#DesignFail #StartupStruggles #AvoidDesignerGhosting
Hey fellow entrepreneurs! Have you heard about the startup that spent $70,000 on custom icons, only to have the designer ghost them? 😱 It’s definitely a cautionary tale that highlights the importance of staying involved in the design process.
Here are a few key takeaways and possible solutions to prevent this from happening to you:
– Always stay engaged with your contractors, even if you trust them to do the work
– Regular check-ins can help avoid costly mistakes and misunderstandings
– Consider setting up milestones or deadlines to ensure progress is being made
– Utilize project management tools to track progress and communicate effectively with your designer
Have you encountered similar situations in the past? What strategies have you used to avoid designer ghosting or miscommunications? Let’s share our experiences and learn from each other! 💡 #StartupLife #DesignTips
How on earth is any investor okay with a startup spending $70k on icons.
basically $4.6 per icon… it would be a disaster if they prepaid it fully
What a stupid investment.
> The startup founder says he wasn’t checking in on the guy’s work because he hires people and trusts them to do the work,
He’s a moron.
It sounds like he was paying weekly.
* He started checking the work completed weekly.
* But he stopped checking.
* And kept paying.
* Bad situation.
* But fully avoidable.
My personal policy is about cost, I don’t like to let vendors owe more than about $5,000 worth of work…
That seems to be the tipping point where some people get greedy to cut & run, like it’s not worth the hit to their reputation of $1-2K, but $5K starts to tempt them.
Or, the wannabees get overwhelmed about their inability to perform and panic and run.
I would not let a regular consultant owe me that much work upfront.
To think he could have gone to the site The noun project and gotten icons for free … sounds really irresponsible this are the kinds of founders who get the funding … so annoying
Lot of design work. Need to hire agency for such humongous work. A solo designer not good fit. Of course, he is ghosting, because he won’t be able to complete that many designs.
In case anyone is wandering in complaining about wasting VC money.
Shpigford (Josh Pigford) is a fairly famous founder in indie / bootstrapped business circles. He sold his previous company, Baremetrics, for $4m and personally got $3.7m of it: https://baremetrics.com/blog/i-sold-baremetrics
His current venture is mostly self-funded (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/maybe-e9ef/company_overview/overview_timeline) last I heard and he isn’t exactly a spring chicken who is getting taken advantage of. Someone decided to light their reputation on fire to get a quick payday.
This is wild. You have to be careful about people who make the podcast rounds. Some of them are liars. Had a friend hire a guy and the guy was a straight up scammer. He changed his name. He went to prison before.
My friend is a sharp dude. But even smart people get caught. He says the guy was one of the most charismatic people he ever met and had mastered the English language in a way that very few people have. I heard the guy speak and he definitely has a way with words.
My rule of thumb when working with contractors is to never risk more than you are willing to walk away from. If you don’t want take time to manage your contractor and you are willing to walk away from $70k, that could be OK in the right circumstances. The same applies when doing work for customers. Don’t do more work without getting paid than you can afford to walk away from. I sometimes order custom stuff from China. For relatively small orders, the Chinese won’t ship until you pay in full. I spend extra to get samples shipped to the US. Then, I place an order for the amount that I can survive if something goes wrong.
I recently had a similar situation with a contractor working on a clearly specified electronics design project. We had weekly progress billing. After a few weeks, I noticed that he would start emailing and chatting about all these great things he was going to accomplish just before the billing date. I also noticed that the tangible work product was lacking – not much progress and lots of lack of attention to detail (which seemed odd for EE). After $10k and several days before the next billing period, I insisted that he send me all his designs immediately. I could understand enough of what he sent me that I could tell either he sucked or he wasn’t really working on the project. I told him he could either make things right on his own time or that our contract was over. He did send over one revision, but it was lame. The situation was a double bummer because I had high hopes, but it was better to lose $10k than $70k IMO.
I don’t understand this project. Wtf are you doing with 14,000 icons? There’s no way those are all being individually designed by hand, you’d need some sort of system to generate them all. What would the icons even be, just some text of the stock ticker symbol? If that’s the case, why would you even want to use icons for that instead of a div with some text inside?
This just screams “you have no business starting up a business”. Flat out, sorry not sorry.
A truly regard founder
Seems a situation where everybody is incompentent or scamming each other.
It makes no sense to create so many icons by hand. So a designer would create a template. Any product manager would know this.
It makes no sense to accept invoice without checking the work.
It makes no sense to spend 70K on icon design
Etc…