time and
| have something useful You get to decide whether subsequent things
| you thought you wanted were actually right and can
| add/remove/change them You get to take learnings from earlier
| things and use them when doing later things[1] As client
| (stakeholder) you get actual deliverables so you can judge actual
| progress, with no room for 'fudging'
|
| [1] This is important and not talked about much with Agile. If
| you do Waterfall you do your design all at once and don't get a
| chance to learn any lessons. If you do Agile, you build the first
| thing and learn some more about your problem and the solutions.
| You are then better prepared for the second thing, which leaves
| you even better prepared for the third thing etc. This includes
| even changing what you thought you were going to do for later
| things.
| jwpapi wrote:
| I think the biggest thing that could've been done differently
| here is hiring through a platform. If you hire through a platform
| there is a third-party that controls that both parties behave as
| they should. All agencies and freelancers have tons of incentive
| to do good work and make the client happy. They basically live
| off their reviews. Also those platforms have escrow, milestone
| payments and many more useful things. I know people hate the 30%
| extra, but in my experience those 30% are actually worth more
| than the 70%.
|
| A good book on these kind of situations is "Skin in the Game -
| Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
|
| WebAgency never had an incentive to make you happy...
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| > 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.
| NomadicDev wrote:
| Agree. Fast is good, but content is better.
|
| 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.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| easrng wrote:
| I wouldn't call Craigslist "thriving", it's still alive but it
| seems like Facebook Marketplace took over a lot of what it did.
| projektfu wrote:
| 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.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| I respect the tone of this blog post. I pause to think how I
| would word this experience if it happened to me. Since it hasn't,
| I don't really know how I would react. However; having this cool
| composure to think through why things ended up as they did and
| how it could be improved in the future is something I hope to
| aspire to.
|
| "We just didn't fit" is a fantastic conclusion.
|
| The ego is one helluva thing, and a hurt ego with negative self
| talk can lead one down silly paths. OP is cool as a cucumber.
| AndrewVos wrote:
| Does anyone want me to build their website for them? I'll do it
| for 10k
| Dachande663 wrote:
| I've worked on the other side of this and it's the end result of
| any large agency that starts chasing the bigger clients. More and
| more time, effort, and money is spent on the
| ideation/thinking/design side to the point everything else just
| grinds to a halt. For executives on both sides it's great. For
| anyone who hasn't to _do_ something, it's at best pointless, and
| at worst poisonous to every other activity.
|
| As the author said, hiring a freelancer with specific goals is a
| much better route.
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| Naming the agency might give them more pressure to make it right.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| Michael, congrats on your product/market situation! Your new
| website is very good, it nicely communicates "tiny" branding, I
| could just put it in my pocket :) Thanks for making an effort to
| describe this case and what you learned
| deltarholamda wrote:
| You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep
| the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt,
| let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno
| and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use
| microservices and..."?
|
| Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is
| fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as
| fun and interesting. And, just as fixing bugs is tedious and
| boring, tweaking designs is tedious and boring.
|
| I've been on both sides for a lot of years, and I have to keep a
| sharp eye on myself to keep from spinning my wheels on
| distractions.
|
| Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine
| Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb.
| EveYoung wrote:
| _Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine
| Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb._
|
| Not that it matters in this context but wasn't it the other way
| around? Didn't Donato Bramante try to sabotage Michelangelo by
| convincing Pope Julius II to give him the Sistine Chapel
| comission, assuming that Michelangelo would fail (due to his
| lack of experience in fresco painting) and ruin his reputation
| in the process?
|
| So Donato Bramante was more a consultant recommending an
| overpaid design agency hoping to benefit from their failure.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I was actually thinking of "The Agony and the Ecstasy," which
| is on somewhat shaky historical accuracy footing.
|
| Rex Harrison whacking Charlton Heston with a stick because
| he's slacking on the ceiling is how all project managers
| should handle both devs and creatives. I hear that's how
| Larry Ellison does it.
| FredPret wrote:
| We've heard of Scrum. Now comes Stick
| einpoklum wrote:
| > a lot of technical debt ... let's rebuild the whole thing
| using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to
| Azure etc.
|
| For me, I'm the dev who says: "This codebase has a lot of
| technical debt. Let's get rid of all of the containers and VMs
| and kubernetes and artificial servicification, take it off the
| cloud, and refactor it into smaller programs which do the work
| efficiently and which can be built and run on basically any
| machine(s) and cooperate peacefully."
| ticviking wrote:
| I wish I knew more devs like you. My life would be so much
| easier if we could all think like this.
| hgomersall wrote:
| But definitely rewrite it in rust ;)
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder how you judge the tipping point?
|
| "Why do it in C when assembly language has been working so well
| for years?"
| kh_hk wrote:
| Following through the example, if assembly language works
| well, then there's no justification to do it in C. One needs
| to find (valid) reasons to justify such decisions.
| slingnow wrote:
| The tipping point would be when you can come up with a
| compelling answer for the question you laid out. You don't
| just rewrite it in C as a reflex to that question.
| [deleted]
| andrepd wrote:
| > Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical
| fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from
| scratch is just as fun and interesting. And, just as fixing
| bugs is tedious and boring, tweaking designs is tedious and
| boring.
|
| My god, that explains why modern designs and user interfaces
| suck so much. That, and the fact that many designers work off
| their gut feelings and personal subjective preferences, rather
| than systematic and evidence-based study.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense, I feel like this is more of a
| management issue, it should be the responsibility of the
| manager to keep everyone working on what is initially planned.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Yeah I sort of rolled my eyes at all the logo redesigns
| (especially as these seem to have come first in the process)
| but it seems Author was fine with it. It's an impressive read
| because Author (and Isaac to some degree) seem quite even
| keeled in dealing with everything.
| [deleted]
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| > seem quite even keeled in dealing with everything
|
| I'm guessing the money they lost in this endeavor didn't
| materially impact them.
| OJFord wrote:
| I know we don't know costs, but per the article it's about
| a month's revenue, and I assume it's pretty profitable. Not
| the first hire either, so the difference between 7k and 46k
| total over several months is not a lot in a way.
| designium wrote:
| I think it's important to establish clear goals before reaching
| out to freelancers and agencies. The agenda from each one is
| different than yours.
|
| I learned to get the team focus by writing a brief (commonly
| used for Brand Managers in big companies) to keep focus on the
| deliverables. That helps to avoid these type of issues.
| hinkley wrote:
| I used to think this whole pattern was just Chasing the Shiny
| with a heavy dose of aversion, but something I noticed was that
| on a redesign, the management tends to give you the benefit of
| the doubt for a while. There's a brief period where everything
| is easier socially before the ugliness starts up again.
|
| Getting a redesign approved can be the difference between
| having a long project on your resume and people asking you why
| you job hopped so much.
| latortuga wrote:
| I was ready to fire the agency the moment the author mentioned
| they were going off script and building whatever they wanted.
| This was a huge, blinking red flag for me. Why would you keep
| paying someone when they're doing work you didn't ask for,
| doing work that doesn't align with your goals, and ignoring
| what you say?
| mderazon wrote:
| You are right But it's not always a clear cut. Sometimes
| trades have "artistic integrity" for a lack of better words.
| Carpenters, architects and also programmers - The client
| tells them what to do, but they usually want some freedom to
| leave their mark.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I call this the being too nice mistake. It is like the
| customer that would watch an employee spit in their food and
| say thanks to them. Effective leaders do not fear
| confrontation.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| In this case it might be a case of being intimidated by a
| big agency. Isaac telling him that he was their smallest
| client had a "you're lucky we are willing to work for you"
| feel.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| > _I thought I'd enjoy service normally reserved for
| large companies despite my limited budget._
|
| Sounds like that's exactly what he got, tbh.
| [deleted]
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That seems to be the point where sunk cost fallacy strikes
| hard in the post to me. They had paid $X for "80% of the
| first milestone of work" and that sunk cost locks them in to
| everything else that happens. They seemed too fearful from
| that point onward that if they fired the agency and brought
| in a new agency or freelancer that they would start from
| square 1 and do all of the previous work (and spend) over
| again.
|
| The sunk cost fallacy suggests that sometimes is better for
| you if you should just accept existing losses, accept you've
| already sunk those costs and won't get them back, and move
| on. I don't know what their contract looked like with the
| agency, but an 80% of a logo design sounds like a perfect
| deliverable that you can safely fire the existing team and
| take the 80% deliverable to a new designer, _not_ start from
| scratch, and ask them to do a final polish step. I would have
| cut losses there, but of course it is much easier to armchair
| quarterback from hindsight and different perspectives than if
| you are in the middle of it fighting that gut feeling that
| you 've already invested so much and can't "afford" to cut
| losses.
| bequanna wrote:
| Which absolutely makes me think this was a well thought out
| con designed to prey on those types of fears and maximize
| the value extracted from the mark.
|
| Those lottery phone scams out of Jamaica which target the
| elderly in the US are almost the exact same scam as what
| was described here.
|
| Promise something, get them to send money, don't deliver,
| tell them you need more time/more money. Keep repeating
| until the mark walks away.
| allenu wrote:
| Maybe "well thought out con" is a little strong here. I
| see it as more likely the consulting firm has learned
| this behavior over time and it has rewarded them well. I
| imagine that if they're normally dealing with large
| contracts, those companies footing the bill are probably
| easier to string along like this. Just do enough and
| promise enough that they keep you on and only budge when
| they get more serious about potentially terminating the
| contract.
| bequanna wrote:
| I don't buy this was some mistake in good faith. I think
| the author is a little naive which made him a good mark.
|
| They started work on and subsequently billed for
| something that was explicitly out of scope.
|
| My guess is that the founder of the agency knew early on
| agency he could push this client around to extract $.
| nerdawson wrote:
| Most of my career has been spent at agencies.
|
| I think you're attributing malice to what was more than
| likely routine mismanagement.
| dahdum wrote:
| > I think you're attributing malice to what was more than
| likely routine mismanagement.
|
| I wouldn't call it mismanagement. Many agencies thrive
| despite regularly delivering these types of experiences.
| It's a conscious choice they can easily rationalize
| because of the money.
|
| The agency turned a one off $7k job into $46k by smooth
| talking and scope creeping an _actual developer_. I 'm
| sure they're absolutely _killing_ it doing the same to
| non-technical folks.
| thayne wrote:
| Perhaps, but there is an incentive to continue that
| mismanagement, rather than fixing it.
| ratww wrote:
| This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other
| devs might hate it. "Yeah I want REAL deliverables after
| the first or second week".
|
| Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with
| architecture astronauts don't really deliver anything but
| hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are
| actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of
| their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile.
|
| Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about.
| There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Pretty sure the agency is well aware of this fallacy, which
| is no doubt why they treated this guy so well in the very
| beginning.
| z3t4 wrote:
| The sunk cost fallacy is perhaps the most useful thing you
| learn in business school. eg. Do I want to pay $9,600 to
| get the job finished. What would it cost if I hired someone
| else to finish it ?
|
| The same thing if you are going to a concert and lost your
| tickets, do you want to pay $200 to go to the concert (not
| taking into account that you've already lost $100, you
| could have lost that $100 on whatever) eg. you are paying
| 200, not 200+100.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep. It's not a situation where they're an indeterminate
| way through building a custom app using a custom framework
| and you really do lose everything if you start again, it's
| a case where an agency has designed and handed over a logo
| and some very conventionally-designed mockups which any
| competent freelancer with knowledge of Vue should be able
| to implement on _your_ platform, and revise as requested.
| And they 're citing lack of availability, so it's not even
| _rude_ to walk away with the deliverables you paid for.
| atourgates wrote:
| You're correct, and I expect the real issue is that working
| that was was completely foreign to WebAgency.
|
| They typically are employed by businesses who are looking for
| a very specific result: a good website that works well.
|
| Their team wasn't setup to, and didn't know how to just
| deliver a simple logo.
|
| The correct answer would have been for WebAgency's CEO to
| say, "We'd love to work with you, but we're not really setup
| for this type of project. If you'd like to have us take on
| your whole website, here's what that would look like.
| Otherwise, I don't think we're a good fit."
| [deleted]
| koide wrote:
| I disagree with the cheap developers point. I've just hired a
| Pakistani designer/web developer team. They were committed, fast,
| cheap, wrote high quality code, and delivered more than what was
| agreed at the start.
|
| It was a closed price project though, which I think is a better
| way in general to get a better deal for everyone involved.
|
| It wasn't perfect. But I can fix the rest.
|
| How cheap? $950 for a new logo and branding guide plus two
| responsive html pages with custom graphics.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| I love blogposts like these that share the specifics thank you
| very much for posting. I probably would have wasted even more
| money.
| issa wrote:
| This sounds like EVERY agency I have ever worked for. I am sure
| there are good agencies out there and others have had better
| experience, but the few agencies I have worked for would have
| considered this scenario a success.
| buzzthro wrote:
| Even though I don't quite agree with everything in your
| postmortem, I do want to thank you for reflecting and sharing
| your experience. It's not easy to admit mistakes in public and
| open yourself up for criticism. Cheers!
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Oh boy. If anyone's in need of some web design services, I know
| people who'll keep the customer frustrated for a far more modest
| sum.
| josefrichter wrote:
| You'd be better off with a $45 template. Maybe another $45 for a
| stock logo (scope creep!)
| pfortuny wrote:
| If it sells, why do you need to stylize it when the style fad
| will change in two years?
|
| Cafe. Sriracha HOT chilly sauce.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| 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...
| pfortuny wrote:
| Totally right but the real question is "do I really know that
| my branding is important or will provide noticeably more
| income"?
|
| That does not seem to be your initial question...
|
| Sorry, the "Cafe." in my post should read "cf " but it got
| autocorrected.
| unixhero wrote:
| Honestly it looks awesome. Your previous also looked awesome, but
| I deed looked dated. Now you have copied the style of Digital
| Ocean, which is fine.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. This is one of those things where experience just
| really helps. A friend of mine is a Creative Director at a firm
| and I asked her for advice for a startup I funded and she
| explicitly advised against an agency at the stage it was at. I'm
| pretty sure she'd advise against this as well. Instead, a single
| contract freelancer is probably a better play than an agency for
| this.
|
| Over time, I have come to value my network very highly.
| Definitely helped me avoid a lot of missteps.
| ezekg wrote:
| Always love your writing, mtlynch. FWIW, I really do like the
| redesign. The logo is great, as are the illustrations. They
| obviously had a talented bunch, even if mismanaged. This is one
| of my fears with hiring freelancers, and why I really haven't
| done it so far. I could use the help, but I feel like it'd suck
| my time and wallet to get the results I'm after. Probably just
| haven't talked to the right one yet, if such a thing exists.
|
| I worked as the dev lead for an ad agency in the past it always
| came down to sales under pricing, not listening to the team about
| what they thought costs would be. Like, "oh yeah, we can
| definitely build this complicated ecom site for $10k!" -- no way,
| mumbled the team. What you spent was pretty typical for a "$10k"
| project. And then frustrated clients would be due to PMs not
| being truthful about what the situation really is, spewing the
| same BS that sales sold them on.
|
| Maybe that was the point, and the business model -- taking
| advantage of your clients? I wouldn't put it past them, at least
| when it came to the ad agency I worked for. It wasn't my favorite
| place to work, that's for sure. Constantly being over budget and
| past deadlines sucked.
|
| Towards the end of my venture there, I almost always recommended
| using Shopify for any ecom project, to stay within the project's
| budget, instead of WooCommerce, Spree, or Magento (never again).
| Even if 9/10 times it didn't happen that way, I still made the
| recommendation.
|
| But these days, a very simple ecom site could even be built by
| offloading onto Stripe Checkout, though I'd still probably go
| with Shopify to future-proof on product catalog growth.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| Yeah, I agree about the talent, and that's something I didn't
| talk about in the post. I thought their design and engineering
| work was really good. If they had just kept pushing junk on me,
| it would have been an easier decision to walk away early. But
| they clearly had good people, and I wanted to figure out a way
| to work with them.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Good God, that logo would be $50 on Fiverr, those illustrations
| would be $10 each, and that landing page would be 2 hours with
| bootstrap.
|
| This is how you turn $500 worth of work into $45,000 worth of
| billing.
| pwython wrote:
| As a designer & developer myself, I agree, the rebranding and
| new bootstrap template would take a week to deliver at most for
| ONE person. I'd charge ~$2,000 USD for something like this (30
| hours at $75/hr).
| raunak wrote:
| I doubt you could get that level of quality illustrations/logo
| from Fiverr, but I could be wrong.
|
| The actual page redesign, I agree - where would you recommend
| hiring a designer from if you don't actually know design, then?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I've gotten some very good work from Fiverr lately. You have
| to go beyond the lowest end and find someone in the $50-100
| range.
| raunak wrote:
| Have any recommendations on designers?
| donatj wrote:
| I got both of these on Fiverr for about $25 each - I'm very
| happy with both.
|
| - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/donatj/StandardOtter/dd3f
| 2...
|
| - https://noteof.app/logo.svg
| raunak wrote:
| Wow, those are actually great! Would you mind sending me a
| link to those/that designer? email in bio
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The noteof logo doesn't look like it would scale to small
| size very well. The gap between the top left corner of the
| N and the other elements seems too small.
| donatj wrote:
| https://noteof.app/favicon.ico I use just the tip of the
| eraser for the favicon.
| mtlynch wrote:
| I was skeptical, but I have to admit that the otter one is
| really nice.
|
| I've hired on Upwork, and I don't find that level of
| quality. The original TinyPilot logo was actually from
| Upwork, but I paid $600.
| coding123 wrote:
| It would be great if there was a matching service that:
|
| was not upwork or similar - just a simple listing. I don't want
| to advertise and market, I just want to get a part time job with
| like 10 hours a week where I fix react components or even per
| line of code.
|
| does not take a huge chunk of the interaction profit (most of
| these services want a percentage, I think that's ok as long as
| it's less than 1% and not exceeding $100)
|
| I'd imagine the person that hired this company would have rather
| had some moonlighter help him through - $7-8k would have been
| amazing for someone like me. I'm not really a designer but I can
| do some limited design work or create backends.
| dredds wrote:
| Quote: "I found them through a Hacker News monthly freelancer
| thread."
|
| It's almost inconceivable to go so far off track, but finally
| conclude a freelancer would have been better when that was
| their first step. WTH is "WebAgency" who doesn't have time for
| small clients doing in a freelancer thread??
|
| They should be outed here for wearing sheep's clothing. But the
| client is happy cos it's all free advertising, so who are the
| sheep?
| EZ-Cheeze wrote:
| Blue and white is boring as shit, goddamn
| EZ-Cheeze wrote:
| "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."
|
| That's awesome tho
| kensai wrote:
| "He felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency's difficulty
| scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot's budget. Their
| typical client has a retainer in the range of $20-40k per month.
| TinyPilot was buying only 40-60 hours per month, which they
| typically reserve for maintenance rather than new development."
|
| I call this bullshit. They had certainly designed in the past for
| smaller budgets, as they were smaller themselves.
| ddubs wrote:
| Great article, thanks for those useful takeaways. I find that
| every website I have ever worked on has gone over budget and over
| scope, it's super frustrating. Mostly it happens because the
| client doesn't know what they want or keeps changing their mind,
| but it seems like you did know what you wanted and were pretty
| steadfast about. Either way, super impressed with how you managed
| to share a shitty experience in an objective, non-bitter way! :)
| [deleted]
| josefresco wrote:
| The part where he talks about paying 100% for something that's
| 80% done but 0% usable hit very hard. As a web agency owner, and
| multi-decade web builder I've been in this position too many
| times with sub-contractors.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I personally like the way the original web site looks and feels
| better.
|
| But the tell is in the dollars. Has business gone up since the
| new site has shipped? If sales go from 45K/mo (or whatever they
| are now) to 50K/mo with no other attributable changes for a year,
| then the 46K paid off.
|
| I didn't see anything in the article that addressed what (if any)
| impact this painful journey has actually done for his earnings.
| wetpaws wrote:
| the redesign looks so much worse
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I think the new design is cleaner and looks more professional.
| Changing the color scheme, fix the fonts, fix the logo and make
| the design less dense could have had the same effect for less
| effort.
|
| My main criticism is that site lacks written content and I still
| don't know what a KVM is or why I need one.
| [deleted]
| ArchitectAnon wrote:
| $46k for those changes holy fucking shit. I've charged less than
| this to design a whole 200m2 house. I built a detailed 3d model,
| secured all the permissions and technical approvals, produced 30
| A1 drawings, written a 200 page spec, coordinated engineering,
| tendered to contractors negotiated the tender, visited the site
| every two weeks for two years to check they were building it
| correctly and signed off on thier invoices to the client. This is
| a normal amount of work for that fee in my industry, am I an
| idiot?
| Torwald wrote:
| You certainly are not an idiot, if you managed to do all that
| work up to professional standards.
|
| You didn't say how much you charged for that job, so it is
| impossible to give assessment there. But it is almost certain
| you charged way too low.
|
| From what I can gather, you provided a lot of services there.
| It's not so much the designing and the 3D model that counts,
| but all the services you describe, that are really, really
| valuable. Because you provide a total package and one that is
| facing regulatore/legal.
|
| Two years of site visits alone would amount to ~50 trips. This
| alone would be worth 20k at least, since you also are bound for
| that time and cannot leave town etc. Hard to say without
| further details...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Doing the work and billing the work are two entirely different
| disciplines.
| ArchitectAnon wrote:
| Also if I agreed to a fee of PS7k and tried to charge a client
| PS46k without agreeing a new scope of work with a new signed
| appointment contract I would probably be struck off and fined
| PS20k by my professional regulator.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Haha, software development doesn't have licensing. I got
| downvoted for suggesting it should, so it's unlikely to have
| it in the future either, unless it becomes government
| regulated. Which would be its own disaster, and why I think
| industry licensing should be a thing.
| wrycoder wrote:
| What was that, five percent of the value of the house (land not
| included)? If so, seems reasonable.
| nwsm wrote:
| You're not an idiot, you're just comparing rates in two
| completely different industries for some reason.
| [deleted]
| javier2 wrote:
| Am I out of touch? I think about 30-40k does not sound
| unreasonable for something like this. You have a redesign, with
| UX people improving your shopping and cart page +
| implementation + updating your maze of weird bootstrap theme to
| the new redesign.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I agree, I don't see it as outrageous at all. Agencies often
| charge too little then get scope creeped into overrunning
| their own labor, so smart agencies charge good money and
| write tight language in contracts to avoid it. It's very easy
| for a project that seems simple to solve to become a massive
| undertaking.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| It sounds reasonable for a good redesign, but this is just
| terrible. Generic all the way.
| prawn wrote:
| I would've thought that the product photo was a strength of
| the offering (proof of legitimacy given designed hardware
| is expensive and shows commitment). But the redesign hides
| it away and uses illustrations like every startup's MVP
| site! Seems insane.
| notahacker wrote:
| tbf the agency's original "how long is a piece of string"
| response to website is probably fair here
|
| Some companies really do want to a/b test their shopping cart
| to death, and have 40 iterations of their logo with
| roundtable meetings in between, and that stuff can genuinely
| take many man months and in the case of the a/b testing might
| even be time and money well spent. I'm sure some of the
| agency's regular clients spend $400k on getting e-commerce
| sites which are only a bit more complex overhauled and think
| they'll see value from it
|
| But 46k is definitely unreasonable for something you've
| estimated at 7k, and 38 billable hours to refactor a
| Bootstrap template for a minimalist website with about 10
| pages doesn't sound like efficient work.
| neither_color wrote:
| It's highly region dependent. In my city the work you're
| describing would go into the six figures(assuming you the
| design-architecture-engineering firm are paying the
| contractors).
| drumttocs8 wrote:
| I work for a very expensive electric utility consulting firm...
| and I guess now I'm impressed by how much work we can actually
| do for 50k. This is so silly that it makes me feel like an
| idiot too.
| mgav wrote:
| Thank you. I'm sorry you had such as terrible #ripoff experience,
| but it's great of you to share what happened, so others can learn
| & avoid.
| stoicjumbotron wrote:
| OP's Running in Production podcast episode was a good listen:
| https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/105-tinypilotkvm-let...
| RadixDLT wrote:
| I think you got scammed big time, I mean, nobody who is doing big
| projects and has a lot on their plate is going to post on "HN:
| Who wants to be hired?"
| napbree wrote:
| Digital Agency Owner Here... I have to say, this is difficult to
| read and it gives a bad name to other agencies.
|
| - I think the first "mistake" was not having it as a fixed price.
| We spend a lot of time up-front defining the scope and get sign
| off before committing to the work. After that, we roll it through
| the relevant departments. We take the risk on for bugs/issues
| (that are within scope) and do the project as a fixed price.
| Anything out of scope is a different conversation but will always
| be priced additions.
|
| - This agency got the best of both worlds, hourly rate and no
| risk on their side.
|
| - I disagree with some of the comments on here about agencies not
| being your "friend", a "good" agency will treat you like a
| partner and be focused on helping you meet those goals,
| regardless of if there's more money to be made. Ultimately, our
| job is to make you look good and reach goals. If we don't do
| that, we don't need to exist.
|
| - They should have said no at the beginning. We turn down clients
| and it's hard to do sometimes, but ultimately you're setting
| everyone up to fail. Honesty is key for all parts.
|
| - The onus should be on the agency, not on you. If there's issues
| with the build, that's the agency's problem not yours. That's why
| the initial scoping is so important.
|
| - A good agency IS better than a freelancer(or freelancers). You
| have a team of people conducting the work, pulling in the right
| people at the right time, expertise and experience of doing this
| day-in-day-out, what to avoid etc. On top of all that, ensuring
| it runs on time (it's in our interest to do so). A rolling
| freelancer is incentivised to keep the project running as long as
| possible, but on top of that you're limited to a knowledge of
| one.
|
| - The CEO unfortunately took full advantage of the situation
| here. This is a short-term approach that may work for a few
| clients but after that, the word spreads. There's few things you
| can keep hold of these days, your name and reputation is one of
| them. I'd advise actually naming this agency as the anonymity
| will only promote them to keep doing it.
|
| Sorry this happened to you and I admire your positive approach to
| the situation, sometimes what's done is done and you have to
| learn and move on.
| gxs wrote:
| As the agency owner, how would you have felt reading this if
| the author had named the agency?
|
| It really bugs me how people take a "protect the innocent"
| approach to these articles when in reality they should be
| saying loud and clear who the offender is.
| dcow wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your comment? Who's the offender
| here?
| gxs wrote:
| The author of the article didn't name the agency he was
| engaged with.
|
| In other words, he essentially wrote a really long,
| detailed review but never mentioned the actual product.
|
| My question to you was simply how would you take it if
| someone named you in an article like this.
| stared wrote:
| I agree with most, especially that OP left the tap open. No
| risk for an agency and de facto unrestricted costs for OP.
|
| With one exception of a blanket statement:
|
| > - A good agency IS better than a freelancer
|
| If there is a single freelancer:
|
| - There is a single person responsible. If it gets diffused, it
| may easily end in an unending project, as no one is
| incentivized to finalize the project.
|
| - The number of people working on the project is capped at one.
| You won't ever get charged for two people talking with each
| other.
|
| - For a single freelancer, they may be some "sanity check"
| regarding the cost. For any well-known agency, it wouldn't
| raise one's eyebrows if you said [This Well Known Agency]
| charged you [any number] $. Logo design alone could have costed
| OP $50k.
| level wrote:
| I recently left a boutique agency of 5 years and I can definitely
| resonate with this one. Our agency aimed to catch big fish, and
| we did, but since they are hard to land we'd pick up small jobs
| in the meantime, just like the project that you're describing
| here. In my perspective, this isn't someone deliberately ripping
| you off. I imagine they intended to ship at the cost they quoted,
| but the team didn't adjust their working style to match your
| price point.
|
| All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly
| overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill and
| wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as they
| typically would on a larger project. Those variations are an
| expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k customer
| treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount.
|
| The reality is, small jobs like this are effectively make-work
| projects for an agency. They typically don't pay enough to be an
| effective use of time for the agency, but are a way to stay in
| the black between higher value projects. Small customers become
| "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is landed. The
| team members being swapped out as they are needed elsewhere and
| newly joining team members then need to re-contextualize and
| regain momentum, all on your dime.
|
| Your takeaway is correct, don't be a small fish for an agency. If
| they're busy they won't take your work, and if do show interest,
| they are desperate for work.
| atourgates wrote:
| I've been at a small agency that's grown into a midsize agency
| over the last decade+.
|
| Everything about this story rings true, and the author's
| conclusions are absolutely on point.
|
| Now our agency is at a place where we can say no to work like
| this, both because we have a solid client base that supports us
| financially without projects like this, and because we've
| learned that no matter how good our intentions, neither we nor
| our clients are going to be happy with the end result.
|
| All that said, my bigger question is: does the new website
| bring in more business than the old?
|
| It's certainly better designed, but looking at the copy and IA,
| I'm not entirely sure that the new site is going to convert
| better than the old.
|
| To me, the old version was distinctive and unique, while the
| new looks like basically every other SAAS site designed since
| the year 2020.
| TheCapn wrote:
| >The reality is, small jobs like this are effectively make-work
| projects for an agency. They typically don't pay enough to be
| an effective use of time for the agency, but are a way to stay
| in the black between higher value projects. Small customers
| become "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is
| landed. The team members being swapped out as they are needed
| elsewhere and newly joining team members then need to re-
| contextualize and regain momentum, all on your dime.
|
| Man. That 3rd paragraph resonates _so well_ with me /my
| employer. We're an industrial automation company. Family owned.
| Started from the owner's shed and grew to what we are now. We
| were built on smalltime clients and our product quality got
| around through word of mouth and are now at the point where we
| have _massive_ multi-million dollar clients.
|
| We still support the little guys though. And we get more little
| guys under our umbrella every year. I think there's still a
| part of our company that recognizes we have roots in helping
| the farmers automated their cleaner processes. We also have the
| nearly identical issue that our OP is bitching about: we're
| married to these massive clients and we fill the gaps with the
| little projects. But when the timing is getting tight, the
| little guys are who loses out.
|
| I'm _starting_ to see the cracks. Clients who built our
| foundations are losing out on support and growth opportunities.
| We 're more concerned with the next mining project or new
| facility build than we are selling small guys upgrades and
| ongoing modernization. It's fine as far as the pocketbook goes
| but I feel like we play a dangerous game allowing our work
| schedules to be dictated by the big guys. Eventually they all
| grow to realize the same thing: the controls part is crucial
| enough to the business that it needs to be brought in house.
| Once that happens our value falls off quickly. It's only bad
| because we're losing our core for the opportunity to play
| puppet to some truly massive clients.
|
| I feel like I'm getting a bit lost in the weeds, but really my
| point is just how I haven't really thought clearly about what
| the perception of our business must be to the clients, both big
| and small. We play a critical service role among many
| industries but we also run the risk of alienating the business
| that's virtually guaranteed to be there in hopes of marrying
| ourselves to somebody who only needs us now, and probably not
| tomorrow.
| nerdawson wrote:
| I've worked at small agencies for the better part of a decade
| and couldn't agree more with this summary.
|
| A lot of the comments seem to take the view that this was some
| deliberate ploy to overcharge. In reality, it was just poorly
| managed.
|
| > Small customers become "nuisance" customers as soon as a
| something better is landed.
|
| My guess would be that when quoted, the project was expected to
| be completed by a certain date. Because the team failed to
| adapt, the project overran, new projects took over leaving this
| one to languish.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing!
|
| > _All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly
| overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill
| and wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as
| they typically would on a larger project. Those variations are
| an expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k
| customer treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount._
|
| Oh, huh.
|
| I was thinking about this as I did the writeup. It didn't feel
| at the time that they were spending excessive time on the logo
| variations, but I went back to the notes I took on our first
| call and realized how out of line all that early work now feels
| relative to their 30-40 hour initial estimate of the rebrand.
| serd wrote:
| The new design is right in a lot of ways but I cannot stop
| thinking how honest and friendly the old design looks. I would
| also prefer the old, cute and more unique logo instead of the
| trendy plane icon.
| donatj wrote:
| I have no joke had roughly what the author wanted done by a
| person on Fiverr for $25. New logo and simple redesign of a
| single page.
|
| Got 3 rounds of revisions even.
| seydor wrote:
| Generification is a thing
| albatross13 wrote:
| I'm sorry friend :(
| lbriner wrote:
| 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.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"including design, custom illustrations, and 3D imaging"
|
| Ha. No wonder my daughter is making a killing. She is freelancer,
| does all of the above and at way more reasonable rates.
|
| BTW the product is amazing and I am definitely buying one as soon
| as I am back from my vacation.
| scottlamb wrote:
| Very nice cautionary tale.
|
| One thing stuck out at me:
|
| > Why didn't you just refuse to pay them until the work was done?
| ... If I had insisted on milestone-based payments from the
| beginning, WebAgency likely would have declined the project. They
| saw me as a small client who could grow, but nobody wants to work
| with a tiny client who's as demanding as a huge corporation.
|
| That would have been for the best, right? Someone savvier than me
| might have realized here the point above about "avoid hiring a
| vendor as their smallest client". They're offering a different
| fee structure than for their other clients, but it's still not
| appropriate for your needs.
| mekoka wrote:
| Maybe there's something I missed in the article, but to me, it
| read like a case of sunk cost fallacy.
|
| _> Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked.
|
| > By December, we were three months into the project. WebAgency
| was 95% done with TinyPilot's new logo. All I wanted was to
| change some rounding on the corners and eliminate the border. I
| expected it to be a couple of hours of work.
|
| > All I needed was a couple more hours of work. But I didn't get
| them._
|
| One of the biggest challenges with creative work is to have a
| concrete idea of the direction you want to take. It seems as
| though by the time he was given the rebranding drafts, OP already
| had that vision . His only issue was that they were only 95%
| done. But designers work with existing brands all the time. Why
| couldn't the rebranding be completed by another designer with
| OP's express guidance?
|
| He had already observed and acknowledged patterns of misbehavior
| from "WebAgency" that one must watch out for when working with
| contractors. What justified giving them a little more money to
| complete the work (multiple times), rather than paying for a new
| designer, if not sunk costs?
| synergy20 wrote:
| he is a marketing genius to me, writing stuff that catching
| eyeballs that might end up selling more his devices, I feel the
| postmortem of the website project is really not the point(or true
| goal here) at all.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Plot twist: it was WebAgency's plan all along.
| roguas wrote:
| There is a reason why successful startups seldom order contract
| work especially early on.
|
| Design is kinda different, yet most startups tend to have some
| competency and capability in that field(some frontend engineer
| more on the artsy/design side). If you did, you could have easily
| said that you are happy with the results and can take it from
| here, ask for source files. Since you pay by the hour and their
| game became to drag this it would be great to introduce a threat
| like that (even as a bluff).
|
| Suddenly someone will realized that due to constraints(finding
| new agency would be costly) he became critical element of your
| business flow and will exploit that.
| asojfdowgh wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Something about the mikado method that makes it one of my
| favorite tools is that you can often get partial credit for an
| idea that doesn't completely pan out.
|
| I'm building a prototype for switching the framework we use to
| another one. In the process of trying to reach feature parity,
| I've been pulling out bits of logic that are coupled with the old
| framework and putting them into other libraries. At the end of
| this we'll have better feature parity between services even if I
| end up abandoning the framework change. By moving the code around
| I may find solutions to the functionality we need that the
| framework makes very difficult to implement.
| jetheredge wrote:
| 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.
| HillRat wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| 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.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| This is interesting to read, because it seems both client and
| vendor had trouble managing boundaries due in large part to a
| contingency-focused or future-focused decisionmaking style. Some
| would call it bait-and-switch on the vendor's part, but this was
| speculative territory for them too, and pretty obviously so based
| on the blog post.
|
| The need to constantly work in favor of anticipation of future
| events effectively locked out their ability to execute on
| established agreements, creating an oscillating wait-and-see
| pattern.
|
| It's rare to see this happen on both sides of a business
| agreement. However if these two sides came together again I'd
| expect to see a similar pattern, not that I'd blame anyone. To
| work around such an obviously favored perception would require a
| very difficult change in individual psychology with a lot of
| focus on practicable alternatives.
|
| A very thorough writeup op, thanks for sharing it.
| pmarreck wrote:
| What is the best payment-structuring model to best align the
| interests of the person requesting the work, with the person
| doing the work, while also de-incentivizing things like scope
| creep and simply "one requirement ends up taking too long and
| should be considered for dropping prior to completion"?
|
| Is it half upfront, half on delivery?
|
| Is it fee-per-milestone?
|
| Is it hourly rate?
|
| Is it some hybrid of the above?
|
| When a requirement must be dropped, who pays for the hours
| already sunk into it? Would it be both parties? (by charging half
| the normal rate)
| system2 wrote:
| Please name and shame. Is it something like Coalition
| Technologies from LA? They are doing the same thing by hiring
| $3/hour employees from 3rd world countries and charge six
| figures.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I think in part the problem is that he is an owner working with
| an agency, i.e. they're all employees all the way to the top.
|
| like this agency said, "we usually work with larger clients",
| i.e. we expect that all interactions across companies involve
| people for whom it's just their job.
|
| BUT, they got (what seems like) the actual business owner on one
| side, not some dissinterested executive.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that.
|
| One of the other surprises from the postmortem was that Isaac
| said that I was the only client that ever did code reviews for
| the code the agency was writing. It sounded like they'd had
| checkbox-style audits in the past for security/compliance
| reasons, but no other clients had asked for reviews just for
| the sake of keeping quality and maintainability high. That also
| hints that they're not normally dealing with owners or
| stakeholders who'd care or be able to recognize code quality.
| vladstudio wrote:
| "Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency" - as a
| freelancer, this warms my heart :-) For a project of this size
| and nature, a one-man orchestra would definitely be a betterr
| choice.
|
| However, to be fair, I must note that similar problems may happen
| with a freelancer (myself included). Self-management is hard, and
| I tend to underestimate, which leads to delays and/or working
| late.
|
| Clear and frequent commucation is not as hard, but requires a
| good habit. You may or may not get it from either agency or
| freelanced.
|
| "How long is a piece of string?" their lead designer asked. --
| sounds like a red flag to me!
| earljman wrote:
| As somebody who feels really guilty for letting a project go even
| 30% beyond an estimate, this was a comforting read for sure.
|
| I build websites for small-scale clients, often who are just
| starting out. After a lot of hard lessons, I make sure to
| communicate as soon as I can even when it was just a "soft"
| deadline. I had a project go 40% over the estimate and had to
| charge the client for it to keep my bills paid (it mostly due to
| scope creep, managed poorly).
|
| After reading this post, it feels like those lessons are
| especially worthwhile as the business world comes to realize the
| value in the boutique/freelance contractors. Also helps me get
| over the mistakes, which weren't nearly as bad in comparison.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions
| about this post.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I think the new design looks awesome. It maybe wasn't cost
| effective and was too painful a process, but hopefully it will
| pay off!
| queuebert wrote:
| 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).
| sdwr wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| > 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?"
| [deleted]
| Graffur wrote:
| Well we know the agency got well paid for the work. We don't
| know how much the people doing the work got.
| saghul wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience. The new site looks great
| btw! I see many negative comments here, but hey, live and
| learn!
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _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.
| testplzignore wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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".
| dangus wrote:
| Yeah, I wanted to give this feedback about this image, too.
|
| Try reading that image from the website on your smartphone.
| It's very hard to see what's going on.
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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.
| allenu wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| 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 onhttps://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.
| lostdog wrote:
| I'll throw another opinion at you.
|
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Interesting, thanks!
|
| 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.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Why are you so nice?
|
| 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?
| alistairSH wrote:
| Came to say the same. This sounds like a classic bait-and-
| switch, like you'd get a used car dealership.
| wizwit999 wrote:
| +1 this is ridiculous and the author is complacent.
| breadchris wrote:
| 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 :)
| mtlynch wrote:
| Oh, cool! Sure, feel free to shoot me an email. My contact
| info is in my profile and on my website.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _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.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| 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.)
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064809 [1]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxgOY2Ms-YI
| jaclaz wrote:
| 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)
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _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...
| Vanderson wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _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.
| Vanderson wrote:
| 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.
| darthcloud wrote:
| I love your blog, but was the end goal really getting a new
| website or getting a good story to tell ;)
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| frankzander wrote:
| Next time leave me a message ... you'll get more for way less
| :-)
| theden wrote:
| With the takeaway I would agree with finding a sole freelancer,
| or a small team 1-3 rather than an agency. Freelancers often
| scale to agencies to make more money off bigger clients that can
| deal with scope creep and huge bills.
|
| I've done freelance work similar to that (redesigning w/
| bootstrap), and I found having a set price for the completed work
| has worked well for me.
|
| On tracking, I worked with a consultancy a while back and had to
| use self-tracking tools like toggl, and it was a dealbreaker for
| me. I absolutely hate tracking (billable) time, some places do it
| down to the minutes, it's madness IMO. It was frustrating because
| a problem could be solved in 2 mins, but required 1hr of
| research/experimentation, when do you start the timer? Oh and you
| have three other clients, and whenever you context switch you
| gotta quickly do it in the tool so it tracks the right client,
| etc. it warps the brain IMO and stifles creative play/thinking,
| especially when you're docked for not having enough billable
| hours, even though in a normal full-time job things would be
| swell. After I left, I had to readjust to not always think about
| my time per task and felt relief and clarity again to solve
| problems with an open-ended mindset.
|
| I think devs should resist this micro tracking tools, they're
| used by agencies to exploit their employees and their customers--
| IMO it's no different than an amazon warehouse tracking their
| employees every move/micro-break.
|
| Edit: Like others have mentioned here, name and shame, they
| scammed you! Lesson learned, but 46k is a lot of money, and for a
| lot of small businesses that could have been enough to tank the
| owners financially, so you may potentially help out others by
| attaching their name.
| spoonjim wrote:
| This is why I only use Upwork for design and assets. If I don't
| like something I throw it out and am not too bent out of shape
| about it. Quality is only marginally less than hiring someone.
| propter_hoc wrote:
| For what it's worth, I think your new logo is great.
| jdoss wrote:
| I was just going to post the same thing. The new logo looks
| fantastic.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thank you! I was really happy with how it turned out.
| aloukissas wrote:
| tl;dr -- should have gone with shopify
| 999900000999 wrote:
| > 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah then people wonder why people prefer going with
| Wix/Squarespace etc
|
| That's why. It also tones the "customer nitpicking every
| detail" way way down, when you can only pick from set choices.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It really gets you 95% there.
|
| 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.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Good for you for posting this. This is something a lot of people
| wouldnt want to talk about but I'm sure people deal with all the
| time.
| aprao wrote:
| I love your blog and thorough retrospectives on all your projects
| - thanks a ton for the great content!
| tootie wrote:
| Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful
| design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual
| rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I've never seen
| it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past
| wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients
| tripping over themselves to hire us.
|
| That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to time
| just for portfolio or on the prospect of a "foot in the door" for
| a bigger account and we actually struggled mightily to scale
| down. We were used to large teams of dedicated specialists and
| didn't have geneslists who could wear all the hats at once. I'm
| wondering if this agency had the same problem.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Another sign that we are in tech bubble. The guy was asking for
| the redesign of 3 pages + a logo. Landing page, shopping cart
| and checkout for one (!) product he sells. This is such a
| standard, run off the mill application why wouldn't a decent
| agency have something ready in their drawer where they just
| have to adjust the CSS to make it look unique. How isn't this
| process completely tried and figured out after 30+ years of
| ecommerce?
|
| > Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone
| for less than $500k
|
| These times are way overdue to end and it seems like they are
| ...
| tootie wrote:
| Probably the opposite actually. The first victims of a
| recession will be consultants. The agency in question is
| probably used to much bigger clients, but was willing to do
| something much smaller because the sales pipeline dried up.
| And then they brought a heavyweight approach to a tiny
| project and failed.
|
| The heavyweight approach is absolutely mandatory when dealing
| with larger corporate clients or when you're trying to really
| bring something unique. You may be surprised who hires
| agencies for this kind of stuff, because past agencies had
| keystone accounts worth millions per year from giant tech
| companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. They don't ask to
| put a template on WooCommerce, they ask how to find, engage
| and retain new customers and differentiate themselves from
| everyone else.
| gusbremm wrote:
| And that big, fancy agency will outsource the whole project for
| 1/20 of the paying price to a small company.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| And the small company will hire a single contractor for 1/4
| of what they're getting, and that's who will do all the work.
| gusbremm wrote:
| Exactly.
| tootie wrote:
| No we did it almost all in-house. It's a pretty competitive
| space, there's like 20 A-list agencies that operate at that
| level and 100 others a notch or two below. We frequently
| ended up working on site with clients, we couldn't hide
| anything.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Me too, 1 month ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31827449
|
| I was finally lucky enough to find someone on Fiverr. I will be
| using Fiverr a lot more now. Upwork and Toptal have been a total
| disaster for me.
| tgv wrote:
| 99designs worked well for us, but for a few fairly straight-
| forward design tasks. And the translation and coding was done
| afterward in-house.
| steve76 wrote:
| MaxPengwing wrote:
| did you do anything other than redesign the website that could
| explain the influx of more sales?
|
| Like any campaigns, newsletters, ad buys etc?
|
| How do you know the new design is the the correlated cause of the
| revenue influx?
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| >Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked.
|
| Interesting: 14-th concept in the list is pretty much Telegram's
| logo
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| What's the reason for "not wanting to be a company's biggest
| client" except maybe inexperience.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| If the company can't handle clients bigger than you, they may
| not be able to handle you either.
| lowercased wrote:
| 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.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| hedora wrote:
| I know nothing about this area, but I'm surprised the redesign
| improved sales by 40%.
|
| Also, I get paying for logos and branding, but I'm having trouble
| wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure
| 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in.
|
| How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they
| doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or
| revamping the store logic or something? Is there a big telemetry
| backend, maybe? (I'm actually asking why this is hard, not trying
| to be snarky.)
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _I 'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website
| couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and
| google js in._
|
| Oh, how I wish it could just be 90s style HTML and CSS! I'm
| forever trying to get back to that.
|
| The website is a static site, but it's built with Gridsome[0],
| a now-defunct Vue-based static site generator. I wanted to be
| able to write blog posts and documentation on the site in
| Markdown, and Gridsome was the easiest way I knew to do that,
| but in retrospect, it was a big mistake.
|
| And there shouldn't be that much JS, but there ends up being an
| annoying amount for managing the shopping cart. At first, I
| just had buy buttons that took you directly to the Shopify
| checkout page. And then I added support for buying a quantity
| other than one. And then users kept asking for a way to support
| VGA, so I added VGA-to-HDMI adaptors as an optional add-on. And
| so a shopping cart seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't
| be that complicated, but there's been a lot of complexity over
| the years. If I had to do it over again from the very
| beginning, I'd have just made it a Shopify template.
|
| > _How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were
| they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list
| or revamping the store logic or something?_
|
| The refactoring was mixed up in the theme migration. We had a
| lot of code that was like `class="header-image"` and then a CSS
| class would add a bunch of CSS rules. They didn't like that, so
| they spent a lot of time rewriting the CSS to use more utility
| classes like `mx-1`. That way, they can change things at the
| theme level, and it filters down into all the elements without
| having to change each class. I think it was a useful
| refactoring, but it wasn't worth the cost at the time.
|
| [0] https://gridsome.org/
| etempleton wrote:
| Agencies as a rule, and I cannot understate this, are always
| trying to find a way to extract more money from you. It is the
| core of an agencies work. Most of their thinking and brain power
| go to extracting money from their clients. They achieved their
| goal spectacularly.
|
| Realistically, they never would have taken you on as a client for
| 15k. It would be barely worth their time. Their goal was always
| to extract about 40-50k from you. And at the end of the day it
| looks like they did some pretty good work, so hey, you achieved
| your goal too, just at a much higher than desired price.
| lacrosse_tannin wrote:
| Parts of this sounds similar to what happened to my (small
| company) job.
|
| We signed up for a small 20 or 40K design project. Landing page
| and pricing page. In the weekly meetings, the designer would
| present all this out of scope work to us. "Heres the new blog
| design" Is this a thing they do on purpose?
|
| Can we have the fonts and logos please?
|
| And yes, all the people doing the actual work were green and/or
| overseas contractors
| [deleted]
| noduerme wrote:
| Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I've never put clients on retainer
| for more than a fraction of the typical work-hours per month...
| which I only really know after I'm well past their first project.
| The point of a retainer is to square off enough time and
| resources to be on call when the next project comes up and the
| one after that. I don't think it's at all the appropriate way to
| handle a resource crunch on a one-off project.
|
| I _do_ shy away from design-only work for one time clients,
| although ten years ago that was typical of my business. From an
| art director 's perspective there are certain red flags on both
| sides of this. I would never present that many logo options to a
| client, or engage in constant back and forth over the options
| until we had internally narrowed it down to a maximum of 3.
| Clients are not designers and presenting them with too many
| choose-your-own questions tends to lead them to micromanaging -
| what I call client vanity logos - and inevitably (though
| paradoxically) they are less happy with the results than if they
| are presented with a few solid choices from the get-go and
| dissuaded from injecting too much of their own design aesthetic.
| The reason is that they come to believe they could have done it
| better themselves. Whereas if it is done for them professionally,
| they will comfort themselves knowing that this is what the
| professionals think and they got the pro opinions they paid for.
| This is something I learned very early on, when I started at an
| ad agency at 15. (We also learned that two of the three you
| present should be slightly flawed, to drive the customer to the
| design strategy we had already settled on but give them the
| illusion of choice. I don't really waste time with that anymore,
| but it's still a tool in the kit).
|
| I'm not blaming the OP for any of this, or saying they're
| especially picky. In my experience it really comes down to the
| quality of work and quality of advice they're getting from an
| agency, and an agency should know how to deal with it.
|
| Another red flag is that each portion of the job should have been
| estimated individually beforehand. That's really essential to
| preventing time overflows and also to dissuade micromanagement.
| Instead, it sounds to me like this entered a loop focused on the
| logo which sucked up more time than anyone expected, and they
| allowed that to be a driver. _They_ probably no longer liked the
| project, and as a result, the final product lacked coherence and
| vision.
| pepan wrote:
| This agency was very unprofessional. The fact that they kept
| working out of scope even though you had to remind themselves not
| to is a huge red flag. And also the fact that they kept reminding
| you that you were their smallest client?? Suspicious how often
| that came up...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-21 23:00 UTC)