I never get why these types always end up running such naked scams - he’s clearly got a gift for sales, with a decent technical founder to back him up, they could be rolling in dough without failing to deliver the actual product
One issue is agencies can have vague contracts because customers did not have a good grasp of what they actually needed, start increasing scope in subtle ways. For example, you deliver a feature and during CAT they find a way to inject new requirements as if they were defects.
These agencies usually don’t have lawyers, so new contracts are full of exploitable holes. You say “we’ll build an e-commerce app with inventory management”, without specifying exactly what inventory management means, your client will start experimenting on your dime and can easily make it seem like it’s your fault. The larger the client, the worse this becomes.
You should always, always make your contracts as specific as possible, but this requires consulting work to nail down requirements before a contract is finalized, and that has a cost, but clients don’t value this and want you “the expert” to magically fill in the blanks in their ideas like an LLM, for free.
Another issue is your team. You might be very competent, but your team might not, hiring is hard. I once had to fire half of my team and build a 6 month client project in 1 month at great cost to my work / life balance because they were just unable to make meaningful progress. Granted, my leadership was not top notch there (being too busy to check on progress and trusting standups is a bad strategy) and I learned a lot, adjusted accordingly.
These are a few counter examples, but I still believe if this is a pattern then you’re a crook.
I mean surely there’s a difference between outright scams where you deliver nothing that works vs what a lot of consulting orgs do where you at least deliver something functional, even if not exactly what the customer wants. One of those is more likely to get you charges than the other.
> Customers who say they spent their life savings without receiving a viable product - they told the BBC they received products from ConvrtX which didn't work or match what they had paid for
An MVP would have sufficed, though they couldn’t be bothered to at least do that. Of course, they should have also said no to the downright unreasonable ideas that some of the customers had for their budget (e.g. accessing all of the phone data remotely, on a startup budget).
But it’s pretty obvious that they had no love for the craft nor even the most basic respect for their customers and just cared about the money.
