Seems there's a "new kid on the block" for the drone pilot referral directories. Seems like there's about a half dozen of them out there. I've heard from other pilots, all these services, the supply of pilots is huge and the number of jobs posted per week is very small in most areas, even on the most prominent directories/referral services.
So I got this email today from FlyGuys, it was highly unprofessional, it started out without my real first name:
Hello #[Contacts.First Name}
The image in the signature was broken, etc. And the email makes claims like "The number of mission inquires, as expected, is going up logarithmically and as a result of this rapidly expanding sales pipeline, booked missions are starting to happen multiple times per day." Logarithmically? What, from 2 jobs a week to 4?
The thing about this FlyGuys service is unlike the other referral services, they want either $99 a month or $199 a month from you. If the job posting to pilot ratio for these services is really low, I would expect the chance you will be paying your monthly fee and getting NO JOBS is quite high. Do you get your fee refunded? No. So these Fly Guys want $1,200 to $2,400 a year where the other service want $0 unless you actually get and bill a job. This really smells like a big SCAM to me!
The email goes on further to say "We are about to launch a major weapon next week. A mostly automated function to register each pilot with near 100 directories. We were already doing google, bing, now yahoo, yellow pages, +90 more... this will help our pilots' url prominence in all searches."
"Major weapon?" My friend who works in the Internet Market business says basically they just signed up for a business directory submission service, there's a dozen of them, for probably a couple hundred bucks a month, and so they are really operating from a revenue standpoint more as an Internet marketing service, collecting thousands in fees and paying hundreds to use an automated directory submission service while most likely providing a small trickle of jobs to select pilots or for pilots to all fight over.
Has anyone actually signed up for this service? How long have you been with them? What kind of jobs did you get? What area of the country are you in? Which affiliate are you?
I'm really afraid this is a scam that many pilots may fall for. There are free ways to get your business listed in directories and you risk paying out lots of money with no jobs referred to you.
So I got this email today from FlyGuys, it was highly unprofessional, it started out without my real first name:
Hello #[Contacts.First Name}
The image in the signature was broken, etc. And the email makes claims like "The number of mission inquires, as expected, is going up logarithmically and as a result of this rapidly expanding sales pipeline, booked missions are starting to happen multiple times per day." Logarithmically? What, from 2 jobs a week to 4?
The thing about this FlyGuys service is unlike the other referral services, they want either $99 a month or $199 a month from you. If the job posting to pilot ratio for these services is really low, I would expect the chance you will be paying your monthly fee and getting NO JOBS is quite high. Do you get your fee refunded? No. So these Fly Guys want $1,200 to $2,400 a year where the other service want $0 unless you actually get and bill a job. This really smells like a big SCAM to me!
The email goes on further to say "We are about to launch a major weapon next week. A mostly automated function to register each pilot with near 100 directories. We were already doing google, bing, now yahoo, yellow pages, +90 more... this will help our pilots' url prominence in all searches."
"Major weapon?" My friend who works in the Internet Market business says basically they just signed up for a business directory submission service, there's a dozen of them, for probably a couple hundred bucks a month, and so they are really operating from a revenue standpoint more as an Internet marketing service, collecting thousands in fees and paying hundreds to use an automated directory submission service while most likely providing a small trickle of jobs to select pilots or for pilots to all fight over.
Has anyone actually signed up for this service? How long have you been with them? What kind of jobs did you get? What area of the country are you in? Which affiliate are you?
I'm really afraid this is a scam that many pilots may fall for. There are free ways to get your business listed in directories and you risk paying out lots of money with no jobs referred to you.
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