I've turned down a number of freelance gigs just from getting this kind of "smell." It's not worth it. If I smell... umm... certain intimate hygiene products... I run away.
Red flags I've seen include:
* Smarmy-looking marketing materials. If I visit the site and think "hmm... would I be worried about downloading this app for fear it would infect my machine?" then that's a bad sign.
* Some advance-marketing and extreme-MVP tactics are okay, but if they take it too far I see it as a red flag.
* Intuition. If I could bottle it I would charge for it and be rich. Earned through school of hard knocks, which is as far as I know the only way to get this.
* No haggling at all on price... especially when combined with other red flags. This leads me to think they're not haggling because they'll just stiff me.
* No milestones or other metrics come up in discussion.
* They don't know what they want. I've seen the screwage go both ways in contracting arrangements where the hiring party kind of just wants "something cool" with only some extremely vague sense of what it looks like. In either case it's not something I want to be a part of.
* Shell company bingo... if I do a search on the founders and they have five dozen LLCs to their names it means they'll just fold the entity and stiff everyone if it doesn't work out. "Extend yourself on others' credit, test a market, and stiff people by busting out the shell if the market doesn't pan out" is a common sketchy business practice.
Red flags I've seen include:
* Smarmy-looking marketing materials. If I visit the site and think "hmm... would I be worried about downloading this app for fear it would infect my machine?" then that's a bad sign.
* Some advance-marketing and extreme-MVP tactics are okay, but if they take it too far I see it as a red flag.
* Intuition. If I could bottle it I would charge for it and be rich. Earned through school of hard knocks, which is as far as I know the only way to get this.
* No haggling at all on price... especially when combined with other red flags. This leads me to think they're not haggling because they'll just stiff me.
* No milestones or other metrics come up in discussion.
* They don't know what they want. I've seen the screwage go both ways in contracting arrangements where the hiring party kind of just wants "something cool" with only some extremely vague sense of what it looks like. In either case it's not something I want to be a part of.
* Shell company bingo... if I do a search on the founders and they have five dozen LLCs to their names it means they'll just fold the entity and stiff everyone if it doesn't work out. "Extend yourself on others' credit, test a market, and stiff people by busting out the shell if the market doesn't pan out" is a common sketchy business practice.