Sewer Water with a Lemon

08 Jul 2008 •

So I like to keep tabs on the web design jobs at Craigslist, as every now and then an interesting freelance gig pops up. Or I’ll come across a job post that might interest one of my friends.

But I also keep tabs on the web design jobs at Craigslist because the services most people post listings for are ridiculously out of line with what they expect to pay.

Yea, I’ve touched on this before, and having recently been back on the job market for a hot second, I’ve got some more to say about that. Good things, actually. But let’s get back to Craigslist.

Cruising the web postings last week I came across this little gem. “Web design/SEO“, part time? So far so good, I can do that. Work remotely? Even better.

“[W]ill acquire equity.“ Hold on. There’s red Flag number one.

Part-time + Equity = “We don’t plan on paying you shit.”

I’d be interested in hearing other web designers thoughts on this, but in my personal experience 100% of possible freelance jobs I’ve discussed that would have given me “equity” also would not be giving me any paycheck worth mentioning.

I’m not saying that equity in a company is something you don’t want to have, I’m just saying that it should be a benefit to your salary and not the other way around. You gotta eat.

But let’s check this out, it might not be that bad…

It’s the usual deal, we need someone to update our site, here’s what we have, etc. “For the right candidate, we will provide them with an equity position in our company. “ Sounds reasonable enough eh? The kicker is the next paragraph:

“Salary will start as soon as we get our unique visitor count above 250,000 per month. “

Sewer Water with a Lemon is Still Sewer Water

Salary will START? No compensation for the work that went into building that kind of traffic?

250,000 uniqiue visitors per month, with no mention of where you’re starting at (but we can get a rough idea).

Spec work with equity is still spec work. Nobody that can build six figure traffic/month for a site is going to waste their time doing it for free, for someone else.

Look, I’ve done some site optimization and built up some decent traffic levels for sites. I’ve managed some pretty large email newsletters. I’ve helped designed campaigns that have brought in some decent ROI. I think it’s safe to say I could probably help them out.

2-5% of 0 is Zero

But why do that for free plus (possibly) “2-5% equity”, when I could just replicate their model and build traffic to my own site, for 100% of the equity?

I’d be doing about the same amount of work for the same amount of money (no salary from them until I hit 250,000 unique visitors), but be building my own web property with which I could probably end up selling advertising to them once I matched them. Think it can’t be done?

Let’s Take a Closer Look

Looking at their site, the design looks pretty generic, the domain is very generic (and not in the good way), and the code is WYSIWYG generated and sloppy (no tables though! They do get a point!).

And good luck signing up for their “eNewsletter,” I couldn’t find the signup form at first look. You have to scroll all the way down to the bottom. Nice.

And what about the content? A quick randomly selected phrase from one of their articles put in the Google shows that they’re just republishing press releases and scraping blogs. Nothing innovating going on there.

Putting it Together

You could build this yourself in an evening, with a few open source scripts and some effort. Effort you’d put into building up 150,000 uniques per month to a site anyway.

All you have to do is install Wordpress, throw in your Adsense links, pop in a plugin and hit “Go”. Spend a few more minutes in Yahoo! Pipes if you really want to get serious. And bam! You just built your own web business.

Put a big ol’ “Sign up for Our Newsletter” call-to-action at the top, and start promoting. Offer to buy 2 tickets to the zoo of a lucky subscriber’s choice per month to sweeten the deal. Hire a copywriter (or of course if you can write do it yourself) to build up your own unique content/brand.

Sign up for Amigo and Campaign Monitor or MailChimp and email the press releases/article links and summaries every Wednesday to your subscribers. Pick one a month and find out where their local zoo is.

Or

Or even better, you could do this all for me, and when you get to 100,000 uniques/month I’ll pay you a salary and 2-5% of the profits. Sounds fair right? Tell me what you bring to the table here