What have we learned about our field during six months of work in St. Petersburg.
Since December 2016, we exist as an independent company. Prior to this, we, the founders of AURORA, had a chance to work in different cities, in different positions, in a variety of agencies involved in website development and Internet marketing. To be honest, these companies have not always worked «cleanly», but we have never seen such a company like in beautiful Petersburg.
To begin with, each (!) Of our 13 current regular customers has had a sad experience working with a web-studio before us.
The reasons for this experience were completely different, from the banal — they got to work, did not even half of the promised to completely flagrant cases of outright fraud. They take a large amount as a prepayment, and for 4 customers this amount even coincided — 200 thousand. rub., and disappear. There were exotic cases of fraud, for example, one of the companies developed a website for its customer, and then sold the same website, with minimal changes, to two other companies. Moreover, the business sphere of these three companies with the same sites is very narrow-profile, in St. Petersburg there are 10 such companies. It turns out that 3 out of 10 enterprises have the same sites. There were times when a web-studio took money for the development of a unique, design site, and as a result the client got a mediocre resource, and even developed on the free Wix designer.
Naturally, after such a disgusting experience of working with web-studios, business owners have a negative opinion about the entire Internet marketing industry as a whole. People do not trust companies, agree to cooperate only on postpay, require strict guarantees, which no developer company will agree to, are only willing to pay symbolic amounts of money. Conscientious web-studios suffer greatly from this attitude towards themselves, especially for young companies. We ourselves fully felt all the negativity and distrust experienced by business owners who once faced fraud. They gained confidence in themselves through hard work. We had to develop sites almost for free, as a prepayment, we usually took a very symbolic amount of ten thousand rubles, and we developed a site of such complexity that any other company would have cost at least two hundred thousand. But that was not all. In order to finally convince a potential client that we are not crooks, we had to write down a clause in the contract according to which the client could at any time and for any reason return the prepayment amount until the act of completion was signed. Thus, after the site’s presentation, the client had only to say: “I don’t like it, return the money”, and a month of work would have gone down the drain. Fortunately, such situations did not happen.
At the moment, each of our clients is a good friend to us, we honestly fulfill our obligations to the client, always in touch, do not violate the promises given to the customer and the agreed terms. In return, we receive the highest appreciation from the client (in addition to money) — recommendations. A recommendation is the coolest form of advertising, much more effective than ideal contextual advertising or the best sales manager in the world.
Our advice to companies that choose which web-studio to entrust the development of their site — contact their customers, ask this studio for direct numbers of directors of enterprises with which it collaborates. If, in response to a request, you hear: “We don’t give out numbers to our customers, they are all very businesslike and they don’t have time,” know that’s a lie. If the client is satisfied, he will be happy to talk and evaluate his cooperation with the development company. And it doesn’t matter, the head of this is a small flower shop or the director of a large network of beauty salons, an industrial enterprise, etc.
We hope our short article will help you make the right choice, save a lot of money and nerves.
