Quiting my job at Precision Media
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
Precision Media: The leader for youth marketing in Romania – advertising/publishing related.
My position: Obviously online project coordinator.
This was my first experience with real chair and laptop office, inside a building full of people doing something so they make some money for the company, and it was a pleasant one.
What have I learned:
- How to approach a client
- How to negotiate a contract (accumulated quite a lot of experience here)
- How to create a proper brief plan strategy for almost anything.
- How to communicate better at a business level. (I’m too social for normal level)
- How to know when it’s the right time to quit.
Note*: Again, I’m talking strictly about real life business, online differs a bit.
What have I liked:
- The office workspace
- Every single (almost) people that worked there.
- The fact that my boss wasn’t romanian, was a + for me. (I am romanian)
- The garden upfront
- The jokes with Ramona, the HR Specialist
What have I disliked:
- The brutal disorganization of departments
- The fact that you are working part-time, and departments have no idea that when they ask for something, each and every other department requested 2-3 things for you. You start to look a bit irresponsable, and it’s the last thing I wanted.
- Fake appreciations just so you continue your needed work for not such a motivating salary.
- Working from home gets everyone paranoid that you’re doing nothing, just being lazy, and they have the right to call you at 9 AM, and 9 PM and demand things.
I quited- I don’t want to be considered irresponsable since the volume of work was more of a full time job in my eyes and I simply couldn’t stand working 2h more a day for the same motivation. There was no other solution as I couldn’t take it full-time, nor do I think the salary would have been any good.
I have decided to move forward with my web projects (currently making me 2x the salary) and BuySellAds.com, Todd is a great guy to work with and I have great plans with him as I want to be part of a business, not a flat number in a business.
I honestly wish everyone all the best, you guys rock!
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Flippa.com – The blackest sheep from SitePoint
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
We’re going to talk in this post about SitePoint Marketplace.
It’s the place where we pay a fee to list our websites, domain names, services – all web related – for sale on the market. It’s a great place simply because it’s very intuitive and has most of the features needed for a perfect sale – even more, it has the fame of #1 Marketplace for Websites, therefore people browse it alot.
What does SitePoint team do with SitePoint Marketplace?
They grab it by the troat and kill it in the most mizerable way possible you can ever imagine.
They create Flippa.com!
Okay, so 99designs.com was a failure in my mind when all the design work moved there, but at least 99designs’s design wasn’t that bad considering that people were selling banners and logos.
Flippa.com has a same design idea, horribly understood as web 2.0.
Functionality is zero, I find it the most ugliest user interface they could have ever decided for a place to sell websites.
They also add a 5% success fee, on top of the listing fee. Why? They don’t handle transactions as Escrow does, so why 5% success fee, to encourage fraud.
Bottom point Flippa.com sucks hard, hopefully they will take their eyes out of the numbers they paid for developing it and realize the old one was better and they just wasted a pile of money on something new and whom the hole community dissaproves with.
Quotes from the community:
edit: I think interface is rather bad. Price is shown only in featured listings tab, all other tabs show is auction title and start/end time. Visitors have to read every single ad in order to filter good websites from junk. I think it would be a good idea to add columns for current bid and buy now, maybe also a column that shows monthly profit.
edit2: Aha, there is a price, but its shown only when I use filters. Filters are very inconvenient, there is too much stuff in it and its all confusing. I think it would be a good idea to add a quick filter for price sorting and keep current advanced search as extra option. Also I think it would be a good idea to add some preset filters, such as good old “premium websites”, but name it “Established: $10,000 or above” (filter by current bid, not by buy now price) and few more similar filters (”Established: $5,000 – $10,000″, “Established: $1,000 – $5,000″, etc…) and add them as popup for quick filtering.
edit3: Statistics popup is badly coded too. Visitor checks listings from top to bottom, not the other way around, that popup covers statistics link for listing below it and it doesn’t disappear when visitor moves mouse out of it. I suggest to put it on timer, so it would disappear 0.5-1 second after visitor moved mouse out of statistics link and out of that popup area.
That website should still be in beta with its current interface.
I’m a big fan of SitePoint, I’ve sold my site here a few months ago for 10k USD, I know how it works and if I were to chose a perfect place to sell a website, it would have been SitePoint Marketplace.
Flippa is actually a horrible decision, horrible!
No only that the design interface looks so bad, so non-userfriendly, thinking that the old marketplace was stylish and had a perfect touch makes me wonder why have you decided such as bad thing?
Regarding the costs, you added a 5% succes fee, this will encourage fraud, bad again.
Stop looking at the development costs of Flippa.com, they are nothing considering a future failure. Go back to old marketplace, it rocked.
I might never get a feedback on what I’m saying here, but I’m a true fan of SitePoint and it’s heart-crushing to see this happening. I’ll also blog about it.
Flippa…. what a stupid name, and stupid design. I doubt I’m going to use Flippa, and prob will start using DP more from now.
Guys… seriously… think about what your customers want. We want the old Sitepoint Auctions back.
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Scorpiono and Nex
Monday, June 15th, 2009
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I’m officially working at BuySellAds.com
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
BuySellAds.com – The leader on the market for banner advertising
Scorpiono – Experienced with online advertising
BuySellAds + Scorpiono = Project.
I’ll be working at the customer support with Todd (CEO) and also account approval / admin side of the web directory.
Thank you Matthew for bringing this opportunity.
My email over there is sergiu[at]buysellads.com, let me know if I can persuede you to buy more banner spots! 
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IncomeDiary dot com – A great blog
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
I don’t personally know Michael from IncomeDiary.com, but I for instance love to see others sharing the inspirational stories and incomediary.com is one of the blogs I’ve been reading in the past days.
I’ll warmly recommend it to web entrepreneurs while I’m busy developing the main Scorpiono.com website, stay tooned, in June you’ll see something BIG!
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