In making apps, games, websites, a modest estimate could be made that most of my working life is spent building the dreams of others. I am approached with ideas all the time. Some merit can often be distilled but rarely are they any good. More often than not they are just straight out bad ideas, but with lots of money behind them.
Now if a direct client of mine has a problem, they are always the first to know. Even if my client has a problem that will only be solved by them ceasing to be my client (and me loosing income from that) it does not change anything. I will still let them know. It’s always hard and I would be a much richer man if I would just shut up and take the money.
But what do you do if your client has a client. Same situation, simply one step removed. Another client with a bad idea and a lot of money. A real whale. Your client’s client is so absolutely convinced that their idea, their app or their service is going to be the next-big-thing. There is only one small problem; it’s not. Everyone involed knows it’s not because it’s our bloody job to know it’s not. They hired us because we know. The only person who doesn’t know it is the poor soul paying for it.
But your immediate client has problems too. They need to make money and they need this abomination built. You are just the person to solve these problems, as you probably have many times in the past, but what of their client? The whale. The naive fatted pig, grinning at you over the board room table, plump and rose-cheeked from the healthy volumes of sycophantic slurry they have undoubtedly been groomed with.
Soon, their terrible app will be built and just as soon it will fail.
You could have confronted them behind your client’s back at many points along the way but you are too honourable for that. In the preliminary meetings you absolved yourself of the inevitable slaughter with many questions like: “are you sure about this?” and “have you researched your market?” Of course they haven’t bloody done any research on this. This is at best a gambling problem and at worst delusions of grandeur.
And so, we kill another fatted pig. We take their money. We shrug our shoulders with a “there was nothing we could have done differently…” or perhaps a “the client insisted this is what they wanted…”.
Perhaps if we stopped looking at clients as sources of income and started looking at them as human beings with hopes and dreams. Perhaps if we level with our clients more, as hard as it is to do sometimes. Perhaps if we did these things we would not have to hunt for clients.
End the slaughter today. You must fire all your fatted pigs or at least be up front with them. They hired you because of your expertise, so why deny it when things get slightly uncomfortable. You are not only wasting their money but you are also wasting your own time on one more project you will never put in your portfolio. If you can’t tell by now, I’m not really a man of wordss. This is all I had to say here. If you are a client and have this problem, now you know about it. If you didn’t, well, now you know that too.
