- They decide they want to go outside so it can get done "quicker" by "professionals."
- It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's primary resolution.
- It takes 6-10 months of "clean up" to make the site usable.
- Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site.
- My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because the entire team over there has turned over since the project inception.
- We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on their own.
- Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months.
We are an early stage startup. We've burned through almost 20% of the revenue we've ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully, finally, we've grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who will I hope put an end to this madness.
A tale as old as (Internet) time - I've seen this cycle happen, too.
Tangentially, I have to wonder to what extent misapplication of Agile, and similar, project management processes is to blame.
You'd think for most relatively simple sites, like we're talking about here, it ought to be planned once and built once, but something about the mindset that the goal posts can be moved during planning and development seems to drag everything out at length.
I think that's pretty backwards. Non-agile is how you get these things being rebuilt every other year because by the time it's built the requirements that were originally gathered are obsolete.
Wow this one is spot on. Had exactly the same experience as a contract PM working with Marketeers who lived in fairy-land.
Two hilarious moments:
1. A big fuss was made of a launch of a new site, marketeers demanded that we had plenty of extra servers for the demand. On launch day I had the live stats of visitors and it occasionally flickered to above 0.
2. We finally needed to refactor and do some maintenance to the duct-taped code that had resulted in years of 'everything is urgent' 'one extra feature by tomorrow`. When I told the Head of Marketing they were doing this vital work, she couldn't understand that because no new graphics or UI were being produced that they were doing actual work - "But I can't see any new work"
It was not worth the small fortune in daily rates they were paying me
Founder / CEO. A lot of people will respond "no the founder needs to back off and let the marketing team do its job" but on a decision to allocate 50% of the annual marketing budget, the CEO should be involved.
I suppose it depends on the expertise of the the founder or CEO in question. On balance, something that takes 50% of budget absolutely should involve oversight greater than a single team or executive, but I'm not sure to what level without knowing more about the team dynamics at play.
There are plenty of engineer founder types who have all sorts of opinions on how infrastructure spend should be divvied up...they're probably on average more well informed there than they might be on the value of good consistent branding and website. On the flip side, a sales-heavy type might have strong opinions on how much engineering is spending on keeping the ship afloat, but that doesn't necessarily make them right.
Of course it's possible to be conversant within multiple modalities, so I am just talking to the average here.
Let's not get into ideals, but: The different stakeholders in the website should agree on it, rather than just one of them deciding - as marketing is just one of a website's purposes; it's not merely a marketing tool.
Perhaps it's my own bias but through the lens of founding and running a SaaS business, but the website often just IS marketing, while the core offering(s) are hosted somewhere else and have their own team/owners/stakeholders. It's certainly different if your product is a physical good or service, but I'm reading the GP's comment as 'tech startup = software company'.
"Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry-picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when it didn't at all]" looks good on a résumé.
Your managers may not understand much, but they can understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at) before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may matter when promotions are available.
That's at least as true in bigco as in startups and small companies.
- Marketing team decides they want a new site.
- I tell them when/how we can schedule it.
- They decide they want to go outside so it can get done "quicker" by "professionals."
- It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's primary resolution.
- It takes 6-10 months of "clean up" to make the site usable.
- Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site.
- My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because the entire team over there has turned over since the project inception.
- We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on their own.
- Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months.
We are an early stage startup. We've burned through almost 20% of the revenue we've ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully, finally, we've grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who will I hope put an end to this madness.