In life every small business owner knows that you need:

1. A good spouse / partner / BFF (NOT business partner… just a solid person who is always there in your life.  This could be anyone from your mom to your friend from elementary school.  Someone who will always give you honest advice and is happy to listen to you vent about todays insane customer.)
2. A good hair stylist
3. A good restaurant to eat at
4. A phenomenal supplier (Okay, maybe this should have been #1 on the list...)
5. And a good web designer to help you along the way. 

But what happens when you cheat on the partner? Or refuse to tip the hair dresser? Or worse… completely stiff your web designer?  Well, we found the answer on Reddit... and it's quite a story!  Enjoy ~ 

"Nzdevon" is a web expert who loves building awesome sites for small businesses, so when a biz owner (who we will call "Jason") contacted nzdevon, he was happy to help.

Jason was in the travel industry and needed a badass website that would fly above the competition (pun intended). And nzdevon (Who we will call “Inzee”) was giddy about pimping Jason's site.

The project was both basic and complex; basic in the sense of making the website “fancy” but complex in terms of re-coding the “backend” to improve SEO and rework coding amongst other things.

The timeframe to launch this site was about 30 days, so Inzee was working against a hard deadline and devoted time and energy to this project basically 24/7.

Typically Inzee requires a deposit of 25% of the total balance to even start the work, so if the total is $10,000, the prospect would put up at least $2,500 for the work to begin, but in this case, Jason explained that he had already hired a previous company to create his site and he got burned BAD. Now maybe you’re thinking “yeah right”, but let me personally tell you, our company was royally screwed by a super expensive, local web design business who damn-near tanked our entire company after 14+ successful years in business.

With that being said, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that Jason was truly f*cked by a terrible web designer (I was, you can read my Worst Web Design Company Ever blog post).

Having faith in humanity, Inzee proceeded on a handshake; sure, I’ll design your site and you pay in full when it’s done, because I know you’ll love my workmanship.

Fast Forward 29 days….

Inzee had the site ready exactly 1 day AHEAD of schedule! Once again, if you have ever hired out work of any kind, you typically plan for delays because something ALWAYS goes wrong… ALWAYS. However in this case, everything went right and the project was done with 1 day to spare!

Like most web designers, Inzee sent Jason the link so he could preview the site without it going “live”. The point of the “preview” function is to view it and make changes before officially clicking that no-turning-back famous “publish button” .

After Jason received the preview link he promptly called Inzee to compliment the craftsmanship. He overly stated that he loved the site but suddenly become afraid that the new site was too new and complex to operate on Jasons old php servers.

Although Inzee assured him that this fear is silly, Jason was adamant that this concern is legitimate, so Inzee went ahead with publishing the fancy, new site to prove it worked.

Inzee gave Jason a little time to poke around the site then called him to collect payment, but to Inzees surprise, Jasons phone endlessly rang with no answer.

Inzee then followed up with emails…. Then more calls…. And more emails…. With no reply, no answer.

It was at this time that Inzee suspected something awful was happening, so he attempted to login to the backend of Jasons servers so he could remove the work he performed, but to his shock, he was hit with an “ACCESS DENIED” message.

It was at this very moment that Inzee realized he was completely taken advantage of.

Eventually Inzee got ahold of Jason and Jason’s only reply was, "listen, I'm not ever going to pay you and there is nothing you can do about it". - And as you can imagine, this didn’t work for Inzee.

When Inzee realized he was completely screwed, he began contemplating how to seek revenge and quickly realized that although Jason owned the url for his site (let’s call it JasonsTravel.com), he didn’t own JasonsTravelSucks.com, so Inzee purchased JasonsTravelSucks.com and posted the identical site, however was sure to include all of the details of the scam transaction. BUT, because Inzee knew a ton about Search Engine Optimization / Page Rank, Inzee was able to make JasonsTravelSucks.com appear as the first result on Google when people innocently searched for “JasonsTravel.com”. - Revenge is a dish best served cold, I have heard….

A couple months later Inzee gets a letter in the mail asking him to take down the JasonsTravelSucks.com site but he stood strong.

As time passed Inzee would occasionally receive emails from people who have indeed bought packages from the actual JasonsTravel website and were upset that their trip was terrible. Inzee would then ask permission to publish these bad reviews on JasonsTravelSucks.com and people were more than happy to comply to spread the word.

More time passes and suddenly Inzee gets a phone call from Jason, who is very desperate to have the JasonsTravelSucks.com site removed… apparently the travel industry faces a LOT of regulations and if you are deemed a scammer the government won’t tolerate it, and, in fact, shut you down. So a very concerned Jason begged Inzee to PLLLLLEASE delete the mirror site. It turns out that Jason was under heavy investigation by the travel agency association. Jason calmly replied “listen, I'm not ever going to remove the site and there’s nothing you can do about it” - Did I yet mention that revenge is a dish best served cold?

But wait, there’s more!

Jasons travel business began collapsing so bad that actual employees of Jasons Travel were contacting Inzee…. And all of these “testimonials” went right onto JasonsTravelSucks.com. This bad press hurt Jasons Travel so bad that it was forced to close.

But wait….. There’s still more….

Like many business owners, Jason had used his personal home and other property to secure mortgages and loans. When Jason defaulted on the payments his property was seized.

Omg….. wait for it…. Wait for it….

So as soon as Jason went “belly up” his domain name (URL) became available and Inzee jumped to purchase it…. Then turned it into a, quote, “cash cow”.

LESSONS LEARNED:

1. NEVER, EVER MESS WITH A FELLOW BUSINESS OWNER!!!!
2. If you hire someone to do work, pay them for frig’s sake!