[HN Gopher] I Regret my Website Redesign ___________________________________________________________________ I Regret my Website Redesign Author : mtlynch Score : 1137 points Date : 2022-07-21 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (mtlynch.io) (TXT) w3m dump (mtlynch.io) | thr0wawayf00 wrote: | This reminds me of when I worked for a B2C company in the | healthcare space. We hired a freelance designer to redesign our | checkout flow and we wanted it done in time for Black Friday, | which was by far our biggest day of the year. | | Of course the project ran long and we crunched so that we could | ship the redesign exactly on Black Friday. I think we shipped the | Tuesday before (because Thanksgiving) and everything seemed | normal. Black Friday rolls around and we go into the office and | they have our internal dashboard monitors set up with our Black | Friday unit sales counts. Spoiler alert: it did not go well. We | were something like 25% off of our goal and 10-15% off of our | previous year's sales. Exec team is freaking out and they order | us to revert the design change ASAP in the early afternoon. We do | and sure enough, we see our sales start to increase. | | Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of the | checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did. | pc86 wrote: | > _Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of | the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did._ | | I hope this was two decades ago because people absolutely | should _know_ by now that doing this has the potential for a | huge impact. | jessermeyer wrote: | Was there ever a follow up to help determine why? Were repeat | customers returning and panicked when they saw a new, and | unexpected, layout change? | MaxPengwing wrote: | Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the | years, but this is the reason why they do it. | | People hate changes to their workflow. | toomuchtodo wrote: | People crave consistency. McDonald's isn't popular because | it's good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is | the same you'd get in Pigeon Forge, TN. | philliphaydon wrote: | I don't know where Santa Monica and Pigeon Forge are. But | traveling around Asia... McDonalds doesn't taste the same | between Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, | Australia, New Zealand. | | Infact Thailand burgers are VERY salty... | spcebar wrote: | I wonder if this is an intentional choice to adapt to the | tastes of local markets? | philliphaydon wrote: | I would assume so, Singapore for some reason HATES salt. | They don't put salt on fries from mcdonalds, so you | always end up with a bag of soggy fries. | | https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore- | hear... | | Taiwan has burger king burgers with peanut butter on | them... | | https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805 | tillinghast wrote: | Throw some sriracha on that BK PB burger and that would | be _magnificent_. | exikyut wrote: | * _Adds "peanut butter and sriracha" to list of | improbable combinations to investigate_* | goodoldneon wrote: | McDonalds' fries are actually good. But point taken | beckingz wrote: | They're hot fries. | | Warm greasy potatoes with a bit of crunch are always | good. | | In 30 minutes? Not good fries. | goodoldneon wrote: | I'm a sucker for thin, salty fries. I know they're low | quality but my mouth enjoys them | bowsamic wrote: | Wow, you are very lucky if you've never had really bad | fries. I've been to places and had undercooked fries, | burnt fries, fries with almost no potato in them, soggy | fries. McDonald's fries are very okay but they are always | okay. They are very rarely hot though, usually quite old, | but at least not stone cold like KFC fries (in the UK and | Europe we have fries instead of mash with fried chicken). | The fries in Belgium are by far the best, but there are | some great ones here in Germany. | beckingz wrote: | I've eaten some potato based food crimes in my day. | Agreed that Belgium has consistently good fries | everywhere. | | Consistently mediocre (3/5, thoroughly passable) is the | value prop of fast food. | lostlogin wrote: | What they do in the UK is horrifying. The soggy oily mass | that you eat with a prong thing. | | I even went to the current winner of 'best fish and | chips' that year, in Whitby. Argh. | bowsamic wrote: | UK chips are my favourite in the world, but they are | qualitatively different in every way. I always get | annoyed when other countries claim to copy fish and chips | but serve them with fries. There isn't anywhere else in | the world that you can get chips like that, so inevitably | the fish and chips that try and copy it are always | disappointing. I know it's controversial, but are | supposed to be soggy and oily, not crunchy. It's supposed | to be like eating oily potatoes. There is a reason why | fish and chips is so renowned and loved, and the chips | are a big part of it. They are the best in the world bar | none. I only didn't mention it earlier because people | find it quite offensive, because they are so much | different from other chips. | rolisz wrote: | But unfortunately not true in other countries! In Hong Kong | the menu is very different and even the fries are | different! | ridgered4 wrote: | You can eventually learn to use a bad UI, but you'll never | learn a constantly changing one. | valleyer wrote: | Quite to the contrary, Apple makes gratuitous changes to the | UI of their OSes on an annual basis. | rad_gruchalski wrote: | > Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over | the years, but this is the reason why they do it. | | I am not so sure, they are turning system preferences into an | iPhone app on macOS. | killion wrote: | That is why I was hoping the article would have the conversion | rate of the website before and after the redesign. | GrumpyNl wrote: | There is a graph at the bottom that shows the conversion | before and after the redesign. | killion wrote: | Thanks! Sorry I had missed that. | SkyMarshal wrote: | Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. | Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add | cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive | overload (taking into account everything else they have to | learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design | achieved _"don't make me think"_ , and any changes, even | improvements, reset that. | rurp wrote: | God, I wish this were printed on the wall of every software | design office. Mediocre designs are fine if people know them, | because they learn to work around the rough edges to the | point where they often don't notice them. But a new design | (probably also mediocre!) requires way more cognitive load. | Tech as an industry is _horrible_ on this front. | | Just to pick on one example: Android. Google absolutely loves | changing the settings and UX on each major version. People | use these controls so much they eventually get habituated... | until they change and have to go hunting around and learn the | new workflows to get back to par. Each one of these redesigns | probably wastes millions of cumulative user hours. | blt wrote: | Android 12 was a complete disaster. | notahacker wrote: | Have to admit, when I saw the two screenshots, I thought the | OP's problem would be exactly that, not the agency process. | Original design not great but has a big picture of a hardware | device, an unmissable order button and some explainer videos. | New design much more visually appealing, but looks like a | different company, potentially even a different class of | product and whilst the order button isn't exactly difficult | to find, it's not shouting as loudly to act. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | This is why I hate all these websites that keep A/B testing. | | Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, | completely disorienting me. | KronisLV wrote: | > Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new | design, completely disorienting me. | | Honestly, I feel like the only way of working around this | is having multiple different interface options available. | | For example, the new Reddit look is more app-like and | certainly has improvements to the user profile pages and | whatnot. Yet for certain types of browsing content, or | wanting to do it without your browser slowing down as much, | the old interface is still available: | https://www.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ | | Many out there will stop using the site the day when the | old interface goes down and for now can just use the old | one despite the new one being available - thus allowing | them to stick to the user experience that they're used to. | | Of course, not many out there want to deal with something | like this on the development side, such as CRUD systems | that would need to move fields around, add new business | process steps etc. There, maintaining two separate versions | would be a massive pain. | alexalx666 wrote: | old design is easier to process. not sure if its just me | but seems like the new design wants to tell me what's | important and I have to fight it spending precious brain | cycles | yamazakiwi wrote: | I would argue that the most important factor when | considering old reddit vs new reddit UI/UX isn't a matter | of preference based upon performance, certain content, or | habit. Old.reddit is actually just better for the end | user experience overall and new reddit UI is better for | Reddit's ad revenue. | | Many times a user not wanting to switch to a new UI isn't | based completely in effort/adaptability but a history of | experience with product life-cycles weighing more towards | business objectives over time. e.g. Facebook calls users | lazy for not trying out "improvements" and blame old | soccer moms for being inflexible when they're just trying | to extract more money. Not that businesses spending | effort to get more money doesn't make sense, because it | does, but businesses love to lie about this common user | complaint. | deaddodo wrote: | The fact that new reddit defaults to showing only a few | comments on the post, followed by recommending 20 other | unrelated posts, just shows how badly aligned that design | is with their goals. | | Reddit is a glorified web forum. Period. Making comments | hidden and difficult to browse basically negates 50% of | it's function (the other being media + content | discoverability). | notahacker wrote: | I imagine it's quite well aligned with their goals of | getting increased user engagement metrics from increased | clicks to read stuff from casual browsers to the site, | and convincing regular users they should download the app | | Of course it's extremely badly aligned with their regular | user's goals of reading comments, but that's solved by | using the old.reddit urls if not the app, whilst the | casual browser coming in from Google or a link gets the | full on _contempt for users ' desire to actually read | threads_ UX until they've bumped the user engagement | metrics up by clicking on more stuff. | TrickyRick wrote: | That's because more often than not you're not the target | audience. Growth > retention in many cases, so it's more | important to give a good first experience than a keeping a | good continued experience. | _fat_santa wrote: | I have a rule now that when designing a page, any "money | screens" get at least 1.5X to 2X the estimate. I define a | "money screen" as anything that leads a company to land a | client or land a sale, things like checkout flows, signup | flows, etc. Usually that extra time gets sucked up in A/B | testing setup and setting up a staggered deployment per region | that the biz operates. | | Whenever customers push back I tell them the story of Knight | Capital [1]. You pay extra for extra assurance that you won't | loose a shit load of money in the future. | | [1]: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure- | case-... | mgav wrote: | In the early 2000s I was a professional day trader and Knight | was a market-making firm. EVERY single person I dealt with | was an absolute crook, happy to break rules and do | disgustingly horrible things to enrich themselves, because | they were truly incompetent traders. | papito wrote: | This is a good example of why some people have zero business | being anywhere near management. They win the birth lottery and | have it easy all their lives by sheer luck, but when a decision | has _real_ consequences - this happens. | | Anyone in the trenches could tell you that rolling out a huge | change to a money-making project on a "round" date is suicidal. | They just have no idea of what they are doing in the first | place - just playing darts - and it usually works due to the | ants killing themselves, to make it all happen. Because health | insurance. | debacle wrote: | I live through this every 2 years: | | - Marketing team decides they want a new site. | | - I tell them when/how we can schedule it. | | - They decide they want to go outside so it can get done | "quicker" by "professionals." | | - It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to | work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, | it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's | primary resolution. | | - It takes 6-10 months of "clean up" to make the site usable. | | - Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even | after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site. | | - My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because | the entire team over there has turned over since the project | inception. | | - We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly | or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on | their own. | | - Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months. | | We are an early stage startup. We've burned through almost 20% of | the revenue we've ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully, | finally, we've grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who | will I hope put an end to this madness. | lacrosse_tannin wrote: | Do we work together? haha | commandlinefan wrote: | > We are an early stage startup | | It's no different at massive corporate behemoths. | debacle wrote: | But these kinds of mistakes can kill an early stage startup. | corrral wrote: | "Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry- | picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when | it didn't at all]" looks good on a resume. | | Your managers may not understand much, but they can | understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at) | before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may | matter when promotions are available. | | That's _at least_ as true in bigco as in startups and small | companies. | einpoklum wrote: | > - Marketing team decides they want a new site. | | That's your problem right there. And the fact that their | decision is the company's decision. | awad wrote: | Ideally, who should decide what the public face of the | company should be if not for marketing? | einpoklum wrote: | Let's not get into ideals, but: The different stakeholders | in the website should agree on it, rather than just one of | them deciding - as marketing is just one of a website's | purposes; it's not merely a marketing tool. | s17n wrote: | Founder / CEO. A lot of people will respond "no the founder | needs to back off and let the marketing team do its job" | but on a decision to allocate 50% of the annual marketing | budget, the CEO should be involved. | zebraflask wrote: | A tale as old as (Internet) time - I've seen this cycle happen, | too. | | Tangentially, I have to wonder to what extent misapplication of | Agile, and similar, project management processes is to blame. | | You'd think for most relatively simple sites, like we're | talking about here, it ought to be planned once and built once, | but something about the mindset that the goal posts can be | moved during planning and development seems to drag everything | out at length. | qrohlf wrote: | As a small business owner myself, this resonates. I would love to | be in a position to be able to confidently pay money to other | professionals to make problems go away. | | Unfortunately, my overall experience has been that hiring any | "expert" in a field that I am not also an expert in has a 50% | chance of working, and a 50% chance of blowing up in my face and | creating more problems. | | I recently attempted to get a new accountant to help me handle | some business growth. It was a person from a well regarded local | firm, initial meetings were good, and then they proceeded to | deliver none of the agreed-upon work, take 2-3 weeks to respond | to emails (multiple times, I had to call their office and | schedule an in-person meeting just to get a response), and then | de-prioritize my business relative to other clients so badly that | I wasn't able to submit my taxes until June. | | If anyone can successfully build a service that lets me reliably | pick professional-services providers with the same level of | confidence that I pick an AirBnb (not 100%, but pretty good, with | an expectation for reasonable mediation and fallback coverage if | the offering is radically different than what's described), I | would happily pay a 20% premium on those services versus the | existing "ask friends for referrals and cross your fingers" | status quo. | soco wrote: | Upwork? I have okay experiences with people there - not perfect | but in range with your stated confidence levels. | dpedu wrote: | Oof, this pains me personally. That $46k pricetag just about | matches the salary I was earning in my first full time job while | still attending college more than a decade ago. I was a web | developer and between a designer, a content gatherer/editor, and | myself, we banged out one or two complete websites a month. These | were no simple sites either - dynamic, Drupal based, custom | theme, stage/prod, self-hosted order forms, newsletters, other | interactivity and even training the owners how to use Drupal. | DBCerigo wrote: | @mtlynch what tool/service do you use to enable the "TinyPilot's | in-house developers report their hours at the end of each working | session" part of your business's workflow? | mtlynch wrote: | I've never found a great solution for this. | | The screenshot in the blog post is from Deel, the platform I | currently use to pay freelancers. I don't really recommend Deel | overall. They make it hard to see aggregate hours over | different periods. | | One of TinyPilots devs reports their hours through TopTracker, | which is better than Deel but still not great. | | I wish there was a simple paid SaaS that just lets freelancers | report their hours easily, but I think all the platforms that | do it are aimed at bigger orgs or are tied up with payment | platforms. | hvs wrote: | Having worked for an ad agency (and for a consulting firm) AVOID | THEM UNLESS YOU ARE A LARGE ORGANIZATION WITH A BIG BUDGET. | | They are not going to watch costs for you. They are not going to | have their "best people on it" (unless, maybe, you are their | biggest client). And everyone working on the project is looking | to get their billable hours in. The entire motivation of the | organization is to bill as many hours as they think the customer | can pay for. | | I met a lot of great people in those companies, but I do not miss | my time working in them. | [deleted] | TIPSIO wrote: | It's really not that simple IMO. | | If you look at the earlier mockups, they were just as good if | not better. I also think they chose the wrong logo from the | earlier mocks. | | If you are smaller team/org/business, I'd highly recommend just | move as quickly as possible with the agency. Less opportunity | for scope creep from them and let the creatives rock and roll. | They will, without a doubt, want the project done as fast as | possible. They will also produce the same work in 1 vs vs 2 vs | vs 3 months. | | If you are bigger team/org/business, usually you are buying the | "process" or "experience". So it's all mute and a team thing. | | If you are looking for both, you'll fail like they did here. | danielunited wrote: | The solution: hire designers who can code. It will save you a lot | of time and money. They can design and code with Webflow at the | same time. The front-end of this project should've taken 80-100 | hours at most -- including custom illustrations & graphics. P.S. | I do that sort of thing if anyone's interested. | A7med wrote: | You got scammed | pdimitar wrote: | To OP: you're too charitable and optimistic towards people in a | business context. If an agent has an incentive to milk you for | money the odds are that they will. Math and history say and prove | so. | | It's not even about the money per se. We all know sometimes | projects balloon over budget but you had a very clear and small | scoped project and yet you failed forcing your contractors to | stick to target. | | IMO your mistake was: | | (a) Not calling out "Isaac" early enough and making a meeting to | re-establish ground rules and produce a crystal-clear short list | of priorities (you seem to have produced similar document -- | kudos for that); | | (b) Not demanding the first delivery in maximum two weeks after | the conversation; | | (C) Accepting business contract that doesn't allow you to put | financial pressure if you are unhappy with the results. | | I believe you mostly arrived at the same conclusion but in case | you haven't -- _you are not friends with these people_. The "but | we had this or that problem" flies only once, or, if you are | feeling very generous, twice. After that you either threaten to | sue or just cut your losses and leave. | | --- | | Your generic "we were just not a match" aphorism is setting you | up for a similar occurrence in the future. Get rid of that | mindset. It applies when dating or making friends, yes, but it | absolutely does not apply in a business setting. You negotiate | terms and when one side fails to stick to the terms, there must | be consequences. | javier_e06 wrote: | The logo of the cute squirrel was replaced by some airplane clip | art? Where is marketing in all this? Bad choice. A re-redesign is | in order. | crikeyjoe wrote: | simonswords82 wrote: | Props to you for hanging it all out there man. We all fuck up, | the hardest lessons are the ones that stick. You won't do this | again! | ivraatiems wrote: | The new version of the website breaks some fundamental - and | easily fixable - rules of web design: No changes to links on | hover, and dropdown menus don't appear on hover, only on click. | If OP reads this, really recommend fixing that. It should be | easy. | | Also, agreed with those who are saying that it's OK to stand up | for yourself as a client. It's hard managing clients as an | agency, and it's good to have empathy for people you work with, | but that doesn't mean you can't push back on added cost or | expanded timelines. | | Frankly, when someone tries to charge you more for something that | is within the scope of work you already paid for, you can simply | say no. Likewise, when someone tries to charge you for something | you didn't agree to pay for, say no. That is maybe what needed to | happen here. | alberth wrote: | My heart goes out to this guy ... | | For those unaware, the blogger left a high-paying job at Google | 4-years ago [1] to start his own business and over those last | 4-years, unfortunately, hasn't really made any money/profit [2] | | His blog is a treasure trove of insights and lessons learned | along the way. | | Highly recommend for others to read. | | [1] https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ | | [2] https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-4/ | DeltaCoast wrote: | Thanks for linking! | wafriedemann wrote: | Wait what. He worked for Google and is not able to build a | website like this himself? | mtlynch wrote: | I did a lot of Python and C++ at Google. I'd be able to | implement a nice ETL pipeline for the website, but Google | didn't pay me for my design skills. | nickstewart wrote: | I've worked at an agency my entire career (nine years so far) | | Looks like there was poor project management and internal | communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking | reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated. | | For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum | (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn't be | started until everything design wise was completed (we do | branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the | UI is on the same train of thought). | | But yea, I wouldn't recommend hiring an agency unless you want to | be hands off or having x amount of budget | dawnerd wrote: | You pretty much nailed it. Also can't really hire a US based | agency with US salaries and expect a rebrand to be cheap. OP | also went though a ton of design rounds which is just throwing | money away. It should have been capped in the contract to | something much lower, like one or two designs. | wafriedemann wrote: | I like the redesign, but it looks like any other template out | there. I don't see how this could not have been done by 1 person | within a week (excl. content - content can take more time). I | sometimes do this for fun and would have charged 500 bucks + some | theme/icon/graphics expenses. | repler wrote: | It looks like this project happened at the early days of COVID. | | There could be dozens of reasons for the ways this played out on | the agency side of things. | | You could very well have kicked this off a year earlier or a year | later and gotten different results. | bawolff wrote: | > For most of the project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially- | complete tasks. The cost of reassigning half-done work and | spinning up a new vendor would be almost as expensive as starting | over from scratch. | | The original project budget was 7k, and you ended up spending | 46k, for something that didn't really deliver on what you asked | for originally. | | It is really hard to imagine that it would have been more | expensive to start over. It seemed clear by the middle of the | story, that web agency wasn't doing what you were paying them | for, at which point you increased the amount you were paying them | in hope that would somehow change things, and then were shocked | when they behaved exactly the same as they had before. | | There's times when starting over is more expensive, this seems | like the polar opposite of that and a clear example of sunk cost | fallacy. | hitekker wrote: | Yeah, I think the article lacks of a single, clear statement on | why things it went wrong. It gets caught up in myriads of | little reasons which I think distracts the author from arriving | at a painful insight. | | His shortest section, left towards the bottom of the page, | seems like an accidental example of rationalizing the sunk cost | fallacy. | | > Firing WebAgency and searching for a replacement would have | burned 30-60 hours of management time. And there was no | guarantee that I'd find someone better. For most of the | project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially-complete tasks. | The cost of reassigning half-done work and spinning up a new | vendor would be almost as expensive as starting over from | scratch. | frozencell wrote: | That is very expansive, for a $100 a lot of teenagers could | make it. | somishere wrote: | Previous agency hack here of many years (many agencies). Do not | take anything communicated to you from businesses like this at | face value. Ignore the tone. The Isaac's of this world are not | your friend. In fact, they likely personally orchestrated the | scenario and tailored the ongoing narrative. I realise how | cynical this sounds, but I'm certain your Isaac would agree. | | Agencies (and Isaacs) have a place. They are useful for large | orgs where certain expectations and business/operating aesthetics | are demanded. Agency workflows and billables have evolved | specifically for this climate of largesse. Buyer beware. | mxben wrote: | Is it just me who finds the old website design much better than | the redesign? The new redesigned website seems to lack character | that the old website had. | KingOfCoders wrote: | The logos look like stocklogos from Freepik - indeed I think | Freepik has better ones. And $7k - yukes. | J1859 wrote: | This was painful to read. I'm sorry you had to go through that. | | The price is extortionate in my opinion, you should have 100% | used a good, solo freelancer. | | And I'm shocked at how long they took to deliver that. This whole | thing could have been done in a 2 weeks, a month maximum. | | Take it as an expensive life lesson and I hope your business does | so well that many years into the future, you laugh about this | whole incident. | andix wrote: | What I learned about doing projects: it's all about deliveries | and milestones. Agree on them, write them down and then enforce | them. Don't continue without getting the previous milestone | delivered (at least 80% or so). | | And if you don't get what you agreed on, pull the plug. Even if | you just have the slightest feeling of doubt, that something is | not right. Quite often there is something very wrong already. | lobocinza wrote: | That reminds me that I should charge way more than I do. | karaterobot wrote: | I worked at WebAgency (not this one, another one) for 13 years, | as a developer, designer, and in leadership roles. In my current | role I'm on the other side of the table, dealing with contractors | we outsource some of our product work to. | | Your experience felt really familiar to me, symptomatic of badly | managed projects I've been on both sides of. To be honest, it | felt familiar in a way that evoked some emotional feelings I have | from working on those kinds of projects for so long! Very few | people want to rip off a small business owner, or to have a | client feel like they've been swindled. Glad I'm out of that | game. | | What I'd like to add is that this can seem predatory, like Isaac | was taking advantage of you, trying to wring you dry. That may be | true (I don't know), but the same thing can easily happen when | everybody has the best of intentions. | | It is up to a PM to pump the breaks if they see designers or | developers burning billable hours on things that won't help the | project succeed. The Project Manager turnover you witnessed, and | the CEO backfilling for them, happens surprisingly often. There's | a lot of churn with PMs at these agencies, at the ones I worked | for it felt like we could never keep them around. Since the | harried CEO usually makes a horrible replacement for a full-time | manager, it's not surprising he dropped the ball in this case. | | In theory, it's also up to the designers and developers to manage | their own time, but those folks are also often under pressure to | be billing ~40 hours a week. If there is nothing for them to do | but sit around, and your project is still active, I could see | them filling their days working on unbidden ideas "to help you | out". Again, I have no idea what happened in your case, but I | have seen that before. | | At the place I spent most of my time, our version of Isaac would | have probably have refunded you a lot of that money, if indeed | they really were busy with big clients (my guess is that's | probably a line he gave you). It's a feast or famine business, | and in feast times we refunded hours generously, both because we | lived off referrals, and because we genuinely did not try to | bleed our customers dry. It just worked out that way sometimes... | | I will say that I think your takeaways from this experience are | right on. I would also add that you _shouldn 't have to be the de | facto project manager_, but in practice that is the safest way to | make sure you get what you want. | | Meaning: schedule check-in meetings, find out what people are | going to deliver and when, post up in their Slack, etc. | | Good companies will appreciate your involvement, as long as | you're not acting like a maniac, and when I think back to the | most successful projects I worked on as a contractor, they all | had some highly active contact on the client side. | bachmeier wrote: | None of this is specific to a website redesign. If you have a | small project, don't hire someone that does big projects. Full | stop. I learned this lesson helping my father run his business | long ago. There's a threshold where the business model changes | from delivering a quality product to sucking as much money out of | the customer as possible. | micromacrofoot wrote: | > Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency | | More people should do this. Many agencies, if not most, | prioritize new customer acquisition. If you're not their biggest | customer, their priority is to do as little work as possible and | inflate the cost (partially why they love retainers). | | Very often a customer like this would be relegated to junior | employees in an agency anyway. You can get a freelancer with a | lot more experience, and _still_ save money. | | I worked at agencies for about the first 5 years of my career, | and left to freelance when I realized I was already doing most of | the work... but someone else was making most of the money. | that_guy_iain wrote: | I've worked at a few agencies. | | One being a low budget fixed costs agency: Here it was | literally all about how quickly can you get it done. The code | they outputted was terrible and often done by people who had | very little knowledge of best practices. On a technical level | this company had the lowest skilled people I worked with, once | even asked me how to do an else if, I answered, "Oh you just do | else and then put an if like you would normally do with an if." | This was not clear enough for them. | | One being a high cost enterprise level counsultancy agency: | Here I probably did the best technical work but lowest product | quality. The Agency prided itself on doing good technical work | and doing BDD so they only did what brough value. Mostly I was | bored, the work was slow paced as the company and clients cared | that deadline and estimates were kept so things were | overestiamted to give a solid buffer and then client charged | for the hours used to develop it. Which often meant by the end | of the sprint it was a case of sitting around doing nothing. | | Overall, both cared about one thing. Time. | | Personally, I much rather be an inhouse dev at a small company. | Get to work without caring about time so much and care about | the product. | paxys wrote: | Kinda weird that their conclusion contradicts the whole post. | | > If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't. But despite all the | missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I | expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it's | been closer to 40%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an all- | time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the | redesign. | | A simple website redesign increased sales by 40-66%, but you | wouldn't do it again? Is the fact that it took longer and cost a | few thousand dollars more than expected really that bad? That | describes literally every software project in existence. | samoppy wrote: | gerdesj wrote: | "Isaac proposed a rebranding rather than a full-blown redesign. | That meant focusing on fundamentals like a new logo, color | scheme, and fonts" | | The brief was for a website redesign and not a rebrand. Then it | went south. | sendfoods wrote: | any details on how Tiny Pilot KVM works technically? As far as I | understand, it's pretty hands-off. No configuring ports or ssh | keys. | pier25 wrote: | Jesus...I would have charged like 10% to do all that work and | still be happy about what I got paid. | lizardactivist wrote: | Never miss an opportunity to advertise your product! | kennydude wrote: | Even from a general customer serivce prespective, this sucks | massively. Working in web development myself, everything is | agreed upon before work to start - not with the agency deciding | to include additional items. | | It's incredibly shameful from this agency - they really owe a | massive apology and should refund for the non-requested parts | tbh. | bagacrap wrote: | the white and green (button) --- does that meet a11y contrast | guidelines? | | I would say for a b2b company design probably doesn't matter too | much. I think minor things like font choice probably affect a | consumer discretionary brand much more than you... | vishnumohandas wrote: | The only degradation I feel is that, in the previous design, I | could see what I was buying within the first fold. I find the | illustration in the new design to be a bit too abstract. | RugnirViking wrote: | For what it's worth, the new site does look a lot better. A good | read, might come in handy to avoid similar mistakes in the | future. Key takeaway I think is the one about avoiding being | somebody's smallest client if you can | Karawebnetwork wrote: | Exactly. I doubt it was malice, I mostly suspect an agency used | to large clients with no experience or methodology with small | ones. A lot of what was set up for his website was stuff that | only makes sense if the project is huge. | | Let's say you want to set up a framework and it takes you XL | amount of hours. That XL amount of hours is worth it if the | website has 15,000 products and 75 pages of content. But if | there's only one product and two pages, it's not worth it. | | Same goes for the management time that crept into the budget. | 20k extra on a 1 million contract is nothing and I would say | expected. But on a 7k project? That's huge. | | If the company has a lot of internal processing in between each | step, it eats up a lot of the budget. Daily stand-up meetings, | agile rituals, pull requests, handover to a QA department and | bug fix rounds. Again, this makes sense for a large project but | not for a small one. | | Most companies that are used to a formula that works will not | change for one customer. | | If I had a metaphor, it would be this: If you want to travel | 1500 kilometres, it makes sense to take a train. Boarding will | be slow and the train will start out slow. But overall, you | win. On the other hand, if you're only traveling 500 meters, | it's a bit of a stretch. It is better to take a truck or a car. | | The problem here is that the company was a train and promised | safe travel to the next station 500 meters away. Were they | being malicious? I doubt it, they probably made the train trip | safe. They probably don't know the details of trucking and | didn't recommend it. | | Should they have recommended going with a smaller company? | Maybe. But I don't know if I would consider that malicious. If | anything, they should have been more transparent about their | internal methodologies and ways of working so that the client | could have properly consented to what he was getting into. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! I'm glad you found it helpful. | saiojd wrote: | I agree. In particular the logo is truly excellent, IMO. It | feels like the devs know what they are doing but are interested | in producing quality, not in budgeting for OP. Meanwhile the | management didn't care about squeezing him. | orzig wrote: | The decision to anonymize the agency is understandable, but I | wonder about the systemic effects. Right now the reputation cost | is born by all agencies, leading to a tragedy of the commons for | shoddy delivery. | | But encouraging authors to name names would drag them into a | public dispute they don't need, and disincentivize the many | valuable lessons that _are_ in here. (THANK YOU! 90% of people | wouldn't have pushed through the discomfort to share their | learning). | | What is a system of public discourse that threads that needle? | I'm sure "Isaac" feels a little bad, but has "don't pitch clients | we can't service" shot to the top of his priority list? But | again, I don't want to put more onus on the author who's already | gifted me a lot of hard earned knowledge. | orzig wrote: | Can anyone give an anecdote about how costly (time and money) | it is to pursue legal options in this kind of situation? I hate | net-negative strategies, but (anec)data would be really helpful | to many of us in the future. | Lapsa wrote: | seven months? "Don't hardcode price into order_spec.js" for | $438.40? Michael, are you hiring? | kizer wrote: | I could have done this for like $50... | Tengiono wrote: | I'm more impressed honestly, that people are willing to pay | $400,- for an remote KVM device. | | Whats your overall margin? I would assume that you are able to | build it for $100,-? | | But yes i think you did not had enough experience working with | agencies. They oversold you as the sales people usually do and | than you fix their issues. You should have stoped as soon as it | was clear that they lost some agreements when moving from the | nice ceo to the developers. | | I was working for a company who was doing development for other | companies. The team setups are cost optimized. Like the dude who | smokes weed every day and only gets 45k / year salary but is sold | as a fulltime senior developer. Or the working student who has 2 | years frontend experience but 0 years <insert your JS Framework | of choice> experience who might get sold as junior or normal | developer. | | Or people who are part of your project for 2 month, the company | knows that they will go on maternity leave and they just replace | one but neither tell you that or really assume thats just fine. | Its not fine. They need again time to onboard and it costs you | money. | | All of this is more or less shitty, but the companies going to | contractors normally offload all of software developer hiring, | onboarding, teaching etc. So its a tradeoff. A trade off | companies have to decide on. | | But i would never ever do this as a small company as you are, | ever. And i only did this with a small company who was having 5 | employees with a very clear target architecture and specific | goals. And they also tried this shit on me with the 'i have | someone who doesn't speak that well german or english and is not | that good but we can offload him on that project' and i spoke up | after 1 week because i'm not paying for someone i can't | communicate issues clearly. Red flag alert was there immedidatly. | jmull wrote: | > Isaac... felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency's | difficulty scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot's | budget. Their typical client has a retainer in the range of | $20-40k per month. | | I think Isaac nailed it. It's just a different mindset between | providing a full-service development group and doing a focused | update of a site for a small business (very small... one might | say "tiny" :) | | But I think this was foreseeable by the agency, and they should | have considered very carefully whether they could achieve what | their client wanted before accepting the work (or gotten the | client to buy into a larger scope up-front). | | BTW, these TinyPilot devices are very cool. I did a pikvm build | to try something, but if I needed something like this for a real | use, I'd probably get a TinyPilot. | corrral wrote: | Yeah, I know a couple agencies like that and they have the good | sense to politely point tiny-budget projects to other--usually | fledgeling--agencies. Mid-five-figures minimum or you'll be | gently redirected to another company or a freelancer or | something. | richardkeller wrote: | I run an software / creative agency in South Africa | (creationlabs.co.za) that works with clients ranging from tiny to | large corporates. What I've found is that the direction of the | blame very much depends on which side of the fence you're | sitting. One the one hand the client blames the agency for being | opportunistic, while at the same time the developers get | frustrated at what may seem like a never-ending list of | unreasonable expectations. | | That's not to say that this is what happened here, but in both | situations the problem comes down to a lack of effective | communication. | | The agency here should have communicated from the start how many | hours they can reasonably expect to spend on each phase of the | project with the given budget, and then provided continuous | updates to allow Michael to understand how much time he had | remaining to complete the project. Opaque processes, coupled with | a lack of transparency and communication is how projects like | this leave a sour taste, or worse, fail entirely. | | On a personal note, I'm gobsmacked at both the hourly rates as | well as the total project hours discussed in this article. A | website like this should have taken a fraction of the time. And | if outsourced to a professional team in another country, a | fraction of the price too. | yieldcrv wrote: | I would have offloaded the incomplete assets to someone on fiverr | by the middle of the second month | low_tech_punk wrote: | hurry! Ask the WebAgency for a 50% refund or their name will be | the HN frontpage. | mountain_peak wrote: | Thanks for sharing your story; as a developer/designer (more | developer than designer; love C, no love for JavaScript), I hear | stories such as yours practically everyday. | | What I really wanted to say is that I love your aviator gopher | and the designer should have at least taken a shot at | incorporating your gopher in the logo. | | I mocked-up a negative space [almost] one-colour logo with a | close-up of a stylized gopher nose and teeth wearing aviators on | a CRT green background with a brighter green cursor reflecting in | the glasses. That ties in your history for continuity, modern | pilot with aviator glasses, a cursor for remote control, and the | green background as a nod to the past. | | Growing up on green and amber CRTs, I'm a huge sucker for retro | designs, and try to incorporate Rand Paul's philosophy wherever I | can, which captures the essence of a company in a clean and | easily recognizable design. | | Edit: here's just the gopher for the curious: | https://imgur.com/a/OEk8IUL | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | I'll take the blame for dropping the chipmunk. I wanted the | logo to appeal more to businesses, and I felt like the chipmunk | came across as too playful, so I told them not to bother | preserving it. | | Your mock up looks pretty cool! | wlonkly wrote: | I love the airplane/shell prompt thing in the new logo, | though. Having never seen TinyPilot before this, I had no | attachment to the chipmunk, and I agree that the change moved | from hobbyist to business vibes. | mountain_peak wrote: | Ah - thanks for having a look and responding with a nice | comment. I suspected what you wrote after I posted, since I | have many people asking for the the next iconic "f" or "G" or | Apple, and I usually tell them that the logo should instantly | recognizable as your own (for whatever that's worth). Paul | Rand's (I think I wrote Rand Paul above!) "Thoughts on | Design" is a great short book where he says, "...[a design] | is not good design if it does not co-operate as an instrument | in the service of communication." | | Above all, it's important that you love your new design (you | mentioned that you do), which is great and positions you for | growth in your target areas as opposed to "preaching to the | converted," which is what I think you're implying with the | chipmunk. | dlandis wrote: | > We'd never discussed custom illustrations, but it seemed like a | small amount of work, so I let it go. | | > "To be clear, the project is still a rebranding and not a | redesign, right?" I asked. | | It's a very interesting post, but when I read quotes like the | above, it seems like such a strange way to deal with an agency | you have hired to perform work for you. Think about if this was | about a remodeling job for your house instead of a website. If | you saw the workers suddenly start repainting a different room or | redoing the trim when it wasn't in scope would you "just let it | go"? | travisgriggs wrote: | Curious what others think of the icon progression? There was an | article a week or so ago about how all cool/crazy/distinctive | logo designs trend to boring sameness. | | The end design looks like something I'd expect to see on the | Delta app I download when I fly and promptly redelete afterwards. | | My person favorite, for reasons I don't understand, is the center | icon in the first column. I don't know why. I just like it's | distinctiveness. | OJFord wrote: | I prefer it pre-colour too. I have no idea why they thought the | ones that scream 'messaging app' were a good idea. The face | ones are weird. | | I think there's two jobs involved really though, and (as an | armchair expert who's never done it) that ideally you do the | first one of roughing out an idea for what it should look like | yourself. The second job is refining it, tweaking the edges, | weight, choosing exactly the right colour, etc. | | Again as someone who's never had the luxury of having to do it, | I think I'd request those things separately on | Fiverr/Upwork/whatever and not pay a lot for it. 1) Here's some | info about my company, give me 25 distinct rough sketches for a | logo; 2) I like this logo, please be designery and refine it | for me. You could even break (1) up and hire 5 people to give | you 5 each or whatever. | mountain_peak wrote: | I think someone else in the thread from a design studio said | it best: (roughly) "You pay a design firm to filter through | all the designs and present a maximum of three to the | client." The three should be wildly different, tested to some | degree, but each compelling in their own way. Then you take | the one that resonates with the client and tweak. | | Unfortunately, I have to agree with the parent that something | "fun" was lost in the transition from the original logo to | the new one. From the mock-ups, I can tell that the client | definitely wanted to maintain the green cursor, which is | good, but likely trusted the designers to know the market for | remote KVM (which I've used for years), which doesn't conjure | a physical plane - more of you being a pilot - in control. | It's possible the client wanted to keep the logo really | simple to make it 3D-printable. | | What's done is done, but just for fun, I mocked-up a logo [0] | (posted on another response as well) that reflects the | original character of the company in a modern format - at | least to me. Corporate branding is critical, and nailing the | logo has traditionally been a difficult task. | | [0] https://imgur.com/a/OEk8IUL | slugiscool99 wrote: | I've never had an experience with an agency that was better than | hiring individuals. You end up paying a 20% markup + dealing with | organizational headaches in exchange for skipping the pain of | finding and vetting individuals with the right skillsets. | | The initial shortcut ends up creating way more problems down the | road. | saos wrote: | This one of the reasons why I hate working with agencies. | Simpletons that say "yes" to anything and charge a fortune for | trash | _aleph2c_ wrote: | It's super smart to turn a project disaster into free advertising | for your website! I hope your gambit pays off. | account-5 wrote: | I think the old site looks much better than the new one. I'd | definitely not be paying for any of that. | hollaur wrote: | wow. dying that _this_ design / "aesthetic" (If you could call | it that) cost $46k. | goatcode wrote: | >I'm not trying to bash the agency here | | He should be trying to do so. | normalhappy wrote: | Wow. I closed my web services shop cuz I couldn;t find more work. | My one client and I parted ways cuz I was too expensive ($100 an | hour) to keep building their aws webapp to monitor patients | weight and blood pressures (also they paid me about 8 months | late). | | Totally appreciate the post-mortem and lessons learned at the end | and I hope there will be NO next time for you. | RadixDLT wrote: | Please dont hold back on naming this company, the leadership is | clearly inexperience, lack of.. creativity, communication, | business etiquette, user experience, user interface design... | shudza wrote: | Rekt. | shortformblog wrote: | As someone who has worked at a content agency for a decade, let | me just say: I feel really bad that this happened to you, and | that scope creep is real. | | I almost feel like you needed to ask for three separate things: A | brand identity, a marketing strategy refresh, and then (finally) | a website redesign. That all three were combined into one process | likely caused this problem to drag on. The agency had its | problems, but to be honest to me as someone who is familiar with | this space, it sounds like they were combining a lot of | disciplines into one project without considering that it would | have been better to chew smaller bites. | | There are times where you do need to bend the rules. At the | beginning of the pandemic I sort of broke protocol to get a | COVID-19 landing page on a client's site online because I knew | that it would take weeks done the normal way and possibly would | have led us to charge the client for something that a skilled | designer only needed a couple of hours to build in WordPress. | While the landing page wasn't perfect, it held up for nearly a | year, and showed that we were taking things seriously at a time | we needed to. A lot of agencies aren't wired for doing right | beyond billable hours, so be mindful of the risks. | | Either way, I feel bad that you paid so much for a site that | looks way better but doesn't feel like $46k worth of work. | allenu wrote: | A few weeks later, WebAgency called a meeting to share updates, | but they hadn't made any progress on the logo or branding. | Instead, they spent the whole meeting showing me design ideas for | the website. "To be clear, the project is still | a rebranding and not a redesign, right?" I asked. | | I'm sure the quote isn't verbatim from your meeting with, but I'm | guessing your tone with them was similar. It sounds like you were | speaking to them like you're both working at the same company, | for the same boss, which isn't the right tone, IMO. | | You hired these people, so you should really be talking to them | like you're the boss. Basically, dictate where their work is | going. If it sounds like they're going off-track, that's your | money they're wasting, so tell them, "This doesn't look like what | I asked for. | tristanb wrote: | I could have knocked that entire thing up in three days, | including building it. You just got a shitty agency. But an | agency is never cheap. You'd of been better off with an | individual. | thih9 wrote: | It's interesting how the author decides against hiring a cheap | developer, but in the end still tries to get good service for | cheap (i.e. hires a company that works with larger clients, | expects them to offer same kind of service to him). | | Also: | | > If I had insisted on milestone-based payments from the | beginning, WebAgency likely would have declined the project. | | Sounds like it would have been a good outcome. | | Of course it's easy to say all that in hindsight. | sbmsr wrote: | what i like to do is work with agencies for a limited trial | period. i give them a couple of easy, medium, and hard tasks, and | see how they fare. based on their performance, i hire them or | move on to someone else. | | This helps me test the hypothesis that this is the right group | for the job. | | That said, I don't know if that would have helped OP. It seemed | like timing (End of year is always a slowdown due to holidays, | and Feb-April are when other clients start ramping back up) was | not on their side, but breaking things down into more bitesized | work could have helped. Most of the work I saw was mockup/design | work, which is more creative/subjective than your typical "Make | button do X" kind of task. | xwdv wrote: | Sometime ago here I posited that America was business friendly | because you could decide to simply not pay a company you weren't | satisfied with and usually have no consequence. This is exactly a | scenario where that would be useful. | y42 wrote: | I worked as a freelancing web designer a long ago and I always | earned around 1k Euro for a whole project including everything or | 500 Euro for little programming stuff, of course usually business | projects. At one point I was beginning to hate those jobs. | | Everytime I read those stories, and that happens from time to | time, I just ask myself: what did I wrong? | | (answer is easy: I'm a good technician but the worst salesman) | NomadicDev wrote: | The trail of scorned developers is littered the sad | understandings of "Oh, I could've easily made way more money if | I was just a little more unethical". | | Pesky morals. | frankzander wrote: | you didn't want much. It's not about sales it's about "I want | that and if you cant afford that you are not the right customer | for me". Thing is that for 1kEUR I wouldn't even think about a | website. But thank you that you did give up ... gives some | other webdesigners the opportunity to say "hey go fy with you | 1kEUR ... I want 5k" (no offense) | mynameishere wrote: | Sounds about right. OP could have gotten someone at his beck | and call to design his site for 15 dollars an hour. Instead he | got some well-reviewed shyster. "Our other clients pay 40k a | month." GTFOOH. | KingOfCoders wrote: | I have seen many outsourcing projects with my coachees and with | founders, I've managed my own and cancelled several when I was | called in to fix them. | | The key to this kind of work is to understand: | | The agency is not your buddy, they have very different goals than | you have. Too often do I seen people who have nice chats with the | agency over a coffee. They are not your friends. | | You need to write the contract to align the incentives of the | agency as much with yours as possible. For example: I see hourly | billing, and bug fixing counting as billed hours. How has the | agency an incentive to keep bugs low if it makes them more money? | Agency has low retention, new people are slower, slower means | more money for the agency. How has the agency an incentive to | keep people on the project? | | [Edit] You might think this is obvious, but I have seen unaligned | incentives in mostly every outsourcing project I've looked into | and was asked to fix. Tip: Do not take the developers they give | you/have on the project. Interview all of them and reject the bad | ones. As a new customer, they will not give you the best but | those available (currently not on project/rejected by other | clients) | ren_engineer wrote: | outsourcing is usually done so leadership has somebody to blame | if their idea fails. Same reason companies like McKinsey exist, | usually some exec just uses them as the way to actually | implement what they want without directly fighting via internal | company politics. If it succeeds, they take credit. If it | fails, blame the contractors/consultants | [deleted] | [deleted] | deaddodo wrote: | > For example: I see hourly billing, and bug fixing counting as | billed hours. How has the agency an incentive to keep bugs low | if it makes them more money? | | More importantly, why is a bug on code they haven't even | delivered yet considered your responsibility. This is not | billable hours, this should be included in the original feature | hours. If he were requesting a new feature and calling that a | bug, sure. But it sounds like _they_ were the one 's | introducing new features against his protests. | | Slightly tangentially, this is why I refuse to do work with | companies that strictly bill hourly. Give me a project estimate | with strictly defined scope. Split the deliverables up into | three-five milestones (so either party can cut and run if | things are not going to plan) with partial payments on | milestone completion. Hourly billing comes _after_ for support | contracts and supplementals. | [deleted] | treis wrote: | >The agency is not your buddy | | I was a consultant for a while and this is true. We usually had | one or two empty suits per project that survived by getting | buddy buddy with the clients. It was kind of a symbiotic | relationship with the superstar devs. The superstars did nearly | all the work and the buddy buddy devs helped keep the clients | happy. But ultimately you're paying a lot of money for someone | to be your buddy. | christkv wrote: | I'm dealing with this right now where it's clear one of the | engineers is burned out and needs to be cycled off the project | for awhile. | winternett wrote: | With how templates, design, and code work on the Internet now | looking at a portfolio does little to reassure people of | capability. | | I run a web design company myself, and the best customers to | work with are ones that are decisive rather than needing to be | sold an idea for design. Also great are customers that realize | that design can be changed later or that precedent in | functionality, message, and content rank foremost above site | design. | | With any web dev project it's best to plan what can be done in | short phases rather than in huge project launches. We learned | from the chaos in Healthcare.Gov (not our project of course) | that huge product launches overwhelm teams, face huge delays, | and also can result in chaotic deployments. | | Great leaders that are decisive, studious, considerate, | accountable, and calculatedly adventurous are the best | customers and I enjoy working with them, also written | agreements/contracts are essential to being on time and on | budget. | | In "WebAgency's" defense though, their illustrations do better | depict the use of your product, despite perhaps the images not | being very flattering. | | One of the biggest hurdles to overcome on our end as a web | design company is marketing, as compared to other companies | (larger agencies that do web design). They spend a lot on | marketing, and thus that is what makes them even more expensive | to hire. These large companies also retain developers and split | them across projects, so accountability and focus are at times | not as good as what a dedicated development team and project | manager could provide. | | The #1 tell for the risk involved in dealing with a design | project is the complexity of the proposed solution. It doesn't | not seem that this project was meant to be that complex.... I | was shocked by the $45k price tag. It's at least a good thing | that I guess the company looks quite profitable. | | I might be charging my customers way too little on the other | hand though... :P | commandlinefan wrote: | > they have very different goals than you have | | I've been seeing stories like this about out of control | software projects as long as I've been working as a developer | (so since about 1992). The conclusion is always that the root | cause is either malice or incompetence - but it's awfully | suspicious that software is conspicuously alone in attracting | _this much_ incompetent malice. Of course, we hear stories like | this about general contractors, but they 're the exception | rather than the rule - for the most part, when somebody hires | somebody else to build a house, they get a house and it costs | mostly what they were quoted up front and takes mostly as long | as they were told it was going to take. | | While I guess nobody would take time to write about a software | project that went exactly as predicted, my experience is that | those are the exception rather than the rule, and the cases | where a software project was accurately quoted in advance are | relatively trivial projects. | | I can understand why the people who are writing the checks | _want_ software projects to be predictable, but in 30 years of | practice, I 've never figured out a way to accurately predict | them, nor have I met anybody else who could. I've met a lot of | people who accuse me (and software developers in general) of | malicious incompetence for not being able to foretell projects | in advance, I have yet to meet one who rolls up their sleeves | and says, "here, let me show you how to estimate this stuff | accurately" except in _very_ abstract terms like "first write | down every task you're going to do, then write down how long | each task is going to take, and then add up those numbers and | voila! Estimate complete!" | mlyle wrote: | > for the most part, when somebody hires somebody else to | build a house, they get a house and it costs mostly what they | were quoted up front and takes mostly as long as they were | told it was going to take. | | ! Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to fight | scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; | fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix | problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price | increases. | | You can get close to original scope and original pricing, but | for me it's always involved the implied threat of litigation. | Note this is the _only_ sector of business life where I 've | had to be this confrontational. | | (Work with individual trades has been not bad at all, but | this has tended to be tightly scoped projects with relatively | simple dependencies). | | > software project was accurately quoted in advance are | relatively trivial projects. | | Even simple software projects tend to have much deeper | interdependencies between work items, and bigger nonlinear | combination of work impacts, than other domains. If someone | changes something small on the fly in a normal construction | project, and a pipe is in a slightly different place-- it's | usually no big deal. It may involve a little bit of rework. | corrral wrote: | > Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to | fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete | work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to | fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price | increases. | | Our experience with looking into GCs for a kitchen remodel | was that their premium was so outrageous and their | ideas/plans so mediocre that we were much better off just | doing it ourselves. | | All the specialist contractors and laborers who actually | did the work were basically fine, easy-enough to work with, | charged reasonable rates, and did good work. | | I think we paid about 1/2 what the cheapest GC wanted (some | were _way_ higher) and used _much better_ materials than | any of them were calling for in their initial plans they | used for their bids. I can only assume their entire market | is people with so much money that they don 't give a shit | what it costs as long as they don't have to do _any_ work | themselves. "$15,000 to save me some googling and phone | calls? Sure, seems reasonable" | interactivecode wrote: | Heck no building a house or renovating anything is always way | more expensive than the initial offered price. Hence the rate | for fixed price building of houses is so much more than | regular pricing. Somehow build always take way longer and so | many if not all contractors leave problematic results. | roguas wrote: | And what is the solution? Essentially at the end of the day you | want to design: effective labour as service. If only it was | this simple we would have it already. Not saying you should not | put important clauses into contract to perhaps later have some | backing in court, but... | | Essentially, I think it's good to not treat business parties as | friends. However, I would put a lot of attention into this | relationship to increase common/shared understanding. For as | long as we think we have common understanding and somehow at | the end of the day I makes me very unhappy -> I might give it a | one more try and do another session of explaining, but finally | I will just switch if it happens to often. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I | assume the people working with me are honest and they're | motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for their time, and | I assume they'll use their time effectively. If they can't use | their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don't try | to fix it with different policies. | | I agree that there are payment schemes that will cause even | honest people to do poor work (e.g., if I paid someone per | kLOC, they'd probably write more bloated code), but in general, | I'm not worried about someone deliberately sandbagging a job if | I'm paying them by the hour. | | Paying by the hour is not perfect, but no payment scheme is. | With milestone-based billing, you get into disputes about what | is or isn't in scope, and I don't want to waste time on that. | It also incentivizes delivering the minimum quality work to | meet the milestone and move on rather than focusing on high | quality. | boesboes wrote: | You didnt hire people. You hired a company. That abused your | good faith. | | Also, 'If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate | the hire', appearantly not? They clearly where not using | their time, your money, effectively. | mtlynch wrote: | I don't think the problem here was in using their time | effectively. Or, at least, it wasn't the high-order bit. | Looking at their task breakdown, there weren't outrageous | items like "10 hours - change a button color." The times | were a little higher than I'd expect for devs who do this | all the time, but not egregiously so. | | I think I overspent on this project, but I attribute it | more to poor communication and poor management than the | devs working too slowly. | d1sxeyes wrote: | 8 commits to disable console logging in production? | | How many hours did they charge for that? I would imagine | that it would take more time to commit 8 times than to | actually change this... | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | I think you're being very generous. | | "You don't fit our usual workflow so no further work will | be done unless you pay us a retainer like the big guys | do" is simply not a good faith position to take half way | into a project. | | They gave you just enough extra attention to hook you in | at the start, then kept stringing you along for more | cash, with a few token deductions to make it seem like it | was all just very unfortunate. (Note: They would not have | made those deductions if you hadn't called them on it.) | | Then when it was clear there was no more money on the | table they finally did the work - which, conveniently, | left you with a positive impression. | | They did _not_ do the job you originally asked them to | do. They did a job they decided they wanted to do - and | charge for - because... why? They 're not organised and | professional enough to deliver what they were asked to? | | It's a classic case of actions speaking louder than | words. | | Some questions to consider: | | 1. Would you have hired them if you knew they were going | to cost nearly seven times more than your budget? | | 2. How much would a website redesign have cost if you'd | asked for that in the first place? | | 3. Do you think that work would have been done in budget, | or would it have exploded far beyond it too? | | 4. Would a different agency have acted in the same way | and presented the same problems? | O__________O wrote: | >> "You don't fit our usual workflow so no further work | will be done unless you pay us a retainer like the big | guys do" is simply not a good faith position to take half | way into a project. | | Good contract would have made this claim by the agency | both immediately not material, a breach of contract - and | in my opinion, may even be a type of fraud called bait- | and-switch, which is illegal. | boesboes wrote: | That's fair enough, I dont' think this is on the devs. At | least not entirely, but I'd argue that a company that | can't maintain budget and scope & is off by _that_ much | on the first estimate is not very effective either & | should be 'fired' as a company. | | And then there is the sunk costs which are not so easily | dimissible... | | That being said, it is a nice and fresh website. And | congratz on the success with the product! It's something | I've been 'dreaming' of, find a nice niche product and | make it well. No BS. | bawolff wrote: | > I think I overspent on this project, but I attribute it | more to poor communication and poor management than the | devs working too slowly. | | That is still using time ineffectively. If they are | working on something other than what needs to be done, | that is the same as doing nothing. | belter wrote: | Have two TinyPilot's...Great product, well supported :-) | | Sorry to hear about the Website redesign issues. Taking into | account the initial budget you were targeting for, it looks | like a scenario that required Gerry Weinberg, "Orange Juice | Test" before anything else. | | https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-orange-juice-test/ | matt321 wrote: | >> motivated to do their jobs well. | | Doing their jobs well for their own boss means getting as | much cash from you as possible. | shepardrtc wrote: | The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to rack | up billable hours. If that involves building an amazing piece | of work, then that's fine. But if it can be done by blowing | off the client and feeding them bullshit, then that's fine | too. I watched consulting companies bilk literally millions | of dollars out of a household name company by simply lying to | people that didn't know any better. | | I really respect your philosophy of assuming people are | honest. I used to be that way, too. But after working with | contractors and consultants and people overall, I think most | people will do what they're told, while others will actively | game the system. I've found that if you're tough in the | beginning and let them know that you're not to be gamed, then | you won't have any issues. Business is business. | | In any case, "Isaac" was completely full of shit. He knew | exactly what was up. He approved all those hours - especially | the dev hours that were spent on nonsense bugs. | | I know I sound harsh, but I believe everyone can excel if you | get past their bullshit and accept only their best. | ElemenoPicuares wrote: | I actually had a big long response to your approach | pointing out how damaging of a mindset that is for design | projects, but I think this is more relevant. | | I worked as a nightclub bouncer for well over a decade. I | learned that you can gauge how confident a bouncer is by | how friendly and warm they are to people they might have to | fight later that night, and by how calmly they respond to | people challenging them, physically or otherwise. If you're | genuinely confident you can handle the odd bad actor | appropriately once they reveal themselves, you don't need | to assume every interaction is a potential battle, and | everybody benefits. It creates goodwill and encourages | understanding when mitigating your own inevitable | inadvertent transgressions. | | I learned that people who openly talk about their toughness | are, without exception, trying to convince _themselves_ | more than anyone else. They can 't help trying to turn | every potential confrontation into supporting evidence for | their argument. These people can't help trying to | proactively _win_ situations that aren 't competitive and | unlikely to ever be dangerous. Not only does that causes a | lot of collateral damage, but the combative attitude is | much better at creating self-fulfilling prophecies than | discouraging bad behavior. However, without exception, they | believe they're responding rationally to the dangers of the | world. It's an exhausting, often self-defeating, anxiety- | inducing way to live. | treve wrote: | Bit of a dangerous thread to comment on, but I own a small | agency and while ultimately billable hours is how we make | our money, the overhead of getting new customers is also | incredibly high. The key way for us to be successful is to | build long-lasting relationships where each side feels they | continue to their money's worth. | | We mainly work for small and medium-sized businesses so | typically it wouldn't fall exactly under the radar if we're | not producing. | | That all being said, I've been on the other end of this | with agencies and freelancers and I would concur that you | should treat these relationships as adversarial until trust | is built. | tptacek wrote: | It's not at all true that the only goal of a T&M | consultancy is to maximize T for any given customer. When | you do that, you burn customers, and most consultancies (at | least, the ones whose names aren't lit up on the sides of | buildings) are extremely dependent on word of mouth and | referrals for business. | | The normal problem here is simple: the bread and butter of | a lot of consultancies are a small set of big "house | accounts", where both the consultancy and the client are on | the same page about the value being generated and the price | tag assigned to it. That's as it should be! Nobody is "full | of shit" just because one client puts a 10x price tag on | work you feel should be valued at 1x. | | That doesn't make WebAgency OK. They mismanaged the | engagement --- they shouldn't have done it at all, because | they don't have the project management or the engagement | structure to do a good job for 1x clients. When they | realized they couldn't deliver a satisfactory project for | the 1x client, they should either have terminated the | engagement and refunded the payments to date, or finished | it gratis and eaten the cost; the vendor should, in most | circumstances, own the delivery risk.+ | | But for a lot of clients, and, importantly, | disproportionately the clients a consultancy should want to | serve, this whole saga is meaningless. The dollar amounts | involved aren't high enough to micromanage, and all they | care about is the outcome. It's of course still possible to | burn those house accounts --- but burning a house account | is a _very big deal_ and well-run consultancies will freak | out if it 's happening. | | This is a live-and-learn situation for everyone involved. | If you're set up to deliver agency work to 1,000 person | clients, you need to be very wary of picking up gigs from | tiny sole-proprietor clients, because even when you get | into things with the best intentions --- and I take | 'mtlynch at their word that that's exactly what happened | --- circumstances can fuck everything up, and a small | client is going to feel that fuckup in ways an ordinary | client won't. | | I think 'mtlynch has exactly the right takeaway from this: | if you're a small shop, you probably want to err on the | side of engaging other small shops for consulting work, | rather than agencies, unless that agency can really | convince you that they've done the work to rig their | business for delivering to small clients. | | + _Here it 's tricky, because WebAgency was screwing up due | to turnover and increased workload from their real clients, | so delivering the work gratis would have impacted house | accounts, and nobody is going to let that happen; | meanwhile, 'mtlynch doesn't want them to cut bait and give | him his money back, so both sides are limping along in an | unproductive stalemate. It's a thing that happens!_ | sgtnoodle wrote: | In my last year of college, a couple friends and I ended up | working on implementing a vehicle-to-infrastructure | communications demo for the department of transportation. | We were doing it for a grade in a special projects class, | but we were working with a consulting company that was | being paid by the DOT to implement the demo. Toward the | beginning of the project, the consulting company folk were | very concerned about giving college students any non- | trivial amount of scope, and were talking about how they | would hedge all their bets by implementing everything | themselves and only use our stuff if it panned out. | | The demo itself consisted of about a dozen different | scenarios. The scenarios were all basically some form or | another of geofencing, and it made sense to make a simple | framework to get 90% of the way, then specialize for each | scenario. The consulting company didn't see it that way, | and instead wanted to treat each scenario as a separate | unit of work. | | Fast forward to the end of the semester, and my friends and | I demoed our framework for the professor, and a Motorola | radio rep. It all worked and we got A's. It was like 400 | lines of python. A couple weeks before the DOT demo, we | started seriously trying to integrate with the consulting | company's stuff, and it was laughably bad. | | The consulting company knew they dropped the ball, but | figured the three of us could just scramble to finish it | all on top of our framework. The Motorola rep chimed in and | pointed out that we already got our A's, and that the | consulting company was getting paid $500k. They ended up | paying us something like $20K, and it only took us a few | hours to implement all the scenarios on top of our | framework. The demo went well, and we ended up directly | helping the DOT demo it a few more times over that summer. | sdoering wrote: | I have a client that had an estimated max. budget of 11 | hours for a project. I just finished the task in 4 hours. | | The estimated budget stemmed from the first project, but I | had told the client that a lot of tasks would be much | quicker because we had built the base in the first part. | | Why would I try to rack up the hours and endanger the | relationship? Client is happy to have the service this | quick and for a very reasonable rate. I am happy, as the | chance for future business is very high. Without the hassle | from new biz efforts. | [deleted] | atwood22 wrote: | > The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to | rack up billable hours. | | This is only true if the contract doesn't have a maximum | budget. Often, the goal is actually to reduce billable | hours because there is a maximum amount that can be spent | (cost-wise) and you need to make sure you have enough hours | left to actually finish the job on time. | ErrantX wrote: | Well in this exact case; the agency quite successfully | structured things so that the billable hours were grown | significantly beyond what was originally contracted... | atwood22 wrote: | Yes, definitely. I just wanted to point out that you | should really include maximum amounts in job-based | contracts. A professional should be able to accurately | guess how many hours it will take. | CodeWriter23 wrote: | You're getting a little beat up here...I'm not piling on, I | am actually interested, because I need to reinforce my skill | in this area, do you have any learning to share about how to | better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting? | | I do appreciate your honest assessment of your project. One | of my investors is pushing me to build a team of outsourced | workers; it seems suboptimal to me to say the least. I find | the clues you share in retrospect to be helpful. Thanks. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | > _do you have any learning to share about how to better | assess the character /ethics of whom you are selecting?_ | | I don't try to assess character because I don't think you | can effectively. And I know others disagree with me here, | but I don't think the agency I hired was lacking in | character or behaving dishonestly. | | At the end of the day, if I'm hiring someone for $100/hr, | they need to produce output that's worth >$100/hr to me. | I'm a developer, and I have a sense of how long things | would take me. I hire other freelance developers, so I see | how long tasks take them relative to their rate. So if | someone is charging a high rate but delivering work very | slowly, I'd let them go, regardless of whether that's their | real speed or if they're padding their numbers. | | My typical strategy is to just hire and fire quickly. I | don't do interviews, and I just hire someone for a small | job (5-10 hours) and see how they do. If they do well, I | give them a larger task and then keep going up after a few | weeks. I wrote a bit more about my hiring process a | different post: | | https://mtlynch.io/freelancer-guidelines/ | CodeWriter23 wrote: | Thank you | clairity wrote: | i'm not fond of commenting on hn-as-marketing-channel | posts, even if it's within the bounds of the guidelines, | but here goes... | | > "I don't try to assess character because I don't think | you can effectively." | | > "My typical strategy is to just hire and fire quickly. | I don't do interviews, and I just hire someone for a | small job (5-10 hours) and see how they do." | | to restate, you can't assess character in a few | meetings/interviews, as there's just not enough data | (it's well within the honeymoon period of any human | relationship). humans are quite good at assessing | character over the long term however. your "typical | strategy" is employed, or at least should be, to mitigate | the inability to assess character _in the short run_. | | but, you didn't employ that strategy in your situation. | fire fast would have been after they didn't deliver the | first set of assets--you'd give them one more chance | (with fair and direct warning), and after that, they | should have been gone. instead, you kept at it for many | more months. you failed to manage your own project, and | that's really the bottom line learning here, not all the | other stuff you wrote about. by the time you did fire | them, you had enough data to assess their character and | fired them based on that, rather than employing your | fire-fast strategy. | | that's not to try to condemn you in any way, as | management is ambiguous and surprisingly complex (NP | hard), but you left a gaping management hole that the | agency filled with their own priorities and goals. i've | been on both sides of this coin, and one of the unobvious | inefficiencies of outsourcing is the need for twice the | management (on each side). your solution to just hire a | freelancer would work, not because it's a small project | and you'd be "rightsizing", but because it'd make it | obvious and necessary that you'd be actively managing the | project. | mgav wrote: | I think outsourced success depends heavily on choosing | capable & honest people and your ability to carefully | manage them (give a little rope, see how they do, and then | decide whether or not to continue). | jrumbut wrote: | I agree with you. I have written plenty of contracts and | statements of work, and it's so important to get those right | and make sure there's a true meeting of the minds and that | they strike the right prject-specific balance between detail | and flexibility, but there's no substitute for both sides | being a little bit reasonable. | | It's just not a business where a project can succeed despite | an adversarial partner. Both sides need to grow together. | j4pe wrote: | As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned | incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly | pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those | incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business. | | Broadly speaking, it's not economically feasible for an | agency to take contracts that pay $7k (or even $25k, for that | matter - I've written about this here | https://bonner.jp/posts/the-co-op-consultancy/). So if they | can do you a favor, in their minds, by fixing your whole | website instead of just three pages - and if you're willing | to pay for it - then everybody wins. Right? | | That's the difference between a business relationship and | being a friend: you may keep your mouth shut when a friend is | being imposing, taking too much for granted, because you | value the relationship. You would never remain silent in a | business context when somebody is spending your money. It's | business. They understand. | | On my jobs, I'm explicit about what I'm going to do and what | I'm not going to do. If my client needs to scale, I'm going | to talk them through options for caching and horizontal & | vertical scaling. But if my client seems to be dragging their | feet on customer development and making poor business | decisions about which features to prioritize, well, that's | not my role in this relationship. | | That said, I would never lead a client into a project | backwards the way this agency did. Because I do value the | relationship! In that I want you to come back, and pay me | more money later. Not because we're friends. That's business | honesty. | | This situation is definitely your fault - but only because | you and your agency had different assumptions about the rules | or norms of your relationship. Your agency poorly | communicated their intentions, and you allowed that to happen | out of a misplaced sense of friendly obligation. | | But hey, the new site does look great. | tshaddox wrote: | > As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned | incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly | pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what | those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do | business. | | I don't know. It's a blurry line at best. If an agency dev | team is really noticing that bug fixes are billable hours | and that's causing them to relax their code quality | standards since they'll be paid for bug fixes anyway, how | is that not dishonest? Perhaps it's possible for them to | not be aware that what they're doing is in bad faith, in | which case you might argue that they're "being dishonest | with themselves" instead of "being dishonest with the | client," but it seems like a distinction without a | difference. | fourseventy wrote: | Ya but your philosophy cost you $47k for work that could have | been done in 2 weeks by a competent developer... | dieselgate wrote: | Philosophy, costs, timelines, and justifications aside - | I'm curious if, in your experience, many "competent" | developers have this sort of design experience in their | wheelhouse? | mtlynch wrote: | I'm sure there's a dev who could have done the same work | faster and cheaper, but they're extremely hard to find. | Everyone wants to hire a frontend dev who can design and | code. They'd either be outside my budget or they'll only | take jobs from people with a personal recommendation. | | There's also the problem that until you hire them, you | can't distinguish between a talented developer and someone | just pretending to be one. I might go through 10 expensive | developers over a year before I find one who's actually | capable of delivering the project in two weeks. | | Do you have a recommendation for where I'd find someone who | can do this job in two weeks to the same level of quality? | [deleted] | soperj wrote: | At least then you'd have that person for the future. | treis wrote: | Has anyone approached you about an acquisition? At 50k+ MRR | and those margins on hardware you really shouldn't be losing | money. Imagine there's a small (or big) hardware company with | in house employees to do what you're outsourcing at a much | lower cost. | bathtub365 wrote: | Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000? | | > you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope, | | This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold | payment when delivery isn't up to your standards, and you are | protected contractually. With pure time & materials it's much | harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they | didn't work the hours they billed for. | Consultant32452 wrote: | I'm on a T&M contract right now where we are having the | stupidest of disputes. | | T&M with a SOW full of deliverables. Client asks us to do a | ton of work outside of scope. We inform the client it's out | of scope, but that we are happy to perform the work as part | of the T&M. Can't get anyone to push through a CR "because | it's T&M so it doesn't matter." Client has been paying all | along. Getting to the end, client doesn't want to sign off | on completion of the project because we didn't do the SOW | deliverables (per our previous alignment). They already | paid so I don't actually care if they sign off on the work, | but it's stupid for everyone involved. | ncallaway wrote: | My favorite protection for this kind of situation is | having a Single Point of Contact clause, that basically | says: "ultimately, we take direction from X person and | only X person". | | This helps in a couple of different ways. Occasionally, | you'll get conflicting requests or instructions from a | client. When that happens, I usually just push it to the | single point of contact and ask how they want to proceed. | | But it also helps in the scenario you outlined, because I | make sure any approvals for "outside the scope of SOW | work" gets approved to be worked by the single point of | contact, along with any relevant disclaimers about total | project budget and estimate. | | Then, when you come to time to evaluate the project | progress the single point of contact has clear language | that they've approved with whatever associated cost | warnings. | freedomben wrote: | OP, I hope you _aren 't_ rethinking it. You'd certainly be | justified in doing so, but I think it would be a mistake. | There are most definitely people out there that fit your | description: | | > _I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in | that I assume the people working with me are honest and | they 're motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for | their time, and I assume they'll use their time | effectively. If they can't use their time effectively, I | terminate the hire, but I don't try to fix it with | different policies._ | | I've worked with many of them. I myself try to live that | way as well, often costing myself non-trivial time and | money to ensure that my client gets what I sold them. | | Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen | multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self- | fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your | expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, | etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing | trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the | ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering | your expectation of people will lower your results. I've | also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that | ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic | misery. Not worth it. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks! | | Yeah, I agree. This experience hasn't affected how much I | try to defend myself from dishonest | employees/contractors. I think the prevalence of | dishonest/malicious people is so low and screening is so | costly/ineffective that it's not worth it. | | > _Of course there are people who are not, but I 've seen | multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self- | fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your | expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, | slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely | showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live | up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation | bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your | results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive | feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, | and misanthropic misery. Not worth it._ | | Yes, 100% agree. When someone tells me, "I've put so many | controls in place to make sure you can't do X," it's so | adversarial that my first though is, "I'd really love to | find a way to do X." But if they tell me, "I'm trusting | you not to do X because that will cause Y negative | consequence for me," then I'm inclined to honor that | request because it doesn't feel like we're adversaries. | bawolff wrote: | I dont think anyone is suggesting you micromanage your | consultants, that is obviously the wrong approach and | defeats the purpose of hiring consultants. | | This is a bussiness arrangement. Normally this works by | you saying some things you want over some timeframe, and | letting them work on it. | | The part of this story where things go off the rails, is | that by the middle of it, it was clear the agency wasn't | delivering on their deliverables or really making | progress. Most people would make some sort of change at | that point, either terminate or set modified expectations | - definitely not blindly give more money. | | Its really not about trust, its about whether or not they | do the job. There could be many reasons why the job | doesn't get done, many might not be malicious - but these | people aren't your friends. You are buying something from | them, if they dont have the goods, then they dont have | the goods and its not a sign of lack of trust to move on. | ratww wrote: | I have also worked with several honest people who were | motivated to do their best, in the most effective way. | | Actually _almost everyone_ I ever worked with was like | that. | | All the exceptions were agency/consulting people. | | Their job is bleeding people dry. Period. | mtlynch wrote: | > _Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting | $46,000?_ | | Honestly, no. I think I certainly made mistakes on this | project, but I don't think trusting devs to use their time | effectively was the problem. | | >> _you get into disputes about what is or isn 't in | scope,_ | | > _This is to your advantage as the one who is able to | withhold payment when delivery isn 't up to your standards, | and you are protected contractually. With pure time & | materials it's much harder to sue for non-delivery unless | you can prove they didn't work the hours they billed for._ | | The problem is that agencies know that, so if I approach | competent agencies demanding a milestone-based contract for | $7-15k, they'd just tell me to get lost. They don't want to | take a risk on some small client demanding the moon before | they'll release payment. | | I'm sure there are desperate agencies who will agree to | contracts that put them in a weak position, but I expect | their work will be lower quality than the agencies that | protect themselves. | whatinthef4747 wrote: | ncallaway wrote: | > so if I approach competent agencies demanding a | milestone-based contract for $7-15k, they'd just tell me | to get lost | | Yep, exactly that. | | And, for a dev agency (I'm not as familiar with how | design would want to structure this), you'd either need | _very_ detailed and specific requirements before we | consider quoting the project, or we're going to need an | up-front discovery phase (that will run a few thousand | dollars anyway) to produce those detailed requirements | and specifications, before we can even give a quote. | | Fixed bid projects do feel like they create much more of | an adversarial relationship than a collaborative one for | working on a project, and when we make fixed bids we | _definitely_ price a lot of the risk into the bid (and | we're up front about that). | deaddodo wrote: | If a contractor told me to "get lost" over a $15k | contract for a three-page rework + redesign; I'd just | respond "gladly". | | That is a dead simple ask and something that could easily | be handled by one front-end dev + one designer in 1-2 | weeks of half-time work. That easily covers their | salaries (in LA, at least) + 30-50% overhead. You would | probably pad that out to a month for other jobs + | unknowables; but I would be absolutely shocked if an | agency quoted anyone any more time than that for such a | basic and trivial task. For a first time contract, that's | a pretty good deal to entice word of mouth referrals + | potential future work. | | This isn't work that needs discovery or intricate | scoping. It's basic work that anyone with web development | experience can scope out and that a shop focused on that | definitely has extensive experience on. Better than that, | if you review his original scope guidelines, he makes it | clear he specifically _doesn 't_ want any more work done | than those three pages. All of the complicated work (logo | redo + rebranding) he was talked into by the agency, | along with random things like additional color palettes, | extended page attributes, etc. | ncallaway wrote: | Well, I was talking about dev work rather than design | work. | | A 3 page build for a marketing website is probably very | well scoped for the dev work (if the designs are done). | | If the designs _aren't_ done, though, and the fixed bid | includes the client signing off on the visual look and | feel, then... that's not a tightly scoped requirement. | | Could we do the dev in that budget? Almost certainly, I | cannot imagine it taking longer than that for a handful | of marketing pages. | | Will I sign a fixed bid contract, if I don't have a | design and requires the client to sign off on the final | look and feel in order to be complete? No, that would be | insane. | giancarlostoro wrote: | > Tip: Do not take the developers they give you/have on the | project. Interview all of them and reject the bad ones. | | This is really good advise and probably will save many people | months of headaches. You wouldn't just hire someone random HR | throws your way, why do that with an agency you've never worked | with before? | Aeolun wrote: | > why do that with an agency you've never worked with before? | | I don't see how this works? You ask agency for a developer | for your project, you get a developer for the project. Will | you just withold payment if they don't use developers you | like? | sally_glance wrote: | The agencies I've worked actually all let me interview the | dev(s) before the contract was signed. If someone didn't | seem a good fit we would either get another candidate or | renegotiate rates. This was for augmenting an existing team | though, things are different if you outsource a whole | project. | giancarlostoro wrote: | Nothing worse than being on a project where everyone is | hostile to one another. | nemothekid wrote: | I can imagine one thing: a project that is overbudget and | past deadlines. | TheRealPomax wrote: | No, you go "I'm sorry but we're paying you for quality work | and the dev you assigned us is clearly a junior dev. If you | do not have the capacity to do this job then we would have | preferred you simply stated this up front" and then you | don't "withhold payment", you make it a contract condition | and you terminate the contract and find someone else. | | It has nothing to do with developers you _like_, but with | developers who are going to deliver what has to be | delivered in the timeframe set out in the contract. If an | interview shows they're not going to be able to, then the | company did not provide you with developer to do the work, | they provided you with someone who can't do the work. | giancarlostoro wrote: | Correct, though I'd argue if your new resource is | hostile, it will not be productive for either party to | work together. | jacobsenscott wrote: | Good consulting companies that are able to think long term | realize that good employees doing good work, getting good | reviews, and getting recommendations are the key to a | sustainable business. Getting fired is expensive. A consultancy | that checks all those boxes is going to be expensive though. | Maybe more expensive than just hiring your own. | jrumbut wrote: | Speaking loosely, I would say that there are two kinds of | people: those that optimize within a framework of rules and | those that optimize the framework so they can relax inside it. | | My experience is a lot of web agency people are the second | kind. They have a cozy business where a happy client is worth | more than a bilked one. They can be (occasionally) generous on | the margins because the overall structure is good for them. | | I would never look at someone coming to me with a $7k contract | thinking "maybe I could stretch this out to several months and | $40k." It's not worth the heart burn. I've only ever seen that | scenario when a client couldn't be talked out of scope creep. | | Unfortunately this agency was the other type. They're bad for | the whole industry because trust is such an important factor | and it's a challenge for clients to know who is happy to make a | bunch of money for an honest hour's work versus who wants to | cheat the already generous system. | kurupt213 wrote: | The only thing that really sticks out as improved is the logo. | branding is everything. maybe that new logo is worth the $46K it | took to get there. | fleddr wrote: | "But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might | justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase | sales by 10-20%, but it's been closer to 40%." | | Should have put this in the beginning of the article. | | As for all the issues mentioned in the article, trust me on this, | it's always like this. I've been that "small client" hiring | externals at all tiers: mechanical turk, freelancers, agencies. | | You ask for A but get B. You agree on a timeline but none are | respected. You can put your foot down but that does absolutely | nothing, they don't need you. You're more like a hobby on the | side. | mrcartmeneses wrote: | 40% increase in sales is phenomenal. If that's down to the | redesign and not because of existing trends then it was money | well spent | dcow wrote: | I've been through this exact same story during my home remodel | with a ~~contractor~~ handyman. The problem as far as I can tell | is that when you pay someone hourly there is exactly zero | incentive to make those hours go away. I don't believe people | intentionally try to abuse the setup, it is just doomed to be a | common outcome because of the structure. If you pay someone | hourly they want to spend those hours doing their best work to | maximize the quality of the referral they'll get when they're | done. It's too easy to forget that timeframe (i.e. budget) is | part of what most people care about during a project. And for | better or worse most people do prefer "better late than never" to | "rushed and shoddy" so it's probably a fair bet for contractors | to implicitly make. | | I also empathize with the author in terms of "why didn't you just | do this and that" and the whole sunk cost fallacy. It's really | easy to be on the outside and give the obvious retrospective | advice that you should have fired X and switched to Y once you | saw a few red flags. But that too, even if it makes logical and | financial sense when you model it out still involves risks. | There's no guarantee the next agency will be any better than the | current so you're making a bet priced at the cost of treading | while getting the next agency spun up. And ultimately humans are | involved. It sounds like the issues with the project were being | communicated and responded to during the project lifecycle so | there's hope that the miss-steps will be corrected. | | It's really hard. The silver lining, in my case and the author's, | is that hopefully, despite the issues, all said and done you'll | get a return on your investment. For me I simply don't want to | lose money I'm not in the housing market to make money, I just | need a place to raise a family. | | The hard advice takeaway: if you have a budget and expectations | about how a project will be delivered, you ABSOLUTELY NEED those | codified in a contract. Shop around until you are willing to find | someone who will agree to share the risk and deliver on a | statement of work for a fixed cost. I understand in a competitive | market this is hard because contractors and firms can easily go | find "other" work. But the more pressure the better. Try | structuring the project to have diminishing returns or financial | penalties for being delivered late. Handymen or otherwise hourly | arangements have their place for small jobs on the order of 1 or | 2 days max 1 week of work. But hourly doesn't buy you any | executive function: which is needed to manage hourly work. Keep | in mind, in most cases, if these hourly people were skilled at | executive function then they'd own a contracting firm, manage a | team, and be profiting... | | The whole experience has really made me wonder why any startups | pay salary before they're profitable. Because as many know, this | happens all the time internally with full time salaried employees | too. No incentive complete work until the very last moment | necessary. Deadlines and punishments for not meeting them are | incredibly important. I mean I get it, a salary says "I need you | around for this much because otherwise my business doesn't work" | so it emotionally makes sense and I'm not saying the industry | should stop doing it. BUT, I also have a seen a lot of work be | dished out to salaried employees when it could have otherwise | been structured as a 5k or 10k contract with a statement of work | and payment remitted upon completion. I'm surprised you don't see | more of that blend. I guess SASS is kinda a stand-in but still. | gorkish wrote: | It's kind of strange that it wont let you join the waitlist if | you are logged into an existing openai account. | nkotov wrote: | We used a design agency as well for one of our product logos. | Come to find out, they just ripped off the Noun Project svgs, | added some color, and called it a day. A lot of the agencies I've | seen typically have enough templates already so it's to the point | now that you just fill in some blanks, choose a color palette, | add relevant graphics and you're done. | unleashit wrote: | As a designer-turned-developer, I find this topic and the | comments amusing. I don't think there's much question that the | agency in question treated the client terribly, and should have | been fired post haste and early. | | That said, you couldn't pay me enough to get involved with design | again in any way shape or form. The reason, as reflected by the | comments and experience, is greatly increased customer | expectations of the design process, number of expected | mockups/choices, iterations, content changes, scope creep, etc. | Even for small projects like the OPs, it's has ballooned to such | an extent that many times it's practically impossible to know if | something is going to take weeks or even years. | | 10 years ago when I last did design, if this author approached me | I'm confident that I could have delivered a significantly better | end result in far less time and at a cost similar to the original | estimate. However, I would have be up front at the start (and in | the contract) about maximum iterations and time spent before | triggering the hourly rate. This most of the time anyway, worked | pretty well to set the client's expectation to what I needed to | match their estimate. I do understand that this wouldn't be | palatable to most businesses anymore because it means having to | be more trusting and flexible about the end result. Yet in almost | all cases, I was able to please the companies I worked with and | do it mostly on time/budget. Indeed, they sometimes had to | compromise a bit but the end result as measured by revenue and | traffic was almost never disappointing to them. | | I'm a big believer of listening carefully and delivering not what | "I" want, but what my customer wants. That said, I also believe | business should be open to the advice of design (and other) | professionals, because that is what they spend all their time | doing. If you're fighting stuff like color/font/design choices | with your designer to the extent that you have to go through a | million changes, you've either picked the wrong designer or you | might also consider the possibility that you might not be | effectively communicating your opinions and/or that they might | not make sense. | kypro wrote: | I don't want to rub salt in the wounds here, but that design is | extremely mediocre. The primary mistake here imo was to think you | needed professional web design in the first place. You didn't. | | Professional web design is best suited to companies with a strong | brand or websites with complicated UX/UI that needs wireframing. | You're just a small business selling KVMs D2C. That doesn't need | anything fancy. | | There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out there | you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even better) | than this. In recent years I've used them almost exclusively to | generate some initial logo ideas then either made minor | alterations myself (where needed), or paid someone a little to do | it for me. | | Similar things can be said for web templates. There are some | really good customisable templates for simple sites like yours | out there today. I don't know why you'd pay someone for something | so simple, especially when the design is so generic and | forgettable (no offense). | | I don't mean to be so critical. The design isn't bad. The site | looks clean and it's pleasant to use. It's just insane to me that | your main takeaway here was that you should have hired a | freelancer instead of an agency. | [deleted] | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | > _There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out | there you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even | better) than this. In recent years I 've used them almost | exclusively to generate some initial logo ideas then either | made minor alterations myself (where needed), or paid someone a | little to do it for me._ | | I've tried AI logo generators and didn't like the results. Last | time I tried was 3-4 years ago, so maybe they've gotten better. | | > _Similar things can be said for web templates. There are some | really good customisable templates for simple sites like yours | out there today. I don 't know why you'd pay someone for | something so simple, especially when the design is so generic | and forgettable (no offense)._ | | Even with a template, there's still a lot of work. Someone has | to sift through all the templates to find a good one. Then I | still have to pay developers to adapt my existing content to | the new theme. And in my experience, template code tends to be | pretty bad. Tons of inline style rules so that the page looks | good in exactly that configuration, but it's not flexible. | | If I had to do it again, I'd still rather work with a | freelancer than search for a template and adapt it to my site. | porter wrote: | I run a similar sized software business and found | generatepress.com. I set up a wordpress site using their | visual builder tools and pre-made components, hosted on | wpengine.com so everything is always up to date. Took a few | weekends, but this is more than adequate these days. Logo | came from upwork.com | | I also feel your pain. I've had a bad experience with a top | python/django agency that turned out to have a CEO | "incubating" several startups to compete with Amazon, while | also running an agency. I got bad vibes early but kept | pressing on, and learned my lesson the hard way. | knubie wrote: | I'll rub a little aloe in that wound. I actually like the | redesign. The illustrations are great, and overall it's a big | improvement over the original. Worth the price? Perhaps not, | but at least you have a better website now, and more | experience dealing with agencies. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for the aloe! Yeah, that's how I feel as well. | | I was expecting people to not like the new design but it's | been surprising to hear how many people prefer the old | design and logo. I think the new one is way better, and | it's not even close. Not perfect, but certainly an | improvement. | pcurve wrote: | I think the design came out pretty nice. | | But I would definitely hire a freelancer to do some | visual clean up time to time. | | As site content is updated, I can already see evidence of | site feel reverting back to 'mom and pop', 'maintained by | webmaster' look in some sections / pages. | javier2 wrote: | I also think the redesign is way better, especially the | product page and <<buy frame>> with prices. | rexreed wrote: | Why not Fiverrs? | mtlynch wrote: | I talk about this at the bottom: | https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/#why-didnt-you-just- | fi... | rexreed wrote: | I see cheap $4/hr developers, but I don't see anything | specific about Fiverrs. Are you lumping them in together? | mtlynch wrote: | Yes. | | I don't mean literally $4/hr, but just any developer | whose distinguishing feature is being cheaper than most | other developers. | | I thought that was Fiverr's brand. | rexreed wrote: | That's not their brand, at least not in the past 5 or so | years. I've had significant success with Fiverr, many of | which are not the cheapest. Certainly you can find the | cheapest if that's what you want, but that's on any | freelance platform. | koshergweilo wrote: | > There are some really good (free) AI logo generators out | there you can use to generate logos very similar (perhaps even | better) than this. | | How have I never heard of these. Which ones are good though? I | couldn't find any free ones | barbecue_sauce wrote: | There aren't any good ones. Everybody who recommends these | must not have any sense of branding or design whatsoever. | theden wrote: | This one looks good https://logomaster.ai/ not free but you | can make one for < $50 | javier2 wrote: | I am gonna disagree, this looks like ok money spent. A bit | expensive, but I know for sure I am unable to do that UX and | design myself. | ThalesX wrote: | If you have more money than time, you're not going to start | shifting through templates, configuring stuff, dealing with | bugs, updating it, generating strange AI logos etc. | ls15 wrote: | Even if the alternative is dealing for months with a design | agency that is creating a three-page website? | ErrantX wrote: | I'd say the author is being generous to the agency and Isaac. | | There is easily a version of this where the agency has landed on | an excellent strategy for milking 7K for 6x their spend. | | At best (generously assuming the agency's retro is all true) the | CEO, Isaac has been greedy or naive in taking on work they | clearly weren't set up to deliver. | system2 wrote: | He is making so much money and forgot the reality. He received | a $2,000 website at best and kept dumping money to the | "agency". It is sad people are getting scammed like this and | think it is normal. | incogitomode wrote: | I'll take a contrarian position here. You paid for professional | services that you could afford, you got them, and they made you | more money. It's the definition of a good investment and a | successful project. | | Will also add that based on the happy conclusion of your story | the title is almost clickbait -- and highly effective clickbait | at that, since you've now gotten 1000s of targeted HN eyeballs. I | can't imagine how much that would have cost you! | epolanski wrote: | That only worked because op had another 39k to throw at the | problem. | | Imagine if he did not, and he ended with no redesign and no | money and needing to find a lawyer.. | sbf501 wrote: | Unrelated to the website discussion, the last link showing it is | still negative profits after spectacular revenue increases is | scary. This looks like a great product at a great price point, | with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?! | bradgessler wrote: | These days when I build a website, I design them with the mindset | that I want to subtlety troll the web design zeitgeist. As such, | most of my designs these days are inspired by resources like | https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and | http://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/ | | Let's look at how I applied those towards my sites: | | https://legiblenews.com/ is just a mother fucking website, with | dark mode. It's responsive, accessible, and fast. So fast that | it's unofficially the fastest news website on the planet | https://legiblenews.com/speed | | https://www.thingybase.com/ is full of childish sketches that I | made on my iPad Pro. Each sketch took maybe 30 minutes. It's fun. | It's whimsical. It's a website that's not taking design too | seriously, but it works, is fast, and is usable. It's also modal | free, with the exception of the Rails deletion confirmation | dialogs that I'll be replacing with an undo. | | And finally my absolute worst designed website is | https://www.imageomatic.com/, which is alpha at v0.1, is a super | lame sketch with a handwritten tagline. | | I am trying to prove a point that people overthink design. What | matters is if the product is useful, usable, and if the design | looks authentic to the people and company behind it. | | Inauthentic design is when small companies throw gobs of money at | their sites or applications trying to make their websites look | like a billion dollar company, like Stripe. | | Authentic design is when a small company, like mine listed above, | don't try to pretend they have a huge design budgets. Inevitably | when small companies pretend they have a big design budget, they | end up with something that starts looking janky over time because | the funds and people needed to maintain it aren't there. | NomadicDev wrote: | I like your philosophy. In fact, I think it helps in more than | one way. When I'm comparing multiple projects, and they all | have the same bland "MicroGoogFace" looking style, I feel like | I've wondered into OpenAI's secret bot farm pumping out generic | copy & paste versions of the same thing. When I see a page | deciding to be unique with their design, I'm more drawn into | giving them a deeper look. | | By the way, I like your news site, never heard of it before, | thanks! And for your thingybase, have you looked into adding | something like PaperCSS [0] to try the whole "sketchy" look | together? Although you may be opposed to adding any css | libraries lol I don't know. | | [0] https://www.getpapercss.com/ | bradgessler wrote: | Yeah, I looked at that but don't want to go full-on pencil & | sketch for the design of the thing. I'm actually planning on | switching the CSS framework from Bulma to Tailwind because | its much easier to deal with. | 0898 wrote: | I run a community for agencies (Agency Hackers). | | I wonder if a flat fee would have been the way to go here? Was | that something you looked at? | | Also, this was an interesting post, and I would love to have you | talk to our community about it sometime if you're up for it. | PaywallBuster wrote: | so the question is, is it really that hard to start from scratch? | | You could have the top tier upwork freelancers for 60-100 USD per | hour | | fully dedicated to your project | | Would it really be more expensive than a spaghetti touched by 10+ | people at an agency? | lowbloodsugar wrote: | Sunk cost fallacy in action. | SicSemperUranus wrote: | Wow, as lifelong web developer, you really got fleeced. This | reads like a list of rookie mistakes to be honest, but not just | on your side. Agencies should know when they're too big for a | client, and they often do. It avoids exactly this kind of | dissatisfaction. | | And yes, they made money, but the hit to their reputation is | usually not worth it if you're their smallest client. I dare say | they probably didn't even do it on purpose, they just didn't have | the bandwidth to actually care about your project. | | I've been looking at Scrum more closely recently, and I think | this would have been a good use case for it (with you as a | stakeholder). This goes toward your point of doing things one | step at a time. Scrum sprints are short and deliver value | consistently. Looking back, I wish I'd had to use it stringently | while I was still working at startups; I believe we would all | have been much better off. | FrancizHam wrote: | Hi Matt, | | First of all, I'd ignore all the haters in this thread. A lot of | people on here are badmouthing the final output when in reality | they're wannabe co-founders in the second year of their CS | degree. They say they can produce a better output with less cost, | I wouldn't be so sure about that. | | At the end of the day you made a torturous, exhausting investment | that seems to be making fantastic returns for you. So at least | you can sleep well knowing that! | | The part that sounds fishy to me is that at the very end of the | 'rebranding' work he suggested that their you use their in-house | developer to integrate the design rather than yours. | | As a developer I'd be pissed if my employer gave me some 80% done | design mockups and told me to go integrate it into a codebase I'm | unfamiliar with. Especially if I wasn't consulted or given the | codebase before hand. | | They then marked the largest task as a one week job then took | five weeks to complete it. It sounds like they used the developer | as a scapegoat and continued to tie up all the design loose ends | in those five weeks. That would explain why the developer started | doing some minor bug-fixes within the first few weeks rather than | 'doing the thing' because 'the thing' wasn't ready yet. I could | be wrong, but if this is true, my heart goes out to that | overworked developer. Hoping you're making the big bucks buddy. | _ynmi wrote: | I think I found them, might be heartbeat | | [link redacted] | juniorholmes wrote: | jer0me wrote: | What makes you think that? | nerdawson wrote: | The author chose not to name them. | | Attempting to find that information and then publicly sharing | it feels in poor taste, regardless of your opinion of how | things went. | _ynmi wrote: | I didn't "attempt to find" them. I was considering working | with this agency and the designs are eerily similar. | nerdawson wrote: | So, you've dragged the company into this, potentially | tarnishing them in the eyes of everyone seeing your | comment, based on a hunch? | | You didn't see a reference in their work examples for | instance, they just happen to look similar? | | Firstly, I think if the author chose to keep it anonymous | we should all respect their decision. | | Secondly, I find it incredibly inappropriate to be throwing | out company names like this without any proof. | sevenf0ur wrote: | Poor taste is stringing along your client and fleecing them | for every penny. | | That said, I'm not convinced this is the company. | adenozine wrote: | First mistake in my eyes is hiring from an Internet forum instead | of a professional service. | | Granted, I don't have a personal website and nor have I hired a | website freelancer. So, heap on the salt. | | Sorry that you went through all this. I can tell how frustrating | it was and it doesn't feel good to be scammed. It's generous of | you to share your experience like this and maybe educate someone | who might've been getting ready to make a similar error. | pfalke wrote: | The same applies within large companies. If you're within a | business team, and you're requesting work from a design | team/engineering team/data science team, you'll face the same | issues with scope creep + churn + competing priorities etc. I | wouldn't blame agencies for being bad, this is people being | people plus a bit of other things. Anticipating and steering | around/against these dynamics has been one of my biggest career | learnings over the last years. The author has some good | suggestions for how to do it -- if you work in a large company, | take another look and ask yourself if they don't also apply to | your work! | _the_inflator wrote: | I feel sorry for your experience. Glad you took it with stride. | | I always try to understand the business model behind agencies. | What they do is selling hours or teams. The more, the better. | | I worked with so many agencies, for quite some it is almost like | a meme: "Oh, your website/service/code is so crappy, we did not | expect that! This means additional efforts you have to pay for." | | If you ever hear degradations like this, run! It won't get | better, even if you pay for. They will always come up with | another reason to charge for more hours. | anewpersonality wrote: | This is obviously a submarine for TinyPilot | drudolph914 wrote: | Kind of unrelated to the original article, but I feel like I've | had this problem on a smaller scale. something I'm excited to use | is DALL-E 2. I borrowed a friends access and tried to use it for | my personal website redesign. It did everything I wanted and | more. saved me $2K | lxe wrote: | > I'm not trying to bash the agency here, so I'll just call them | WebAgency. | | Wow after reading this, I'd love to know who this WebAgency is so | I can stay away. Alternatively I'm thinking of starting my own | WebAgency and charge $7k to change button colors from green to | limegreen. | Graffur wrote: | Well written and an interesting read. Thanks for posting. My | reaction is "WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOING?" haha. | | I am not in the position to spend 46k on... anything but I would | like to think I wouldn't be duped in the same way. All this | "you're a small client" stuff is BS imo. | eightysixfour wrote: | I have worked in and out of consulting and agencies for many | years and I have a simple rule for hiring them when anyone asks: | | 1. Are you going to be one of their three biggest clients? If | not, find a smaller agency. | | 2. If you can't find an agency small enough to be one of their | three biggest clients, you want a contractor, not an agency. Put | them on retainer for more than 50% of their time. | | Firms will bend over backwards for their largest clients because | they do a poor job of tracking that it is _costing them money_ | when they need to fix a mistake. They just see one of their | biggest clients is unhappy and they will lose them. | skilled wrote: | I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on Tailwind | CSS) template generators which will produce results superior to | the pages you received. | | Sure, you'd need to hire someone to do the logo and the custom | icons, but I am certain that would not cost you anywhere near | $46k. | | Furthermore, I cannot comprehend how this actually happened even | if you shared all the details. Holy shit, for $46k you could have | gotten the spaceship-equivalent of a design from someone who | actually loves what they are doing. | | Mate, $46k is annual salary for A LOT of people. In the amount of | months that it took for them to "finish" the project, a junior | dev could have picked up design chops and done a 10x better job | at this. | | Just wow.... | | ALSO A QUICK EDIT: | | If anyone needs design work done (best I can do is a checkout | page with a bunch of unstyled ordered lists) my pricing starts at | $40k per 8 months, which is a lot less for what the author's | company was charging him. | duckmysick wrote: | > I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on | Tailwind CSS) template generators which will produce results | superior to the pages you received. | | Where are they? | gabrielizaias wrote: | Here: https://tailwindui.com/templates | mushufasa wrote: | how does one contact you? | skilled wrote: | fartingwizard[at]hhhhhsssshssss[dot]dev | | I primarily code in Python so that's why the weird domain | name. | GingerMidas wrote: | Professional, nice. | mushufasa wrote: | do you have a professional portfolio page or website? | skilled wrote: | I do not as global warming has caused my servers to | dissolve into ash particles. You can try to find me in | your favorite code editor (I live there now), but | alas...to answer your question - if you are genuinely | curious about the type of work I can do, please see | Cameron's World[0] as it best reflects my approach to | brandable (and sustainable I guess) web design. | | [0]: https://www.cameronsworld.net/ | [deleted] | swalsh wrote: | In my opinion, you're not paying $175 for a good looking page. | You're paying that premium for an expertise in what will | convert, how to build a funnel, and what to measure. I can pay | a guy $60/hr in India, and get something that looks decent. | mywittyname wrote: | Based on the sales graph, it sounds like they didn't even | accomplish that much. | TIPSIO wrote: | Except the name of the game for agencies is to book a big | expensive project and farm it out to entry level employees | (dev and designers) with just enough supervision to be | better. | | Then have a fun enough office to try and keep people around | in an extremely high turn over industry. | | It is what almost everyone is doing unfortunately who gets | big enough to carry a team. | | The best designers and developers also don't tend to want to | do contract work like this. | skilled wrote: | I don't know where you got the idea that this agency has any | experience in design conversions or building funnels, but I | won't dismiss your comment entirely. | | From a design standpoint, my biggest gripe is with the first | two sections on the landing page design. I mean, it quite | literally looks like either the site is reselling (drop- | shipping) or it's a knockoff scam. At no point did I get the | impression of "brand identity" or "this product looks | trustworthy". | | Which means that the primarily source of sales for this | product is word of mouth (reputation), and to be fair I | wouldn't be surprised if this agency just realized that | themselves and exploited the whole idea. | | If reputation is how you get sales, then why give a shit | about building a brandable design. A design that actually | converts and is possible to measure in long-term. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | > I can pay a guy $60/hr in India | | Man, you're really overpaying if you think an Indian designer | would be $60/hr. | | That would be more than the annual salary of a senior FAANG | engineer. | bbreier wrote: | wait what? 50 weeks * 60 / hr * 40 hr weeks = 120k yearly. | what senior faang engineer is making less than that? | nibbleshifter wrote: | Ones in India. | codegeek wrote: | "In India" | gtm1260 wrote: | He says he got a 40% increase in sales, so I imagine that takes | the edge off a little LOL! | yellow_lead wrote: | Well he had a 32% increase (vs. the previous month) in June | [1]. I'm not sure how the increase was calculated but I don't | think see how you can attribute 40% to the redesign - the | graph is already up and to the right ;) | | [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/07/#tinypilothttps | tin... | whenlambo wrote: | "Development: Items in my cart can have a negative quantity" -- | 2.32 hours?! | | "Development: allow console.log during development but not | production" -- 2.01 hours?! | | Total rip off. | NomadicDev wrote: | See the retrospective call summary is insane to me. I wouldn't be | able to do anything besides offer a partial, if not total, | refund. I literally, fundamentally, do not understand how people | can brush off such major mistakes with "Yeah, sorry, that was a | misstep on my part." | | I've only worked with a handful of clients so far, but the number | one thing I care about most is providing an honest service. I | estimate rough timelines for each major task in my head, then add | a few hours depending on complexity. If I go over that limit, I'm | usually working on that task for free until it gets completed | (unless there's some major flaw that is causing the slowdown, | like previous developer bugs or slow responses from client). The | client never sees this process, but in the end they see tasks | being completed in a fair timeframe. | | If I'm noticing events are causing me to slow down on a client's | work (by like a week, let alone the several months OP had to | endure), I quickly communicate with the client to let them know & | have us work out a plan. | | These aren't things that make me feel like I'm doing something | unique in this space, because they just feel so simple & basic to | how any working individual should conduct themselves. If OP was | dealing with a fresh in the field freelancer, still wet behind | the ears, then sure, I guess I can see how things can get away | from you in your first project. But this is supposed to be an | agency with big clients? And they had this many "missteps"? | | Insanity. Actual insanity. I'm not trying to rag on "Isaac" too | hard here, I'm more trying to word my confusion on whether or not | this is the norm for other freelance agencies. I hope not, | because the recount reads like a shameful state showcasing the | lack of care in this industry. | sarahlwalks wrote: | This is the rule and not the exception. It seems software always | takes much longer and costs much more than you think it will. The | smaller the task, the better it can be estimated, and the less | likely you are to veer off into crazyland. | | The best solution I know would be to hire a team and use agile | methodology to focus on the most important things first, breaking | them down into small tasks. The team might be people you hire, or | it could be people from an agency, but the project needs a | strong, hands-on leader who is committed to the goal. I have | never known a toss-a-big-solution-over-the-wall approach to work | really well. Those projects can vary from annoying to completely | dysfunctional. | alangibson wrote: | I've run into this phenomenon so many times playing entrepreneur | that I gave it the name Alan's Law: getting paid to do a job has | little to no influence on an entities ability to do said job. | NKosmatos wrote: | Huge respect for your TinyPilot project (especially for the free | version of the software over at https://github.com/tiny- | pilot/tinypilot), but I think you were ripped off and not enough | care/attention was given to your page :-( | | I'm not trying to be one of those people who say, you gave too | much money for something I would create in 2 weeks with only 4k, | but I'm trying to give a friendly advice to a fellow software | engineer :-) | | Two things that should be fixed in revision 2.0 of your page: | | - If we select the "Product" option from the top menu, we're | taken directly to the order page for the TinyPilot Voyager 2. If | we go to the root page for the products | (https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/) we get a page not found!!! | | - Although you're also selling something else, the TinyPilot Pro | software (over at https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-pro) | this isn't visible in the "Product" selection or from the main | page. Maybe you should rename this selection to "Products" since | you have at least 2 things you sell. The page for buying the | software is only referenced from the Voyager2 page and from | nowhere else. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for the feedback! | | > _If we select the "Product" option from the top menu, we're | taken directly to the order page for the TinyPilot Voyager 2. | If we go to the root page for the products | (https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/) we get a page not found!!!_ | | Are you talking about if you manually change the URL? I don't | think anything links to the /product/ route. | | > _Although you 're also selling something else, the TinyPilot | Pro software (over at | https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-pro) this isn't | visible in the "Product" selection or from the main page. Maybe | you should rename this selection to "Products" since you have | at least 2 things you sell. The page for buying the software is | only referenced from the Voyager2 page and from nowhere else._ | | Yeah, we intentionally focus on the Voyager and bury everything | else. We used to have a product catalog, but it made users | confused about what they were supposed to buy ("Do I need to | buy the hardware and software separately?"). | | We consolidated down to a single product, and it roughly | doubled sales: | | https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/11/#simplifying-to-ju... | solardev wrote: | It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency. They ripped you | off =/ No two ways about it. | | > I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this | project. I don't feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze | money out of me. We just didn't match. I was used to working with | individual freelancers, and WebAgency was accustomed to larger | clients. | | ...I think that is a very forgiving, but utterly self- | doormatting, perspective on the issue. This was an incompetently | managed agency who kept bullying you because you let them. At | $175/hr, even as their smallest client, you deserved waaaaaaaaay | more professionalism. IMHO the biggest lesson to be learned here, | that you didn't really talk about in the blog post, is not to let | someone -- agency or employer or freelancer or otherwise -- | fleece you over like this. Isaac kept stalling and not delivering | and mis-spending your contracted funds. You should've demanded a | partial refund or threatened to sue. Their behavior wasn't | acceptable, but you just kept saying "it'll get better...". It | never does. | | Sorry to be so harsh, but you kept trying to defend their "best | intentions". No, they just didn't take you seriously, and then | they failed your project and dragged you down with them. Nobody | should be paying for an agency like that, especially for $175/hr. | What a rip-off :( | | You did mention that you probably would've seen better results | from a freelancer, and that's probably true -- especially from a | place with some bare accountability, like Upwork where there's | reviews. | Supermancho wrote: | > I don't feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money | out of me. | | From the article: > They were so excited about the project and | got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they'd | spent redesigning the blog. | | The management directed the designers to do that work, to see | if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, | that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you. | runnerup wrote: | I don't think this is universally true. Developers (myself | included) often just do what they want regardless of what | they're told and in a consultancy it has to be billed | somewhere. Here, a client was cost a lot of money. But it | might not have been directed by a manager! | | At large corps like MSFT and APPL, this behavior is often | lauded by the hacker community because it leads to wonderful | things like PowerToys and GraphingCalculator. | philliphaydon wrote: | > Developers (myself included) often just do what they want | regardless of what they're told | | I don't believe this is true for adhoc work. There's often | pressure to get a job done under time under budget to | maximize profit. It's one reason I much prefer working for | a service based company as there IS room to do what you | want and push boundries. | runnerup wrote: | I did it plenty when I was working as part of a | contracting house where "every hour is billed to a | client". There's plenty of room to spend time making | crazy tools to automate your work or provide | internal/external/personal value. | | Sometimes these rogue gambits pay off and return | multiples of value...sometimes they just waste massive | time. | | But I can say that I was absolutely a rogue project-doer | in an engineering body shop. | philliphaydon wrote: | Good point, if youre billing every hour you can just | squeeze the client. I've never worked in a place like | that so I can't comment on what it's like. | solardev wrote: | It's one thing to factor in employee overhead -- whether | it's "20% time" or vacation time or healthcare or just | plain inefficiency -- into your pricing model. It's another | thing entirely to take a client's contracted hours to pay | for something they never asked for -- repeatedly, even when | asked to stop. It's both a difference in degree and in | expectations between paying for a monthly service vs paying | for billable hours. If you're an agency and your dev went | wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the | client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), | you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better | structuring their work. | | There's also a pretty big difference between spending a | LITTLE extra time on a side project vs not even finishing | the actual project because your side project became the | main focus. This is probably OK: "Hey, here's that finished | logo you asked for. By the way, we had plenty of extra | hours left, so I spent an hour on this new design mockup... | doesn't it fit in much better with the new logo? What do | you think, should we consider expanding the project scope | to pursue this, or drop it if you don't like this | direction?" | | That's not what this agency did. They were more like | "Ohhhhh yeah we still haven't had time to finish your logo. | We need a few more months while we figure stuff out | internally. Sorry, you're just not a high priority for us. | But hey, one of our designers took half your hours and made | this, check it out! Yeah, I know it's not what you wanted, | but the logo person is busy. But check it out anyway! | C'mon! By the way, if you paid us more, maybe we'd take you | more seriously." What bullshit, lol... =/ | runnerup wrote: | Honestly you hit the nail on the head here: | | > If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random | stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless | you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the | costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their | work. | | Additionally, if he was "such a small % of their total | revenue" it should have been nothing at all to eat the | inappropriately high costs on this project. | bzxcvbn wrote: | And "I've got a lot of my plate but let me see if I can | squeeze you in" is one of the most obvious ploy of | salespeople. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | _> It 's odd that you didn't want to name the agency._ | | I've learned to keep things vague. I'm even careful about | writing complimentary stuff; usually, if I have had a hand in | it, I generally try to avoid directly naming. | | I am _very_ careful about writing non-complimentary stuff; even | if I have documented proof. In these cases, I may keep it to | direct personal experience, and avoid directly naming the | guilty parties. I 've found that people don't heed warnings, so | I'm not actually doing anyone a favor. | | Lawyers in the US can get awful indiscriminate, when it comes | to dragging people into court, and I have found that most | organizations have many teams; not all of which may be | bad/good. | sys_64738 wrote: | Don't change the design. It'd bloody annoying. | sanitycheck wrote: | What you needed was a professional logo design. An agency might | well be the best place to get that done, although they may well | use a subcontractor. | | After that, everything else could be done by a middling freelance | designer with Squarespace. No web dev required. | | I don't necessarily think the agency had especially ill intent, | but the way they work is clearly not accommodating of clients | with restricted budgets and they should probably not have taken | the job to begin with. | ricardobayes wrote: | $175 an hour lol. I know senior designers/programmers who work | for a fifth of that in Europe. Perfect English, 5+ yoe I never | understood why companies pay hundreds per hour to anyone. You can | get equivalent talent for much less, if you know where to look. | mtlynch wrote: | Where do you recommend looking? | O__________O wrote: | From the article: "The real issue, [WebAgency CEO] said, was that | I was their only hourly client. I would always be at the mercy of | long-term retainer clients pre-empting my project." | | -- and -- | | From the article: "They were so excited about the project and got | carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they'd spent | redesigning the blog." | | ___ | | That's bait-and-switch in my opinion and might very well be | illegal. | | My suggestion would be to immediately stop talking about this to | random people on the internet and speak to an attorney | specializing in contract law. Prepare a brief covering what you | did in the blog, have copies of any emails, specs, contracts, | etc. -- and have them clarify if there was a material breach of | contract that would warrant damages and/or any evidence showing | the web agency committed illegal acts. | | I would also be very careful about identifying the company, since | they might file for legal damages. If the CEO's first name is | real, I would immediately remove it from your blog and the | reference to finding them on HN to make any claim you did | identify them harder. | cafetree wrote: | This is so typical for some business to waste money and charge | higher price. Like health care industry. As a dev, I also | designed logo and webpage myself. | __derek__ wrote: | Contrary to the author's assumption about disincentives, it seems | like terminating the contract may have been _why_ all the work | suddenly got done. That 's when the author went from a customer | to a potential threat. If the agency hadn't completed the work | (including the "no charge" fixes after the contract ended), I'm | guessing we wouldn't have gotten a pseudonym for the agency and | project lead. | mtlynch wrote: | I'm not following. What threat did I pose to the agency after | they had all my money? | werds wrote: | hey since looking at your site, i have seen about 10 of your | TinyPilot ads. I am certainly not in the market for one of these | and probably not that many other people who viewed the article | site are, so i suggest you dial back on the retargeting budget | following this hacker news traffic, save yourself some money. The | hacker news readers who are in the market have already seen your | best piece of marketing for the product today, this article. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for the suggestion! I'm paying per click, so I think | that should still work fine, but I'll speak with TinyPilot's | marketing freelancer about this. | rexreed wrote: | While the OP says in the post that he's not a rube, this whole | post makes me wince and shouts "rube". There's no reason in | today's day and age to spend this much or take this much time on | a website "redesign", especially if you're a small business or | one-person shop selling basically a consumer item. Agile | methodology is key. Iterate quickly. Design / test / build | quickly and iterate. Any long-term web design project is at high | risk of being a waste of time and money. This has been an | accepted best practices approach, especially for fast-moving | projects for decades. | | It does seem like he learned his lesson and at the end he talks | about how basically an iterative approach with lots of deliveries | and low-cost testing is the best approach. And yes, it's the | best-practice. But then again he learned an expensive lesson that | if he had asked others about, would have gladly told him. | Sometimes people need to learn lessons on their own with their | own expense to realize that best practices apply to them, too. I | find the lack of acceptance of methodology and best practices | approaches very sad. | pattle wrote: | Stories like this make me think I should get back into | freelancing. | | I'm pretty such I could have had the whole project finished | within a couple of weeks for around $5k | globalreset wrote: | This is what reliably happens if you give one person project to a | team. Seen this multiple times internally. | lawn wrote: | > I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this | project. I don't feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze | money out of me. We just didn't match. | | Sounds exactly like how people rationalize abusive behavior from | their partner. "It was my fault he hit me" etc. | | That's because they did abuse you and ripped you off. | rkangel wrote: | > "Structure for serial, incremental results" | | This bit was the surprise to me that it was a new lesson to | someone who posts on Hacker News. It's a lesson that | 'conventional' project people haven't learned but it's Agile 101. | It's the absolute basis and core of agile - don't do everything | all at once, progressing together and delivering at the end. | Instead do the first thing all the way through, and then the next | thing. | | Doing it has many many benefits: You can stop at any time and | have something useful You get to decide whether subsequent things | you thought you wanted were actually right and can | add/remove/change them You get to take learnings from earlier | things and use them when doing later things[1] As client | (stakeholder) you get actual deliverables so you can judge actual | progress, with no room for 'fudging' | | [1] This is important and not talked about much with Agile. If | you do Waterfall you do your design all at once and don't get a | chance to learn any lessons. If you do Agile, you build the first | thing and learn some more about your problem and the solutions. | You are then better prepared for the second thing, which leaves | you even better prepared for the third thing etc. This includes | even changing what you thought you were going to do for later | things. | jwpapi wrote: | I think the biggest thing that could've been done differently | here is hiring through a platform. If you hire through a platform | there is a third-party that controls that both parties behave as | they should. All agencies and freelancers have tons of incentive | to do good work and make the client happy. They basically live | off their reviews. Also those platforms have escrow, milestone | payments and many more useful things. I know people hate the 30% | extra, but in my experience those 30% are actually worth more | than the 70%. | | A good book on these kind of situations is "Skin in the Game - | Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. | | WebAgency never had an incentive to make you happy... | throwaway81523 wrote: | I can't remember seeing a website redesign in my entire life that | didn't make the site worse. Many sites have gone down the tubes | due to redesigns while always blaming the failure on something | else. Kudos for at least having the self-awareness to realize | that your redesign didn't help. | | To first order, there's (usually) only one site metric that | really matters, and that's page load speed. Craigslist still | thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, | because it's so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty. | Meanwhile the also-rans with busy pages (remember Yahoo leading | the search space? Digg leading link aggregation?) are now near | forgotten. | paulcole wrote: | > Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and | looking prehistoric, because it's so fast. Google.com homepage | looks almost empty. | | Craigslist and Google's site speed enhances their success, it | isn't the cause of their success. Their content is what the | user wants. Giving it to them fast is a huge bonus. | | I don't want to see shit fast. I want to see good stuff fast. | If I have to, I'll wait to see really good stuff. | | > Meanwhile the also-rans with busy pages (remember Yahoo | leading the search space? Digg leading link aggregation?) are | now near forgotten. | | Yet Amazon, with an incredibly busy page thrives. Because the | content is what matters. | NomadicDev wrote: | Agree. Fast is good, but content is better. | | If you can give me super content medium fast, I'll take that | over medium content super fast. It's really only at the | extremes do things start to differ (ie shit content or snails | pace slow & glitchy). | | Of course, the ideal setup is super content super fast, which | is why Craigslist is probably never going to do a major | rebrand. They already have plenty of startups constantly | nipping at their heels, so they may as well maintain the | super fast advantage they have over them to cement their | status. Their only real threat would be a super speedy, super | pretty, site that somehow launches full of good content. | throwaway81523 wrote: | We're talking about the site design. The stuff actually in | the site is a separate issue. Most redesigns afaict make the | site slower, which is the wrong direction. The content | presumably stays the same either way. | | Case in point: plenty of HN readers click on the comment | thread but not TFA. I believe that a lot of the time, that's | due to dread of some godawful slow loading page contaminating | their browser with tracking cooties and who knows what. | [deleted] | easrng wrote: | I wouldn't call Craigslist "thriving", it's still alive but it | seems like Facebook Marketplace took over a lot of what it did. | projektfu wrote: | I think Facebook Marketplace is thriving but mainly because | it inserts itself into people's other behavior, maybe not | because people think it's the best platform for exchanging | goods. In fact, it could really use some of the moderation | features of Craigslist. | | After much creative destruction, we're back to inserting | classified ads next to the stuff people are reading to pass | the time. | andrewallbright wrote: | I respect the tone of this blog post. I pause to think how I | would word this experience if it happened to me. Since it hasn't, | I don't really know how I would react. However; having this cool | composure to think through why things ended up as they did and | how it could be improved in the future is something I hope to | aspire to. | | "We just didn't fit" is a fantastic conclusion. | | The ego is one helluva thing, and a hurt ego with negative self | talk can lead one down silly paths. OP is cool as a cucumber. | AndrewVos wrote: | Does anyone want me to build their website for them? I'll do it | for 10k | Dachande663 wrote: | I've worked on the other side of this and it's the end result of | any large agency that starts chasing the bigger clients. More and | more time, effort, and money is spent on the | ideation/thinking/design side to the point everything else just | grinds to a halt. For executives on both sides it's great. For | anyone who hasn't to _do_ something, it's at best pointless, and | at worst poisonous to every other activity. | | As the author said, hiring a freelancer with specific goals is a | much better route. | sevenf0ur wrote: | Naming the agency might give them more pressure to make it right. | alexalx666 wrote: | Michael, congrats on your product/market situation! Your new | website is very good, it nicely communicates "tiny" branding, I | could just put it in my pocket :) Thanks for making an effort to | describe this case and what you learned | deltarholamda wrote: | You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep | the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt, | let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno | and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use | microservices and..."? | | Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is | fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as | fun and interesting. And, just as fixing bugs is tedious and | boring, tweaking designs is tedious and boring. | | I've been on both sides for a lot of years, and I have to keep a | sharp eye on myself to keep from spinning my wheels on | distractions. | | Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine | Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb. | EveYoung wrote: | _Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine | Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb._ | | Not that it matters in this context but wasn't it the other way | around? Didn't Donato Bramante try to sabotage Michelangelo by | convincing Pope Julius II to give him the Sistine Chapel | comission, assuming that Michelangelo would fail (due to his | lack of experience in fresco painting) and ruin his reputation | in the process? | | So Donato Bramante was more a consultant recommending an | overpaid design agency hoping to benefit from their failure. | deltarholamda wrote: | I was actually thinking of "The Agony and the Ecstasy," which | is on somewhat shaky historical accuracy footing. | | Rex Harrison whacking Charlton Heston with a stick because | he's slacking on the ceiling is how all project managers | should handle both devs and creatives. I hear that's how | Larry Ellison does it. | FredPret wrote: | We've heard of Scrum. Now comes Stick | einpoklum wrote: | > a lot of technical debt ... let's rebuild the whole thing | using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to | Azure etc. | | For me, I'm the dev who says: "This codebase has a lot of | technical debt. Let's get rid of all of the containers and VMs | and kubernetes and artificial servicification, take it off the | cloud, and refactor it into smaller programs which do the work | efficiently and which can be built and run on basically any | machine(s) and cooperate peacefully." | ticviking wrote: | I wish I knew more devs like you. My life would be so much | easier if we could all think like this. | hgomersall wrote: | But definitely rewrite it in rust ;) | m463 wrote: | I wonder how you judge the tipping point? | | "Why do it in C when assembly language has been working so well | for years?" | kh_hk wrote: | Following through the example, if assembly language works | well, then there's no justification to do it in C. One needs | to find (valid) reasons to justify such decisions. | slingnow wrote: | The tipping point would be when you can come up with a | compelling answer for the question you laid out. You don't | just rewrite it in C as a reflex to that question. | [deleted] | andrepd wrote: | > Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical | fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from | scratch is just as fun and interesting. And, just as fixing | bugs is tedious and boring, tweaking designs is tedious and | boring. | | My god, that explains why modern designs and user interfaces | suck so much. That, and the fact that many designers work off | their gut feelings and personal subjective preferences, rather | than systematic and evidence-based study. | eddd-ddde wrote: | This makes a lot of sense, I feel like this is more of a | management issue, it should be the responsibility of the | manager to keep everyone working on what is initially planned. | dieselgate wrote: | Yeah I sort of rolled my eyes at all the logo redesigns | (especially as these seem to have come first in the process) | but it seems Author was fine with it. It's an impressive read | because Author (and Isaac to some degree) seem quite even | keeled in dealing with everything. | [deleted] | tmp_anon_22 wrote: | > seem quite even keeled in dealing with everything | | I'm guessing the money they lost in this endeavor didn't | materially impact them. | OJFord wrote: | I know we don't know costs, but per the article it's about | a month's revenue, and I assume it's pretty profitable. Not | the first hire either, so the difference between 7k and 46k | total over several months is not a lot in a way. | designium wrote: | I think it's important to establish clear goals before reaching | out to freelancers and agencies. The agenda from each one is | different than yours. | | I learned to get the team focus by writing a brief (commonly | used for Brand Managers in big companies) to keep focus on the | deliverables. That helps to avoid these type of issues. | hinkley wrote: | I used to think this whole pattern was just Chasing the Shiny | with a heavy dose of aversion, but something I noticed was that | on a redesign, the management tends to give you the benefit of | the doubt for a while. There's a brief period where everything | is easier socially before the ugliness starts up again. | | Getting a redesign approved can be the difference between | having a long project on your resume and people asking you why | you job hopped so much. | latortuga wrote: | I was ready to fire the agency the moment the author mentioned | they were going off script and building whatever they wanted. | This was a huge, blinking red flag for me. Why would you keep | paying someone when they're doing work you didn't ask for, | doing work that doesn't align with your goals, and ignoring | what you say? | mderazon wrote: | You are right But it's not always a clear cut. Sometimes | trades have "artistic integrity" for a lack of better words. | Carpenters, architects and also programmers - The client | tells them what to do, but they usually want some freedom to | leave their mark. | encryptluks2 wrote: | I call this the being too nice mistake. It is like the | customer that would watch an employee spit in their food and | say thanks to them. Effective leaders do not fear | confrontation. | onionisafruit wrote: | In this case it might be a case of being intimidated by a | big agency. Isaac telling him that he was their smallest | client had a "you're lucky we are willing to work for you" | feel. | Domenic_S wrote: | > _I thought I'd enjoy service normally reserved for | large companies despite my limited budget._ | | Sounds like that's exactly what he got, tbh. | [deleted] | WorldMaker wrote: | That seems to be the point where sunk cost fallacy strikes | hard in the post to me. They had paid $X for "80% of the | first milestone of work" and that sunk cost locks them in to | everything else that happens. They seemed too fearful from | that point onward that if they fired the agency and brought | in a new agency or freelancer that they would start from | square 1 and do all of the previous work (and spend) over | again. | | The sunk cost fallacy suggests that sometimes is better for | you if you should just accept existing losses, accept you've | already sunk those costs and won't get them back, and move | on. I don't know what their contract looked like with the | agency, but an 80% of a logo design sounds like a perfect | deliverable that you can safely fire the existing team and | take the 80% deliverable to a new designer, _not_ start from | scratch, and ask them to do a final polish step. I would have | cut losses there, but of course it is much easier to armchair | quarterback from hindsight and different perspectives than if | you are in the middle of it fighting that gut feeling that | you 've already invested so much and can't "afford" to cut | losses. | bequanna wrote: | Which absolutely makes me think this was a well thought out | con designed to prey on those types of fears and maximize | the value extracted from the mark. | | Those lottery phone scams out of Jamaica which target the | elderly in the US are almost the exact same scam as what | was described here. | | Promise something, get them to send money, don't deliver, | tell them you need more time/more money. Keep repeating | until the mark walks away. | allenu wrote: | Maybe "well thought out con" is a little strong here. I | see it as more likely the consulting firm has learned | this behavior over time and it has rewarded them well. I | imagine that if they're normally dealing with large | contracts, those companies footing the bill are probably | easier to string along like this. Just do enough and | promise enough that they keep you on and only budge when | they get more serious about potentially terminating the | contract. | bequanna wrote: | I don't buy this was some mistake in good faith. I think | the author is a little naive which made him a good mark. | | They started work on and subsequently billed for | something that was explicitly out of scope. | | My guess is that the founder of the agency knew early on | agency he could push this client around to extract $. | nerdawson wrote: | Most of my career has been spent at agencies. | | I think you're attributing malice to what was more than | likely routine mismanagement. | dahdum wrote: | > I think you're attributing malice to what was more than | likely routine mismanagement. | | I wouldn't call it mismanagement. Many agencies thrive | despite regularly delivering these types of experiences. | It's a conscious choice they can easily rationalize | because of the money. | | The agency turned a one off $7k job into $46k by smooth | talking and scope creeping an _actual developer_. I 'm | sure they're absolutely _killing_ it doing the same to | non-technical folks. | thayne wrote: | Perhaps, but there is an incentive to continue that | mismanagement, rather than fixing it. | ratww wrote: | This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other | devs might hate it. "Yeah I want REAL deliverables after | the first or second week". | | Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with | architecture astronauts don't really deliver anything but | hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are | actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of | their maker. Or the equivalent for designers. | jokethrowaway wrote: | I'd bet you a large sum of money this agency used Agile. | | Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about. | There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver. | charlie0 wrote: | Pretty sure the agency is well aware of this fallacy, which | is no doubt why they treated this guy so well in the very | beginning. | z3t4 wrote: | The sunk cost fallacy is perhaps the most useful thing you | learn in business school. eg. Do I want to pay $9,600 to | get the job finished. What would it cost if I hired someone | else to finish it ? | | The same thing if you are going to a concert and lost your | tickets, do you want to pay $200 to go to the concert (not | taking into account that you've already lost $100, you | could have lost that $100 on whatever) eg. you are paying | 200, not 200+100. | notahacker wrote: | Yep. It's not a situation where they're an indeterminate | way through building a custom app using a custom framework | and you really do lose everything if you start again, it's | a case where an agency has designed and handed over a logo | and some very conventionally-designed mockups which any | competent freelancer with knowledge of Vue should be able | to implement on _your_ platform, and revise as requested. | And they 're citing lack of availability, so it's not even | _rude_ to walk away with the deliverables you paid for. | atourgates wrote: | You're correct, and I expect the real issue is that working | that was was completely foreign to WebAgency. | | They typically are employed by businesses who are looking for | a very specific result: a good website that works well. | | Their team wasn't setup to, and didn't know how to just | deliver a simple logo. | | The correct answer would have been for WebAgency's CEO to | say, "We'd love to work with you, but we're not really setup | for this type of project. If you'd like to have us take on | your whole website, here's what that would look like. | Otherwise, I don't think we're a good fit." | [deleted] | koide wrote: | I disagree with the cheap developers point. I've just hired a | Pakistani designer/web developer team. They were committed, fast, | cheap, wrote high quality code, and delivered more than what was | agreed at the start. | | It was a closed price project though, which I think is a better | way in general to get a better deal for everyone involved. | | It wasn't perfect. But I can fix the rest. | | How cheap? $950 for a new logo and branding guide plus two | responsive html pages with custom graphics. | Nimitz14 wrote: | I love blogposts like these that share the specifics thank you | very much for posting. I probably would have wasted even more | money. | issa wrote: | This sounds like EVERY agency I have ever worked for. I am sure | there are good agencies out there and others have had better | experience, but the few agencies I have worked for would have | considered this scenario a success. | buzzthro wrote: | Even though I don't quite agree with everything in your | postmortem, I do want to thank you for reflecting and sharing | your experience. It's not easy to admit mistakes in public and | open yourself up for criticism. Cheers! | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | Oh boy. If anyone's in need of some web design services, I know | people who'll keep the customer frustrated for a far more modest | sum. | josefrichter wrote: | You'd be better off with a $45 template. Maybe another $45 for a | stock logo (scope creep!) | pfortuny wrote: | If it sells, why do you need to stylize it when the style fad | will change in two years? | | Cafe. Sriracha HOT chilly sauce. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | I think design improvements can help even if styles change. For | example, if you look at Apple's ads from 20-30 years ago[0], | they look dated, but they're still better than what I'm capable | of creating today with my limited design skills. | | [0] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/01/09/photo-essay- | apple-a... | pfortuny wrote: | Totally right but the real question is "do I really know that | my branding is important or will provide noticeably more | income"? | | That does not seem to be your initial question... | | Sorry, the "Cafe." in my post should read "cf " but it got | autocorrected. | unixhero wrote: | Honestly it looks awesome. Your previous also looked awesome, but | I deed looked dated. Now you have copied the style of Digital | Ocean, which is fine. | renewiltord wrote: | Interesting. This is one of those things where experience just | really helps. A friend of mine is a Creative Director at a firm | and I asked her for advice for a startup I funded and she | explicitly advised against an agency at the stage it was at. I'm | pretty sure she'd advise against this as well. Instead, a single | contract freelancer is probably a better play than an agency for | this. | | Over time, I have come to value my network very highly. | Definitely helped me avoid a lot of missteps. | ezekg wrote: | Always love your writing, mtlynch. FWIW, I really do like the | redesign. The logo is great, as are the illustrations. They | obviously had a talented bunch, even if mismanaged. This is one | of my fears with hiring freelancers, and why I really haven't | done it so far. I could use the help, but I feel like it'd suck | my time and wallet to get the results I'm after. Probably just | haven't talked to the right one yet, if such a thing exists. | | I worked as the dev lead for an ad agency in the past it always | came down to sales under pricing, not listening to the team about | what they thought costs would be. Like, "oh yeah, we can | definitely build this complicated ecom site for $10k!" -- no way, | mumbled the team. What you spent was pretty typical for a "$10k" | project. And then frustrated clients would be due to PMs not | being truthful about what the situation really is, spewing the | same BS that sales sold them on. | | Maybe that was the point, and the business model -- taking | advantage of your clients? I wouldn't put it past them, at least | when it came to the ad agency I worked for. It wasn't my favorite | place to work, that's for sure. Constantly being over budget and | past deadlines sucked. | | Towards the end of my venture there, I almost always recommended | using Shopify for any ecom project, to stay within the project's | budget, instead of WooCommerce, Spree, or Magento (never again). | Even if 9/10 times it didn't happen that way, I still made the | recommendation. | | But these days, a very simple ecom site could even be built by | offloading onto Stripe Checkout, though I'd still probably go | with Shopify to future-proof on product catalog growth. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | Yeah, I agree about the talent, and that's something I didn't | talk about in the post. I thought their design and engineering | work was really good. If they had just kept pushing junk on me, | it would have been an easier decision to walk away early. But | they clearly had good people, and I wanted to figure out a way | to work with them. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | Good God, that logo would be $50 on Fiverr, those illustrations | would be $10 each, and that landing page would be 2 hours with | bootstrap. | | This is how you turn $500 worth of work into $45,000 worth of | billing. | pwython wrote: | As a designer & developer myself, I agree, the rebranding and | new bootstrap template would take a week to deliver at most for | ONE person. I'd charge ~$2,000 USD for something like this (30 | hours at $75/hr). | raunak wrote: | I doubt you could get that level of quality illustrations/logo | from Fiverr, but I could be wrong. | | The actual page redesign, I agree - where would you recommend | hiring a designer from if you don't actually know design, then? | spaceman_2020 wrote: | I've gotten some very good work from Fiverr lately. You have | to go beyond the lowest end and find someone in the $50-100 | range. | raunak wrote: | Have any recommendations on designers? | donatj wrote: | I got both of these on Fiverr for about $25 each - I'm very | happy with both. | | - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/donatj/StandardOtter/dd3f | 2... | | - https://noteof.app/logo.svg | raunak wrote: | Wow, those are actually great! Would you mind sending me a | link to those/that designer? email in bio | Invictus0 wrote: | The noteof logo doesn't look like it would scale to small | size very well. The gap between the top left corner of the | N and the other elements seems too small. | donatj wrote: | https://noteof.app/favicon.ico I use just the tip of the | eraser for the favicon. | mtlynch wrote: | I was skeptical, but I have to admit that the otter one is | really nice. | | I've hired on Upwork, and I don't find that level of | quality. The original TinyPilot logo was actually from | Upwork, but I paid $600. | coding123 wrote: | It would be great if there was a matching service that: | | was not upwork or similar - just a simple listing. I don't want | to advertise and market, I just want to get a part time job with | like 10 hours a week where I fix react components or even per | line of code. | | does not take a huge chunk of the interaction profit (most of | these services want a percentage, I think that's ok as long as | it's less than 1% and not exceeding $100) | | I'd imagine the person that hired this company would have rather | had some moonlighter help him through - $7-8k would have been | amazing for someone like me. I'm not really a designer but I can | do some limited design work or create backends. | dredds wrote: | Quote: "I found them through a Hacker News monthly freelancer | thread." | | It's almost inconceivable to go so far off track, but finally | conclude a freelancer would have been better when that was | their first step. WTH is "WebAgency" who doesn't have time for | small clients doing in a freelancer thread?? | | They should be outed here for wearing sheep's clothing. But the | client is happy cos it's all free advertising, so who are the | sheep? | EZ-Cheeze wrote: | Blue and white is boring as shit, goddamn | EZ-Cheeze wrote: | "I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but | it's been closer to 40%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an | all-time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the | redesign." | | That's awesome tho | kensai wrote: | "He felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency's difficulty | scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot's budget. Their | typical client has a retainer in the range of $20-40k per month. | TinyPilot was buying only 40-60 hours per month, which they | typically reserve for maintenance rather than new development." | | I call this bullshit. They had certainly designed in the past for | smaller budgets, as they were smaller themselves. | ddubs wrote: | Great article, thanks for those useful takeaways. I find that | every website I have ever worked on has gone over budget and over | scope, it's super frustrating. Mostly it happens because the | client doesn't know what they want or keeps changing their mind, | but it seems like you did know what you wanted and were pretty | steadfast about. Either way, super impressed with how you managed | to share a shitty experience in an objective, non-bitter way! :) | [deleted] | josefresco wrote: | The part where he talks about paying 100% for something that's | 80% done but 0% usable hit very hard. As a web agency owner, and | multi-decade web builder I've been in this position too many | times with sub-contractors. | travisgriggs wrote: | I personally like the way the original web site looks and feels | better. | | But the tell is in the dollars. Has business gone up since the | new site has shipped? If sales go from 45K/mo (or whatever they | are now) to 50K/mo with no other attributable changes for a year, | then the 46K paid off. | | I didn't see anything in the article that addressed what (if any) | impact this painful journey has actually done for his earnings. | wetpaws wrote: | the redesign looks so much worse | AtNightWeCode wrote: | I think the new design is cleaner and looks more professional. | Changing the color scheme, fix the fonts, fix the logo and make | the design less dense could have had the same effect for less | effort. | | My main criticism is that site lacks written content and I still | don't know what a KVM is or why I need one. | [deleted] | ArchitectAnon wrote: | $46k for those changes holy fucking shit. I've charged less than | this to design a whole 200m2 house. I built a detailed 3d model, | secured all the permissions and technical approvals, produced 30 | A1 drawings, written a 200 page spec, coordinated engineering, | tendered to contractors negotiated the tender, visited the site | every two weeks for two years to check they were building it | correctly and signed off on thier invoices to the client. This is | a normal amount of work for that fee in my industry, am I an | idiot? | Torwald wrote: | You certainly are not an idiot, if you managed to do all that | work up to professional standards. | | You didn't say how much you charged for that job, so it is | impossible to give assessment there. But it is almost certain | you charged way too low. | | From what I can gather, you provided a lot of services there. | It's not so much the designing and the 3D model that counts, | but all the services you describe, that are really, really | valuable. Because you provide a total package and one that is | facing regulatore/legal. | | Two years of site visits alone would amount to ~50 trips. This | alone would be worth 20k at least, since you also are bound for | that time and cannot leave town etc. Hard to say without | further details... | jstummbillig wrote: | Doing the work and billing the work are two entirely different | disciplines. | ArchitectAnon wrote: | Also if I agreed to a fee of PS7k and tried to charge a client | PS46k without agreeing a new scope of work with a new signed | appointment contract I would probably be struck off and fined | PS20k by my professional regulator. | LadyCailin wrote: | Haha, software development doesn't have licensing. I got | downvoted for suggesting it should, so it's unlikely to have | it in the future either, unless it becomes government | regulated. Which would be its own disaster, and why I think | industry licensing should be a thing. | wrycoder wrote: | What was that, five percent of the value of the house (land not | included)? If so, seems reasonable. | nwsm wrote: | You're not an idiot, you're just comparing rates in two | completely different industries for some reason. | [deleted] | javier2 wrote: | Am I out of touch? I think about 30-40k does not sound | unreasonable for something like this. You have a redesign, with | UX people improving your shopping and cart page + | implementation + updating your maze of weird bootstrap theme to | the new redesign. | partiallypro wrote: | I agree, I don't see it as outrageous at all. Agencies often | charge too little then get scope creeped into overrunning | their own labor, so smart agencies charge good money and | write tight language in contracts to avoid it. It's very easy | for a project that seems simple to solve to become a massive | undertaking. | sergiomattei wrote: | It sounds reasonable for a good redesign, but this is just | terrible. Generic all the way. | prawn wrote: | I would've thought that the product photo was a strength of | the offering (proof of legitimacy given designed hardware | is expensive and shows commitment). But the redesign hides | it away and uses illustrations like every startup's MVP | site! Seems insane. | notahacker wrote: | tbf the agency's original "how long is a piece of string" | response to website is probably fair here | | Some companies really do want to a/b test their shopping cart | to death, and have 40 iterations of their logo with | roundtable meetings in between, and that stuff can genuinely | take many man months and in the case of the a/b testing might | even be time and money well spent. I'm sure some of the | agency's regular clients spend $400k on getting e-commerce | sites which are only a bit more complex overhauled and think | they'll see value from it | | But 46k is definitely unreasonable for something you've | estimated at 7k, and 38 billable hours to refactor a | Bootstrap template for a minimalist website with about 10 | pages doesn't sound like efficient work. | neither_color wrote: | It's highly region dependent. In my city the work you're | describing would go into the six figures(assuming you the | design-architecture-engineering firm are paying the | contractors). | drumttocs8 wrote: | I work for a very expensive electric utility consulting firm... | and I guess now I'm impressed by how much work we can actually | do for 50k. This is so silly that it makes me feel like an | idiot too. | mgav wrote: | Thank you. I'm sorry you had such as terrible #ripoff experience, | but it's great of you to share what happened, so others can learn | & avoid. | stoicjumbotron wrote: | OP's Running in Production podcast episode was a good listen: | https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/105-tinypilotkvm-let... | RadixDLT wrote: | I think you got scammed big time, I mean, nobody who is doing big | projects and has a lot on their plate is going to post on "HN: | Who wants to be hired?" | napbree wrote: | Digital Agency Owner Here... I have to say, this is difficult to | read and it gives a bad name to other agencies. | | - I think the first "mistake" was not having it as a fixed price. | We spend a lot of time up-front defining the scope and get sign | off before committing to the work. After that, we roll it through | the relevant departments. We take the risk on for bugs/issues | (that are within scope) and do the project as a fixed price. | Anything out of scope is a different conversation but will always | be priced additions. | | - This agency got the best of both worlds, hourly rate and no | risk on their side. | | - I disagree with some of the comments on here about agencies not | being your "friend", a "good" agency will treat you like a | partner and be focused on helping you meet those goals, | regardless of if there's more money to be made. Ultimately, our | job is to make you look good and reach goals. If we don't do | that, we don't need to exist. | | - They should have said no at the beginning. We turn down clients | and it's hard to do sometimes, but ultimately you're setting | everyone up to fail. Honesty is key for all parts. | | - The onus should be on the agency, not on you. If there's issues | with the build, that's the agency's problem not yours. That's why | the initial scoping is so important. | | - A good agency IS better than a freelancer(or freelancers). You | have a team of people conducting the work, pulling in the right | people at the right time, expertise and experience of doing this | day-in-day-out, what to avoid etc. On top of all that, ensuring | it runs on time (it's in our interest to do so). A rolling | freelancer is incentivised to keep the project running as long as | possible, but on top of that you're limited to a knowledge of | one. | | - The CEO unfortunately took full advantage of the situation | here. This is a short-term approach that may work for a few | clients but after that, the word spreads. There's few things you | can keep hold of these days, your name and reputation is one of | them. I'd advise actually naming this agency as the anonymity | will only promote them to keep doing it. | | Sorry this happened to you and I admire your positive approach to | the situation, sometimes what's done is done and you have to | learn and move on. | gxs wrote: | As the agency owner, how would you have felt reading this if | the author had named the agency? | | It really bugs me how people take a "protect the innocent" | approach to these articles when in reality they should be | saying loud and clear who the offender is. | dcow wrote: | I'm not sure I understand your comment? Who's the offender | here? | gxs wrote: | The author of the article didn't name the agency he was | engaged with. | | In other words, he essentially wrote a really long, | detailed review but never mentioned the actual product. | | My question to you was simply how would you take it if | someone named you in an article like this. | stared wrote: | I agree with most, especially that OP left the tap open. No | risk for an agency and de facto unrestricted costs for OP. | | With one exception of a blanket statement: | | > - A good agency IS better than a freelancer | | If there is a single freelancer: | | - There is a single person responsible. If it gets diffused, it | may easily end in an unending project, as no one is | incentivized to finalize the project. | | - The number of people working on the project is capped at one. | You won't ever get charged for two people talking with each | other. | | - For a single freelancer, they may be some "sanity check" | regarding the cost. For any well-known agency, it wouldn't | raise one's eyebrows if you said [This Well Known Agency] | charged you [any number] $. Logo design alone could have costed | OP $50k. | level wrote: | I recently left a boutique agency of 5 years and I can definitely | resonate with this one. Our agency aimed to catch big fish, and | we did, but since they are hard to land we'd pick up small jobs | in the meantime, just like the project that you're describing | here. In my perspective, this isn't someone deliberately ripping | you off. I imagine they intended to ship at the cost they quoted, | but the team didn't adjust their working style to match your | price point. | | All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly | overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill and | wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as they | typically would on a larger project. Those variations are an | expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k customer | treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount. | | The reality is, small jobs like this are effectively make-work | projects for an agency. They typically don't pay enough to be an | effective use of time for the agency, but are a way to stay in | the black between higher value projects. Small customers become | "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is landed. The | team members being swapped out as they are needed elsewhere and | newly joining team members then need to re-contextualize and | regain momentum, all on your dime. | | Your takeaway is correct, don't be a small fish for an agency. If | they're busy they won't take your work, and if do show interest, | they are desperate for work. | atourgates wrote: | I've been at a small agency that's grown into a midsize agency | over the last decade+. | | Everything about this story rings true, and the author's | conclusions are absolutely on point. | | Now our agency is at a place where we can say no to work like | this, both because we have a solid client base that supports us | financially without projects like this, and because we've | learned that no matter how good our intentions, neither we nor | our clients are going to be happy with the end result. | | All that said, my bigger question is: does the new website | bring in more business than the old? | | It's certainly better designed, but looking at the copy and IA, | I'm not entirely sure that the new site is going to convert | better than the old. | | To me, the old version was distinctive and unique, while the | new looks like basically every other SAAS site designed since | the year 2020. | TheCapn wrote: | >The reality is, small jobs like this are effectively make-work | projects for an agency. They typically don't pay enough to be | an effective use of time for the agency, but are a way to stay | in the black between higher value projects. Small customers | become "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is | landed. The team members being swapped out as they are needed | elsewhere and newly joining team members then need to re- | contextualize and regain momentum, all on your dime. | | Man. That 3rd paragraph resonates _so well_ with me /my | employer. We're an industrial automation company. Family owned. | Started from the owner's shed and grew to what we are now. We | were built on smalltime clients and our product quality got | around through word of mouth and are now at the point where we | have _massive_ multi-million dollar clients. | | We still support the little guys though. And we get more little | guys under our umbrella every year. I think there's still a | part of our company that recognizes we have roots in helping | the farmers automated their cleaner processes. We also have the | nearly identical issue that our OP is bitching about: we're | married to these massive clients and we fill the gaps with the | little projects. But when the timing is getting tight, the | little guys are who loses out. | | I'm _starting_ to see the cracks. Clients who built our | foundations are losing out on support and growth opportunities. | We 're more concerned with the next mining project or new | facility build than we are selling small guys upgrades and | ongoing modernization. It's fine as far as the pocketbook goes | but I feel like we play a dangerous game allowing our work | schedules to be dictated by the big guys. Eventually they all | grow to realize the same thing: the controls part is crucial | enough to the business that it needs to be brought in house. | Once that happens our value falls off quickly. It's only bad | because we're losing our core for the opportunity to play | puppet to some truly massive clients. | | I feel like I'm getting a bit lost in the weeds, but really my | point is just how I haven't really thought clearly about what | the perception of our business must be to the clients, both big | and small. We play a critical service role among many | industries but we also run the risk of alienating the business | that's virtually guaranteed to be there in hopes of marrying | ourselves to somebody who only needs us now, and probably not | tomorrow. | nerdawson wrote: | I've worked at small agencies for the better part of a decade | and couldn't agree more with this summary. | | A lot of the comments seem to take the view that this was some | deliberate ploy to overcharge. In reality, it was just poorly | managed. | | > Small customers become "nuisance" customers as soon as a | something better is landed. | | My guess would be that when quoted, the project was expected to | be completed by a certain date. Because the team failed to | adapt, the project overran, new projects took over leaving this | one to languish. | mtlynch wrote: | Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing! | | > _All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly | overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill | and wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as | they typically would on a larger project. Those variations are | an expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k | customer treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount._ | | Oh, huh. | | I was thinking about this as I did the writeup. It didn't feel | at the time that they were spending excessive time on the logo | variations, but I went back to the notes I took on our first | call and realized how out of line all that early work now feels | relative to their 30-40 hour initial estimate of the rebrand. | serd wrote: | The new design is right in a lot of ways but I cannot stop | thinking how honest and friendly the old design looks. I would | also prefer the old, cute and more unique logo instead of the | trendy plane icon. | donatj wrote: | I have no joke had roughly what the author wanted done by a | person on Fiverr for $25. New logo and simple redesign of a | single page. | | Got 3 rounds of revisions even. | seydor wrote: | Generification is a thing | albatross13 wrote: | I'm sorry friend :( | lbriner wrote: | I think the sad thing is the contrary to some people's opinions, | this is not limited to small "cowboy" companies, it can happen | from the smallest to the biggest and it is a mixture of | competence, management, desire for profits etc. as it is in most | companies. | | The biggest difficulty is that you are paying a premium for | intangibles when you talk designs and branding. If you absolutely | know that your current brand is useless then anything is better | than nothing but also you probably don't have to do very much to | get better before the returns are diminishing. | | Otherwise for design work, although the result might look "OK", | it is hard to see how they would justify the money, although of | course they will just like Tropicana justified their failed | redesign. | | I would normally say that you have to know enough about something | to pay somebody else to do it well but here the OP does seem to | know roughly what is going on so it might just come back to a | more formal kick-off process and not getting caught up in the | excitement that you just start and worry about it later. Clearly | this company _could_ have done a good job so it is not about | ability, just management and scoping it properly. | FpUser wrote: | >"including design, custom illustrations, and 3D imaging" | | Ha. No wonder my daughter is making a killing. She is freelancer, | does all of the above and at way more reasonable rates. | | BTW the product is amazing and I am definitely buying one as soon | as I am back from my vacation. | scottlamb wrote: | Very nice cautionary tale. | | One thing stuck out at me: | | > Why didn't you just refuse to pay them until the work was done? | ... If I had insisted on milestone-based payments from the | beginning, WebAgency likely would have declined the project. They | saw me as a small client who could grow, but nobody wants to work | with a tiny client who's as demanding as a huge corporation. | | That would have been for the best, right? Someone savvier than me | might have realized here the point above about "avoid hiring a | vendor as their smallest client". They're offering a different | fee structure than for their other clients, but it's still not | appropriate for your needs. | mekoka wrote: | Maybe there's something I missed in the article, but to me, it | read like a case of sunk cost fallacy. | | _> Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked. | | > By December, we were three months into the project. WebAgency | was 95% done with TinyPilot's new logo. All I wanted was to | change some rounding on the corners and eliminate the border. I | expected it to be a couple of hours of work. | | > All I needed was a couple more hours of work. But I didn't get | them._ | | One of the biggest challenges with creative work is to have a | concrete idea of the direction you want to take. It seems as | though by the time he was given the rebranding drafts, OP already | had that vision . His only issue was that they were only 95% | done. But designers work with existing brands all the time. Why | couldn't the rebranding be completed by another designer with | OP's express guidance? | | He had already observed and acknowledged patterns of misbehavior | from "WebAgency" that one must watch out for when working with | contractors. What justified giving them a little more money to | complete the work (multiple times), rather than paying for a new | designer, if not sunk costs? | synergy20 wrote: | he is a marketing genius to me, writing stuff that catching | eyeballs that might end up selling more his devices, I feel the | postmortem of the website project is really not the point(or true | goal here) at all. | dalmo3 wrote: | Plot twist: it was WebAgency's plan all along. | roguas wrote: | There is a reason why successful startups seldom order contract | work especially early on. | | Design is kinda different, yet most startups tend to have some | competency and capability in that field(some frontend engineer | more on the artsy/design side). If you did, you could have easily | said that you are happy with the results and can take it from | here, ask for source files. Since you pay by the hour and their | game became to drag this it would be great to introduce a threat | like that (even as a bluff). | | Suddenly someone will realized that due to constraints(finding | new agency would be costly) he became critical element of your | business flow and will exploit that. | asojfdowgh wrote: | If you hired a mechanic to regas your car's AC, and they give the | car back with a full realignment, detailing, etc, all at prices | you wouldn't have ever paid in the first place, you would be | driving away without even thinking of paying, probably to the | nearest ombudsman or law firm. | | but at least that mechanic probably would have done the re- | gassing first. | hinkley wrote: | Something about the mikado method that makes it one of my | favorite tools is that you can often get partial credit for an | idea that doesn't completely pan out. | | I'm building a prototype for switching the framework we use to | another one. In the process of trying to reach feature parity, | I've been pulling out bits of logic that are coupled with the old | framework and putting them into other libraries. At the end of | this we'll have better feature parity between services even if I | end up abandoning the framework change. By moving the code around | I may find solutions to the functionality we need that the | framework makes very difficult to implement. | jetheredge wrote: | As the owner of a digital product agency, this is really hard to | read. It is such a shame that an agency would do this to you. I | know you felt like they "did their best", but by setting you up | with unrealistic expectations out of the gate they essentially | guaranteed that everyone was going to walk away unhappy. Besides, | when you go to an agency communication/transparency/team of | experts is what you are paying for! You're paying for | accountability! There really are good agencies out there that | care about their customers and bend over backwards to deliver | what they promise, but they are hard to find. For the size | project you were looking at though, I do agree that a freelancer | could have been a better option, but you'll run into some of the | same challenges. Finding good freelancers can be just as hard as | finding a good agency. | HillRat wrote: | The agency shouldn't have taken the work to begin with -- the | part where the lead admitted that he killed project governance | entirely was a bit of a painful moment. Agencies are optimized | to work at a specific scale, and it's risky for them to scale | up _or_ down for a specific project; in this case, their client | fell through the cracks because they were using him as fillable | hours and didn 't ride herd on their designers. Considering | they were working outside of the SoW, those were disputable | invoices, but that's cold comfort when you don't have the free | cash flow to take this to legal. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | Yeah, I don't think the agency is blameless here, but I also | don't think they're malicious or dishonest. I think they just | overestimated their ability to scale down their workflows to a | project smaller than their typical gig. | laurent123456 wrote: | Well they know they've done an awful job, you know it too, | but they happily kept the $45K. If they were as honest as you | say, they would have refunded some of it. | themodelplumber wrote: | This is interesting to read, because it seems both client and | vendor had trouble managing boundaries due in large part to a | contingency-focused or future-focused decisionmaking style. Some | would call it bait-and-switch on the vendor's part, but this was | speculative territory for them too, and pretty obviously so based | on the blog post. | | The need to constantly work in favor of anticipation of future | events effectively locked out their ability to execute on | established agreements, creating an oscillating wait-and-see | pattern. | | It's rare to see this happen on both sides of a business | agreement. However if these two sides came together again I'd | expect to see a similar pattern, not that I'd blame anyone. To | work around such an obviously favored perception would require a | very difficult change in individual psychology with a lot of | focus on practicable alternatives. | | A very thorough writeup op, thanks for sharing it. | pmarreck wrote: | What is the best payment-structuring model to best align the | interests of the person requesting the work, with the person | doing the work, while also de-incentivizing things like scope | creep and simply "one requirement ends up taking too long and | should be considered for dropping prior to completion"? | | Is it half upfront, half on delivery? | | Is it fee-per-milestone? | | Is it hourly rate? | | Is it some hybrid of the above? | | When a requirement must be dropped, who pays for the hours | already sunk into it? Would it be both parties? (by charging half | the normal rate) | system2 wrote: | Please name and shame. Is it something like Coalition | Technologies from LA? They are doing the same thing by hiring | $3/hour employees from 3rd world countries and charge six | figures. | bsedlm wrote: | I think in part the problem is that he is an owner working with | an agency, i.e. they're all employees all the way to the top. | | like this agency said, "we usually work with larger clients", | i.e. we expect that all interactions across companies involve | people for whom it's just their job. | | BUT, they got (what seems like) the actual business owner on one | side, not some dissinterested executive. | mtlynch wrote: | Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. | | One of the other surprises from the postmortem was that Isaac | said that I was the only client that ever did code reviews for | the code the agency was writing. It sounded like they'd had | checkbox-style audits in the past for security/compliance | reasons, but no other clients had asked for reviews just for | the sake of keeping quality and maintainability high. That also | hints that they're not normally dealing with owners or | stakeholders who'd care or be able to recognize code quality. | vladstudio wrote: | "Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency" - as a | freelancer, this warms my heart :-) For a project of this size | and nature, a one-man orchestra would definitely be a betterr | choice. | | However, to be fair, I must note that similar problems may happen | with a freelancer (myself included). Self-management is hard, and | I tend to underestimate, which leads to delays and/or working | late. | | Clear and frequent commucation is not as hard, but requires a | good habit. You may or may not get it from either agency or | freelanced. | | "How long is a piece of string?" their lead designer asked. -- | sounds like a red flag to me! | earljman wrote: | As somebody who feels really guilty for letting a project go even | 30% beyond an estimate, this was a comforting read for sure. | | I build websites for small-scale clients, often who are just | starting out. After a lot of hard lessons, I make sure to | communicate as soon as I can even when it was just a "soft" | deadline. I had a project go 40% over the estimate and had to | charge the client for it to keep my bills paid (it mostly due to | scope creep, managed poorly). | | After reading this post, it feels like those lessons are | especially worthwhile as the business world comes to realize the | value in the boutique/freelance contractors. Also helps me get | over the mistakes, which weren't nearly as bad in comparison. | mtlynch wrote: | Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions | about this post. | nikisweeting wrote: | I think the new design looks awesome. It maybe wasn't cost | effective and was too painful a process, but hopefully it will | pay off! | queuebert wrote: | I liked your original design. Simpler, to the point, and lower | contrast so my eyes don't bleed. | | Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web page | takes even for these "professionals". Yet another profession | that pays way better for way less work than mine (scientist). | sdwr wrote: | I like the original one better too. Theres a picture of the | product at the top instead of an abstract diagram, and it | reads as more honest + less sterile. | dleslie wrote: | I'll second this; the new design both lacks strongly | differentiating features from countless other tech companies, | and lacks strong objects to focus my attention on. | | Having a picture of the product was both endearing and | reassuring. The new site could just be another rebrand for a | reseller of cheap Chinese schlock. | solardev wrote: | > Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web | page takes even for these "professionals". Yet another | profession that pays way better for way less work than mine | (scientist). | | Opinion from a web dev who has great respect for scientists: | Our work isn't easy, but what you're seeing here is less | reflective of the difficulty of the task than the insane | variability in web dev pricing. This same body of work from | the blog post could've been anywhere from a totally free | template (it honestly kinda looks like one) to a $25/hr | freelance job to this ripoff $175/hr agency, or even $150k+ | if some inexperienced startup in-housed it and gave it months | of back-and-forth stakeholder meetings. It's crazy how much | variance there is in the cost and pricing of simple web | projects. It's pretty much just pulling a number out of thin | air and finding someone willing to pay that. It's very much a | "what the market will bear" pricing model rather than "how do | I recoup my education/training/equipment/etc. costs" model... | i.e., it's a speculative bubble pricing with no real | relationship to costs that I can see. | | Certainly I think my profession deserves a livable wage, like | any other. However, while my work is difficult, it's not any | more so than a scientist's, or teacher's, or truck driver or | park worker or garbage collector or landscaper. But more so | than the difficulty, again, is the variability. | | Over the last 5 years, some clients were paying me $20/hr, | others $35/hr, others $150/hr (I actually had to negotiate | that _down_ because I felt like we were ripping off our | clients... but my partner wouldn 't budge much because it | would impact his hourly rate too, sigh). That last job was at | an ripoff agency similar to the one in the OP's blog post... | I was getting paid that mostly to move pixels up and down a | page (adjusting whitespace between paragraphs) on a simple | Wordpress theme. Meanwhile, the $35/hr job had me working on | everything from SQL to CDNs to in-memory caches to | maintaining LAMP and email servers -- skills that were orders | of magnitude more difficult than what I was doing for the | Wordpress agency. There is no rhyme or rhythm to how anything | in this industry is priced beyond "this is what we think | customers will pay". | | It is, I think, one of the great tragedies of capitalism that | so much wealth and labor value is locked away in growth | bubbles that invest not in social good but speculative ROI. | If our society were saner, teachers, civil servants, vets, | etc. would be better off than CEOs and mid-level tech | management. But nope, so much wealth goes to people who | ultimately contribute little to nothing to society at large. | Who cares if Google launches a 7th chat app? It's all just a | big ol' worthless bubble of pyramid schemes. What a waste of | human potential. | | Today I work at a solar manufacturing company because I at | least believe in the social good of its output. If I were to | switch to tech proper, I'd probably make 2x-3x the money even | though my skills would be largely the same. But I don't want | to do that because it feels... dirty, like I'm contributing | to the overall decline of our ruthless trickle-up society, | working on worthless projects that only serve to make venture | capitalists richer at the expense of regular working people. | When I hear my peers in big tech arguing about total | compensation and stock valuation even though they already | make like 5x median wage... I don't envy them, I just feel | sorry that they're so detached from reality. When this bubble | bursts it's going to be a eye-opener for our society, and I | hope it causes a moment's pause and forces people to ask, | "What the hell were we doing from 1990 to 2020? Why did we | spend three decades chasing advertising bubbles while | everything was crumbling around us?" | [deleted] | Graffur wrote: | Well we know the agency got well paid for the work. We don't | know how much the people doing the work got. | saghul wrote: | Thanks for sharing your experience. The new site looks great | btw! I see many negative comments here, but hey, live and | learn! | spamizbad wrote: | I just want you to know: You're not alone. I worked at a | company that had a similar experience with a highly regarded | web design firm. Only difference is we did our own | implementation from their designs. Working with them as an IC | was even worse because they knew I wasn't the one signing their | checks. | | Some anecdotes: | | * their new designs actually made our metrics WORSE. | | * Some of their design work didn't cleanly translate to | responsive web code very well, so I wanted time with one of | their designers and try and come up with some quick solutions | to try an adapt it to something you can actually implement. Web | design firm didn't like this and we were forced to play a game | of telephone between a project manager... which as you can | imagine racked up a bunch of billable hours. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | > _Only difference is we did our own implementation from | their designs. Working with them as an IC was even worse | because they knew I wasn 't the one signing their checks._ | | Oh, that makes me feel a little better about letting the | agency take on the dev work instead of doing it in-house like | I'd originally planned. I feared that there'd be a lot of | miscommunication and confusion if my company's dev team had | to resolve design issues with the external agency's | designers. From your experience, it sounds like I was right | to worry. | testplzignore wrote: | Some feedback from a person who is the target audience of your | product: | | https://tinypilotkvm.com/illustrations/tinypilot-overview-il... | is the most prominent image on your site and of little value in | my opinion. Rather than have a sketch that looks like it very | well could just be a stock image (and my brain is trained to | ignore this type of image), I recommend having actual photos | that show the same scene. A photo of the device hooked up to a | real server (and with neat cabling if you want to impress me). | A photo of a laptop showing what the software actually looks | like. | | The photos on https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot- | voyager2 are good. Put them on the home page. | | Slow down the screenshot carousels a bit. They go too fast for | me to be able to see what is going on. And if there isn't | already, have a page with screenshots of all of the key | features of the product. That's what I would want to see to | evaluate what the product does. | | Others have already mentioned this: the old logo was better. | You can tell it was made with love. The new logo - this is a | common theme - might as well be a stock image. | | And because I like to do free QA testing, here's a bug :) 1. Go | to https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions. 2. Click the first | "Read Instructions" button. The URL changes to | https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions/voyager2/v2 . 3. Click | Support -> Product Instructions. 4. Click the first "Read | Instructions" button again. The URL changes to | https://tinypilotkvm.com/instructions/voyager2/instructions/... | which shows "Page Not found". | dangus wrote: | Yeah, I wanted to give this feedback about this image, too. | | Try reading that image from the website on your smartphone. | It's very hard to see what's going on. | mtlynch wrote: | I'm not crazy about the image, either. I think it's okay | not great. | | I was hoping the design agency would take more of a lead in | creating a concept that conveyed what the product does, but | it mostly fell to me. | | "KVM over IP" is a hard concept to represent visually. If | you already know what a KVM over IP is, then we can just | show you a photo of ours, but if you've never heard of one | before, the illustration has to do a lot of work. | allenu wrote: | Even on a regular laptop screen, it took a little too long | for my eyes to grok what I was looking at. My initial | impression from the photo is that this company is selling | some SaaS and not a physical device. | | In my opinion, the original page with the picture of the | actual device made it much clearer what you were getting. | | For the OP, perhaps use a color for the device's housing? | Assuming the costs are the same, a cute little blue box | would make it stand out in photos and give it more | character than its current generic black. In illustrations, | you could make the scene in black and white and have the | device be blue, for example. To me, the goal should be to | make that little box seem magical and unique. | [deleted] | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | I appreciate the feedback, but the hard part about feedback | like this is: how do I identify who's right? Half the people | in the thread are saying the old design is better, and half | are saying the new design is better. | | If I could flip a switch and try the design you're describing | and see how it affects sales, I'd try it, but taking | professional photographs and redesigning the site is several | thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of management time. | | > _The photos onhttps://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot- | voyager2 are good. Put them on the home page._ | | Sidenote: these are actually computer-generated, not photos. | Good right? | | > _And because I like to do free QA testing, here 's a bug :) | _ | | Ah, good catch! Thanks! Fixed now. | lostdog wrote: | I'll throw another opinion at you. | | The biggest problem is that the device's box looks 3d | printed, and I associate that with "hobbyist/prototype" | automatically. I would also prefer to see the real device | over stock art, but if a picture of the device evokes | unreliability, then removing the real photo may have helped | for this reason. | mtlynch wrote: | Interesting, thanks! | | I've been looking at case changes for a while, but it's | hard to ditch 3D printing. As we iterate on the hardware | the physical layout changes every few months, so it's | great being able to update the 3D printed case design in | a few days. | | That said, 3D printing with the material we use is pretty | slow and expensive. We eventually have to move to either | plastic injection molding or some type of metal. | | I usually get positive feedback about the case material, | but I can see how it looks different from other network | devices people view as high-quality. | gameshot911 wrote: | >how do I identify who's right? Half the people in the | thread are saying the old design is better, and half are | saying the new design is better. | | You look at the data. If you think the increased sales are | due to the site redesign vs some other variable - well | there's your answer. | mtlynch wrote: | The data aren't entirely conclusive. My sales increased | but I can't prove it was due to the new design. | | I could A/B test the old design against the new, but my | sales volume is low enough that it could take weeks | before we get compelling results for any experiment. | | It's easy to come up with lots of ideas for design | improvements, but it's much harder to actually implement | them and then measure the results. | Traubenfuchs wrote: | Why are you so nice? | | You got tricked. You got scammed. Whether it was through their | excessive incompetence or their active malice. You should name | and shame. | | The new design looks like a random free template. It's ok, at | best. | | You are a victim here! Don't you see it? | alistairSH wrote: | Came to say the same. This sounds like a classic bait-and- | switch, like you'd get a used car dealership. | wizwit999 wrote: | +1 this is ridiculous and the author is complacent. | breadchris wrote: | completely unrelated to your post, but just wanted to say | thanks for your work on the rebooting of nyt's ingredient | parser. I use it in my project here: | https://github.com/cookwherever/cookwherever (site is currently | down due to the server being physically moved from our house | lol). If you are interested in talking more about how i'm using | it I would love to share :) | mtlynch wrote: | Oh, cool! Sure, feel free to shoot me an email. My contact | info is in my profile and on my website. | ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: | I hate to be blunt but you got scammed. Of course hindsight is | 20/20 but I feel like you're approaching this the wrong way if | your first reaction was to schedule a call with the scammer and | amicably discuss where things went wrong. | | My first instinct, would be to amicably discuss reimbursement | of at least parts of the bill, which in my experience an honest | agency would consider especially when they outright admit | (hopefully in writing) that the work and management of the | project was subpar. And in the event that this doesn't work, | I'd explore my legal options. Neither this rebranding, nor the | redesign work you got is worth 46k. | | Also the only mention of a contract I could find was at the end | when discussing termination. It's one of the conclusions you | drew, but it's crazy that the scope, deliverables and timetable | were not clearly defined, especially if you are paying upfront. | | Anyway props to you for publishing this, it's very useful | knowledge. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | > _I hate to be blunt but you got scammed. Of course | hindsight is 20 /20 but I feel like you're approaching this | the wrong way if your first reaction was to schedule a call | with the scammer and amicably discuss where things went | wrong._ | | Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome | or if it's just easier for me to empathize with the agency | having worked with them face-to-face, but I still think the | events are explainable without assuming the agency was | dishonest. Hanlon's Razor and all that. I think they | overestimated their ability to scale down their workflows to | a project of my size, and the rest was just a consequence of | that incorrect prediction. | | > _Also the only mention of a contract I could find was at | the end when discussing termination. It 's one of the | conclusions you drew, but it's crazy that the scope, | deliverables and timetable were not clearly defined, | especially if you are paying upfront._ | | Part of the problem was that the boundary between | "rebranding" and "redesigning" is subjective. I suppose I | could have said, "You're only allowed to change fonts, | colors, and the logo, but you're not allowed to adjust | layout," but that felt too restrictive. I agree with their | argument that we should adjust the design a little bit to fit | a new brand. | | And if I wanted to, I could have scoped back down to a | rebrand in December. In retrospect, that's what I should have | done. But I felt like even though the designs went beyond the | scope I asked for, they looked pretty good and they were 80% | done, so we might as well just use them. | ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: | With regards to the difference between branding and web- | design, it's fairly clear cut in my eyes. They should have | been the ones guiding you and helping you understand that | boundary as design professionals. Defining your brand | identity and guidelines should have been their first | priority, given what you asked of them, long before any | development work. | | I'm no expert myself, so take it with a grain of salt but | I've been learning a lot about branding for my own | company[0]. It's pretty much the same process everywhere, | if you're interested in learning more and seeing how a | project typically goes I'd recommend watching The Futur's | "Building a Brand" on youtube[1], it's a great series and | gives a good bird's eye view of the process. (It depicts a | large project, but from what I've seen small projects | follow the same process with less polish and back-and- | forth.) | | [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064809 [1]: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxgOY2Ms-YI | jaclaz wrote: | First thing, thanks for your post, it has been really | interesting. | | I would like to ask how you made the correlation between the | new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your product | is a very good one and would have expected that your intended | target, if anything, is less sensible to site design[0]: | | >But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might | justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase | sales by 10-20%, but it's been closer to 40%. In July, the | TinyPilot website hit an all-time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% | higher than before the redesign. | | [0] I mean it is not like you are selling fashion accesories, | if someone wants/needs a Tinypilot they actually want/need a | Tinypilot, and they shouldn't be sensible to the looks of the | site (and BTW they would probably also want to see a picture of | the HDMI/VGA adapter) | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | > _I would like to ask how you made the correlation between | the new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your | product is a very good one and would have expected that your | intended target, if anything, is less sensible to site | design_ | | Yeah, I tried not to lean too hard on this because I don't | have rigorous evidence that the redesign caused the | improvement. But anecdotally, it seems like it did. | | Usually when the website sees a significant uptick in sales, | I can usually tie it to a particular event (e.g., a new | review, new product launch), but nothing notable happened in | May or June except that we finished the new designs, and they | were some of our strongest months. It could just be that | we're growing over time, so maybe the same thing would have | happened either way. | | One other change to the website that I feel like is well- | supported by this point was changing how we present our | products. We used to show four products in our catalog, but | in November, we simplified the website to show only our | flagship product, and it was almost an overnight doubling of | sales that's persisted ever since: | | https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/11/#simplifying-to- | ju... | Vanderson wrote: | You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your | solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems | as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale. | | In this comment: | | > There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. | WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I | declined them all and told them to focus on the design I'd | approved. I'm glad I did because they'd probably still be | working on the website today. | | I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of | the size of the team you are working with. | | Design companies seem to want to make customers feel like they | are unskilled / unable to make design decisions for themselves, | but maybe this is all experts? And I can say I have had very | stubborn customers in the past, and it was good for everyone | involved to have a customer that knows what they want and | expects it, even if the designer doesn't really like the | results as much as their own ideas. | dangus wrote: | I think the key is not to hire anyone to do _website design_. | | Hire graphic designers to make logos, illustrations, and come | up with a color palette. That's the kind of stuff that can't | possibly take weeks and weeks. | | The author doesn't need a website design, this site is | totally fine with a generic SquareSpace/Wix template. | | Get your logos and illustrations and drop them in, and set | your colors and fonts accordingly. | | Custom website design is complicated enough that it can get | into its own little version of development hell, and most | small businesses don't need anything that a simple generic | page can't handle. | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | > _You said you 'd next time go with a freelancer as one of | your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same | problems as you described in your main post, just on a | smaller scale._ | | Yes, definitely. In my experience, the smaller scale makes it | easy to manage, so you can nip problems in the bud more | quickly. | | >> _There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. | WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I | declined them all and told them to focus on the design I'd | approved. I'm glad I did because they'd probably still be | working on the website today._ | | > _I think you need to do this with every project reguardless | of the size of the team you are working with._ | | Yeah, I think it's important to be vigilant to some degree, | but some people are effective at suggesting useful | improvements. TinyPilot's in-house devs, for example, will | frequently suggest improvements to designs or architecture | that will cost more up-front but will reduce costs long-term, | and I love those kinds of suggestions. | | If the agency had a history of suggesting improvements and | correctly estimating the cost of implementing them, then I'd | be more open to their suggestions. But their track record was | consistently to expand scope and run late, so I wanted to | constrain scope as much as possible. | Vanderson wrote: | To be clear, I agree with your assessment and I would not | recommend an agency unless you are a huge company as well. | It's a mis-match of interests and goals. | | The work I did as a web programmer for an agency | (freelance) was similarly imbalanced with many "leaders" | telling me what to do, (ie, project lead heavy, 1 designer, | 1 programmer) and it was a mess and I won't bother with it | again. | darthcloud wrote: | I love your blog, but was the end goal really getting a new | website or getting a good story to tell ;) | dangus wrote: | I wonder if you considered whether this agency pulls this exact | playbook intentionally and repeatedly? | | I don't think they are made up of honest people in the first | place. | | My personal guess is that this is a perfected game that they | play with all their customers: | | 1. Give a reasonable quote | | 2. Start the project on a reasonably productive cadence | | 3. Scope creep, deliver items that are outside of what the | customer wanted but proves work is being done. Withhold any | deliverables that would end the project. | | 4. Repeat step 3 until the customer gets fed up | | 5. Customer terminates the contract, quickly finish the | deliverables in the 30 days and wrap it up with a nice bow to | reduce the chance of getting sued. Customer got what they | wanted - sure, it was over-budget, but we delivered! | | This company played you, and it was difficult to read the | article because of how I wanted to tell you to stop being so | forgiving to them through each step of the process. I think | there is a time and a place to be a demanding customer. | | I am shocked you had a "postmortem" with Isaac, and that you | even said that Isaac was candid! I absolutely disagree: all he | had for you was excuses and bullshit. Isaac's kindness, to me, | all seems like part of the plan. He's there to make it look | like they gave it an honest try. | | I don't know why you aren't at your lawyer's office writing | some sternly worded letters. | frankzander wrote: | Next time leave me a message ... you'll get more for way less | :-) | theden wrote: | With the takeaway I would agree with finding a sole freelancer, | or a small team 1-3 rather than an agency. Freelancers often | scale to agencies to make more money off bigger clients that can | deal with scope creep and huge bills. | | I've done freelance work similar to that (redesigning w/ | bootstrap), and I found having a set price for the completed work | has worked well for me. | | On tracking, I worked with a consultancy a while back and had to | use self-tracking tools like toggl, and it was a dealbreaker for | me. I absolutely hate tracking (billable) time, some places do it | down to the minutes, it's madness IMO. It was frustrating because | a problem could be solved in 2 mins, but required 1hr of | research/experimentation, when do you start the timer? Oh and you | have three other clients, and whenever you context switch you | gotta quickly do it in the tool so it tracks the right client, | etc. it warps the brain IMO and stifles creative play/thinking, | especially when you're docked for not having enough billable | hours, even though in a normal full-time job things would be | swell. After I left, I had to readjust to not always think about | my time per task and felt relief and clarity again to solve | problems with an open-ended mindset. | | I think devs should resist this micro tracking tools, they're | used by agencies to exploit their employees and their customers-- | IMO it's no different than an amazon warehouse tracking their | employees every move/micro-break. | | Edit: Like others have mentioned here, name and shame, they | scammed you! Lesson learned, but 46k is a lot of money, and for a | lot of small businesses that could have been enough to tank the | owners financially, so you may potentially help out others by | attaching their name. | spoonjim wrote: | This is why I only use Upwork for design and assets. If I don't | like something I throw it out and am not too bent out of shape | about it. Quality is only marginally less than hiring someone. | propter_hoc wrote: | For what it's worth, I think your new logo is great. | jdoss wrote: | I was just going to post the same thing. The new logo looks | fantastic. | mtlynch wrote: | Thank you! I was really happy with how it turned out. | aloukissas wrote: | tl;dr -- should have gone with shopify | 999900000999 wrote: | > Why didn't you just use a Shopify template? If I could go back | to when I first created the website, I would have made it a | simple Shopify store with a custom theme. | | That's the biggest take away here. Unless you have a unique need, | use an off the shelf solution. | raverbashing wrote: | Yeah then people wonder why people prefer going with | Wix/Squarespace etc | | That's why. It also tones the "customer nitpicking every | detail" way way down, when you can only pick from set choices. | 999900000999 wrote: | It really gets you 95% there. | | Like try to explain to a non technical person how to deploy a | website on AWS with a real domain. | | Zryo is actually cheaper than Wix if you just need to put up | a static site. Yeah I can do it for free on S3, but it's easy | to design my Zryo site and it looks nice. | Taylor_OD wrote: | Good for you for posting this. This is something a lot of people | wouldnt want to talk about but I'm sure people deal with all the | time. | aprao wrote: | I love your blog and thorough retrospectives on all your projects | - thanks a ton for the great content! | tootie wrote: | Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful | design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual | rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I've never seen | it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past | wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients | tripping over themselves to hire us. | | That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to time | just for portfolio or on the prospect of a "foot in the door" for | a bigger account and we actually struggled mightily to scale | down. We were used to large teams of dedicated specialists and | didn't have geneslists who could wear all the hats at once. I'm | wondering if this agency had the same problem. | _fizz_buzz_ wrote: | Another sign that we are in tech bubble. The guy was asking for | the redesign of 3 pages + a logo. Landing page, shopping cart | and checkout for one (!) product he sells. This is such a | standard, run off the mill application why wouldn't a decent | agency have something ready in their drawer where they just | have to adjust the CSS to make it look unique. How isn't this | process completely tried and figured out after 30+ years of | ecommerce? | | > Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone | for less than $500k | | These times are way overdue to end and it seems like they are | ... | tootie wrote: | Probably the opposite actually. The first victims of a | recession will be consultants. The agency in question is | probably used to much bigger clients, but was willing to do | something much smaller because the sales pipeline dried up. | And then they brought a heavyweight approach to a tiny | project and failed. | | The heavyweight approach is absolutely mandatory when dealing | with larger corporate clients or when you're trying to really | bring something unique. You may be surprised who hires | agencies for this kind of stuff, because past agencies had | keystone accounts worth millions per year from giant tech | companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. They don't ask to | put a template on WooCommerce, they ask how to find, engage | and retain new customers and differentiate themselves from | everyone else. | gusbremm wrote: | And that big, fancy agency will outsource the whole project for | 1/20 of the paying price to a small company. | sanitycheck wrote: | And the small company will hire a single contractor for 1/4 | of what they're getting, and that's who will do all the work. | gusbremm wrote: | Exactly. | tootie wrote: | No we did it almost all in-house. It's a pretty competitive | space, there's like 20 A-list agencies that operate at that | level and 100 others a notch or two below. We frequently | ended up working on site with clients, we couldn't hide | anything. | s1k3s wrote: | Me too, 1 month ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31827449 | | I was finally lucky enough to find someone on Fiverr. I will be | using Fiverr a lot more now. Upwork and Toptal have been a total | disaster for me. | tgv wrote: | 99designs worked well for us, but for a few fairly straight- | forward design tasks. And the translation and coding was done | afterward in-house. | steve76 wrote: | MaxPengwing wrote: | did you do anything other than redesign the website that could | explain the influx of more sales? | | Like any campaigns, newsletters, ad buys etc? | | How do you know the new design is the the correlated cause of the | revenue influx? | _fat_santa wrote: | When I was working on a website for my stepdad, I had to keep | re-iterating to him that he should monitor metrics before going | off with any re-design. Often he would call wondering if | something could be re-designed, something I taught him is that | unless it's going to help bring customers and money in the | door, it's not worth it. | | I get tons of "customers" like this. They want a website that | is a reflection of their business. I always tell them the same | thing, base your decisions about redesigns in the numbers, let | the metrics tell you when it's time to redesign to increase | engagement/click through/etc. | kgeist wrote: | >Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked. | | Interesting: 14-th concept in the list is pretty much Telegram's | logo | raverbashing wrote: | In the same vein as companies "not wanting to be a company's | biggest client" there's a reason for not being a company's | smallest client as well, as this shows well. | YetAnotherNick wrote: | What's the reason for "not wanting to be a company's biggest | client" except maybe inexperience. | throwaway81523 wrote: | If the company can't handle clients bigger than you, they may | not be able to handle you either. | lowercased wrote: | You end up hitting scaling issue the agency hasn't hit | before, and they're learning on your dime. That scaling could | be technical, but also organizational and procedural. Your | org may be big enough to have specific legal/regulatory | issues to contend with, but the agency has never dealt with | those before, for example. | | I understand people will almost always be 'learning' in some | capacity on every project. "Hey, we're constantly learning! | This is great!". I recognize it, but don't always think it's | something to celebrate. You'll _usually_ be better off | working with an agency that 's dealt with your size | project/org before. | kylebenzle wrote: | hedora wrote: | I know nothing about this area, but I'm surprised the redesign | improved sales by 40%. | | Also, I get paying for logos and branding, but I'm having trouble | wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure | 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in. | | How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they | doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or | revamping the store logic or something? Is there a big telemetry | backend, maybe? (I'm actually asking why this is hard, not trying | to be snarky.) | mtlynch wrote: | Thanks for reading! | | > _I 'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website | couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and | google js in._ | | Oh, how I wish it could just be 90s style HTML and CSS! I'm | forever trying to get back to that. | | The website is a static site, but it's built with Gridsome[0], | a now-defunct Vue-based static site generator. I wanted to be | able to write blog posts and documentation on the site in | Markdown, and Gridsome was the easiest way I knew to do that, | but in retrospect, it was a big mistake. | | And there shouldn't be that much JS, but there ends up being an | annoying amount for managing the shopping cart. At first, I | just had buy buttons that took you directly to the Shopify | checkout page. And then I added support for buying a quantity | other than one. And then users kept asking for a way to support | VGA, so I added VGA-to-HDMI adaptors as an optional add-on. And | so a shopping cart seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't | be that complicated, but there's been a lot of complexity over | the years. If I had to do it over again from the very | beginning, I'd have just made it a Shopify template. | | > _How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were | they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list | or revamping the store logic or something?_ | | The refactoring was mixed up in the theme migration. We had a | lot of code that was like `class="header-image"` and then a CSS | class would add a bunch of CSS rules. They didn't like that, so | they spent a lot of time rewriting the CSS to use more utility | classes like `mx-1`. That way, they can change things at the | theme level, and it filters down into all the elements without | having to change each class. I think it was a useful | refactoring, but it wasn't worth the cost at the time. | | [0] https://gridsome.org/ | etempleton wrote: | Agencies as a rule, and I cannot understate this, are always | trying to find a way to extract more money from you. It is the | core of an agencies work. Most of their thinking and brain power | go to extracting money from their clients. They achieved their | goal spectacularly. | | Realistically, they never would have taken you on as a client for | 15k. It would be barely worth their time. Their goal was always | to extract about 40-50k from you. And at the end of the day it | looks like they did some pretty good work, so hey, you achieved | your goal too, just at a much higher than desired price. | lacrosse_tannin wrote: | Parts of this sounds similar to what happened to my (small | company) job. | | We signed up for a small 20 or 40K design project. Landing page | and pricing page. In the weekly meetings, the designer would | present all this out of scope work to us. "Heres the new blog | design" Is this a thing they do on purpose? | | Can we have the fonts and logos please? | | And yes, all the people doing the actual work were green and/or | overseas contractors | [deleted] | noduerme wrote: | Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I've never put clients on retainer | for more than a fraction of the typical work-hours per month... | which I only really know after I'm well past their first project. | The point of a retainer is to square off enough time and | resources to be on call when the next project comes up and the | one after that. I don't think it's at all the appropriate way to | handle a resource crunch on a one-off project. | | I _do_ shy away from design-only work for one time clients, | although ten years ago that was typical of my business. From an | art director 's perspective there are certain red flags on both | sides of this. I would never present that many logo options to a | client, or engage in constant back and forth over the options | until we had internally narrowed it down to a maximum of 3. | Clients are not designers and presenting them with too many | choose-your-own questions tends to lead them to micromanaging - | what I call client vanity logos - and inevitably (though | paradoxically) they are less happy with the results than if they | are presented with a few solid choices from the get-go and | dissuaded from injecting too much of their own design aesthetic. | The reason is that they come to believe they could have done it | better themselves. Whereas if it is done for them professionally, | they will comfort themselves knowing that this is what the | professionals think and they got the pro opinions they paid for. | This is something I learned very early on, when I started at an | ad agency at 15. (We also learned that two of the three you | present should be slightly flawed, to drive the customer to the | design strategy we had already settled on but give them the | illusion of choice. I don't really waste time with that anymore, | but it's still a tool in the kit). | | I'm not blaming the OP for any of this, or saying they're | especially picky. In my experience it really comes down to the | quality of work and quality of advice they're getting from an | agency, and an agency should know how to deal with it. | | Another red flag is that each portion of the job should have been | estimated individually beforehand. That's really essential to | preventing time overflows and also to dissuade micromanagement. | Instead, it sounds to me like this entered a loop focused on the | logo which sucked up more time than anyone expected, and they | allowed that to be a driver. _They_ probably no longer liked the | project, and as a result, the final product lacked coherence and | vision. | pepan wrote: | This agency was very unprofessional. The fact that they kept | working out of scope even though you had to remind themselves not | to is a huge red flag. And also the fact that they kept reminding | you that you were their smallest client?? Suspicious how often | that came up... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-21 23:00 UTC)