RISEX and Julia. 5 stages of love customer and designer

Good day to all! I hope this post found you in good spirits, because we need your sincere help in resolving the dispute that arose between young startups and a no less young designer. Both are handsome, both are full of desire to live and flourish. But a misunderstanding passed, which grew into a dispute. It is important to understand who is to blame and what to do in this situation. I will tell everything without embellishment and honestly, so that there is no engagement and subjectivity. And dear community please help in finding the truth, assessing the situation and the verdict. I ask the jury , if I may say so. We adhere to the chosen strategy of acting openly in the project because we are crypto enthusiasts and advocate decentralization, for which, among other things, it is necessary to find a consensus. but to achieve it without openness is extremely difficult. Perhaps our case will also help someone not to repeat mistakes in such situations ... Dear gentlemen of the jury ...

Photo by Kevin Wenning on Unsplash

So, we are a young crypto startup RiseX, which creates an improved version of Localbitcoins, but with a high customer focus and new features. Of course, like any startup from this topic, it’s not easy for us to convey to users that cryptocurrency is not as scary and complicated as it seems at the beginning. For non-professional traders, interface and usability are a very important criterion not only when choosing a site for cryptocurrency operations, but also in general for entering the market. Therefore, the design of any products should help and have the maximum cooperation. So by the end of 2018 we came to the decision that, in addition to the site of the trading platform, we need a landing page explaining to users who we are, what we do and how we can be of help to them. Perhaps a familiar story to many readers. Someone from the customer, and a significant majority from the performer.

Our permanent designer (Stas), who designed the site for the trading platform to us, already at the beginning of December 2018 offered his version of such a landing page. The work took him about 8 hours in absolute time. Here is a part of its layout:

In general, for 128 dollars (8 hours x $ 16 / hour) quite well, but we needed work stronger, so we decided to look for a designer stronger. On the recommendation (and this is an important point!), We found Julia, a designer from Kiev. The list of her works looked great, so we decided to act immediately, and on December 17, 2018 a group was created, the correspondence from which I will publish to you in full below. I will break the subsequent story into several logical stages, along which cooperation developed.

Stage 1. Candies with cognac: December 17 - December 31, 2018
Stage 2. Salted chocolate: January 3 - January 10, 2019
Stage 3. Ginger tea: January 10 - 17, 2019
Stage 4. Green tea with lemon: January 17 - January 25, 2019
Stage 5. Coffee without sugar and without milk: January 25 - February 7, 2019

Under the first agreements, we made several mistakes, relying on high recommendations, namely:
Customer errors

• TK was not provided, following the strategy - to give the opportunity to reveal the "professional";
• deadlines were not immediately established, because progress promised to be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow; and at the first stage, priority even switched from deadlines to quality (fatality!);
• A break in relations was not announced immediately after the first version or before it, but there was an attempt to pull the work up to a minimum.

Performer errors

• TK was not requested, based on the fact that we are moving from the general idea to the final product in stages;
• the payment plan was not requested in stages (based on verbal agreements, we planned to complete the work within 2 weeks);
• the estimated workload in the project was incorrectly estimated (20/30 hours per week);
• it was not announced that during the work hours the communication hours are included.
  

Stage 1. Candies with cognac (December 17 -31)

Any beginning of a new relationship is always exciting (as it’s exciting to eat candy with cognac, expecting a contrast in taste), because there is a thin thread between people that either becomes stronger or breaks. Everyone is full of hope. And often it is not always reasonable that we waste our high balance of trust. The relationship of the customer and the performer does not differ from any other relationship. In our interaction with Julia, we immediately came to the fore with ideas from Julia. And here it seems they start, and everything is fine. But such a promising start turned out to be only a false start, because immediately after the ideas such messages began:

And on December 26, the first draft of the idea was presented, which again revived hopes for the result ... But the delay in terms continued. Mega important mistake was the communication curve, which was constantly interrupted. What I, of course, said:

but silence is gold. And it continued to shine. And on December 28, Julia wrote that she did not have time (at the standard rate).

And here it was possible to break up amicably, without mutual claims, except that we lost time in waiting. But a score of 9 out of 10 really warmed up the expectation of getting a quality result. Therefore, we said once again that we are improving communication and agree that by January 8-10 we’re ending landing, having misunderstood each other.

And the tea is cold. And I didn’t want candy anymore ...

Stage 2. Salted chocolate (January 3 - December 10)

Have you ever tasted salted chocolate? I am sure that many yes. This is the moment when your experience and your expectations are fighting among themselves for taste buds. Having prepared to work hard on the landing page since January 3, I sent several reminders of the agreements ...

But hope dies last. And at the very last moment, when Yulia’s overseas trip, which she did not warn about, was completed and when hopes were almost lost, we received a version from the designer (9 out of 10), recalling that feeling, for the first time you met wonderful chocolate: chocolate, but it seems not.

Stage 3. Ginger tea (January 10 - 17)

Photo by Dominik Martin on Unsplash

Chocolate no longer wanted, but a strange aftertaste wanted to drink. And the right decision would be to break up here. However, the time lost was significant. And there was no other tea besides ginger. Taking into account the holidays, there is hope that it is possible now after the holidays Yulia will take up our project in a priority order, observing, finally, the communication. Just siping ginger tea, we talked structurally continued work. It was recorded that this work is not accepted, leaving the coder once again without work, but I suggested to develop further cooperation in this scenario (as the only possible one), because this is not the level of work that was expected:

Yulia needed money, and she did not agree with this approach. And she didn’t like this ginger tea either. But we agreed that we would go further along this path. The project for me was shifted from priority 1 to priority 3, because with the start of working everyday tasks there were much more tasks than during the holidays. And only a week later I finished my tea, giving the edits -1 from myself and my colleagues.

On this day, I finally finished one type of tea and changed it to another taste, as it turned out not to be the best. My gastronomic journey continued ...

Stage 4. Green tea with lemon (January 17 - January 25)

Photo by Anda Ambrosini on Unsplash
January 21, the first signs of recovery in the group. Apparently tea with lemon has invigorating properties. We began to discuss specifics, working out the changes. Somewhere far away a ray of hope has dawned: can tea not be so bad? I took another sip ... A whole hour of productive work. It was mainly devoted to the converter, which had no analogue on the market, but based on the result of such tea drinking, we came to the conclusion that we split the work into 4 stages, and after each stage we discard the results of the work in order to continue the discussion. It was January 21st. And the tea is still hot.

And on the 25th, I received several versions of works that were later deleted from the folder and which I cannot show. But the essence has not changed dramatically - the abyss of incomprehension remains the same as it was. There was no agreement and discussion after each stage, as agreed. The quality has not increased at times, so that the work became a passing one. I had to decide whether to prepare new edits for draft-2, which we did not agree on. And I took a break. After a month of small ordeals and swings, for the first time I didn’t want any sweets or tea ... I wanted to change the drink, but rather the designer. But I left the hope for some sensible result. Then he made coffee for himself to think, dropping the task from priority 3 to the backlog.

Stage 5. Coffee without sugar and milk (January 25 - February 7)

I do not know about you, but I drink black coffee almost every day, custard. Moreover, my friends say that I am doing quite well enough. And those freelancers with whom I worked and work tell me that, in general, it is easy to work with me, because my empathic approach allows me to express myself better, plus management at the level. This situation for me and for Julia was the first time, as far as I understood. And it was necessary to come to a decision. On the one hand, given that she then threw a good option in the same folder , but in a cropped form (1/3 of the landing page), I understood that she could bring the landing page to mind, but on the other hand, I did not understand how many she really needs time, given that real communication was only 1 hour in these 5+ weeks. You know that the fear of the next step can sometimes be generated from failure. And here it is necessary either to change something, or to change someone. And although the landing page went down in priority, it did not become less of a priority for our startup as a whole. Somewhere there was hope that the work could be completed. I expected the result, as a maximum until January 10, and it was already the beginning of February. And it is not known when we could finish the work. In parallel, we had landings for other products, where professional designers (Alexey and Emir) did the work with approximately the same introductory in a short time (2-3 weeks), and for money much lower, because they did not include the so-called. communication clock. Perhaps this is a common practice, share? But in any case, they had to be announced at the beginning, right? Summing up the pros and cons, the decision was to refuse the services of Julia, which I wrote to her on February 7, after finishing my bitter coffee. The work was not accepted and should not be used by us.

It seemed that she, too, exhaled, because for her the story was also delayed (but this is subjective). We tried to come together for a compromise, but missed each other. And I took up the calculator. This is what happened:

As a result, I suggested subtracting the hours for communication, which we did not agree on, and using a comparative method, evaluate the work (even if the last incomplete version) in comparison with the work of Stas, who completely made a landing model in 8 hours. The proposed compensation was $ 120.
Julia did not agree with the assessment, considering that I have no right to conduct such calculations, but demanded to pay for the work in full, that is, by paying $ 600. We are not a large company that, like any freelancer, fights for its balance sheets in order to get out of the valley of death. And for us, and $ 10, and $ 80, and even more than $ 480 for unaccepted work, which we also will not use, a lot. And the proposed compensation is quite adequate, in my opinion, although it is 16%, as Yulia wrote. But Yulia can be understood that she has invested a certain number of hours in the work, even considering her incompleteness.

Who is more guilty and what decision to take in this case, please prompt and write with your explanations in the comments. We both made mistakes, we are about the same situation (for lost opportunities), and we both need a compromise. We made the decision that we will build on the decision made under this post so as not to be subjective in the assessment, but to rely on the opinion of the majority. We will be extremely grateful for your comments and similar cases. Perhaps there is a way out somewhere else, but we do not see it. Thank you in advance! Eugene.

Correspondence in the working group
Personal correspondence sent by the referee
Yulin timing