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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I've never seen it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients tripping over themselves to hire us.

That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to time just for portfolio or on the prospect of a "foot in the door" for a bigger account and we actually struggled mightily to scale down. We were used to large teams of dedicated specialists and didn't have geneslists who could wear all the hats at once. I'm wondering if this agency had the same problem.

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Another sign that we are in tech bubble. The guy was asking for the redesign of 3 pages + a logo. Landing page, shopping cart and checkout for one (!) product he sells. This is such a standard, run off the mill application why wouldn't a decent agency have something ready in their drawer where they just have to adjust the CSS to make it look unique. How isn't this process completely tried and figured out after 30+ years of ecommerce?

> Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn't pick up the phone for less than $500k

These times are way overdue to end and it seems like they are ...

Probably the opposite actually. The first victims of a recession will be consultants. The agency in question is probably used to much bigger clients, but was willing to do something much smaller because the sales pipeline dried up. And then they brought a heavyweight approach to a tiny project and failed.

The heavyweight approach is absolutely mandatory when dealing with larger corporate clients or when you're trying to really bring something unique. You may be surprised who hires agencies for this kind of stuff, because past agencies had keystone accounts worth millions per year from giant tech companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. They don't ask to put a template on WooCommerce, they ask how to find, engage and retain new customers and differentiate themselves from everyone else.

And that big, fancy agency will outsource the whole project for 1/20 of the paying price to a small company.

And the small company will hire a single contractor for 1/4 of what they're getting, and that's who will do all the work.

Exactly.

No we did it almost all in-house. It's a pretty competitive space, there's like 20 A-list agencies that operate at that level and 100 others a notch or two below. We frequently ended up working on site with clients, we couldn't hide anything.

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