Comment by psweber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psweber | Hacker News Reader

I just went through this from the agency side, and I totally agree with the author. I think just the list of people that were brought on the project prove the point.

All these people were involved: Account director, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Marketing Specialists (3 of them for some reason), Copy writer, Content Strategist, User Experience, Art Director, Technical Manager, Front end developer, Back End developer

The agency burned through enough money to hire 4-5 employees for a year. We had a few meetings with the client and 8 people from the agency. The math there is pretty painful for the client. 8 people for an hour (at $165+ each per hour) means that each meeting costs well over $1k.

Hire a freelancer (like meeeeeee) or get full time employees. Agencies best serve large companies that can't (or don't want to) maintain design and development teams in house.

Sounds like you hired the wrong kind of agency. You don't want a "new media" or ad agency. These guys are used at gobbling up the huge corporate budgets to create big splash marketing that doesn't make sense for any company with less than 8-figure revenue. They do amazing work, but it is utterly pointless before you have the business model locked in to the point that you can scale.

But this is not what all agencies do. If you lack a technical co-founder then you want a technical agency. A ThoughtWorks or Hashrocket or Go Free Range is going to be much better at understanding the nature of a tech startup and they will be able to help you iterate in a reasonable with much better talent than you will ever find by yourself.

Thanks for the kind words. Wow, that sounds like a huge meeting. I can only imagine.

Did they ship early and often? Or did they hold back and try to get it "perfect"? And also, is that startup still alive today?

Standard agency waterfall process. Definitely shooting for "perfect". The product just launched. It was funded by the client's extremely wealthy family and the upkeep fees should be tiny compared to the upfront cost they paid to the agency, so it should be able to stay afloat for a little while.

The real problem is the weak product idea. The agency wasn't in a position to tell the client their idea was bad because they wanted the money.

I hear you. The really sad part is that shipping your mvp is really "just the beginning," whereas a lot of agencies and clients assume that the job is done.

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