- If you like a specific project from their portfolio, ask if the same designer will be on your project.
- If they are doing any development work, ask if about the team’s experience.
- If they are not from the same culture as your target audience, do your due diligence to make sure this won’t impact the rebrand.
- It’s good to ask follow-up questions on ECF forum, e.g. Are you still happy with the agency? With this, some members may also DM you their experience. Sometimes members don’t want to spell out their bad experiences with an agency on the forum, but they will DM you to caution you.
- When you receive recommendations from an entrepreneur, make sure they were a client and not just a friend of the agency owner.
- When an agency has very recently received a great review on ECF, they might suddenly get swamped. Keep that in mind (It might mean project delay, divided attention, or rapid hiring of new staff who are not quite qualified or have not worked with their team members on any project yet). Ask questions about their project queue, and if they plan to juggle more projects than they normally can handle.
- Branding can be very inclusive (including rebrand, website design, development, launch, CRO, SEO). Make sure you know what you are getting and that the agency has demonstrated expertise for each.
- If the branding agency will be working on your website, clarify if by website they mean a “Figma mockup”, or a Shopify theme, or something else. I didn’t think I had to ask that, but I should have.
- Have a trusted friend or AI read over your contract to make sure you are getting what you asked for
- Finally, very important: Can you communicate clearly with each other, or do they often reply without answering your questions (e.g. misunderstand your questions, avoid answering them, or answer a different question)
My experience with Project Human:
1. The 4 month project took 8 months to complete.
2. Lack of common sense in Branding. Example: We sell rings, and they suggested showing just half of each ring on our product listings. (I can’t think of any brand that shows half a product as the main product images.)
3. Not a well-oiled machine. Lots of new hires and some of them came in half way and some dropped out of the project. Poor communication. Many misunderstandings. Lack of experience.
4. The CRO dev team is careless. For example, dev version was live on our website, demo would have a ton of bugs, and an A/B test that tanked our ranking was not rolled back properly. Their negligence cost us $50K+ in August revenue and impacted our Q4.
Poorly executed test cost us more than $50K
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- They asked me to pick an A/B testing tool. I thought that was odd because they should use a tool they are familiar with.
- I picked Intelligems. (Turned out they have never used it.)
- They executed an A/B test on our homepage.
- Suddenly our Google ranking tanked from top 3 to #12.
- Our sales tanked 20% right away.
- I asked the agency to stop the test.
- Surprisingly our ranking didn’t recover, so I kept looking for other reasons why our ranking plummeted
- Meanwhile our sales continued to slide for 4 weeks
- By week 4, our Shopify sales were down 60%
- On day 30, I realized that a Shopify element that was in the A/B test was never removed
- I removed it, and our ranking bounced back in 8 hours
- Turned out the CRO team didn’t cleanly remove the test
- And they never checked our live website (otherwise they would’ve noticed that the left version A and B on the homepage)
- I let the agency know what happened
- The owner and the CRO lead both misunderstood my explanation
- We lost at least $50K in revenue that month (August)
- The setback is huge. We still haven’t fully recovered.
- The owner never apologized.
- He remembered it as something highly rare “that can happen to any agency” and is “outside of their control”
- Rolling back an A/B test properly is 100% within their control, and is not a big ask.
- Huge miscommunication on Project Scope
- In hindsight, I realized that Aviad (agency owner) and I had always had miscommunications.
- I was very clear from the start that I wanted a new website. I said so in the emails.
- When Aviad said they didn’t build the website for the business that recommended them, we hopped on a video call to clarify.
- The video call was recorded.
- In the call, I asked, “So who will be implementing the website?”
- He said, “We will do everything – development, test, launch – everything relating to CRO”
- I didn’t realize the keywords were “relating to CRO”. He meant they would to the development relating to CRO, but not the website.
- At this point, since I thought he meant the agency will be implementing the website, I said, “Oh that’s good because the last thing I want is to have you guys design the site, and then go somewhere else to have the website built.”
- He didn’t correct me or disagree. Just blank expression.
- I asked him, after reviewing the recorded call together, why he didn’t correct me. He said, because at the time he thought he might be able to implement the website.
- In the contract, he wrote that they will be providing “a responsive design of each page on our website”.
- Because “responsive” usually applies to website themes and not “Figma mockups”, and because we had that call to confirm who would do the implementation, I thought I was getting a new site made.
- The quote was for $25K and a 4-month duration. Reasonable to expect that the website development was included.
- At 6 months in (2 month delay at this point), Aviad out of the blue let me know that I need to find another agency to develop the website, because they don’t have the capacity.
- I was surprised. I said, “But it’s in our contract…”
- He said, “No it’s not.”
- Turned out, from his perspective, he knew I wanted a website, but he only included “website design” in the contract (but worded in such as way that I understood it as website development).
- So what I was getting was just a set of Figma mockups, and CRO development.
- I asked, “You knew I wanted a website. You’re now letting me know you can’t develop it because you knew that’s what I asked for. So why was it not included in the project?” He said he was going to draft a second contract for the website development, after the website design is done.
- Very unusual, isn’t it?