Working with DataPierce was the worst business decision I have ever made
SUMMARY -
Unless this company genuinely changes its business model and corrects the number of wrongs they have done against my company, it should be known that DataPierce is a complete scam, has committed phishing, fraud, has stolen thousands of dollars from my company, and has irreparably damaged my company’s reputation, in addition to my own personal mental health. Do not work with this company under any circumstance.
BACKGROUND -
I connected with the founder and owner of DataPierce, Mr. Paras Pandya, by chance on Facebook in a group of startup founders, since I was looking for one to join my company. He had expressed interest and so we had a few conversations, and he shared his previous recommendations from previous customers, so it seemed legitimate. I agreed to contract DataPierce with a pilot project to determine if we would be a good fit working together. I have “worked” with this company for almost a year, although I leave “worked” in quotation marks because the majority of that time has been spent trying to get what I have been owed or promised.
My company had been developing a progressive web app for some time as part of a new product line, and we paid their team to rework it. The product they delivered to me after 3 months of work was UNUSABLE, did not match their mockups, was completely unresponsive in terms of desktop design, and required over a month of reformatting it and adding any kind of functionality to get it working to the level we previously had it at. Ultimately, their work was completely scrapped and we internally redid the app using more modernized frameworks, but that was $400+ plus weeks of fixing the issues they left behind I’ll never get back.
They forced our company to move our hosting from Webflow into GoDaddy because that was what they were comfortable with, upgrade to a higher paid plan for no good reason, and use Wordpress and Elementor builder to build the webpages. Our website load times went from <1s to sometimes up to 30 seconds as a result, and our hosting costs have almost doubled each month for absolutely no benefit.
Communication with them was near impossible, as they constantly switched communication platforms from FaceBook messenger to Trello to Google Hangouts to WhatsApp to Slack, but every time I would message them on one, they would shift to another and then abandon it shortly. They would go silent for weeks if not months at a time.
Without a doubt, the quality of ALL work that this company has provided me was unprofessional, unusable, and in many cases incredibly damaging financially and brand-wise to our company.
Their social media marketing was disastrous for our company. They inconsistently posted social media posts on platforms that did not align with our target demographic, completely ignored platforms that do align with our target demographics, featured ugly visuals using outdated or misleading product imagery and were completely off brand for us, had copy text that was filled with grammatical and spelling errors, stereotyped individuals based on race or gender, and in some cases even tried to post content that could have been misconstrued as a suggestion to our clients to commit suicide.
I have requested documentation hundreds of times from them on various projects, spending reports, and more and have received only empty promises that I would receive it. It took 2 months to receive a scanned copy of a customer contract that turned out to be completely fraudulent.
They had me pay up front for marketing costs with a loose breakdown of where the money was going (organic SEO vs paid advertising), but the money certainly did not go where it was intended. Only two ads were ever run for far less than the ~$400 I sent them to run ad campaigns for a few weeks. They did not share any info about what they were working on while they were working on it, but instead sent reports months after the work was done that claimed to show growth and successes, but the results I saw did not match what they sent me on their reports.
This company also posed as fake investors and customers to convince me to send over $10000 to them for due diligence, travel to secure deals, and more. They claimed this was all reimbursable and that I would get documentation of all of this, but it has been over 7 months and I have received none of which I was owed.
Never, ever work with DataPierce or Mr. Pandya.
