DataPierce Consulting

Working with DataPierce was the worst business decision I have ever made

Reviewed by Jacob Boyle , CEO at MARCo Technologies LLC

Completed

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. This will be a long review, but I want to ensure that any individuals or companies considering working with this company understand the true depth of challenges, failures, and dangers in all aspects of working with them. 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. TECH STACK - The tech stack this company uses is outdated, overpriced for the benefits provided, and incredibly frustrating to work with and maintain. 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. They used HTML, Bootstrap CSS, and JQuery, but did not follow any kind of acceptable practices in terms of development, leaving a nightmare of spaghetti code for our team to maintain with no documentation. 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. They refused to use any modern payment processing methods such as Stripe or Paypal for web payments, but left it up to me to integrate payment processing on the app and website they were tasked to upgrade. Their cybersecurity plugins they tried installing on our site were so outdated that the latest versions of wordpress and php do not support them. 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. QUALITY OF WORK - In my initial reviews of this company, I may have said that I was pleased with the initial quality of work, which only focused on a website design and a static image mockup of a redesign of our PWA. The reason I said this was because I wanted to please the founder to keep him on as a partner, as I was afraid of losing a seemingly legitimate business partner after being burned numerous times. Now I am not afraid, and I will say that 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. Let’s start with digital marketing. 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. They had no cohesive digital marketing strategy but would post on social media or on blogs whenever they wanted to bill us further. The content they put out was consistently written in completely butchered English and always published under my name. The topics of the articles they put out were almost always nonsensical, on topics that nobody would read about, and the keywords they tried to rank for were ones that showed zero traffic on all search engines. Beyond content creation, their business listing and SEO strategy was frustrating. They put out improper business listings on nearly every site they posted on, and got our company banned from numerous important social sites, including Reddit, which was a key part of our marketing strategy. Instead of focusing their time, effort, and the money our company paid them on activities related to our field, they focused on quantity of billable work instead of quality in anything. To give you a quick insight, our mental health medical technology company that is based in New Jersey does not need a CrunchyRoll account or a Bahamas local business listing. In terms of SEO result, the company might argue that we have seen higher traffic as a result of their work. If you saw our trends in Google Search Web Console, this might seem true: there was an increase in traffic since we started working together. However, none of their work on ranking web pages or optimizing for key words made any effect. The reason we saw an increase in traffic was organic growth of a free applet on our website that I had made months before working with them that naturally accrued hundreds of visits over the months since it’s launch. The reason for the growth is because our sitemap had never been submitted for Google Indexing until around the time we started working with DataPierce. None of the other pages or keywords they attempted to rank for have shown any considerable growth in click rate or impressions. Furthermore, they installed an SEO extension on our site but consistently left pages unoptimized after starting to work on them. I do not know where their efforts were focused whatsoever. Their web design was also extremely frustrating beyond the tech stack issues. I spent about $300 for them to design new mockups of our website, and after I approved it (despite being fairly underwhelmed), they scrapped the designs entirely, had me pay for a template, and then loosely filled it in. Furthermore, their designs used old product imagery that we no longer wanted displayed, had ugly colors and patterns that were patently off brand from the rest of the content we put out, and worst of all, for a company that boasted themselves on SEO and keyword copywriting, required me to write all the copy for our webpages. Ultimately, this was the best thing, because given the absolutely unprofessional nature of their writing, but essentially I was paying for them to tell me to do work. Needless to say, not a single important page on our website looks as how they designed it. In terms of app development, their work is unacceptable at all stages. Aside from the outdated tech stack they used that was aforementioned, I paid for them to redesign our entire application, and they did not even bother asking for the requirements, just promising me that they will “make it better.” Dozens of features and pages were missing upon final delivery, and the delivered front-end design had no functionality whatsoever. It took me almost 2 months to correct their mistakes and add any sort of functionality to the app. Furthermore, the reason I agreed to hire them to redo the app design was that Mr. Pandya repeatedly bashed my original app prototype as being unresponsive between desktop and mobile, having bugs, not easy to use, etc. and promising he could fix all the issues. The design I was delivered did not respond to switching between mobile and desktop properly, but instead used a fixed size window that did not scale with screen size but instead fit on all screens because it was only a few hundred pixels across. When I complained about this, no attempts were made to correct it. Months after they handed me their work, I converted our app from a web only app to a mobile app and put it on the major stores. After launch, Mr. Pandya accused me of putting out unacceptable store listings featuring unprofessional screenshots (the screenshots, by the way, were straight from the app which his team was so proud to have designed a UI for). He demanded that I use his designer to make the screenshots, since they had 13 years of app development. I played along, saying I needed a quick turnaround time for the screenshots of a few days. Two weeks later, I got fake screenshots featuring mockups of an app that looked nothing like the true application, inappropriate copy text, ugly backgrounds, and worst of all, wrong dimensions so that I could not even upload them to the App or Play store if I wanted. You would think that a company that has 13+ years of experience in app development and marketing would know how strict the App store requirements are for screenshots. TRANSPARENCY - For the first month of working together, I would have rated this company fairly highly on transparency. They included me on their Trello boards for project management. After the first month, transparency became nonexistent. 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. I asked numerous times for rightful access to Google Analytics for my own company’s website because they disconnected the Analytics project that I had been using in favor of their own, and I still have not been able to see this. LIES AND FRAUD - I can confirm one case of fraud where the company posed as a potential customer to try and make their marketing services appear more effective, and I am highly suspicious of many more cases of fraud where they posed as either potential customers or investors. About a month after they migrated my company’s website to its new hosting platform and started making sweeping changes, they added a brand new “Contact Us” form. Briefly after this went live, Mr. Pandya emailed me with a form submission about an inquiry about purchasing our product from a “Dr. Hyungesok Lee” from Barcelona Spain. He claimed to work for a hospital and was interested in using our product for his patients, what the price was, whether we could ship overseas, etc. I responded with our info and asked for some info about his organization, if we could schedule a meeting to discuss, the usual. He responded asking for higher quantities of our product, if he could get custom pricing for higher volumes, and how fast we could ship, but he would not give us any info about his hospital or respond to my requests for a phone call. This went on for over a month, and I could not find any details on a Dr. Lee in Barcelona, Spain. Ultimately, he stopped emailing us after claiming he caught COVID and would be out of work. He never responded again. This went on a few months ago, and I assumed it was just spam and forgot about it, until I did some digging into DataPierce’s company reviews after getting suspicious. Sure enough, there were reviews on TrustPilot from a Dr. Lee from the same city in India where DataPierce is based who complimented them on their digital marketing services. So I did some digging into the emails this Dr. Lee sent me and sure enough, the sender’s IP was not traced back to Spain, but instead a spam server in South Korea that was reported for blackmail requesting bitcoin and unsolicited promotions for website design and digital marketing services, which suspiciously enough is exactly what DataPierce does. Additionally, DataPierce supposedly secured a deal with two Indian universities that wanted to use our product and would put a contract into writing. It took months to get a copy of ONE letter of acceptance from ONE customer, but that turned out to be fake as well. Mr. Pandya claimed to have spoken directly with the Dean of this college, but the letter that was supposed to confirm the sale came from an assistant librarian. I have received no letter of sale from the other supposed customer either. I am also convinced the company has had individuals pose as supposed investors. Mr. Pandya claimed to have two interested VC firms that wanted to invest millions of dollars into our company and took $1000 from me that was supposedly reimbursable to go on a trip to meet with these investors in another city. However, he provided no details of the trip, no expense reports, and never mentioned the $1000 that was supposed to be reimbursed again. Next, he said these investor firms required almost $4000 combined to perform due diligence, but that this would be reimbursable. Then for months afterwards he kept promising to set up a meeting between myself and these investors, which ultimately never happened. I got one phone call from a man named Mr. Sundar, who claimed to be on the board of a VC firm, but there was no man with that name on the board of the firm, no contact number or email address since of course all communications had to be done through DataPierece only, and no follow-ups even 3 months after the fact. The supposed reimbursement of the near $5000 I am owed has been delayed continually as well, and I have not received any of the promised paperwork, communications, contacts, or funds. In terms of marketing, I paid somewhere in the tune of $2400 for press releases to reputable sources because Mr. Pandya claimed he had insiders who could get us published quickly for a good price, but I had to put up money fast. He claimed that these publications’ internal teams would write up a complete press release for their respective publications, which included Forbes, BI, the Economist, CNN, and Fox. I even paid an extra $900 because he wanted to get a story expedited to be published in November when we paid in October. It is now June and not a single story has been published. I only received two drafts of press releases for review to two supposed publications. One of them clearly was written by a member of DataPierce’s team due to its butchered English, which was unacceptable because I was promised that these would be written by the publication’s team. The other was a bit better, but after corrections, neither were ever published. I never heard again about the $900 I paid for the Economist article that was supposed to be published 7 months ago. I repeatedly asked for proof of submission to these publications and to this date I have received none. PARTNERSHIP CULTURE - Working with DataPierce is highly toxic both to your company and to your health. Mr. Pandya harassed me on WhatsApp at all hours of the day and night, forced me onto calls at unholy hours of the morning, badgered me on holidays when I told him I would be away to fix issues that he himself caused, and would not leave me alone if he needed me to send him money. However, if I needed anything, especially the thousands of dollars he owes me, he cannot be found nor will he respond. He continually pressed me to have things done immediately, whether or not they were important, and then would sit on them and do nothing with them. I sent him webpages, content, funds, corrected articles, pitch materials, code, hundreds of things that he supposedly needed ASAP and nothing was done with them. The method Mr. Pandya uses to hook his customers into working with DataPierce is that he tries to belittle them straight off the bat. This is not just from my own experience; I watched him do the same to other prospective customers. He will tell you everything wrong about you, everything wrong about your company, everything you are doing wrong and promise that he can fix it. But when you agree to let him “fix it,” suddenly all of his suggestions are out the window and DataPierce will do all the things they said you did wrong (see above about responsiveness of our web app).