Francis Koenig / Adultvest and iPorn drama worth sharing
 

Hi GFY folks -

Below is an email I just sent to Francis Koenig, President and CEO of Adultvest and iPorn. I believe it's worthy of being an open letter to this community. Cheers to all, and happy fourth.

Francis -

I received the check you sent, however, as Mike had warned me, you decided to cut the dollar amount for less than we had agreed upon.

So tell me, how is that justified in your mind? I had discussed my rate with Mike - I was quite firm that it was $60 an hour, and you guys had paid that rate for the prior work I had done on the iPorn site.

Mike called not once, but twice after I had sent my invoice and said that you had requested that I cut my rate. The first time I refused, on principal, because as I told Mike, we agreed on $60 an hour. Mike agreed and said he'd send out a check. Two weeks passed, so I emailed asking if the check had been sent. Mike called again, apologized for having to ask me again to cut my rate, but said it was coming from you. I agreed to take 10% off the top, and stated that I no longer wanted to work with you guys.

I sent in my invoice, forced '10% discount' applied, yet even after that you cut a check for less than that amount. That is not only unprofessional, it's unethical.

I like to think that working in the adult business is akin to mainstream, but actions like yours make me think otherwise. My only other experience working in adult has been as Creative Director with XBiz for a few years. Alec is a fair and honest businessman who treats his employees well. Clearly I was mistaken to take that experience and apply the same trust to your project.

What baffles me here is that you are doing this to an individual. You're not shorting a large company - you're taking money directly out of someone's pocket. I'm an artist that does design work to pay rent and keep up with my school loans. You decided to take over $800 off of my bill - that's a large cut for someone like me.

I, along with the rest of your team, put in the hours and many late nights in order to make sure that under a tight three-week deadline, with no real formulated idea of what you wanted the site to be, you had a site up by Erotic LA. It's interesting to me that you'd pay a mint for the 'iPorn' name, then not pay the people that work hard to make it a reality.

I like to think the best of folks, but you've made me realize that greed is an unfortunate part of human nature. I'm glad I'm not in your shoes, having to wake up every morning thinking about the people I've walked all over.

You have an excellent team - all individually good people. You should be thankful for that, but my guess is that if you've slighted me, I'm not the only one.

It's interesting that through Adultvest you also claim to manage other people's money as a hedge fund manager. I can only imagine what the accounting on that must look like.

An organization can easily be tarnished from the top down, and as you embark creating affiliate programs and the like with the 'iPorn' brand, know that reputation goes a long way.

What goes around, comes around. Good luck to ya.

Kasey

* Also, just a bit of advice - as you cheat webmasters going forward, I highly
recommend changing the passwords on the websites they've done work on.

Sig Spot :)

I am parking it right here.

Dramaaaa

sucks they cheated you out of $$ :(

what is your position with XBiz? designer?

What do you want from a company with only 10 billion dollars in claimed available capital. Corners need to be cut!

I was formerly the Creative Director at XBiz for a few years, but now am a freelancer. I don't represent XBiz in any way, shape or form.

LOL - check the "join free" link, priceless :).

Good point :)

Btw you might wanna contact the admins to get your name changed, if you no longer work for XBiz :)

The join link is awesome. Karma will bite them in the ass sooner than later I am sure.

PS. you should ask Eric to change your nick.

Good idea - I tried to create a new account, but wasn't able to post so ended up using the old one. I'll contact 'em now. Thanks!

http://i32.tinypic.com/2h4matl.jpg

LOL

4th of July drama!

Drammmmmaa!!!

Dont this guys have 6 billion or some thing like that and hedge fund of the year etc etc.

7billion I guess is what google tells me

With AdultVest growing at the rate of $300 Million per week

must

insert

sig

HERE!

Yep, which makes this all the more ridiculous, you know?

<sigh>

I only changed the header and the join free link on the iPorn site for fun. As tempting as it is to take the whole site down, I really don't want to create work for anyone.

Anyhow, I think rainbows, unicorns and bunnies are pretty good for iPorn branding :)

oh shit! that is too funny!

Of all the whining i've seen on gfy in my past, that's one of the most professionally written letters i've seen. best of luck to you recovering the funds.
WG

And so it shows that fucking over people is a stupid idea.
The $800 + 10&#37; they fucked you out of already costed them more in bad PR.

Some people are idiots.

x2 :thumbsup Hope you get your money back!

People who are willing to take food out of your mouth pretty much never give it a second thought.

my pornography hedge fund website is coming out next week. currently, its growing at 1 trillion dollars weekly, and we have 100 trillions to invest in the pornography, smut peddling business. now is a terrible time to use that money to buy low-priced equities that have been slammed or real estate, or to pay web designers. there's so much cash flying around in this economy, i don't know what to do with it.

now sign up here and pay my monthly subscription rate to get access to these investors. also, lets partner up, i want to be your business partner.

Priceless thread

The toughest lessons in design.

I think I'm actually going to make it through the day because of this thread. Spot on for writing a neat, concise letter.

You are probably a better person than I, because I think I might have given in to temptation. :1orglaugh

Hope you get your money!

Wow! damn people are stupid some time... and very nice colors theme with the unicorn and the rabbit.

Looks like they've changed the password. For any that missed it, here was what the iPorn site looked like for the past 12 or so hours:

supertinymonster.com/iporn.jpg

The 'Join Free' links went here:

supertinymonster.com/cheap.html

Thanks to all for your support. I highly doubt that I'll see any money from him, but you can be sure that I'll be sending him another bill next week for 'web modifications'. Anyhow, this has made me laugh enough to make it all worth it. I suppose we all measure value differently :)

Be well!
Kasey

????????

Thanks for the 4th of July present Kasey!!! Very nice of you!
 

We hired Kasey McMahon on several occasions to work on various design projects prior to her work on iPorn. We had been consistently paying her $50/hr and have always paid on time. It would be easy for me to produce records of this fact. Then she wrote us a bill for $60/hr and our accounting department brought it to me. We thought it was a mistake. I asked them to check the rates we had previously paid her. Kasey arbitrarily raised her rate. She never called me to discuss an increase in her pay rate. So we went ahead and paid her at the $50/hr rate. I would have agreed to the $60 rate if Kasey would have asked for it up front before starting the project. All she had to do was put in a call to me and talk about it. Instead she tried to be sneaky about it and slip it through the cracks. Now she went ahead and did something could put her in a lot of trouble. I would be surprised to see other companies jumping to hire Kasey after she?s shown everyone that she is willing to vandalize and slander a company over a misunderstanding that could have easily been cleared up with a phone call. Kasey this is your direct quote: ?I like to think that working in the adult business is akin to mainstream, but actions like yours make me think otherwise.? Kasey, you?ve obviously contradicted yourself. I?ve worked with a lot of great people in the adult industry. Your course of action is EXACTLY what gives the adult business a bad rap!

~Francis Koenig

That's just plain not true. I had charged you guys $50 an hour for a couple of projects last year, which were not web related. I was clear with Mike Weiss from the beginning that my rate was $60 for this project. Heck, I have an invoice from you guys for the first round of iPorn work that was charged at - you guessed it $60 per hour.

Geez, why would I make this up?

It's pretty simple. You're lying. How does it feel to be called out, Francis. I'm laughing at you, not with you here :)

Cheers.

lets see the records...

Invoice for first round of work done for iPorn is here:

supertinymonster.com/invoice1.jpg

Check was paid, as agreed at $60 per hour.

The second invoice I sent is here - billed for a total of $4920.

supertinymonster.com/invoice2.jpg

Francis sent me a check for $4100.

That's it. It pretty much speaks for itself.

Kasey

Francis, you really should leave the bunnies and rainbows up on the iPorn site - they're totally sexy.

ROFL :)

ok Francis, now lets see what you got...

I still don't get why people are willing to lose business over 1000$ or less(I don't know which party is right, but the side that is not will for sure lose business).

they paid 500k for iporn.com domain name and to put up a typical join free site ?
what am i missing here ??

because they are trying to get mobile numbers for sms marketing... pretty smart actually considering how big sms will be in the next 3-5 years in terms of .. well never mind, i wont give away the pie for free...

Kasey, your best course of action would have been to call me and discuss the situation. I'm sure this ridiculous misunderstanding could have been resolved with one phone call. As it stands now, you have publicly admitted to Vandalism and have made efforts to slander my reputation and that of the company's I’m am placed in charge of. What you have actually done is you have shown the entire GFY community that you are a serious risk to any company who hires you.

Signing off,
Francis

PS-- Happy 4th to everyone!

Anyone need a job at $60/hr?

Lot of drama here... but entering onto a server and changing shit around that you have no permission to no matter how small or big... really really bad move...

Whatever the issues... keep your nose clean... simple rules.

Commmoonn people thats the dumbest fucking letter requesting payment I have ever seen.

Man when I was reading that I was expecting something serious and at the end of it all that its over $10 an hour.

Fuck why are designers such idiots.

Seriously the O.P went off on a tangent about how they are ruining the industry being unethical blah blah blah.. over what I bet is a lack of proper communication of $10 an hour...

wtf.

That is the type of letter you send the owners of pornbb not some guy that owes you $250 bucks..

Kasey just a tip wait for your PMS to pass before you go further with this...

Considering that you had Mike call me to discuss this twice, then you wrote and sent me a check for less than my invoice, my response is simply, you reap what you sow, Francis.

Sure, I put a few rainbows and unicorns on your site, but I had the chance to really mess with it, and didn't. Call it what you like - if I'm a vandal, whatever. I'm not worried about it.

As I mentioned before, I like to think that they're aren't shady folks working in adult, that it's an industry just like any other. However, this interaction proved me wrong. Had you done honest business, this thread never would have been written.

The best part about this is that you know I am right. Your employees know that I am right. I hope they all got a good laugh out of this :)

Kasey