Medium Happiness

In my early days as a freelancer I was so gassed to get a project that I didn’t always think about what the upside was as much as I should have. The obvious “upside” answer is money, but what if you aren’t getting any?

Almost 2 years ago 3 fairly intelligent and very enthusiastic people approached me about helping them launch FadMashion.com, a fashion networking site that they promised was going to change the way high-end clothes were bought and sold. The current model basically consists of the designer, showroom, and buyer, in that order. Designers design the clothes, the clothes go to the showroom, and the buyer visits the showroom and buys or doesn’t buy the clothes. Sure, there are probably some inefficiencies in there, but as I would learn, the model works pretty well. “If it ain’t broke…” comes to mind. People like to touch and feel clothes before they buy them.

The long and short of the story is that the 3 “founders” never paid me, nothing, zip. I got invited to a few parties with warm bottles of champagne but that was it. Thankless is probably the best way to describe their MO. They weren’t so much willful as they were clueless, though.

Anyhow, after about 7 months of working for free and seeing that their online model was not financially viable, I realized there would be no upside. They were never going to have any money to pay me, even if I demanded it, and any kind of equity offer ever being worth anything was a forgone conclusion. So, I bailed.

Now there’s just the cheap shadenfreude of watching FadMashion chug along in the purgatory for sites that were conceived with good intentions but are destined to irrelevance and a slow, dying brown dwarf send off. Last I checked FadMashion was wooing people with prizes. That’s never a good sign. FadMashion, no hard feelings, but I’m glad it’s not working out. It makes me feel like I did the right thing.