Should I Take the Deal?
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 7:52 am
A guy shot me an email two days ago out of Michigan. He flips websites regularly and has 4 other partners. They do affiliate marketing and website flipping as well. They get a site idea, build it up, generate traffic against it, and then sell it, making quite a lot of money, supposedly. They also buy tiny sites that someone else has built, change the code and the look and feel, build them up, encourage the traffic, and then sell those too.
Anyway, he wants me to do one of these websites where you type in what you want and look for the best price in a particular topic area, and it shops around with other sites. (It is *not* adult-oriented, nor even close.) Also, don't forget -- he also needs me to build the admin pages for the site too. He does not pay by the hour but wants, instead, me to spend 30-45 days building the site for $7,000 and a 1% stake in the affiliate income. The affiliate income comes in two fashions -- ad copy clicks and referral traffic from the clicked best price items. If I go over in hours, then I must eat the cost until it is complete. If I do well, then I may also be paid for follow-on tasks and for work on other websites they build. At my disposal, I will get a newbie junior developer to work with, a page template designer, and a developer who handles all the backend integration with the other sites that sell the service or product the site integrates with. They had a developer build like 50% of the app, but then supposedly flew the coop after 30 days and they never received his source. So, the only thing they have now is a well-done functional spec, some wireframe designs, and a competitive site on the web that they say they want me to sort of copy in most respects.
He does have a track record of selling other sites from his portfolio on the web. I have no idea at all whether the last developer on this project discovered the guy is full of feature creep -- he either may be one of those guys or not.
Looking at the competitive site example, I'm a bit nervous. I was thinking more along the lines of 2-2.5 months. However, since the page templates are not mine to do and will be done extremely rapidly, the backend third-party site integration is not my deal and is almost completely finished, there's no ecommerce here, and they gestated on this project already for 30 days -- I was thinking that I might be able to crunch it into 30 - 45 days.
Another thing I'm nervous about is that they are not certain how to integrate the referrals where companies pay them back for the clicked price items that drive traffic from this site to their site. They said pixel tracking was not possible with these vendors and that the backend guy was thinking it would run along the lines of a query param call with a CRC applied on it, like ?ref=2338&c=30388, where ref is the sort of "secret" code for themselves and c is the CRC value. Some vendors he said may want an exception on that, but in general it will be done with query param calls.
So I ask you, would you take this deal for $7K USD and 1% ad revenue stake? Would you put some conditions on this deal to consider before taking it? What questions would you ask before taking the deal?
Okay, what if he comes back with $6000 USD and a 1.5% stake in the ad revenue?
P.S. Now, as far as my background on something remotely similar goes, I've done a searchable, browsable, paginated classified listing site with listing promotions that involved a good amount of Javascript and AJAX work as well, and some ecommerce integration, and it took me almost 3 months and $7K to do. At first, I really wished I had generated it in 2 months and for $9-$10K in order for it to have made my while, but in the long run it worked out because the client and I have built a great relationship and I'm getting more cash from him on other projects. However, since then, I have learned jQuery, which can improve upon one of my greatest time killers. I also burnt a couple weeks on that project fighting with the ecommerce, burnt a week waiting on the design and page templates, burnt one week in loading data, and burnt three weeks in extensive testing and in changes to the admin that I did not know had to be redone (we interpreted a functional spec item about the admin interface completely differently).
Anyway, he wants me to do one of these websites where you type in what you want and look for the best price in a particular topic area, and it shops around with other sites. (It is *not* adult-oriented, nor even close.) Also, don't forget -- he also needs me to build the admin pages for the site too. He does not pay by the hour but wants, instead, me to spend 30-45 days building the site for $7,000 and a 1% stake in the affiliate income. The affiliate income comes in two fashions -- ad copy clicks and referral traffic from the clicked best price items. If I go over in hours, then I must eat the cost until it is complete. If I do well, then I may also be paid for follow-on tasks and for work on other websites they build. At my disposal, I will get a newbie junior developer to work with, a page template designer, and a developer who handles all the backend integration with the other sites that sell the service or product the site integrates with. They had a developer build like 50% of the app, but then supposedly flew the coop after 30 days and they never received his source. So, the only thing they have now is a well-done functional spec, some wireframe designs, and a competitive site on the web that they say they want me to sort of copy in most respects.
He does have a track record of selling other sites from his portfolio on the web. I have no idea at all whether the last developer on this project discovered the guy is full of feature creep -- he either may be one of those guys or not.
Looking at the competitive site example, I'm a bit nervous. I was thinking more along the lines of 2-2.5 months. However, since the page templates are not mine to do and will be done extremely rapidly, the backend third-party site integration is not my deal and is almost completely finished, there's no ecommerce here, and they gestated on this project already for 30 days -- I was thinking that I might be able to crunch it into 30 - 45 days.
Another thing I'm nervous about is that they are not certain how to integrate the referrals where companies pay them back for the clicked price items that drive traffic from this site to their site. They said pixel tracking was not possible with these vendors and that the backend guy was thinking it would run along the lines of a query param call with a CRC applied on it, like ?ref=2338&c=30388, where ref is the sort of "secret" code for themselves and c is the CRC value. Some vendors he said may want an exception on that, but in general it will be done with query param calls.
So I ask you, would you take this deal for $7K USD and 1% ad revenue stake? Would you put some conditions on this deal to consider before taking it? What questions would you ask before taking the deal?
Okay, what if he comes back with $6000 USD and a 1.5% stake in the ad revenue?
P.S. Now, as far as my background on something remotely similar goes, I've done a searchable, browsable, paginated classified listing site with listing promotions that involved a good amount of Javascript and AJAX work as well, and some ecommerce integration, and it took me almost 3 months and $7K to do. At first, I really wished I had generated it in 2 months and for $9-$10K in order for it to have made my while, but in the long run it worked out because the client and I have built a great relationship and I'm getting more cash from him on other projects. However, since then, I have learned jQuery, which can improve upon one of my greatest time killers. I also burnt a couple weeks on that project fighting with the ecommerce, burnt a week waiting on the design and page templates, burnt one week in loading data, and burnt three weeks in extensive testing and in changes to the admin that I did not know had to be redone (we interpreted a functional spec item about the admin interface completely differently).