I regret my website redesign

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I just mention this because for a thread this large, it is unusually good. (And yes, we're still going to solve this paging business and then there won't be any more of these annoying notices.)

You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt, let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use microservices and..."?

Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and interesting. And, just as fixing bugs is tedious and boring, tweaking designs is tedious and boring.

I've been on both sides for a lot of years, and I have to keep a sharp eye on myself to keep from spinning my wheels on distractions.

Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

"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.

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/

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.

It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency. They ripped you off =/ No two ways about it.

> I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match. I was used to working with individual freelancers, and WebAgency was accustomed to larger clients.

...I think that is a very forgiving, but utterly self-doormatting, perspective on the issue. This was an incompetently managed agency who kept bullying you because you let them. At $175/hr, even as their smallest client, you deserved waaaaaaaaay more professionalism. IMHO the biggest lesson to be learned here, that you didn't really talk about in the blog post, is not to let someone -- agency or employer or freelancer or otherwise -- fleece you over like this. Isaac kept stalling and not delivering and mis-spending your contracted funds. You should've demanded a partial refund or threatened to sue. Their behavior wasn't acceptable, but you just kept saying "it'll get better...". It never does.

Sorry to be so harsh, but you kept trying to defend their "best intentions". No, they just didn't take you seriously, and then they failed your project and dragged you down with them. Nobody should be paying for an agency like that, especially for $175/hr. What a rip-off :(

You did mention that you probably would've seen better results from a freelancer, and that's probably true -- especially from a place with some bare accountability, like Upwork where there's reviews.

I 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.)

This sounds like every accidentally toxic (maybe sometimes no accident) contractor relationship I've ever seen.

The initial energetic kick off, the slow decline into unimportant details, lowered enthusiasm, and unreturned messages, and so on. Often driven by lack of clear scope from the client & a vendor whose enthusiasm far outpaces even the loose scope restrictions provided.

In this case, sure, the author bears some responsibility but from their account they seem to have gone in with a relatively clear scope.

The thing that really makes it all not smell quite right is that the pace of work didn't even get significantly better when the author agreed to a retainer contract, only when they cancelled it with a month still prepaid for work to be done. So the vendor, perhaps not completely or intentionally predatory in it's practices, moves quickly to get the client out the door without making too much of a fuss.

This is the unfortunate state things can arrive at even with the best of intentions, so hopefully that's all it was here too, but it still doesn't reflect well on then vendor. A disciplined contractor will work a bit more to keep a client on point and aware of progress towards goals vs. budget remaining, estimates for going out of scope, etc.

I can't remember seeing a website redesign in my entire life that didn't make the site worse. Many sites have gone down the tubes due to redesigns while always blaming the failure on something else. Kudos for at least having the self-awareness to realize that your redesign didn't help.

To first order, there's (usually) only one site metric that really matters, and that's page load speed. Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it's so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty. Meanwhile the also-rans with busy pages (remember Yahoo leading the search space? Digg leading link aggregation?) are now near forgotten.

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

Serif -> Cliche San Serif, CHECK!

Quirky Original Graphics -> Corporate Memphis, CHECK!

Distinctive Colours -> Generic Shades of #0000FF, CHECK!

Crisp Headline -> Something Generic, CHECK!

Sharp image of distinctive looking device, makes you curious, looks like a unit! -> Generic Graphics, CHECK!

And more...

They ruined it!

What a shame it was so good, so perfect before.

The redeeming thing about the new design, if any, is that if you want to sell the company or get investment it might add some value as it makes it look more like a "tech" investment.

> 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.

Previous agency hack here of many years (many agencies). Do not take anything communicated to you from businesses like this at face value. Ignore the tone. The Isaac's of this world are not your friend. In fact, they likely personally orchestrated the scenario and tailored the ongoing narrative. I realise how cynical this sounds, but I'm certain your Isaac would agree.

Agencies (and Isaacs) have a place. They are useful for large orgs where certain expectations and business/operating aesthetics are demanded. Agency workflows and billables have evolved specifically for this climate of largesse. Buyer beware.

Not surprised! One of my first jobs was interning at a digital agency, and I really hated it. I'm probably completely biased, but I'd never hire them for anything.

One of their big sales pitches was that they didn't offshore any of the work, it was all 100% local. But they'd hire a bunch of interns to do the work, and pay them next to nothing.

In fact, the coding assignment for the interview was a client's new website. On the day I started, my first task was to finish up my coding assignment so they could sent it to the client.

Being an intern I was slower, and produced lower-quality work. All my forms would submit using GET requests instead of POST. If I had to modify how the CMS worked, I'd just modify core code instead of making an add-on. I'm sure that caused confusion when the next upgrade wiped the custom code!

And apparently it was one of "the good" digital agencies...

This is interesting to read, because it seems both client and vendor had trouble managing boundaries due in large part to a contingency-focused or future-focused decisionmaking style. Some would call it bait-and-switch on the vendor's part, but this was speculative territory for them too, and pretty obviously so based on the blog post.

The need to constantly work in favor of anticipation of future events effectively locked out their ability to execute on established agreements, creating an oscillating wait-and-see pattern.

It's rare to see this happen on both sides of a business agreement. However if these two sides came together again I'd expect to see a similar pattern, not that I'd blame anyone. To work around such an obviously favored perception would require a very difficult change in individual psychology with a lot of focus on practicable alternatives.

A very thorough writeup op, thanks for sharing it.

  A few weeks later, WebAgency called a meeting to share updates, but they hadn’t made any progress on the logo or branding. Instead, they spent the whole meeting showing me design ideas for the website.
    
    “To be clear, the project is still a rebranding and not a redesign, right?” I asked.

I'm sure the quote isn't verbatim from your meeting with, but I'm guessing your tone with them was similar. It sounds like you were speaking to them like you're both working at the same company, for the same boss, which isn't the right tone, IMO.

You hired these people, so you should really be talking to them like you're the boss. Basically, dictate where their work is going. If it sounds like they're going off-track, that's your money they're wasting, so tell them, "This doesn't look like what I asked for.

Contrary to the author's assumption about disincentives, it seems like terminating the contract may have been why all the work suddenly got done. That's when the author went from a customer to a potential threat. If the agency hadn't completed the work (including the "no charge" fixes after the contract ended), I'm guessing we wouldn't have gotten a pseudonym for the agency and project lead.

As a German person, this and so many other stories about customer - business relations gone awry or lost in miscommunication, I sometimes want to scream at the monitor, "why the hell wouldn't you get that in writing???"

The same goes for many work situations where the boss suddenly lowers the pay or fires someone for not filling in last minute for another employee calling in sick on a weekend. How is that possible? Don't you Americans value written contracts?

I am often annoyed by the amount of paperwork needed to make my life go smoothly, from work to private matters to whatever - but the times I was glad I could just point to a written and signed, extremely detailed contract which is the only thing that matters should things ever get in front of a judge, easily make up for the tedious writing and reading of contracts beforehand.

> 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"?

Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.

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

Wow, as lifelong web developer, you really got fleeced. This reads like a list of rookie mistakes to be honest, but not just on your side. Agencies should know when they're too big for a client, and they often do. It avoids exactly this kind of dissatisfaction.

And yes, they made money, but the hit to their reputation is usually not worth it if you're their smallest client. I dare say they probably didn't even do it on purpose, they just didn't have the bandwidth to actually care about your project.

I've been looking at Scrum more closely recently, and I think this would have been a good use case for it (with you as a stakeholder). This goes toward your point of doing things one step at a time. Scrum sprints are short and deliver value consistently. Looking back, I wish I'd had to use it stringently while I was still working at startups; I believe we would all have been much better off.

I respect the tone of this blog post. I pause to think how I would word this experience if it happened to me. Since it hasn't, I don't really know how I would react. However; having this cool composure to think through why things ended up as they did and how it could be improved in the future is something I hope to aspire to.

"We just didn't fit" is a fantastic conclusion.

The ego is one helluva thing, and a hurt ego with negative self talk can lead one down silly paths. OP is cool as a cucumber.

The decision to anonymize the agency is understandable, but I wonder about the systemic effects. Right now the reputation cost is born by all agencies, leading to a tragedy of the commons for shoddy delivery.

But encouraging authors to name names would drag them into a public dispute they don’t need, and disincentivize the many valuable lessons that are in here. (THANK YOU! 90% of people wouldn’t have pushed through the discomfort to share their learning).

What is a system of public discourse that threads that needle? I’m sure “Isaac” feels a little bad, but has ”don’t pitch clients we can’t service” shot to the top of his priority list? But again, I don’t want to put more onus on the author who’s already gifted me a lot of hard earned knowledge.

I'll take a contrarian position here. You paid for professional services that you could afford, you got them, and they made you more money. It's the definition of a good investment and a successful project.

Will also add that based on the happy conclusion of your story the title is almost clickbait — and highly effective clickbait at that, since you've now gotten 1000s of targeted HN eyeballs. I can't imagine how much that would have cost you!

Always love your writing, mtlynch. FWIW, I really do like the redesign. The logo is great, as are the illustrations. They obviously had a talented bunch, even if mismanaged. This is one of my fears with hiring freelancers, and why I really haven't done it so far. I could use the help, but I feel like it'd suck my time and wallet to get the results I'm after. Probably just haven't talked to the right one yet, if such a thing exists.

I worked as the dev lead for an ad agency in the past it always came down to sales under pricing, not listening to the team about what they thought costs would be. Like, "oh yeah, we can definitely build this complicated ecom site for $10k!" -- no way, mumbled the team. What you spent was pretty typical for a "$10k" project. And then frustrated clients would be due to PMs not being truthful about what the situation really is, spewing the same BS that sales sold them on.

Maybe that was the point, and the business model -- taking advantage of your clients? I wouldn't put it past them, at least when it came to the ad agency I worked for. It wasn't my favorite place to work, that's for sure. Constantly being over budget and past deadlines sucked.

Towards the end of my venture there, I almost always recommended using Shopify for any ecom project, to stay within the project's budget, instead of WooCommerce, Spree, or Magento (never again). Even if 9/10 times it didn't happen that way, I still made the recommendation.

But these days, a very simple ecom site could even be built by offloading onto Stripe Checkout, though I'd still probably go with Shopify to future-proof on product catalog growth.

Most commenters think of this as an honest/dishonest situation on behalf of the agency. A different approach (and the one I'm reading it as) is that 'Isaac' operates as a seller that likes to make 100k per customer or project in any given time.

Not committing to each project, or actually listening, when the customer complains Isaac makes a few adjustments and continues business as usual.

He only cares about that 100k in a few month's time for a project. So now that he got only half of it he probably thinks he did the client a favor.

EDIT: the product is a life-saver for servers, kudos to the developer(s)

> Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency

More people should do this. Many agencies, if not most, prioritize new customer acquisition. If you're not their biggest customer, their priority is to do as little work as possible and inflate the cost (partially why they love retainers).

Very often a customer like this would be relegated to junior employees in an agency anyway. You can get a freelancer with a lot more experience, and still save money.

I worked at agencies for about the first 5 years of my career, and left to freelance when I realized I was already doing most of the work... but someone else was making most of the money.

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

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)

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.

Honestly, the old site comes across as way more “real” to me and I think he should go back.

I appreciate that they’re getting their enclosure done with 3D printing but going for a highly refined website design while 3d printing your enclosure seems like a mismatch in quality expectations. (I think the new site comes off as an attempt at a refined modern design but is very “light” or lacks real personality or depth)

I think the old site and the 3d printed enclosure of the product are the perfect match.

The new version of the website breaks some fundamental - and easily fixable - rules of web design: No changes to links on hover, and dropdown menus don't appear on hover, only on click. If OP reads this, really recommend fixing that. It should be easy.

Also, agreed with those who are saying that it's OK to stand up for yourself as a client. It's hard managing clients as an agency, and it's good to have empathy for people you work with, but that doesn't mean you can't push back on added cost or expanded timelines.

Frankly, when someone tries to charge you more for something that is within the scope of work you already paid for, you can simply say no. Likewise, when someone tries to charge you for something you didn't agree to pay for, say no. That is maybe what needed to happen here.

> Why didn’t you just use a Shopify template? If I could go back to when I first created the website, I would have made it a simple Shopify store with a custom theme.

That's the biggest take away here. Unless you have a unique need, use an off the shelf solution.

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…

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.

Kinda weird that their conclusion contradicts the whole post.

> If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t. But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an all-time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the redesign.

A simple website redesign increased sales by 40-66%, but you wouldn't do it again? Is the fact that it took longer and cost a few thousand dollars more than expected really that bad? That describes literally every software project in existence.

Agencies as a rule, and I cannot understate this, are always trying to find a way to extract more money from you. It is the core of an agencies work. Most of their thinking and brain power go to extracting money from their clients. They achieved their goal spectacularly.

Realistically, they never would have taken you on as a client for 15k. It would be barely worth their time. Their goal was always to extract about 40-50k from you. And at the end of the day it looks like they did some pretty good work, so hey, you achieved your goal too, just at a much higher than desired price.

For what it's worth, I think your new logo is great.

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.

I've worked on the other side of this and it's the end result of any large agency that starts chasing the bigger clients. More and more time, effort, and money is spent on the ideation/thinking/design side to the point everything else just grinds to a halt. For executives on both sides it's great. For anyone who hasn't to _do_ something, it's at best pointless, and at worst poisonous to every other activity.

As the author said, hiring a freelancer with specific goals is a much better route.

Oof, this pains me personally. That $46k pricetag just about matches the salary I was earning in my first full time job while still attending college more than a decade ago. I was a web developer and between a designer, a content gatherer/editor, and myself, we banged out one or two complete websites a month. These were no simple sites either - dynamic, Drupal based, custom theme, stage/prod, self-hosted order forms, newsletters, other interactivity and even training the owners how to use Drupal.

Not to undermine the effort that has been put into, but it's interesting that we used to churn out such redesigns across multiple webpages & logo, within a matter of weeks and mostly as a single developer taking help / feedbacks from another, if needed. This was at a product startup early in my career.

I'm not implying that this entire project was a scam, but it's interesting how two different flavours of working styles can bring out so much difference in efficiency.

Great post Michael! We talked about this on our last call and I shared similar sentiments at the time.

We made a similar mistake on Server.pro a few years ago. Our first hire was a designer that had no coding experience. Costed us 130k, 2 years and terrible CSS that is finally getting replaced 5 years later. And our users did not like the design as much as our last one, which also uses bootstrap.

No problem, keep at it! Michael is extremely industrious in his blogging. Several front page posts the last months.

I run an software / creative agency in South Africa (creationlabs.co.za) that works with clients ranging from tiny to large corporates. What I've found is that the direction of the blame very much depends on which side of the fence you're sitting. One the one hand the client blames the agency for being opportunistic, while at the same time the developers get frustrated at what may seem like a never-ending list of unreasonable expectations.

That's not to say that this is what happened here, but in both situations the problem comes down to a lack of effective communication.

The agency here should have communicated from the start how many hours they can reasonably expect to spend on each phase of the project with the given budget, and then provided continuous updates to allow Michael to understand how much time he had remaining to complete the project. Opaque processes, coupled with a lack of transparency and communication is how projects like this leave a sour taste, or worse, fail entirely.

On a personal note, I'm gobsmacked at both the hourly rates as well as the total project hours discussed in this article. A website like this should have taken a fraction of the time. And if outsourced to a professional team in another country, a fraction of the price too.

Unrelated to the website discussion, the last link showing it is still negative profits after spectacular revenue increases is scary. This looks like a great product at a great price point, with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?!

With the takeaway I would agree with finding a sole freelancer, or a small team 1-3 rather than an agency. Freelancers often scale to agencies to make more money off bigger clients that can deal with scope creep and huge bills.

I've done freelance work similar to that (redesigning w/ bootstrap), and I found having a set price for the completed work has worked well for me.

On tracking, I worked with a consultancy a while back and had to use self-tracking tools like toggl, and it was a dealbreaker for me. I absolutely hate tracking (billable) time, some places do it down to the minutes, it's madness IMO. It was frustrating because a problem could be solved in 2 mins, but required 1hr of research/experimentation, when do you start the timer? Oh and you have three other clients, and whenever you context switch you gotta quickly do it in the tool so it tracks the right client, etc. it warps the brain IMO and stifles creative play/thinking, especially when you're docked for not having enough billable hours, even though in a normal full-time job things would be swell. After I left, I had to readjust to not always think about my time per task and felt relief and clarity again to solve problems with an open-ended mindset.

I think devs should resist this micro tracking tools, they're used by agencies to exploit their employees and their customers—IMO it's no different than an amazon warehouse tracking their employees every move/micro-break.

Edit: Like others have mentioned here, name and shame, they scammed you! Lesson learned, but 46k is a lot of money, and for a lot of small businesses that could have been enough to tank the owners financially, so you may potentially help out others by attaching their name.

Maybe there's something I missed in the article, but to me, it read like a case of sunk cost fallacy.

> Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked.

> By December, we were three months into the project. WebAgency was 95% done with TinyPilot’s new logo. All I wanted was to change some rounding on the corners and eliminate the border. I expected it to be a couple of hours of work.

> All I needed was a couple more hours of work. But I didn’t get them.

One of the biggest challenges with creative work is to have a concrete idea of the direction you want to take. It seems as though by the time he was given the rebranding drafts, OP already had that vision . His only issue was that they were only 95% done. But designers work with existing brands all the time. Why couldn't the rebranding be completed by another designer with OP's express guidance?

He had already observed and acknowledged patterns of misbehavior from "WebAgency" that one must watch out for when working with contractors. What justified giving them a little more money to complete the work (multiple times), rather than paying for a new designer, if not sunk costs?

This is what reliably happens if you give one person project to a team. Seen this multiple times internally.

I personally like the way the original web site looks and feels better.

But the tell is in the dollars. Has business gone up since the new site has shipped? If sales go from 45K/mo (or whatever they are now) to 50K/mo with no other attributable changes for a year, then the 46K paid off.

I didn't see anything in the article that addressed what (if any) impact this painful journey has actually done for his earnings.

See the retrospective call summary is insane to me. I wouldn't be able to do anything besides offer a partial, if not total, refund. I literally, fundamentally, do not understand how people can brush off such major mistakes with "Yeah, sorry, that was a misstep on my part."

I've only worked with a handful of clients so far, but the number one thing I care about most is providing an honest service. I estimate rough timelines for each major task in my head, then add a few hours depending on complexity. If I go over that limit, I'm usually working on that task for free until it gets completed (unless there's some major flaw that is causing the slowdown, like previous developer bugs or slow responses from client). The client never sees this process, but in the end they see tasks being completed in a fair timeframe.

If I'm noticing events are causing me to slow down on a client's work (by like a week, let alone the several months OP had to endure), I quickly communicate with the client to let them know & have us work out a plan.

These aren't things that make me feel like I'm doing something unique in this space, because they just feel so simple & basic to how any working individual should conduct themselves. If OP was dealing with a fresh in the field freelancer, still wet behind the ears, then sure, I guess I can see how things can get away from you in your first project. But this is supposed to be an agency with big clients? And they had this many "missteps"?

Insanity. Actual insanity. I'm not trying to rag on "Isaac" too hard here, I'm more trying to word my confusion on whether or not this is the norm for other freelance agencies. I hope not, because the recount reads like a shameful state showcasing the lack of care in this industry.

From the article: “The real issue, [WebAgency CEO] said, was that I was their only hourly client. I would always be at the mercy of long-term retainer clients pre-empting my project.”

— and —

From the article: “They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.”

___

That’s bait-and-switch in my opinion and might very well be illegal.

My suggestion would be to immediately stop talking about this to random people on the internet and speak to an attorney specializing in contract law. Prepare a brief covering what you did in the blog, have copies of any emails, specs, contracts, etc. — and have them clarify if there was a material breach of contract that would warrant damages and/or any evidence showing the web agency committed illegal acts.

I would also be very careful about identifying the company, since they might file for legal damages. If the CEO’s first name is real, I would immediately remove it from your blog and the reference to finding them on HN to make any claim you did identify them harder.

The new design is right in a lot of ways but I cannot stop thinking how honest and friendly the old design looks. I would also prefer the old, cute and more unique logo instead of the trendy plane icon.

Wow. I closed my web services shop cuz I couldn;t find more work. My one client and I parted ways cuz I was too expensive ($100 an hour) to keep building their aws webapp to monitor patients weight and blood pressures (also they paid me about 8 months late).

Totally appreciate the post-mortem and lessons learned at the end and I hope there will be NO next time for you.

I've worked at an agency like that for a loooong time in my past. It's shocking that a website that looks like a cookie-cutter template that you could buy for $50 on websites like WrapBootstrap could cost a THOUSAND times as much.

It is absolutely ridiculous. This guy was ripped off by a combination of wilful malice and sheer incompetence.

Anyone would be better helped by going onto a website like Fiverr with your pre-selected paid-for Bootstrap template and tasking a designer from India or Pakistan whose work you like with the simple one-price task: "Take this template and personalize it to my product."

The total costs shouldn't amount to more than $1000 to $2000, including taxes. And, honestly, you'd have a far better-looking result than... this thing. It looks like it was designed by amateurs, really.

I could set that entire page up in less than 3 hours. Easily. Responsive and all.

I'd say the author is being generous to the agency and Isaac.

There is easily a version of this where the agency has landed on an excellent strategy for milking 7K for 6x their spend.

At best (generously assuming the agency's retro is all true) the CEO, Isaac has been greedy or naive in taking on work they clearly weren't set up to deliver.

The solution: hire designers who can code. It will save you a lot of time and money. They can design and code with Webflow at the same time. The front-end of this project should’ve taken 80-100 hours at most — including custom illustrations & graphics. P.S. I do that sort of thing if anyone’s interested.

hey since looking at your site, i have seen about 10 of your TinyPilot ads. I am certainly not in the market for one of these and probably not that many other people who viewed the article site are, so i suggest you dial back on the retargeting budget following this hacker news traffic, save yourself some money. The hacker news readers who are in the market have already seen your best piece of marketing for the product today, this article.

I think the new design is cleaner and looks more professional. Changing the color scheme, fix the fonts, fix the logo and make the design less dense could have had the same effect for less effort.

My main criticism is that site lacks written content and I still don’t know what a KVM is or why I need one.

Is it just me who finds the old website design much better than the redesign? The new redesigned website seems to lack character that the old website had.

> I’m not trying to bash the agency here, so I’ll just call them WebAgency.

Wow after reading this, I'd love to know who this WebAgency is so I can stay away. Alternatively I'm thinking of starting my own WebAgency and charge $7k to change button colors from green to limegreen.

To learn the value of a contract, it cost them $46,000.

But it is a very valuable lesson. Unfortunately, you either fuck over in business or get fucked over. I'm sure a lot of individuals make an effort to be sincere, at least most of the time.

They lacked self-confidence, and WebAgency engaged in aggressive commercial techniques. You must be firm if you want equitable treatment, particularly if you are hiring a larger agency to complete the work. Or you may get a gorgeously dressed and well-groomed salesman who will take you out to dinner, treat you to wine and supper, fuck you raw, and not return your call the next morning.

Sign the agreement. But also take notes from this treatment if you wish to succeed financially.

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.

As a designer-turned-developer, I find this topic and the comments amusing. I don't think there's much question that the agency in question treated the client terribly, and should have been fired post haste and early.

That said, you couldn't pay me enough to get involved with design again in any way shape or form. The reason, as reflected by the comments and experience, is greatly increased customer expectations of the design process, number of expected mockups/choices, iterations, content changes, scope creep, etc. Even for small projects like the OPs, it's has ballooned to such an extent that many times it's practically impossible to know if something is going to take weeks or even years.

10 years ago when I last did design, if this author approached me I'm confident that I could have delivered a significantly better end result in far less time and at a cost similar to the original estimate. However, I would have be up front at the start (and in the contract) about maximum iterations and time spent before triggering the hourly rate. This most of the time anyway, worked pretty well to set the client's expectation to what I needed to match their estimate. I do understand that this wouldn't be palatable to most businesses anymore because it means having to be more trusting and flexible about the end result. Yet in almost all cases, I was able to please the companies I worked with and do it mostly on time/budget. Indeed, they sometimes had to compromise a bit but the end result as measured by revenue and traffic was almost never disappointing to them.

I'm a big believer of listening carefully and delivering not what "I" want, but what my customer wants. That said, I also believe business should be open to the advice of design (and other) professionals, because that is what they spend all their time doing. If you're fighting stuff like color/font/design choices with your designer to the extent that you have to go through a million changes, you've either picked the wrong designer or you might also consider the possibility that you might not be effectively communicating your opinions and/or that they might not make sense.

This sounds unexpectedly familiar to the experience of refurbishing my flat. Goal post moving, postponements, delays, pay in advance and job unfinished, etc.

My take is that you were too flexible and the agency took advantage of that to extract as much as possible. Also the payment strategy (per hour) is not in your favour. For these clear projects (same in constructions) it's best to arrange a fixed price. That of course does not solve all problems because they will cut corners and deliver average work but at least you can hold them accountable and refuse further payments until a certain milestone is completed.

Thank you for the detailed article and good luck with your projects.

“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.

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.

There is a reason why successful startups seldom order contract work especially early on.

Design is kinda different, yet most startups tend to have some competency and capability in that field(some frontend engineer more on the artsy/design side). If you did, you could have easily said that you are happy with the results and can take it from here, ask for source files. Since you pay by the hour and their game became to drag this it would be great to introduce a threat like that (even as a bluff).

Suddenly someone will realized that due to constraints(finding new agency would be costly) he became critical element of your business flow and will exploit that.

Something about the mikado method that makes it one of my favorite tools is that you can often get partial credit for an idea that doesn’t completely pan out.

I’m building a prototype for switching the framework we use to another one. In the process of trying to reach feature parity, I’ve been pulling out bits of logic that are coupled with the old framework and putting them into other libraries. At the end of this we’ll have better feature parity between services even if I end up abandoning the framework change. By moving the code around I may find solutions to the functionality we need that the framework makes very difficult to implement.

"Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency" - as a freelancer, this warms my heart :-) For a project of this size and nature, a one-man orchestra would definitely be a betterr choice.

However, to be fair, I must note that similar problems may happen with a freelancer (myself included). Self-management is hard, and I tend to underestimate, which leads to delays and/or working late.

Clear and frequent commucation is not as hard, but requires a good habit. You may or may not get it from either agency or freelanced.

“How long is a piece of string?” their lead designer asked. -- sounds like a red flag to me!

You should read the other Hertz story. You'll feel much better. :)

To OP: you're too charitable and optimistic towards people in a business context. If an agent has an incentive to milk you for money the odds are that they will. Math and history say and prove so.

It's not even about the money per se. We all know sometimes projects balloon over budget but you had a very clear and small scoped project and yet you failed forcing your contractors to stick to target.

IMO your mistake was:

(a) Not calling out "Isaac" early enough and making a meeting to re-establish ground rules and produce a crystal-clear short list of priorities (you seem to have produced similar document -- kudos for that);

(b) Not demanding the first delivery in maximum two weeks after the conversation;

(C) Accepting business contract that doesn't allow you to put financial pressure if you are unhappy with the results.

I believe you mostly arrived at the same conclusion but in case you haven't -- you are not friends with these people. The "but we had this or that problem" flies only once, or, if you are feeling very generous, twice. After that you either threaten to sue or just cut your losses and leave.

---

Your generic "we were just not a match" aphorism is setting you up for a similar occurrence in the future. Get rid of that mindset. It applies when dating or making friends, yes, but it absolutely does not apply in a business setting. You negotiate terms and when one side fails to stick to the terms, there must be consequences.

I think you got scammed big time, I mean, nobody who is doing big projects and has a lot on their plate is going to post on "HN: Who wants to be hired?"

I think the sad thing is the contrary to some people's opinions, this is not limited to small "cowboy" companies, it can happen from the smallest to the biggest and it is a mixture of competence, management, desire for profits etc. as it is in most companies.

The biggest difficulty is that you are paying a premium for intangibles when you talk designs and branding. If you absolutely know that your current brand is useless then anything is better than nothing but also you probably don't have to do very much to get better before the returns are diminishing.

Otherwise for design work, although the result might look "OK", it is hard to see how they would justify the money, although of course they will just like Tropicana justified their failed redesign.

I would normally say that you have to know enough about something to pay somebody else to do it well but here the OP does seem to know roughly what is going on so it might just come back to a more formal kick-off process and not getting caught up in the excitement that you just start and worry about it later. Clearly this company could have done a good job so it is not about ability, just management and scoping it properly.

Curious what others think of the icon progression? There was an article a week or so ago about how all cool/crazy/distinctive logo designs trend to boring sameness.

The end design looks like something I'd expect to see on the Delta app I download when I fly and promptly redelete afterwards.

My person favorite, for reasons I don't understand, is the center icon in the first column. I don't know why. I just like it's distinctiveness.

While the OP says in the post that he's not a rube, this whole post makes me wince and shouts "rube". There's no reason in today's day and age to spend this much or take this much time on a website "redesign", especially if you're a small business or one-person shop selling basically a consumer item. Agile methodology is key. Iterate quickly. Design / test / build quickly and iterate. Any long-term web design project is at high risk of being a waste of time and money. This has been an accepted best practices approach, especially for fast-moving projects for decades.

It does seem like he learned his lesson and at the end he talks about how basically an iterative approach with lots of deliveries and low-cost testing is the best approach. And yes, it's the best-practice. But then again he learned an expensive lesson that if he had asked others about, would have gladly told him. Sometimes people need to learn lessons on their own with their own expense to realize that best practices apply to them, too. I find the lack of acceptance of methodology and best practices approaches very sad.

This reminds me of a former employer of mine. It was a small company with an internal team of three developers who worked on the main product. The CEO had a relationship with a design consultant agency that she had been using for years. Every few months, they would sell her on the idea that the company's site needed a new design and she would oblige every time. After all, according to them, the current design is the reason why the site isn't reaching its potential in new traffic, and the web changes all the time, so a new design is always the key to solving that problem. Utter crap. And what's worse, after the design was completed, it would still be handed off to one of the in-house developers to actually implement, so it took time away from actually improving the product, which was what really needed the help. Needless to say, the consultant's relationship was an expensive time-suck (and looking at their site now, apparently it still is)

I don't understand why you went with a time & material contract. You could have easily gone with a fixed price contract for the logo redesign. Since this would have meant that the risk of scope creep is on the side of the agency, they would have most probably delivered only ehat was agreed on and they would have minimized the time for meetings.

I love blogposts like these that share the specifics thank you very much for posting. I probably would have wasted even more money.

If you hired a mechanic to regas your car's AC, and they give the car back with a full realignment, detailing, etc, all at prices you wouldn't have ever paid in the first place, you would be driving away without even thinking of paying, probably to the nearest ombudsman or law firm.

but at least that mechanic probably would have done the re-gassing first.

I've been on both ends of a scenario like this, as a client and also as the manager. Both situations suck, but they happen.

I actually really like the redesign, one thing I'd change is make the blue color a little less cold and a bit more inviting - but current one still works well.

However, the amount of money it cost is absolutely ridiculous.

OMG, you had the perfect logo in front of your face! Did you really not see it?

Look at your Black-Box, the simple arrow, simple, clean, perfect. That could be used in your Website design too.

Your animal was horrible and the new Airplane logo is senseless, cause you have "Pilot" in your name, but that has nothing todo with an airplane!

OP's Running in Production podcast episode was a good listen: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/105-tinypilotkvm-let...

If it sells, why do you need to stylize it when the style fad will change in two years?

Cafe. Sriracha HOT chilly sauce.

$175 an hour lol. I know senior designers/programmers who work for a fifth of that in Europe. Perfect English, 5+ yoe I never understood why companies pay hundreds per hour to anyone. You can get equivalent talent for much less, if you know where to look.

As somebody who feels really guilty for letting a project go even 30% beyond an estimate, this was a comforting read for sure.

I build websites for small-scale clients, often who are just starting out. After a lot of hard lessons, I make sure to communicate as soon as I can even when it was just a “soft” deadline. I had a project go 40% over the estimate and had to charge the client for it to keep my bills paid (it mostly due to scope creep, managed poorly).

After reading this post, it feels like those lessons are especially worthwhile as the business world comes to realize the value in the boutique/freelance contractors. Also helps me get over the mistakes, which weren’t nearly as bad in comparison.

This is the rule and not the exception. It seems software always takes much longer and costs much more than you think it will. The smaller the task, the better it can be estimated, and the less likely you are to veer off into crazyland.

The best solution I know would be to hire a team and use agile methodology to focus on the most important things first, breaking them down into small tasks. The team might be people you hire, or it could be people from an agency, but the project needs a strong, hands-on leader who is committed to the goal. I have never known a toss-a-big-solution-over-the-wall approach to work really well. Those projects can vary from annoying to completely dysfunctional.

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.

>WebAgency tries to keep project management to less than 5% of billable hours. At my scale, 5% would be too limited to provide any tangible benefit, so he eliminated project management entirely.

???

Excuse me, what?

How did he think that eliminating project management entirely would be a good idea?

The same applies within large companies. If you’re within a business team, and you’re requesting work from a design team/engineering team/data science team, you’ll face the same issues with scope creep + churn + competing priorities etc. I wouldn’t blame agencies for being bad, this is people being people plus a bit of other things. Anticipating and steering around/against these dynamics has been one of my biggest career learnings over the last years. The author has some good suggestions for how to do it — if you work in a large company, take another look and ask yourself if they don’t also apply to your work!

I have worked in and out of consulting and agencies for many years and I have a simple rule for hiring them when anyone asks:

1. Are you going to be one of their three biggest clients? If not, find a smaller agency.

2. If you can't find an agency small enough to be one of their three biggest clients, you want a contractor, not an agency. Put them on retainer for more than 50% of their time.

Firms will bend over backwards for their largest clients because they do a poor job of tracking that it is costing them money when they need to fix a mistake. They just see one of their biggest clients is unhappy and they will lose them.

I am _baffled_ at the cost of websites these days. The company I'm currently at asked for a redesign of their site, and the team was told that their $7k estimate for costs was "too optimistic".

Yes, I have definitely remained out of touch since the very first version of CSS. Yes, I hail from the days when you could do it all in a text editor and Javascript was optional. Yes, I've never paid attention to SEO and all that marketing stuff. But $46k?! And he initially even estimated $15k?!

I'm either missing something major (very possible!), or the industry is scam.

@mtlynch what tool/service do you use to enable the "TinyPilot’s in-house developers report their hours at the end of each working session" part of your business's workflow?

I feel sorry for your experience. Glad you took it with stride.

I always try to understand the business model behind agencies. What they do is selling hours or teams. The more, the better.

I worked with so many agencies, for quite some it is almost like a meme: "Oh, your website/service/code is so crappy, we did not expect that! This means additional efforts you have to pay for."

If you ever hear degradations like this, run! It won't get better, even if you pay for. They will always come up with another reason to charge for more hours.

In the same vein as companies "not wanting to be a company's biggest client" there's a reason for not being a company's smallest client as well, as this shows well.

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.

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?

Interesting. This is one of those things where experience just really helps. A friend of mine is a Creative Director at a firm and I asked her for advice for a startup I funded and she explicitly advised against an agency at the stage it was at. I'm pretty sure she'd advise against this as well. Instead, a single contract freelancer is probably a better play than an agency for this.

Over time, I have come to value my network very highly. Definitely helped me avoid a lot of missteps.

What is the best payment-structuring model to best align the interests of the person requesting the work, with the person doing the work, while also de-incentivizing things like scope creep and simply "one requirement ends up taking too long and should be considered for dropping prior to completion"?

Is it half upfront, half on delivery?

Is it fee-per-milestone?

Is it hourly rate?

Is it some hybrid of the above?

When a requirement must be dropped, who pays for the hours already sunk into it? Would it be both parties? (by charging half the normal rate)

I hired someone to create a basic one-page landing page on WordPress, my suggestion was: buy any theme and just change the logo/text/colors. Three months later, they just published a page that only has the hero section and an empty footer...

The problem: there was no deadline imposed and payment was done per month.

Solution: Define a VERY STRICT scope/tasks list and (short) deadline. If the deadline feels too short, reduce the scope instead of extending the deadline.

I have never seen or heard of a "web agency" doing anything for a reasonable amount of money or in a reasonable timeframe. The whole business idea behind a web agency seems to be scamming customers out of the maximum possible amount of money. I would never even consider hiring one. For something like this you hire a solo freelancer. Fraction of the money, done way quicker, and you don't end up paying the gigantic overhead of the agency.

Great article, thanks for those useful takeaways. I find that every website I have ever worked on has gone over budget and over scope, it's super frustrating. Mostly it happens because the client doesn't know what they want or keeps changing their mind, but it seems like you did know what you wanted and were pretty steadfast about. Either way, super impressed with how you managed to share a shitty experience in an objective, non-bitter way! :)

Stories like this make me sick to my stomach.

Lots of mistakes made on both sides but hourly billing itself was a major contributor that neither party even mentioned in the postmortem.

I disagree with the cheap developers point. I've just hired a Pakistani designer/web developer team. They were committed, fast, cheap, wrote high quality code, and delivered more than what was agreed at the start.

It was a closed price project though, which I think is a better way in general to get a better deal for everyone involved.

It wasn't perfect. But I can fix the rest.

How cheap? $950 for a new logo and branding guide plus two responsive html pages with custom graphics.

What you needed was a professional logo design. An agency might well be the best place to get that done, although they may well use a subcontractor.

After that, everything else could be done by a middling freelance designer with Squarespace. No web dev required.

I don't necessarily think the agency had especially ill intent, but the way they work is clearly not accommodating of clients with restricted budgets and they should probably not have taken the job to begin with.

The benefit of an agency for most companies is that they don't have to keep hiring new freelancers or contractors every few months. They are outsourcing all of that, and the associated overhead, to the agency. Training and managing a team of specialists is not trivial, especially if they are far removed from the focus of the company so nobody really knows how to go about hiring or managing said specialists.

Maybe there's a distribution of talent and skill in orgs, and it's nearly impossible to see if your new business partner will be great or terrible unless you have expertise in what they do...which you most likely don't if you're hiring them.

Further, how do I know if the web designer or plumber or mechanic is overcharging me, diagnosing problems I don't understand, or doing work that's not really needed?

My old business partner and I did some freelancing on the side, and it was shocking to hear clients say an agency quoted them $40k when we figured it would cost $8k. The author is right that agencies aren't always the way to go. You're paying for a lot of administrative overhead, and the owners and managers are most likely pocketing most of the money while paying overseas developers $10/hr.

“He felt that the underlying problem was WebAgency’s difficulty scaling down their workflows to fit TinyPilot’s budget. Their typical client has a retainer in the range of $20-40k per month. TinyPilot was buying only 40-60 hours per month, which they typically reserve for maintenance rather than new development.”

I call this bullshit. They had certainly designed in the past for smaller budgets, as they were smaller themselves.

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

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.

What I learned about doing projects: it’s all about deliveries and milestones. Agree on them, write them down and then enforce them. Don’t continue without getting the previous milestone delivered (at least 80% or so).

And if you don’t get what you agreed on, pull the plug. Even if you just have the slightest feeling of doubt, that something is not right. Quite often there is something very wrong already.

Parts of this sounds similar to what happened to my (small company) job.

We signed up for a small 20 or 40K design project. Landing page and pricing page. In the weekly meetings, the designer would present all this out of scope work to us. "Heres the new blog design" Is this a thing they do on purpose?

Can we have the fonts and logos please?

And yes, all the people doing the actual work were green and/or overseas contractors

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.

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.

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!

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.

We used a design agency as well for one of our product logos. Come to find out, they just ripped off the Noun Project svgs, added some color, and called it a day. A lot of the agencies I’ve seen typically have enough templates already so it’s to the point now that you just fill in some blanks, choose a color palette, add relevant graphics and you’re done.

I read through the post, is there something about how to make sure this doesn't happen? How to catch yourself falling down that slope? They suggested using Freelancers instead of agencies, and that seems like good advice in this context, but I am looking for frameworks that make sure this doesn't happen even in a different situation

None of this is specific to a website redesign. If you have a small project, don't hire someone that does big projects. Full stop. I learned this lesson helping my father run his business long ago. There's a threshold where the business model changes from delivering a quality product to sucking as much money out of the customer as possible.

> "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.

Worked for agencies, agree with the conclusion - don't look for an agency if you have a project under 50k$ - this kind of work is too low margin for a full agency (with the whole pipeline of sales, PM, team effort, then their internal cost like HR and finance, etc. etc.).

Such small projects are contractor/freelancer level work.

Even from a general customer serivce prespective, this sucks massively. Working in web development myself, everything is agreed upon before work to start - not with the agency deciding to include additional items.

It's incredibly shameful from this agency - they really owe a massive apology and should refund for the non-requested parts tbh.

There is a perverse incentive when the client has a retainer to bill hours and makes excuses to line their pockets. Why tolerate this behavior? The customer is always right, force them to stick to the contract or break away and take them to court if they are working on things outside of your contract and billing you.

Generification is a thing

> I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match.

Sounds exactly like how people rationalize abusive behavior from their partner. "It was my fault he hit me" etc.

That's because they did abuse you and ripped you off.

I've never had an experience with an agency that was better than hiring individuals. You end up paying a 20% markup + dealing with organizational headaches in exchange for skipping the pain of finding and vetting individuals with the right skillsets.

The initial shortcut ends up creating way more problems down the road.

I like the redesign, but it looks like any other template out there. I don't see how this could not have been done by 1 person within a week (excl. content - content can take more time). I sometimes do this for fun and would have charged 500 bucks + some theme/icon/graphics expenses.

Hey OP, You should read through this before next time. https://stratosphere.digital/#blog-6qs

avoid hn hug: https://archive.ph/ZnLLw

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.

> Within six weeks, we narrowed in on a concept we all liked

Not trying to be corky, but six weeks and the logo look like an airport booking service? I mean, a pilot should be a person, not a machine. I don't really know where the designer got that inspiration, but it's just not right.

Well written and an interesting read. Thanks for posting. My reaction is "WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOING?" haha.

I am not in the position to spend 46k on... anything but I would like to think I wouldn't be duped in the same way. All this "you're a small client" stuff is BS imo.

Kind of unrelated to the original article, but I feel like I’ve had this problem on a smaller scale. something I’m excited to use is DALL-E 2. I borrowed a friends access and tried to use it for my personal website redesign. It did everything I wanted and more. saved me $2K

This agency was very unprofessional. The fact that they kept working out of scope even though you had to remind themselves not to is a huge red flag. And also the fact that they kept reminding you that you were their smallest client?? Suspicious how often that came up...

Jesus...I would have charged like 10% to do all that work and still be happy about what I got paid.

You'd be better off with a $45 template. Maybe another $45 for a stock logo (scope creep!)

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.

>"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.

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

Wow - looks absolutely dreadful for that price. I could have done a better job for free.

Plenty of comments calling out the design as "worse".

Bottomline: "But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%."

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.

Nobody talks about the inflated prices for that kind of work with close to zero effort and required knowledge. A Community College student would have done that 3 pages website in 3 days at most and would looks 100x better. win-win.

Even though I don't quite agree with everything in your postmortem, I do want to thank you for reflecting and sharing your experience. It's not easy to admit mistakes in public and open yourself up for criticism. Cheers!

Sometime ago here I posited that America was business friendly because you could decide to simply not pay a company you weren’t satisfied with and usually have no consequence. This is exactly a scenario where that would be useful.

The part where he talks about paying 100% for something that's 80% done but 0% usable hit very hard. As a web agency owner, and multi-decade web builder I've been in this position too many times with sub-contractors.

This sounds like EVERY agency I have ever worked for. I am sure there are good agencies out there and others have had better experience, but the few agencies I have worked for would have considered this scenario a success.

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.

hurry! Ask the WebAgency for a 50% refund or their name will be the HN frontpage.

"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.

I've run into this phenomenon so many times playing entrepreneur that I gave it the name Alan's Law: getting paid to do a job has little to no influence on an entities ability to do said job.

This is why I only use Upwork for design and assets. If I don’t like something I throw it out and am not too bent out of shape about it. Quality is only marginally less than hiring someone.

I could have knocked that entire thing up in three days, including building it. You just got a shitty agency. But an agency is never cheap. You'd of been better off with an individual.

Please dont hold back on naming this company, the leadership is clearly inexperience, lack of.. creativity, communication, business etiquette, user experience, user interface design...

The only degradation I feel is that, in the previous design, I could see what I was buying within the first fold. I find the illustration in the new design to be a bit too abstract.

This is so typical for some business to waste money and charge higher price. Like health care industry. As a dev, I also designed logo and webpage myself.

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.

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.

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.

Hire me - I would have completed your 3-4 pages and rebranding for 1/4th the cost in <1 month (30 days is the worst case scenario).

This one of the reasons why I hate working with agencies. Simpletons that say "yes" to anything and charge a fortune for trash

>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

It's super smart to turn a project disaster into free advertising for your website! I hope your gambit pays off.

It's kind of strange that it wont let you join the waitlist if you are logged into an existing openai account.

You hire an agency when you can afford to grossly overpay and because time is more important to you than money.

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.

seven months? "Don't hardcode price into order_spec.js" for $438.40? Michael, are you hiring?

I think the old site looks much better than the new one. I'd definitely not be paying for any of that.

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.

How to make a ton of bullshit if you’re not a bull: take the least important feature and throw ten people at it who refer to themselves as “creative”. Should it be light purple or foggy morning green? We need to consult a vet.

Your site was what a site should look like, and redesign turned it into yet another ctrl-w nonsense. Personally I would ask why would you do that even if it costed $50.

feel like the people giving the agency benefit of the doubt didn't read the article...

this was clearly unprofessional behaviour, maybe not from the designers, but from the managers - they know exactly what they are doing...

and all these content managers on this thread apologising is pretty funny.

I love your blog and thorough retrospectives on all your projects - thanks a ton for the great content!

I'm amazed at the patience the author had. I would have terminated the contract after 4 weeks.

I would have offloaded the incomplete assets to someone on fiverr by the middle of the second month

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...

This is unbelievable. 46k DOLLAR.

So much time, waisted resources and an agency management from hell.

It's highly tempting to scour Dribble or Behance to track what the agency was.

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.

Does anyone want me to build their website for them? I'll do it for 10k

Sunk cost fallacy in action.

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?

Naming the agency might give them more pressure to make it right.

That reminds me that I should charge way more than I do.

>I’m not trying to bash the agency here

He should be trying to do so.

Never miss an opportunity to advertise your product!

People think they are clever going to big agencies.

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.

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.

The result is great though.

Just not sure about that logo ...

This is obviously a submarine for TinyPilot

Blue and white is boring as shit, goddamn

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.

wow. dying that this design / "aesthetic" (If you could call it that) cost $46k.

I think I found them, might be heartbeat

[link redacted]

I could have done this for like $50…

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.

The logos look like stocklogos from Freepik - indeed I think Freepik has better ones. And $7k - yukes.

I'm sorry friend :(

trending post mortems on HN are a great way to recoup losses

you fell for the ol' superset!

website redesign ∊ branding

Don't change the design. It'd bloody annoying.

You got scammed

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.

the redesign looks so much worse

I worked at WebAgency (not this one, another one) for 13 years, as a developer, designer, and in leadership roles. In my current role I'm on the other side of the table, dealing with contractors we outsource some of our product work to.

Your experience felt really familiar to me, symptomatic of badly managed projects I've been on both sides of. To be honest, it felt familiar in a way that evoked some emotional feelings I have from working on those kinds of projects for so long! Very few people want to rip off a small business owner, or to have a client feel like they've been swindled. Glad I'm out of that game.

What I'd like to add is that this can seem predatory, like Isaac was taking advantage of you, trying to wring you dry. That may be true (I don't know), but the same thing can easily happen when everybody has the best of intentions.

It is up to a PM to pump the breaks if they see designers or developers burning billable hours on things that won't help the project succeed. The Project Manager turnover you witnessed, and the CEO backfilling for them, happens surprisingly often. There's a lot of churn with PMs at these agencies, at the ones I worked for it felt like we could never keep them around. Since the harried CEO usually makes a horrible replacement for a full-time manager, it's not surprising he dropped the ball in this case.

In theory, it's also up to the designers and developers to manage their own time, but those folks are also often under pressure to be billing ~40 hours a week. If there is nothing for them to do but sit around, and your project is still active, I could see them filling their days working on unbidden ideas "to help you out". Again, I have no idea what happened in your case, but I have seen that before.

At the place I spent most of my time, our version of Isaac would have probably have refunded you a lot of that money, if indeed they really were busy with big clients (my guess is that's probably a line he gave you). It's a feast or famine business, and in feast times we refunded hours generously, both because we lived off referrals, and because we genuinely did not try to bleed our customers dry. It just worked out that way sometimes...

I will say that I think your takeaways from this experience are right on. I would also add that you shouldn't have to be the de facto project manager, but in practice that is the safest way to make sure you get what you want.

Meaning: schedule check-in meetings, find out what people are going to deliver and when, post up in their Slack, etc.

Good companies will appreciate your involvement, as long as you're not acting like a maniac, and when I think back to the most successful projects I worked on as a contractor, they all had some highly active contact on the client side.

I've been through this exact same story during my home remodel with a ~~contractor~~ handyman. The problem as far as I can tell is that when you pay someone hourly there is exactly zero incentive to make those hours go away. I don't believe people intentionally try to abuse the setup, it is just doomed to be a common outcome because of the structure. If you pay someone hourly they want to spend those hours doing their best work to maximize the quality of the referral they'll get when they're done. It's too easy to forget that timeframe (i.e. budget) is part of what most people care about during a project. And for better or worse most people do prefer "better late than never" to "rushed and shoddy" so it's probably a fair bet for contractors to implicitly make.

I also empathize with the author in terms of "why didn't you just do this and that" and the whole sunk cost fallacy. It's really easy to be on the outside and give the obvious retrospective advice that you should have fired X and switched to Y once you saw a few red flags. But that too, even if it makes logical and financial sense when you model it out still involves risks. There's no guarantee the next agency will be any better than the current so you're making a bet priced at the cost of treading while getting the next agency spun up. And ultimately humans are involved. It sounds like the issues with the project were being communicated and responded to during the project lifecycle so there's hope that the miss-steps will be corrected.

It's really hard. The silver lining, in my case and the author's, is that hopefully, despite the issues, all said and done you'll get a return on your investment. For me I simply don't want to lose money I'm not in the housing market to make money, I just need a place to raise a family.

The hard advice takeaway: if you have a budget and expectations about how a project will be delivered, you ABSOLUTELY NEED those codified in a contract. Shop around until you are willing to find someone who will agree to share the risk and deliver on a statement of work for a fixed cost. I understand in a competitive market this is hard because contractors and firms can easily go find "other" work. But the more pressure the better. Try structuring the project to have diminishing returns or financial penalties for being delivered late. Handymen or otherwise hourly arangements have their place for small jobs on the order of 1 or 2 days max 1 week of work. But hourly doesn't buy you any executive function: which is needed to manage hourly work. Keep in mind, in most cases, if these hourly people were skilled at executive function then they'd own a contracting firm, manage a team, and be profiting...

The whole experience has really made me wonder why any startups pay salary before they're profitable. Because as many know, this happens all the time internally with full time salaried employees too. No incentive complete work until the very last moment necessary. Deadlines and punishments for not meeting them are incredibly important. I mean I get it, a salary says "I need you around for this much because otherwise my business doesn't work" so it emotionally makes sense and I'm not saying the industry should stop doing it. BUT, I also have a seen a lot of work be dished out to salaried employees when it could have otherwise been structured as a 5k or 10k contract with a statement of work and payment remitted upon completion. I'm surprised you don't see more of that blend. I guess SASS is kinda a stand-in but still.

lol

Rekt.

$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?

tl;dr -- should have gone with shopify

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.

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)