TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Shhhhhh!!

Here then, is the latest completed logo:

Three down, two to go. I should also have my first preview for MMAForums’s skin soon.

The video is making progress, albeit slowly.

ChatWebDev had a live auction on Sunday. It was quite fun. A lot of crap domains and prices, and it was run prett poorly but the domains should hopefully get better next time, and I’m sure it will be run much better. Always hard doing things the first time.

Anyhow, my domains sold like hotcakes. I believe 4 sold, but only 2 ended up going through. I sold WarOnOil.com ($25) and Demagnify.com ($15) and I bought one myself: OpenReviews.org for $18. Might develop it in the future, or resell. Not sure, but it’s a nice little domain for $18. Workable..

I had an advertiser renew an ad for 6 months which came to $2025. If all the rest renew their ads this month, I’ll just barely beat the month of Janurary. If things go really well, I might break 5 digits.

Project J is making me think. I may be veering off the cheap outsourcing trail this time, and look towards a private freelancer or company. The problem here lies in: 1. Finding one that can handle the job 2. Finding one that is down to earth and easy going; I find it incredibly difficult to work with ones that aren’t. 3. One that won’t charge me 100 grand.

So I don’t even know where to start in this search… My expectations of quality work dramatically differs than that of the general webmaster public. This includes ‘successful’ web entrepreneurs. I have a very high expectation and so this makes it near impossible to find quality work for a reasonable price. Sigh.

Moving on, I’d like to warn all of you about Kolby of www.vbcore.com.

I don’t normally do this. In fact, I’ve never had nearly this bad an experience with anybody I’ve hired ever before, and believe you me I’ve hired a many number of people.

I first met vbcore perhaps around a year ago from talking to him on MSN. He would message me on occassion asking me if I wanted to buy his site (vbcore.com) to which he said made in the medium to high 5 digit range in profits each year.

I then later talked to him from time to time as he’d tell me how ugly my forum skins were and that he could redo them for me for $600 or whatever his price was. I always declined because although his portfolio is decent (which says a lot coming from me), they never ‘wowed’ me enough to warrant the pricetag set on them.

Anyhow, a number of months ago he seemed extra desperate for cash and was asking me if there were any vb projects I’d need doing. He then suggested he could integrated Movie-Vault.com’s forum into the current design and integrate the colours and such so that it would fit inside. He said he’d do it for $150. Initally I declined, but after a week or two, I changed my mind as I felt it was worth it.

What came to follow was the worst experience that I cannot properly write down as so much has happened that I’m not going to go into as it’s not worth my time. But I wanted to give you all the gist of it so none of you would have to deal with this horrible person as I had to.

We agreed to the project, and I immediately sent him the agreed $150 via PayPal. He initially told me it would take an hour or two to do, and should be done in the next day or so. After a lot of dodging and excuses, about two weeks later he again kept telling me “Okay, I’ll have it done in an hour or two”.

I kept sending him e-mails and whatnot asking him what was going on – I hear from him like 3 weeks later. He says he had food poisoning. I apologize and give him my condolences. Now, I’m not so sure he had food poisoning at all from all his lies, but I of course don’t know for sure.

About 2-3 weeks later, I start hounding him again about getting the skin done. I see him on AIM and MSN all the time. 90% of the time he doesn’t answer, even though he’s so obviously there (I’d message him once he got off ‘away’ mode and was active). 5% of the time he’d just log off. The other 5% of the time he’d say “Sure I’ll get to it tomorrow”.

Now, from here my time is pretty messed up since he took forever, but I’d guess it was about another 2-3 weeks when he finally e-mailed me stating he was finished. He sent me a screenshot and I was very disappointed. He did an extremely half-assed job, and what pissed me off most was that all he did was copy the header and footer code, and put that in. I could have done that myself in 5 minutes. He did not integrate the left side, because he said “It wouldn’t fit right”. But also the top part he quickly cut off in HTML he didn’t even bother to integrate; that is, the bottom half of the nagivation menu images were all cut off, but he didn’t care.

Perhaps the worst part of it was that he didn’t integrate/match the forum colours at all. He used the DEFAULT colours, and if I remember corectly, even the default forumstatus icons! (What I have now is better than that!!!) claiming the default colours were ‘blue’ and worked well.

So even though I’m pissed, I politely ask him to fix the navigation thing, and he of course says “Sure, no problem”.

I keep hounding him to contact me, I e-mail him about once every 2-3 days. He keeps replying asking for forum admin access. I keep giving it to him, he e-mails me with pathetic things like “I forgot my password can you resend it” then later “I forgot my username can you make me a new one”.

Now, what’s probably 2 months later, I’m left here. I warned him in the e-mail if he didn’t contact me back and finish what he was paid to do, I’d write about this on my blog. Obviously he didn’t respond.

As I write this, I see him online on MSN.

So I lose $150. Big deal (except for all the hours of time and expectation he stole from me). Fortunately I’m doing pretty well moneywise. But what if it wasn’t me? What if it was little Joey Smith from down the Internet who saved all his monthly AdSense earnings of $15.64 to finally afford to hire a skin designer for his forum, only to see nothing happen?

Again, I don’t normally make such things private, but this was just horrible. I warn you all, NEVER TRUST THIS MAN. BUY ANY OF HIS SITES OR SERVICES AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Spread the word, too, folks.