Edited Themselves Right Out Of Business

A long time ago, in an entrepreneurial venture iteration far, far away, back when I in a completely different line of work and owned a website development firm, we had a client who edited themselves right out of business.

That’s right.

Here’s the story:

They launched a new website and brand. Contained within that website were seven long-form sales letters, each promoting a different program or product, a couple of them variations tailored to specific niches.

Every single week, based on “feedback” they got from randoms and their own obsession over their website, they requested dozens, sometimes hundreds of edits, to all seven pages…

…Every Single Week.

Meanwhile they constantly complained about not making money, bitching about our invoices and how they were spending money and getting no return on it, etc. etc. – you know the drill.

They kept throwing in our face how they were trying to replace us with someone “cheaper”, even giving us the names of our competitors and what these oh-so-much-more-reasonable other companies were going to charge – like that was supposed to make us just slash our rates by two-thirds and bust out the Ramen noodles.

Thrice they “replaced” us – only to have our “more fair” competitor leave them high and dry right behind a tight deadline. Imagine that!

This client would then beg us to save the day – which we would.

We’d invoice fairly, and – you guessed it – they’d bitch some more and promise/threaten to find a more “reasonable” replacement.

After the third time in three months this happened, I said, out of righteous exasperation:

You know, you might be a happier person who all these other companies who (in your mind) are so much better than us, actually want to work with if you spent less time editing your website and, oh, maybe, MORE TIME PROMOTING IT!

Sadly, That Message Didn’t Get Through.

Sadly (for them), they ran out of money for their venture a few weeks later.

Yep – they edited themselves right out of business.

Too bad – their stuff was actually good.

They just couldn’t get out of their own damn way.