Why Brandstack is the real silent killer.

Why is Brandstack.com the real silent killer, why is it worse than most of the crowdsourcing sites designers complain with and why it is the real evil Spec Watch should check out, and why it needs to be muted once and for all?

I’m not a fan, but instead of bashing them, which I find great joy in doing so, I’m going to present you all with the facts, in a constructive mature manner, well, sort of. See, Brandstack and I have never seen eye to eye, their entire concept is wrong, besides that the founder/owner Wes Wilson in my opinion is the biggest tool alive. He’s not only a tool, but has no idea how to run a faulty piss poor excuse of a service like Brandstack.

So, what’s wrong with them? Well, let’s take a look at their business model. I’ll break this down and honestly do my best to word it in a way that is not misleading or biased.

Brandstack Business Model:

Ok fellas, here’s what we’re gonna do with the 15% of sales we steal from our designers!

Step 1:  Give those same designers more competition by purchasing a $500/mo designer-targeted ad on Logopond and countless other inspiration sites, thus increasing our userbase and our extraordinary number of low-quality, rip-off designs!

Step 2:  Develop pointless and ridiculous add-ons to my already terrible User Interface, such as an AJAX chatroom that doesn’t even work!

Step 3:   We’re going to encourage our users to give us free adspace on their portfolio sites and spam their twitter followers with shitty Brandstack spam!

Step 4:  Hire incompetent douchebags like Robert McGuire who alienate their own design community!

Why are we going to fail?

1.  We are idiots who know nothing about ecommerce!

2.  We could have used the same $500+ we spent on designer-targeted advertising and targeted buyers with it!  Instead we’ll leave it up to the designer to find buyers for their work (literally says this in the “Promote Yourself” section) but we won’t hesitate to charge them the 15% finders fee!

3.  We know nothing about landing page design or SEO so a user has no clue how to find our site and once they do, well shit, they don’t know where the hell to go next!

4. Those designers we were counting on to promote our site know nothing about SEO either, so the only crowd we are reaching remains designers!  And their twitter following?  It’s all designers, too! (do you see a pattern here?)  This #Brandstack hashtag does absolutely nothing for you and trust me, it never will!

5.  We hire incompetent douchebags such as Robert McGuire!

Brandstack. “Pay us for all your designs.”

Ok, now let’s take a moment to think about this for a second, I wont address issues that have happened in the past, I obviously will but for now, let’s discuss the real issue with Brandsock. Spec work. Here’s the thing, Brandstink designers, the real ones that is, not the ones created by Brandsick itself to sell off their in house designs, well, they’re now cooking up logos just to post up for sale on Brandsack. They cook up these logos faster than you can say SPEC, the quality control is still horrendous.

Now about the quality control, they have a system in which they approve logos, most of us believe it’s one of 3 things. They have either hired a monkey to randomly pick logos to accept, coin tossing or dart throwing. To make matters worse they pretty much give everyone the impression that if you buy a featured spot, your logos, crap or otherwise, will be accepted. Yeah, something wrong there.

So overall, Brandstack is another startup run by completely clueless individuals hoping to rip their designers blind out of their hard earned money for a quick paycheck.

Toni Zova
Personal Site: www.tonizova.com
Twitter: @tonfue

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.