561–570 of 789 posts
Hey OP, You should read through this before next time. https://stratosphere.digital/#blog-6qs avoid hn hug: https://archive.ph/ZnLLw
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I'm not following. What threat did I pose to the agency after they had all my money?
The ability to write a bad review that's upvoted and read on HN.
My other blog posts about freelancers [0, 1] are to say that they did a good job and other people should hire them, so I'd imagine if they were thinking about the writeup, they'd want it to put more effort into making sure it's positive.
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Am I out of touch? I think about 30-40k does not sound unreasonable for something like this. You have a redesign, with UX people improving your shopping and cart page + implementation + updating your maze of weird bootstrap theme to the new redesign.
tbf the agency's original "how long is a piece of string" response to website is probably fair here Some companies really do want to a/b test their shopping cart to death, and have 40 iterations of their logo with roundtable meetings in between, and that stuff can genuinely take many man months and in the case of the a/b testing might even be time and money well spent. I'm sure some of the agency's regular clients sp…
Dont joke about untangling Bootstrap from your css architecture, I’ve seen that take 6 months to get out from.
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 accou…
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I'll rub a little aloe in that wound. I actually like the redesign. The illustrations are great, and overall it's a big improvement over the original. Worth the price? Perhaps not, but at least you have a better website now, and more experience dealing with agencies.
Thanks for the aloe! Yeah, that's how I feel as well. I was expecting people to not like the new design but it's been surprising to hear how many people prefer the old design and logo. I think the new one is way better, and it's not even close. Not perfect, but certainly an improvement.
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…
If anything I take it as a positive signal when a company has an "amateur" website. If they are successful without a fancy modern-looking site, then it means that the product must be decent enough to sell itself, and the business owners are presumably putting their energy into the product & service and not just appearances. I have no idea if this is true in general, but it seems to hold up in my own experience.
I feel the same way, I’d be much more likely to buy from the old website.
The new site brings me slightly closer to asking myself “is this real? Is this a scam” because it lacks authenticity and ends up looking like yet another generic web whatever point O website.
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.
As a designer & developer myself, I agree, the rebranding and new bootstrap template would take a week to deliver at most for ONE person. I'd charge ~$2,000 USD for something like this (30 hours at $75/hr).
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?
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?!
>This looks like a great product at a great price point, with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?!
In short: the chip shortage.
The biggest expense right now is hardware engineering. We couldn't continue manufacturing our PCB because one of the components sold out, so we had to redesign with different components. That's been expensive (about $60k so far).
And then to avoid redesigning further, I've had to stockpile components for 6-24 months, so a lot of money is tied up in inventory.
The redesign work is wrapping up, though, so I'm hoping to have significantly lower expenses in the second half of the year.
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've hired from Upwork quite a bit, and I think the problem is that the clients have excessive power and abuse the freelancers/agencies. The platforms typically side with clients in financial disputes, and clients know how damaging a negative review is, so they force the agencies/contractors to do work beyond the contract. The result is that the talented agencies leave the platform as soon as they're successful enough to leave. The result is that the quality of agencies/contractors on Upwork is lower than what you can find outside the platform.