Brent Turner & Joe Temple
www.MinisiteFrog.com
www.pulpminisites.com
[email protected]
[email protected]
So I guess I was on their list, & I received an e-mail regarding them launching their new site called Minisite Frog.
Supposedly they were closing down Pulp Minisites, which now that I think about it seems suspicious to me.
Anyway, I wrote to them because I had problems confirming my signup to their new list. Brent responded back very quickly, & asked me to send him a screenshot – I wrote him back to tell him it was working now.
This all took place on March 16, 2009.
I asked him some questions relating to us hiring them to do a website design for us, & I never heard back.
I had my assistant do the same thing, nothing.
I e-mailed them again 4 days later & still nothing.
Brent Turner completely vanished even though he had responded to one of my e-mails.
I keep getting their list e-mails, so I know they are still around.
This is what I mean about online companies being scams.
A real company usually doesn’t last long if they ignore people & don’t respond back to sales inquiries.
People looking to hire online should NOT be treated in this manner. Us customers are no different then an offline customer.
This behavior is rude & basically gives the message that they don’t care about us as a customer. Granted we weren’t customers yet, but why should that matter?
I am a business owner & have been for ions. I respond back to EVERYONE, whether they are a client or not. That’s called being respectful.
If I don’t want that person as a client, I find a way to tell them because I don’t believe in ignoring people & leaving them hanging. That’s very poor communication skills & is passive aggression.
If I’m too busy, I get my assistant to handle the person & if I find I can’t handle the e-mails, then it’s my job as a business owner to hire someone.
One of the worst things a person or company can do is market their services & then NOT respond back to inquiries or service the people who need them.
Granted there are times when things just can’t be helped, but then it’s the owner’s responsibility to inform the clients or potential clients that something has come up, & they need a week or so to get back to them.
I say to all online or offline businesses out there, if you can’t run your business properly, either hire a business consultant to help you, or CLOSE DOWN. You are wasting people’s precious time & time is money. Leave the business to companies that really care about customers. They deserve them.
Michelle
What Andy is referring to:
A) First the review – testimonial from Michael Cheney
B) What Michael Cheney’s Site Looks like
So here was Brent’s response to my post. I will respond after this, & then past my assistant’s response as well.
[email protected]
Just so everyone knows, Brent had no problem e-mailing me almost the minute the post went live, like within a day he e-mailed me, yet when I e-mailed them trying to do business with them, & nothing.
——————————–
Hello Michelle,
Quite frankly, we are saddened that you would go out of your way to jeopardize our reputation without first gaining the simple facts. Labeling our business as a “scam” is not only hugely offensive but disrespectful to our loyal clients who have used our services for years. We don’t need to explain ourselves to you however you may be interested to know that we are a couple of young, honest, hard-working guys providing a genuine service of high value.
While we understand your frustration, we find it questionable that the only method you tried to contact us was through our our ezine/newsletter email address. There is a contact form on our website that clients who do this the right way will assure you that we have excellent customer support and very professional dealings with prospective clients.
As a matter of fact, 3 of our clients have “offered” to give us testimonials these past 2 weeks alone – and no, we didn’t ask for them at all.
Secondly, yes we did shift from Pulp Minisite to Minisite Frog. Why? Because the Pulp Minisites branding simply wasn’t working for us – It was also a chance for us to start fresh as we completely overhauled our business to accompany marketers with lower budgets alongside providing faster turnaround times for our clients. I am sorry you found this suspicious.
Just as you could assume that our methods are suspicious, gaining profits through Google Adsense on the expense of other honest human beings seems to us as rather unethical. The fact that you would go out of your way to undermine honest, hard-working people to gain a profit from Google Adsense makes us feel sick in the stomach.
Michelle, call us unprofessional but we are actually glad we didn’t take you on as a client, you’re not worth the time, effort or money.
It’s a sad fact that the internet allows scammers to exploit honest working people, but I find it sadder that the ones who *claim* to be these honest people can hide behind their computers and point the finger at the ones just trying to make a decent living, next time I suggest you call us on the phone before you start pointing your finger.
We could go on all day about your unethical approach of doing business but we have better and more profitable things to do like attending to our work and making sure our clients are completely satisfied with the services we offer them.
Regards,
Brent Turner & Joe Temple
MinisiteFrog.com
My comments:
LOL, I really had to laugh at this.
1. First, I never really said 100% you were scammers, but yes, I find it very suspicious that you would ignore people’s e-mails.
I find it suspicious every time a company or someone online does this.
I feel that is only natural to be suspicious of people who hide behind the computer, & aren’t mature or respectful enough to respond to e-mails.
So maybe you aren’t scammers, maybe you just don’t know how to run a business properly, or you are very poor when it comes to customer service. Either way, you belong on this blog for that reason.
2. As for me reading your mind, I can’t read your mind.
You or whomever responded back to my e-mail initially asking me to help you & provide you with a screenshot to what the problem was on your site.
Very nicely I responded back because I like to help out people online, it’s just within my nature to help other businesses.
You had no problem responding back to my e-mail then, so I will assume you have no problem receiving my e-mails. Had you not responded to that e-mail, I would have gone to your site & looked for another way to contact you, but you did.
I have about 30-35 e-mails in my e-mail client & I receive ALL of them, it doesn’t matter what e-mail address people write to, it’s my responsibility as a site owner to receive them all & address them all.
If I had only e-mailed you once, okay, fine, e-mails do get lost, but I didn’t, I e-mailed you, then my assistant Andy e-mailed you & nothing.
As Andy will point out in his response, your area to contact you is just a small little link on your footer nav, yet you have very large areas telling people how to sign up for your list.
Had you asked me to use your contact form, or even given me a phone number (another suspicious action is when companies hide behind e-mail & DON’T put phone numbers on their sites. People who own these sites will try to get around this by telling you they shouldn’t have to give you a phone number because they are online business, but I rarely trust companies that aren’t professional & this is one good way to tell if a company actually cares about you, because companies who do care will go to the ends of the earth so you feel comfortable.
I tell people, if a company or person hides behind an e-mail, then one has to ask why.
Companies online should be held to the same standards that offline companies should be held to, so I expect online companies to have a simple phone number, just like I expect offline companies to respond to ALL e-mails if they have a working live website.)
Anyway, my point is, you should have responded to our e-mails & to blame us for your actions is immature.
3. Now you are calling me a scam because I have AdSense on my blog??? LOL
This is hilarious.
Minimum 50% of all sites online where the owners know how to run a business have AdSense on their sites.
I have AdSense on here because this is a free blog, & I spend my time posting my experiences to help other consumers. I do this all for FREE.
Clearly you don’t know much about marketing online if you think sites that have AdSense are just there to make a buck & are scammers. Some are, yes, but it should be clear which ones are & which ones aren’t.
I think for the $2 I make per month vs. the time I invest, we can assume I’m NOT a scammer.
You are saying I post negative reviews just to get people to click on my AdSense ads???
Sure, if my posts were a few lines, maybe, but I spend a lot of time writing, & no scammer is going to do that. It’s not even worth their time.
Anyway, not once did either of you apologize for your behavior. All you did was blame me & call me names to try & cover up your actions.
I really don’t care if you treated your other customer Mr. Smith with respect & he liked your services, you didn’t treat US with respect & that’s all that matters to me.
Thank you
Michelle
I will post the ugly Word Press templates in my original post, as I can’t do that here. It will be at the bottom.
This is Andy’s response to Brent’s response to my original post…
————————————
“Their footer links don’t exactly “Stand out”… also on their contact page they mispelled twitter if you wanna let ’em know so they can fix that up.
On their front page, that testimonial from Michael Cheney… maybe he changed his site recently, but his site is a free wordpress template, and certainly not something I’d think they’d want people to think they designed. Very very ugly.
And honestly it doesn’t matter how someone tries to contact them. They do not put their contact info front and center. There is no link in their main links that allows you to contact them…. you can signup to get a free template. That’s there multiple times on the front page. But no easy contact form or contact link until you scroll all the way to the bottom, and you can click Contact Us between FAQ (which is also in the top nav) and the Terms of Service.
If they really wanted people to contact them from their page, that should certainly stand out more. To me, the site seems to be one that would be referral based (people recommend them etc etc).
They sent out the newsletter via aweber. You responded. They responded to you. That tells me that that is an acceptable method of contact, seeing as there was no special notice in there on how to contact them at all… default email methods are “You hit reply and send a reply”. If it wasn’t acceptable, they’d never have responded the first time.
You let him know of a problem, he replied saying
“Hi Michelle,
Thanks for letting us know! A screenshot would be fantastic 🙂
Brent”
You replied back to him letting him know I’d be contacting him… no reply to you, no reply to me. Oh well. He asked for us to supply him a screenshot… the contact form on their site doesn’t allow attachments that I’m aware of. Even though no screenshot was available since the window was closed, he asked specifically for one to be sent over… he gave no address to send it to, so it was assumed that we’d send to the one he emailed from.
They have no reason to be defensive. At all. We replied to their contact, they replied to us asked us to send them something back, we both replied… they didn’t reply again. He could have easily said:
“Thanks for letting us know! A screenshot would be fantastic 🙂 This email address is not the best to use to contact us, so please use this other email address or the contact form on our site so we’re sure to receive it”
Instead, he lead us to believe it was “ok”, and then used it as an excuse.
-Andy”