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I regret my website redesign

• lobocinza 4y ago
  That reminds me that I should charge way more than I do.
• mtlynch 4y ago
  Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.
  • queuebert 4y ago
    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).
    • dleslie 4y ago
      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.
      • quikacct 4y ago
        That was my immediate impression as well: no differentiation. The new site does look modern and it inspires more confidence, but the old brand had a clear personality that should’ve been preserved in the spruce-up.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • sdwr 4y ago
      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.
    • solardev 4y ago
      > 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?"
    • Graffur 4y ago
      Well we know the agency got well paid for the work. We don't know how much the people doing the work got.
  • spamizbad 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    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?
    • wizwit999 4y ago
      +1 this is ridiculous and the author is complacent.
    • alistairSH 4y ago
      Came to say the same. This sounds like a classic bait-and-switch, like you'd get a used car dealership.
  • breadchris 4y ago
    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 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 4y ago
      Oh, cool! Sure, feel free to shoot me an email. My contact info is in my profile and on my website.
  • Vanderson 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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.
  • darthcloud 4y ago
    I love your blog, but was the end goal really getting a new website or getting a good story to tell ;)
  • frankzander 4y ago
    Next time leave me a message ... you'll get more for way less :-)
  • saghul 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing your experience. The new site looks great btw! I see many negative comments here, but hey, live and learn!
  • ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  • testplzignore 4y ago
    Some feedback from a person who is the target audience of your product: https://tinypilotkvm.com/illustrations/tinypilot-overview-illustration.svg 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 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 https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions. 2. Click the first "Read Instructions" button. The URL changes to https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions/voyager2/v2 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/voyager2/v2 https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions/voyager2/instructions/... which shows "Page Not found".
    • dangus 4y ago
      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.
      • allenu 4y ago
        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.
  • dangus 4y ago
    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.
  • jaclaz 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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-just-one-product https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/11/#simplifying-to-ju...
      • jaclaz 4y ago
        >One other change to the website that I feel like is well-supported by this point was changing how we present our products. We used to show four products in our catalog, but in November, we simplified the website to show only our flagship product, and it was almost an overnight doubling of sales that's persisted ever since: This is much more correspondent to the "mental model" I have of the majority of your customers, they want/need a Tinypilot , and they get a Tinypilot (as fast and as directly as possible), no matter how the site looks. Maybe there is a coincidence of some kind, something else that increased the visibility of the site or the knowledge of the device existing at the same time of the site redesign.
  • nikisweeting 4y ago
    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!
• drudolph914 4y ago
  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
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• pfortuny 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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-adverts/ https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/01/09/photo-essay-apple-a...
    • pfortuny 4y ago
      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.
• seydor 4y ago
  Generification is a thing
• propter_hoc 4y ago
  For what it's worth, I think your new logo is great.
  • jdoss 4y ago
    I was just going to post the same thing. The new logo looks fantastic.
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    Thank you! I was really happy with how it turned out.
• MaxPengwing 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• raverbashing 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    What's the reason for "not wanting to be a company's biggest client" except maybe inexperience.
    • throwaway81523 4y ago
      If the company can't handle clients bigger than you, they may not be able to handle you either.
    • lowercased 4y ago
      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 4y ago
• thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  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.
  • jessermeyer 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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...
• KingOfCoders 4y ago
  The logos look like stocklogos from Freepik - indeed I think Freepik has better ones. And $7k - yukes.
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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.
• RugnirViking 4y ago
  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
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    Thanks for reading! I'm glad you found it helpful.
  • Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    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.
  • saiojd 4y ago
• y42 4y ago
  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)
  • mynameishere 4y ago
    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.
  • frankzander 4y ago
    you didn't want much. It's not about sales it's about "I want that and if you cant afford that you are not the right customer for me". Thing is that for 1k€ I wouldn't even think about a website. But thank you that you did give up ... gives some other webdesigners the opportunity to say "hey go fy with you 1k€ ... I want 5k" (no offense)
  • NomadicDev 4y ago
    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.
• KingOfCoders 4y ago
  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)
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    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.
    • bathtub365 4y ago
      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.
• kurupt213 4y ago
  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.
• adenozine 4y ago
  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.
• skilled 4y ago
  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.
  • swalsh 4y ago
    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.
    • skilled 4y ago
      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.
    • TIPSIO 4y ago
      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.
• solardev 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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.
• pattle 4y ago
  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
• throwaway81523 4y ago
  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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • paulcole 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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.
• unixhero 4y ago
  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.
• albatross13 4y ago
  I'm sorry friend :(
• lbriner 4y ago
  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.
• asojfdowgh 4y ago
  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.
• jetheredge 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    • pantulis 4y ago
      The difference in size between companies imply different operation trajectories. If you are their smallest customer, you are bound to be deprioritized and treated as second-class. If you are their biggest customer, you may well destroy them with procurement and governance processes.
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    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.
• 999900000999 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
      • Nathanba 4y ago
        I don't find any wix templates that would be anywhere near as good as what he has now. And trying to customize the wix/shopify template stuff to work exactly how he wants it is not trivial either. It's really mostly his frontpage with the bad line/vector graphic that is the problem and what made the design seem bad and the whole story seem so outrageous at first. When I actually visit the site all his other pages look very good and clean. Of course I still think that the agency basically architected this situation and it amounts to a scam in my opinion, practically holding his work at ransom and then demanding that he pay more. I don't think that they ever intended to finish the work for 7k.
        • 999900000999 4y ago
          I'm pretty sure if you find someone experienced with Shopify they can make something pretty damn nice for 7k. It's a better bet than paying $40,000 for a basic website, what about maintenance. What happens when he needs to update the site ,?
• tootie 4y ago
  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.
  • gusbremm 4y ago
    And that big, fancy agency will outsource the whole project for 1/20 of the paying price to a small company.
    • sanitycheck 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Exactly.
    • tootie 4y ago
      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.
  • _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
    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 ...
• debacle 4y ago
  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.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    > We are an early stage startup It's no different at massive corporate behemoths.
    • debacle 4y ago
      But these kinds of mistakes can kill an early stage startup.
    • corrral 4y ago
      "Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry-picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when it didn't at all]" looks good on a résumé. Your managers may not understand much, but they can understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at) before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may matter when promotions are available. That's at least as true in bigco as in startups and small companies.
  • zebraflask 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Upwork? I have okay experiences with people there - not perfect but in range with your stated confidence levels.
  • JamesAdir 4y ago
    As someone who have been on both sides of the table I can completely resonate with your statements. But I think that there is an expectation by small business owners that every expert will completely understand their business and will deliver exceptional results from day 1. So I think there should be some learning curve with very clear results expected on each and every step.
    • wruza 4y ago
      Is answering email at least this week exceptional? What learning curve a small business accountant has even? It’s not a factory with amortizing equipment, worker schedules, rolling production and distribution of expenses. I work with accountants all my life, and for small businesses it’s a matter of loading contracts, bank statements, invoices and salaries into an app, sorting expenses by legal category and that’s it. There is nothing to learn in a small business accounting, it is entry-level for this job title.
• hvs 4y ago
  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.
  • TIPSIO 4y ago
    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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• nickstewart 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• repler 4y ago
  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.
• mxben 4y ago
  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.
• bagacrap 4y ago
  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...
• orzig 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• goatcode 4y ago
  >I’m not trying to bash the agency here He should be trying to do so.
• shortformblog 4y ago
  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.
  • JohnAaronNelson 4y ago
    Don’t feel bad. The end result was positive. Sales increased enough that the cost will be made up in a few months. Person actually made out well considering the effect of the work.
    • AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      On the whole I agree with you. That said, margins on this kind of hardware product aren't great. The author has shared them before. https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-3/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-3/
    • CogitoCogito 4y ago
      It's not at all guaranteed that increase in sales was due to the redesign. But yeah considering that revenues have only gone up, might as well just call it a cost of doing business. Learn from it and move on. (It sounds like this is exactly what he's doing.)
• allenu 4y ago
  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.
• fleddr 4y ago
  "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 4y ago
    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
  • manytree 4y ago
    Wow yeah I missed this. Read through most if it and was looking to see if anyone else had already commented my thinking: “And the new design is WAY worse in every way!” Honestly it’s hard to tell what it even is with the new design: SaaS product? Contract agency? Flight tracker? I found the first design to be significantly clearer. I wonder how the author distinguished between revenue increase coming from natural growth vs. the redesign.
  • MacroChip 4y ago
    Yeah I'm a little surprised he regrets it. I guess he assumes that a freelancer would have done the same work since his takeaway says so. He may have indeed gotten "service normally reserved for large companies despite my limited budget".
• nkotov 4y ago
  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.
• sbf501 4y ago
  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?!
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    Thanks for reading! >This looks like a great product at a great price point, with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?! In short: the chip shortage. The biggest expense right now is hardware engineering. We couldn't continue manufacturing our PCB because one of the components sold out, so we had to redesign with different components. That's been expensive (about $60k so far). And then to avoid redesigning further, I've had to stockpile components for 6-24 months, so a lot of money is tied up in inventory. The redesign work is wrapping up, though, so I'm hoping to have significantly lower expenses in the second half of the year.
• PaywallBuster 4y ago
  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?
• _ynmi 4y ago
  I think I found them, might be heartbeat [link redacted]
  • jer0me 4y ago
    What makes you think that?
  • nerdawson 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      I didn't "attempt to find" them. I was considering working with this agency and the designs are eerily similar.
      • nerdawson 4y ago
        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 4y ago
      Poor taste is stringing along your client and fleecing them for every penny. That said, I'm not convinced this is the company.
  • juniorholmes 4y ago
    You would be wrong. Enough clues were left. Look at the retrospective blog posts - OP started work with design agency in October 2021. So look at September 2021 'freelancer/seeking freelancer' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380660) search throw using unusual words from blog post. read likely posts. stop for some air. click through website of likely candidate. hold breath. check CEOs name. not the same but... Elementary my dear Watson. Ele-flipping-mentary. CEO takes the time to post in freelancer thread. They can write a comment to give us their side and hopefully announce the full return of all monies to OP. Because the popularity of this post is soaring like a plane or weather balloon.
• globalreset 4y ago
  This is what reliably happens if you give one person project to a team. Seen this multiple times internally.
• andrewallbright 4y ago
  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.
• Dachande663 4y ago
  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.
• deltarholamda 4y ago
  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.
  • m463 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • eddd-ddde 4y ago
    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.
    • 4y ago
• Nimitz14 4y ago
  I love blogposts like these that share the specifics thank you very much for posting. I probably would have wasted even more money.
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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).
    • RomanPushkin 4y ago
      It's not easy to find individual, most of them just disappear into a sunset: their PC died, parrot got sick, payment didn't went through, money didn't make their way to their bank account, and so on...
  • raunak 4y ago
    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?
    • donatj 4y ago
      I got both of these on Fiverr for about $25 each - I'm very happy with both. - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/donatj/StandardOtter/dd3f2781ccb11832e1c92b551b6be4674f0e42c5/Icon.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/donatj/StandardOtter/dd3f2... - https://noteof.app/logo.svg https://noteof.app/logo.svg
      • raunak 4y ago
        Wow, those are actually great! Would you mind sending me a link to those/that designer? email in bio
      • 4y ago
• themodelplumber 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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)
• bsedlm 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• theden 4y ago
  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.
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  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.
• s1k3s 4y ago
  Me too, 1 month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31827449 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 4y ago
    99designs worked well for us, but for a few fairly straight-forward design tasks. And the translation and coding was done afterward in-house.
• kgeist 4y ago
  >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
• dpedu 4y ago
  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.
• ivraatiems 4y ago
  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.
• Lapsa 4y ago
  seven months? "Don't hardcode price into order_spec.js" for $438.40? Michael, are you hiring?
• sbmsr 4y ago
  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.
• gorkish 4y ago
  It's kind of strange that it wont let you join the waitlist if you are logged into an existing openai account.
• kypro 4y ago
  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.
  • ThalesX 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Even if the alternative is dealing for months with a design agency that is creating a three-page website?
  • koshergweilo 4y ago
    > 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
    • theden 4y ago
      This one looks good https://logomaster.ai/ https://logomaster.ai/ not free but you can make one for < $50
• NKosmatos 4y ago
  Huge respect for your TinyPilot project (especially for the free version of the software over at https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot 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/ 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 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 4y ago
    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/ 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 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-just-one-product https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/11/#simplifying-to-ju...
• O__________O 4y ago
  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.
  • InspClouseau 4y ago
    Not OP. No affiliation etc.. "since they might file for legal damages" On what grounds would their case not be thrown out immediately? Regardless of how well known their lawyer is. Also, the agency might as well close up shop if they sue as they(incl. CEO & most staff) would never be hired again as agency or individuals given the whole nature of the internet. from https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/yes-you-can-post-negative-online-review-says-congress-n693001 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/yes-you-can-post-n... > Congress has reaffirmed your right to post truthful negative reviews about a hotel, restaurant, or service — even if you signed an agreement OP could easily name company and CEOs real name and still be legally sound & protected. Stop scaremongering please.
    • O__________O 4y ago
      Keyword is “truthful” — not saying the OP is lying, but mistakes, misunderstandings, etc. happen all the time, especially in stressful situations. Further, winning in court is not free and anyone is legally allowed to bring lawsuit against another; they even have a name and laws against them in many jurisdictions: Strategic lawsuit against public participation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_pu... My point is OP given the situation should speak to an attorney. As for your points, they’re specific to the US, set of assumptions, etc — which you didn’t even clearly articulate in your comment and created what appears to be a throwaway account to respond to a single comment. Impressive.
• sevenf0ur 4y ago
  Naming the agency might give them more pressure to make it right.
• ezekg 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  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.
• mgav 4y ago
  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.
• aprao 4y ago
  I love your blog and thorough retrospectives on all your projects - thanks a ton for the great content!
• steve76 4y ago
• hedora 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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/ https://gridsome.org/
• bachmeier 4y ago
  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.
• jmull 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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.
• dlandis 4y ago
  > 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"?
• xwdv 4y ago
  Sometime ago here I posited that America was business friendly because you could decide to simply not pay a company you weren’t satisfied with and usually have no consequence. This is exactly a scenario where that would be useful.
• _the_inflator 4y ago
  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.
• sys_64738 4y ago
  Don't change the design. It'd bloody annoying.
• josefrichter 4y ago
  You'd be better off with a $45 template. Maybe another $45 for a stock logo (scope creep!)
• level 4y ago
  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.
  • TheCapn 4y ago
    >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.
• vladstudio 4y ago
  "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!
• richardkeller 4y ago
  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.
• mountain_peak 4y ago
  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 https://imgur.com/a/OEk8IUL
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    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!
    • mountain_peak 4y ago
      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.
    • wlonkly 4y ago
      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.
• normalhappy 4y ago
  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.
• 0898 4y ago
  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.
• josefresco 4y ago
  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.
• wetpaws 4y ago
  the redesign looks so much worse
• DBCerigo 4y ago
  @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 4y ago
    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.
• noduerme 4y ago
  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.
• danielunited 4y ago
  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.
• lxe 4y ago
  > 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.
• whenlambo 4y ago
  “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.
• cafetree 4y ago
  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.
• lawn 4y ago
  > 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.
• issa 4y ago
  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.
• ddubs 4y ago
  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! :)
• donatj 4y ago
  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.
• kizer 4y ago
  I could have done this for like $50…
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 https://imgur.com/a/OEk8IUL
• anewpersonality 4y ago
  This is obviously a submarine for TinyPilot
• rkangel 4y ago
  > "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.
• etempleton 4y ago
  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.
• coding123 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  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.
• crikeyjoe 4y ago
• saos 4y ago
  This one of the reasons why I hate working with agencies. Simpletons that say "yes" to anything and charge a fortune for trash
• hollaur 4y ago
  wow. dying that this design / "aesthetic" (If you could call it that) cost $46k.
• buzzthro 4y ago
  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!
• napbree 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• scottlamb 4y ago
  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.
• roguas 4y ago
  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.
• A7med 4y ago
  You got scammed
• alberth 4y ago
  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/ https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ [2] https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-4/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-4/
  • DeltaCoast 4y ago
    Thanks for linking!
  • wafriedemann 4y ago
    Wait what. He worked for Google and is not able to build a website like this himself?
    • mtlynch 4y ago
      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.
    • thrdbndndn 4y ago
      I think OP intentionally offloads some work to others, to focus on his managerial role of his company. Not like he can't do it himself (after some learning processes) to certain degree, but it takes time and his time is more precious than potential financial cost.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      Well he did build a website like this, but thought (incorrectly) that a professional designer/marketer (which is not what a Google engineer specializes in) could build something better.
      • muro 4y ago
• SicSemperUranus 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
• sanitycheck 4y ago
  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.
• stoicjumbotron 4y ago
  OP's Running in Production podcast episode was a good listen: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/105-tinypilotkvm-lets-you-remote-control-your-server-from-your-browser https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/105-tinypilotkvm-let...
• vishnumohandas 4y ago
  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.
• tristanb 4y ago
  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.
• bradgessler 4y ago
  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/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/ http://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/ Let’s look at how I applied those towards my sites: https://legiblenews.com/ 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://legiblenews.com/speed https://www.thingybase.com/ 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/ 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 4y ago
    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/ https://www.getpapercss.com/
• NomadicDev 4y ago
  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.
• __derek__ 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I'm not following. What threat did I pose to the agency after they had all my money?
    • __derek__ 4y ago
      The ability to write a bad review that's upvoted and read on HN.
      • mtlynch 4y ago
        If they thought I had a wide reach with my blog, why wouldn't they do good work from the start? My other blog posts about freelancers [0, 1] are to say that they did a good job and other people should hire them, so I'd imagine if they were thinking about the writeup, they'd want it to put more effort into making sure it's positive. [0] https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/ https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/ [1] https://mtlynch.io/editor/ https://mtlynch.io/editor/
        • baobabKoodaa 4y ago
          Those things are not mutually exclusive: I'm sure they intended to do good work from the start and they were scared of a bad review after they botched the job. When you terminated the contract they obviously wanted to minimize the damage.
        • __derek__ 4y ago
          The sibling comment captured what I would have written, so I'll just note that this submission has ~10x more points/comments than the one about having a positive experience hiring an editor.
• pdimitar 4y ago
  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.
• bawolff 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    That is very expansive, for a $100 a lot of teenagers could make it.
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > That is very expansive, for a $100 a lot of teenagers could make it These are the $4 devs. Look, a teen coder can hack up a storm. But I distinctly remember a brilliant friend of mine taking a gig in college and not understanding why the small business who contracted him was pissed he’d rebuilt their site in Silverlight. He wouldn’t make that mistake now. But he doesn’t charge what he billed then either.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  I would have offloaded the incomplete assets to someone on fiverr by the middle of the second month
• account-5 4y ago
  I think the old site looks much better than the new one. I'd definitely not be paying for any of that.
• lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  Sunk cost fallacy in action.
• alexalx666 4y ago
  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
• javier_e06 4y ago
  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.
• samoppy 4y ago
• Tengiono 4y ago
  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.
• slugiscool99 4y ago
  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.
• alangibson 4y ago
  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.
• serd 4y ago
  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.
• lacrosse_tannin 4y ago
  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
• pepan 4y ago
  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...
• andix 4y ago
  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.
• paxys 4y ago
  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.
• ErrantX 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• eightysixfour 4y ago
  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.
• jwpapi 4y ago
  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…
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    Thanks for reading! I've hired from Upwork quite a bit, and I think the problem is that the clients have excessive power and abuse the freelancers/agencies. The platforms typically side with clients in financial disputes, and clients know how damaging a negative review is, so they force the agencies/contractors to do work beyond the contract. The result is that the talented agencies leave the platform as soon as they're successful enough to leave. The result is that the quality of agencies/contractors on Upwork is lower than what you can find outside the platform.
    • jwpapi 4y ago
      I understand. Good point. This indeed creates a bit of a problem. I might have not needed any work above Upwork level. However I still would avoid scenarios where agencies don’t have enough skin in the game, you said something along those lines in your article anyway. Good Look with tinypilot.
• FpUser 4y ago
  >"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.
• mekoka 4y ago
  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?
• system2 4y ago
  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.
• pier25 4y ago
  Jesus...I would have charged like 10% to do all that work and still be happy about what I got paid.
• pfalke 4y ago
  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!
• EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
  Blue and white is boring as shit, goddamn
  • EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
    "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
• hinkley 4y ago
  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.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  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.
• kensai 4y ago
  “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.
• ArchitectAnon 4y ago
  $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?
  • jstummbillig 4y ago
    Doing the work and billing the work are two entirely different disciplines.
  • ArchitectAnon 4y ago
    Also if I agreed to a fee of £7k and tried to charge a client £46k without agreeing a new scope of work with a new signed appointment contract I would probably be struck off and fined £20k by my professional regulator.
    • LadyCailin 4y ago
      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.
  • javier2 4y ago
    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.
    • notahacker 4y ago
      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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• low_tech_punk 4y ago
  hurry! Ask the WebAgency for a 50% refund or their name will be the HN frontpage.
• thih9 4y ago
  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.
• werds 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• koide 4y ago
  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.
• spoonjim 4y ago
  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.
• RadixDLT 4y ago
  Please dont hold back on naming this company, the leadership is clearly inexperience, lack of.. creativity, communication, business etiquette, user experience, user interface design...
• ricardobayes 4y ago
  $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 4y ago
    Where do you recommend looking?
• somishere 4y ago
  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.
• _aleph2c_ 4y ago
  It's super smart to turn a project disaster into free advertising for your website! I hope your gambit pays off.
• dcow 4y ago
  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.
• rexreed 4y ago
  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.
• synergy20 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Plot twist: it was WebAgency's plan all along.
    • synergy20 4y ago
      yes except after the reading Tinypilot image is all over the page, that's why I call him a marketing genius, it's not talking about the product, and it is actually aimed for the product(exposure of it)
      • mitchdoogle 4y ago
        Yes that's the goal of every single blog post from a business owner that gets posted here. It's all marketing designed as helpful advice about running / starting a business
• sendfoods 4y ago
  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.
• kennydude 4y ago
  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.
• shudza 4y ago
  Rekt.
• unleashit 4y ago
  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.
• incogitomode 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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..
• Graffur 4y ago
  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.
• wafriedemann 4y ago
  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.
• RadixDLT 4y ago
  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?"
• sarahlwalks 4y ago
  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.
• AndrewVos 4y ago
  Does anyone want me to build their website for them? I'll do it for 10k
• J1859 4y ago
  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.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  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.
• Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• earljman 4y ago
  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.
• lizardactivist 4y ago
  Never miss an opportunity to advertise your product!
• aloukissas 4y ago
  tl;dr -- should have gone with shopify
• simonswords82 4y ago
  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!
• gerdesj 4y ago
  "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.
• JamesAdir 4y ago
  I'm amazed at the patience the author had. I would have terminated the contract after 4 weeks.
• testmasterflex 4y ago
  Great post Michael! We talked about this on our last call and I shared similar sentiments at the time. We made a similar mistake on Server.pro a few years ago. Our first hire was a designer that had no coding experience. Costed us 130k, 2 years and terrible CSS that is finally getting replaced 5 years later. And our users did not like the design as much as our last one, which also uses bootstrap. No problem, keep at it! Michael is extremely industrious in his blogging. Several front page posts the last months.
• bgdkbtv 4y ago
  I've been on both ends of a scenario like this, as a client and also as the manager. Both situations suck, but they happen. I actually really like the redesign, one thing I'd change is make the blue color a little less cold and a bit more inviting - but current one still works well. However, the amount of money it cost is absolutely ridiculous.
• wruza 4y ago
  How to make a ton of bullshit if you’re not a bull: take the least important feature and throw ten people at it who refer to themselves as “creative”. Should it be light purple or foggy morning green? We need to consult a vet. Your site was what a site should look like, and redesign turned it into yet another ctrl-w nonsense. Personally I would ask why would you do that even if it costed $50.
• junglistguy 4y ago
  lol
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tastysandwich 4y ago
  Not surprised! One of my first jobs was interning at a digital agency, and I really hated it. I'm probably completely biased, but I'd never hire them for anything. One of their big sales pitches was that they didn't offshore any of the work, it was all 100% local. But they'd hire a bunch of interns to do the work, and pay them next to nothing. In fact, the coding assignment for the interview was a client's new website. On the day I started, my first task was to finish up my coding assignment so they could sent it to the client. Being an intern I was slower, and produced lower-quality work. All my forms would submit using GET requests instead of POST. If I had to modify how the CMS worked, I'd just modify core code instead of making an add-on. I'm sure that caused confusion when the next upgrade wiped the custom code! And apparently it was one of "the good" digital agencies...
  • leaflets2 4y ago
    > the next upgrade wiped the custom code! Good for the agency: More hours to bill, if re-doing that work?
• AMorissette 4y ago
  Hey OP, You should read through this before next time. https://stratosphere.digital/#blog-6qs https://stratosphere.digital/#blog-6qs avoid hn hug: https://archive.ph/ZnLLw https://archive.ph/ZnLLw
  • AMorissette 4y ago
    think the CEO of that company is active on HN. might be able to advise you of your options or you could reach out to a lawyer like Gabe Levine, the same lawyer in the famous "F*ck you, Pay Me" talk by Mike Monteiro. he may have some advice.
• Ken_At_EM 4y ago
  Honestly, the old site comes across as way more “real” to me and I think he should go back. I appreciate that they’re getting their enclosure done with 3D printing but going for a highly refined website design while 3d printing your enclosure seems like a mismatch in quality expectations. (I think the new site comes off as an attempt at a refined modern design but is very “light” or lacks real personality or depth) I think the old site and the 3d printed enclosure of the product are the perfect match.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    If anything I take it as a positive signal when a company has an "amateur" website. If they are successful without a fancy modern-looking site, then it means that the product must be decent enough to sell itself, and the business owners are presumably putting their energy into the product & service and not just appearances. I have no idea if this is true in general, but it seems to hold up in my own experience.
    • Ken_At_EM 4y ago
      All actions and design choices signal something. I feel the same way, I’d be much more likely to buy from the old website. The new site brings me slightly closer to asking myself “is this real? Is this a scam” because it lacks authenticity and ends up looking like yet another generic web whatever point O website.
• SaintSeiya84 4y ago
  Nobody talks about the inflated prices for that kind of work with close to zero effort and required knowledge. A Community College student would have done that 3 pages website in 3 days at most and would looks 100x better. win-win.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  This sounds like every accidentally toxic (maybe sometimes no accident) contractor relationship I've ever seen. The initial energetic kick off, the slow decline into unimportant details, lowered enthusiasm, and unreturned messages, and so on. Often driven by lack of clear scope from the client & a vendor whose enthusiasm far outpaces even the loose scope restrictions provided. In this case, sure, the author bears some responsibility but from their account they seem to have gone in with a relatively clear scope. The thing that really makes it all not smell quite right is that the pace of work didn't even get significantly better when the author agreed to a retainer contract, only when they cancelled it with a month still prepaid for work to be done. So the vendor, perhaps not completely or intentionally predatory in it's practices, moves quickly to get the client out the door without making too much of a fuss. This is the unfortunate state things can arrive at even with the best of intentions, so hopefully that's all it was here too, but it still doesn't reflect well on then vendor. A disciplined contractor will work a bit more to keep a client on point and aware of progress towards goals vs. budget remaining, estimates for going out of scope, etc.
  • prawn 4y ago
    For that sort of money, he should've been putting his foot down. He got screwed at every step and could've been aggressively querying every invoice.
• WhompingWindows 4y ago
  Maybe there's a distribution of talent and skill in orgs, and it's nearly impossible to see if your new business partner will be great or terrible unless you have expertise in what they do...which you most likely don't if you're hiring them. Further, how do I know if the web designer or plumber or mechanic is overcharging me, diagnosing problems I don't understand, or doing work that's not really needed?
• de6u99er 4y ago
  I don't understand why you went with a time & material contract. You could have easily gone with a fixed price contract for the logo redesign. Since this would have meant that the risk of scope creep is on the side of the agency, they would have most probably delivered only ehat was agreed on and they would have minimized the time for meetings.
• megablast 4y ago
  People think they are clever going to big agencies.
• agileAlligator 4y ago
  >WebAgency tries to keep project management to less than 5% of billable hours. At my scale, 5% would be too limited to provide any tangible benefit, so he eliminated project management entirely. ??? Excuse me, what? How did he think that eliminating project management entirely would be a good idea?
• faangiq 4y ago
  • timack 4y ago
    • faangiq 4y ago
      The internet and it’s endless supply of scumbag marketers.
• thea404 4y ago
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
• xyst 4y ago
  Hire me - I would have completed your 3-4 pages and rebranding for 1/4th the cost in <1 month (30 days is the worst case scenario).
• Minor49er 4y ago
  This reminds me of a former employer of mine. It was a small company with an internal team of three developers who worked on the main product. The CEO had a relationship with a design consultant agency that she had been using for years. Every few months, they would sell her on the idea that the company's site needed a new design and she would oblige every time. After all, according to them, the current design is the reason why the site isn't reaching its potential in new traffic, and the web changes all the time, so a new design is always the key to solving that problem. Utter crap. And what's worse, after the design was completed, it would still be handed off to one of the in-house developers to actually implement, so it took time away from actually improving the product, which was what really needed the help. Needless to say, the consultant's relationship was an expensive time-suck (and looking at their site now, apparently it still is)
• dataminded 4y ago
  You hire an agency when you can afford to grossly overpay and because time is more important to you than money.
• kerryoco 4y ago
  trending post mortems on HN are a great way to recoup losses
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Serif -> Cliche San Serif, CHECK! Quirky Original Graphics -> Corporate Memphis, CHECK! Distinctive Colours -> Generic Shades of #0000FF, CHECK! Crisp Headline -> Something Generic, CHECK! Sharp image of distinctive looking device, makes you curious, looks like a unit! -> Generic Graphics, CHECK! And more... They ruined it! What a shame it was so good, so perfect before. The redeeming thing about the new design, if any, is that if you want to sell the company or get investment it might add some value as it makes it look more like a "tech" investment.
  • montag 4y ago
    I have to disagree with you. The site went from a basement project look-and-feel to something much more slick and credible. I'm with you right up until the point where people are paying for TinyPilot out of the business account; then the brand credibility really matters.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      Touche! Probably why slack went from edgy logo to looking like an Atlassian product line. Didn’t get fired for choosing X. I might be wrong then in that light. But I would personally have been more drawn in by the OG design.
  • rewgs 4y ago
    When I say the redesign I audibly groaned. Just another bland, featureless, nothing website. While I certainly don't agree that the old one was "perfect," it at least had some sort of character.
  • bjohnson225 4y ago
    Surely the redeeming thing about the new design is that it led to 40% higher sales? By the only metric that matters this design is significantly better than “perfect”.
    • joegahona 4y ago
      I wish the OP had shared conversion rate rather than overall sales. It's hard to say that 40% higher sales wasn't the result of something completely unrelated to the redesign.
• jonathanstark 4y ago
  Stories like this make me sick to my stomach. Lots of mistakes made on both sides but hourly billing itself was a major contributor that neither party even mentioned in the postmortem.
• sidcool 4y ago
  You should read the other Hertz story. You'll feel much better. :)
  • dang 4y ago
    Good point. It's here: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183 - July 2022 (290 comments)
• dang 4y ago
  This thread has over 600 comments. If you want to read them all, you need to click "X more comments" at the bottom of each page, or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=3 I just mention this because for a thread this large, it is unusually good. (And yes, we're still going to solve this paging business and then there won't be any more of these annoying notices.)
• TeresaFord 4y ago
• p0larboy 4y ago
  Plenty of comments calling out the design as "worse". Bottomline: "But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%."
• dcj4 4y ago
  I have never seen or heard of a "web agency" doing anything for a reasonable amount of money or in a reasonable timeframe. The whole business idea behind a web agency seems to be scamming customers out of the maximum possible amount of money. I would never even consider hiring one. For something like this you hire a solo freelancer. Fraction of the money, done way quicker, and you don't end up paying the gigantic overhead of the agency.
• scotty79 4y ago
  The result is great though. Just not sure about that logo ...
• sizzle 4y ago
  There is a perverse incentive when the client has a retainer to bill hours and makes excuses to line their pockets. Why tolerate this behavior? The customer is always right, force them to stick to the contract or break away and take them to court if they are working on things outside of your contract and billing you.
• progx 4y ago
  OMG, you had the perfect logo in front of your face! Did you really not see it? Look at your Black-Box, the simple arrow, simple, clean, perfect. That could be used in your Website design too. Your animal was horrible and the new Airplane logo is senseless, cause you have "Pilot" in your name, but that has nothing todo with an airplane!
• suction 4y ago
  As a German person, this and so many other stories about customer - business relations gone awry or lost in miscommunication, I sometimes want to scream at the monitor, "why the hell wouldn't you get that in writing???" The same goes for many work situations where the boss suddenly lowers the pay or fires someone for not filling in last minute for another employee calling in sick on a weekend. How is that possible? Don't you Americans value written contracts? I am often annoyed by the amount of paperwork needed to make my life go smoothly, from work to private matters to whatever - but the times I was glad I could just point to a written and signed, extremely detailed contract which is the only thing that matters should things ever get in front of a judge, easily make up for the tedious writing and reading of contracts beforehand.
  • 2143 4y ago
    > As a German person It's not about anybody's nationality. If one does good work, one does good work. In any country, there's always going to be lots of smart people and lots of not-so-smart people. Big screw ups happen everywhere, even in Germany [1]. > Don't you Americans value written contracts? Americans value written contacts. A lot of things do go according to plan in America (as well as Germany I hope). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935980
    • suction 4y ago
      Maybe I should have said "as a person being used to German standards of doing business", would that have made you less defensive?
      • 2143 4y ago
        > would that have made you less defensive? Loaded question fallacy [1]. Can't say yes or no without putting myself in a bad light. I know I was the one who brought it up (and I'm sorry), but I won't make further comments about the "German standards of doing business", because I suspect it'll not lead to any productive discussion. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
• pantulis 4y ago
  It's highly tempting to scour Dribble or Behance to track what the agency was.
• BonoboIO 4y ago
  This is unbelievable. 46k DOLLAR. So much time, waisted resources and an agency management from hell.
• AndrianV 4y ago
  To learn the value of a contract, it cost them $46,000. But it is a very valuable lesson. Unfortunately, you either fuck over in business or get fucked over. I'm sure a lot of individuals make an effort to be sincere, at least most of the time. They lacked self-confidence, and WebAgency engaged in aggressive commercial techniques. You must be firm if you want equitable treatment, particularly if you are hiring a larger agency to complete the work. Or you may get a gorgeously dressed and well-groomed salesman who will take you out to dinner, treat you to wine and supper, fuck you raw, and not return your call the next morning. Sign the agreement. But also take notes from this treatment if you wish to succeed financially.
  • RamblingCTO 4y ago
    > Unfortunately, you either fuck over in business or get fucked over. That's bullshit. You should look for better business partners then.
• andrew-jack 4y ago
  My old business partner and I did some freelancing on the side, and it was shocking to hear clients say an agency quoted them $40k when we figured it would cost $8k. The author is right that agencies aren't always the way to go. You're paying for a lot of administrative overhead, and the owners and managers are most likely pocketing most of the money while paying overseas developers $10/hr.
• arminsergiony 4y ago
  The benefit of an agency for most companies is that they don't have to keep hiring new freelancers or contractors every few months. They are outsourcing all of that, and the associated overhead, to the agency. Training and managing a team of specialists is not trivial, especially if they are far removed from the focus of the company so nobody really knows how to go about hiring or managing said specialists.
• MahajanVardhan 4y ago
  I read through the post, is there something about how to make sure this doesn't happen? How to catch yourself falling down that slope? They suggested using Freelancers instead of agencies, and that seems like good advice in this context, but I am looking for frameworks that make sure this doesn't happen even in a different situation
  • bengale 4y ago
    The two things that stand out for me would be: 1. Set deadlines, and hold people to them. Repeatedly missing deliveries means an end to the engagement. 2. Sunk cost. He should have fired this agency much earlier instead of throwing good money after bad.
  • astura 4y ago
    For such a small project with such a tight scope I'd absolutely insist on a firm fixed price contract.
• macns 4y ago
  Most commenters think of this as an honest/dishonest situation on behalf of the agency. A different approach (and the one I'm reading it as) is that 'Isaac' operates as a seller that likes to make 100k per customer or project in any given time. Not committing to each project, or actually listening, when the customer complains Isaac makes a few adjustments and continues business as usual. He only cares about that 100k in a few month's time for a project. So now that he got only half of it he probably thinks he did the client a favor. EDIT: the product is a life-saver for servers, kudos to the developer(s)
• Linda703 4y ago
  [dead]
• lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Wow - looks absolutely dreadful for that price. I could have done a better job for free.
• moonchrome 4y ago
  Worked for agencies, agree with the conclusion - don't look for an agency if you have a project under 50k$ - this kind of work is too low margin for a full agency (with the whole pipeline of sales, PM, team effort, then their internal cost like HR and finance, etc. etc.). Such small projects are contractor/freelancer level work.
• shaman1 4y ago
  This sounds unexpectedly familiar to the experience of refurbishing my flat. Goal post moving, postponements, delays, pay in advance and job unfinished, etc. My take is that you were too flexible and the agency took advantage of that to extract as much as possible. Also the payment strategy (per hour) is not in your favour. For these clear projects (same in constructions) it's best to arrange a fixed price. That of course does not solve all problems because they will cut corners and deliver average work but at least you can hold them accountable and refuse further payments until a certain milestone is completed. Thank you for the detailed article and good luck with your projects.
• nirui 4y ago
  > Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked Not trying to be corky, but six weeks and the logo look like an airport booking service? I mean, a pilot should be a person, not a machine. I don't really know where the designer got that inspiration, but it's just not right.
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  feel like the people giving the agency benefit of the doubt didn't read the article... this was clearly unprofessional behaviour, maybe not from the designers, but from the managers - they know exactly what they are doing... and all these content managers on this thread apologising is pretty funny.
• 734129837261 4y ago
  I've worked at an agency like that for a loooong time in my past. It's shocking that a website that looks like a cookie-cutter template that you could buy for $50 on websites like WrapBootstrap could cost a THOUSAND times as much. It is absolutely ridiculous. This guy was ripped off by a combination of wilful malice and sheer incompetence. Anyone would be better helped by going onto a website like Fiverr with your pre-selected paid-for Bootstrap template and tasking a designer from India or Pakistan whose work you like with the simple one-price task: "Take this template and personalize it to my product." The total costs shouldn't amount to more than $1000 to $2000, including taxes. And, honestly, you'd have a far better-looking result than... this thing. It looks like it was designed by amateurs, really. I could set that entire page up in less than 3 hours. Easily. Responsive and all.
• ghusto 4y ago
  I am _baffled_ at the cost of websites these days. The company I'm currently at asked for a redesign of their site, and the team was told that their $7k estimate for costs was "too optimistic". Yes, I have definitely remained out of touch since the very first version of CSS. Yes, I hail from the days when you could do it all in a text editor and Javascript was optional. Yes, I've never paid attention to SEO and all that marketing stuff. But $46k?! And he initially even estimated $15k?! I'm either missing something major (very possible!), or the industry is scam.
  • curiousgal 4y ago
    Especially when there so many frameworks (Tailwind etc) and design resources out there that aim to make development easier and more streamlined!
• lewisjoe 4y ago
  Not to undermine the effort that has been put into, but it's interesting that we used to churn out such redesigns across multiple webpages & logo, within a matter of weeks and mostly as a single developer taking help / feedbacks from another, if needed. This was at a product startup early in my career. I'm not implying that this entire project was a scam, but it's interesting how two different flavours of working styles can bring out so much difference in efficiency.
• XCSme 4y ago
  I hired someone to create a basic one-page landing page on WordPress, my suggestion was: buy any theme and just change the logo/text/colors. Three months later, they just published a page that only has the hero section and an empty footer... The problem: there was no deadline imposed and payment was done per month. Solution: Define a VERY STRICT scope/tasks list and (short) deadline. If the deadline feels too short, reduce the scope instead of extending the deadline.
• parentheses 4y ago
  you fell for the ol' superset! website redesign ∊ branding