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Is FlyGuys a SCAM? Are you a Fly Guy?

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Dec 15, 2017
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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 pilot supply / job demand ratio for these services is high right now, 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. These 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.
 
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 pilot supply / job demand ratio for these services is high right now, 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. These 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.
Do you have a link as there are quite a few outfits using that name...
There is this one - FlyGuys Drone Pilot Company | Aerial Photography Videography and Drone Surveying
And this one - FLYGUYS - Drone Creatives Amsterdam | Aerial Cinematography & 360°
 
Based on my experience on Droners, which is much older and well-established than these guys, I wouldn't touch this company with a 10-foot pole. I wouldn't be surprised if 6 months later I would have nothing to show for the $600 I gave them.
 
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 pilot supply / job demand ratio for these services is high right now, 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. These 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.
I stay FAR away from any "referral" service that wants $ up front...
 
Hello, I'm from the FlyGuys company. Getting more jobs to Affiliate Pilots is definitely our goal, but job referrals are not the basis of subscription fees. What we do is cover ongoing back-office business services for pilots, including marketing, phone answering, job booking and billing, site mapping, help desk, branded materials, drone equipment locker use, website development and hosting and more. Optional services include media post processing. Many drone pilots don't have the resources to do all these steps personally. We pool processes and create shared, lower cost services to help grow AND manage your drone business. Hope that helps!
 
Ran across this post on Google and decided to signup and chime in. I gave these guys a try. Three months in, didn't get a single job. I can't say I'm surprised seeing that I've been on Droners.io for a year. Droners.io has been around way longer than FlyGuys and I've been getting notification on jobs in most major cities in California. The number of jobs is low, even for major cities, even on Droners which has the most exposure. And when the jobs do come up, it's a feeding frenzy so you now you've got a bunch of guys low balling, desperate to get a job, making the prices ridiculously low. I've been desparate to get a job probably like most other pilots on Droners and so that's why I tried FlyGuys "pay for play" just to see if they had some secret channel to bring in jobs better than Droners. Not. Waste of money. I feel sorry for others than keep paying with their fingers crossed. Maybe you will eventually get a job, maybe not but if you weren't the first pilot that signed up in your city, based on the trickle of jobs I've seen on Droners, I can pretty much guarantee you will get "jack" through Fly Guys. Anyone paying for anything before even getting one job is a sucker. Yep, that was me.
 
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Ran across this post on Google and decided to signup and chime in. I gave these guys a try. Three months in, didn't get a single job. I can't say I'm surprised seeing that I've been on Droners.io for a year. Droners.io has been around way longer than FlyGuys and I've been getting notification on jobs in most major cities in California. The number of jobs is low, even for major cities, even on Droners which has the most exposure. And when the jobs do come up, it's a feeding frenzy so you now you've got a bunch of guys low balling, desperate to get a job, making the prices ridiculously low. I've been desparate to get a job probably like most other pilots on Droners and so that's why I tried FlyGuys "pay for play" just to see if they had some secret channel to bring in jobs better than Droners. Not. Waste of money. I feel sorry for others than keep paying with their fingers crossed. Maybe you will eventually get a job, maybe not but if you weren't the first pilot that signed up in your city, based on the trickle of jobs I've seen on Droners, I can pretty much guarantee you will get "jack" through Fly Guys. Anyone paying for anything before even getting one job is a sucker. Yep, that was me.
Pay to play schemes are useless. You build your business over time and with hard marketing work and satisfied client referrals. I never even bother to bid Drone.io jobs, waste of time. My regular customers is what keeps me in business.
 
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Looks like enough of the FlyGuys pilots are getting tired of paying them a monthly fee for little to no jobs. I wonder how many paid a year's worth of fees to help pay for FlyGuys' online advertising and DroneDeploy/Pix4D business subscription, and didn't make their money back? Is their a no-job refund policy? This just in from the FlyGuys Pilot Newsletter...

2018 Pilot Beta Programs
Based on pilot feedback, drone business support tools are still of high interest, yet paid programs are not useful before a certain mission traction is reached. So the early 2018 FlyGuys pilot programs, Standard and Plus, will be closing on December 31, 2018
 
After many years of commercial drone operation I would estimate that 99% of the work we have done has NOT come from drone directories.

We did spend money on this route to market in the first year but soon realised that the companies we signed up to were full of promises but short on fulfilment. Focus on client satisfaction and the work will build up over time.
 
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These things are scams, plain and simple. These are carry overs from photo/video industry where you get spammed constantly from these companies and nothing ever comes from it other than a THEM taking your money.
 
I think people are intelligent enough to make up their own minds with these types of outfits.
If individuals are unfortunate enough to get burned, they do not return.

Enough said.
 
Hello, I'm from the FlyGuys company. Getting more jobs to Affiliate Pilots is definitely our goal, but job referrals are not the basis of subscription fees. What we do is cover ongoing back-office business services for pilots, including marketing, phone answering, job booking and billing, site mapping, help desk, branded materials, drone equipment locker use, website development and hosting and more. Optional services include media post processing. Many drone pilots don't have the resources to do all these steps personally. We pool processes and create shared, lower cost services to help grow AND manage your drone business. Hope that helps!
Yeah but your contract sucks. Can't pursue prospects for 3 years? Hey, everyone is a prospect, so if someone FG wanted sees my ad and calls me, you automatically gain the right to sue me for their actions. Big nope. Your contract also needs to state it is not enforceable until FG actually delivers a paying job. Too many hangups. Where's our protection? Again, big nope.
 
There are plenty of scammers in our world, this is just another one. UNBELIEVABLE!!!!
 
I have recently tried a service called Bark. I have not had much experience with it as you have to pay to get the contact information for a job, but then you get paid for the job so I guess it works out. In my area at least a lot of people seem to request jobs for Aerial work so maybe try that out. I wish it didn't cost so much before you even get a job but hey there are a lot of listings. Maybe check that out? I have only heard the experience from others so don't take my word for it.
 
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 pilot supply / job demand ratio for these services is high right now, 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. These 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.
I have wondered the same thing. And what questions should I ask that would prove they are real?
 
I have recently tried a service called Bark. I have not had much experience with it as you have to pay to get the contact information for a job, but then you get paid for the job so I guess it works out. In my area at least a lot of people seem to request jobs for Aerial work so maybe try that out. I wish it didn't cost so much before you even get a job but hey there are a lot of listings. Maybe check that out? I have only heard the experience from others so don't take my word for it.
Now that is a real scam. Stop and think about it. They want you to pay them ahead of time for a job, that is downright nuts. These job brokers all seem to be a bunch of crooks.

I just got one for Bear Valley, wanted the site mapped for $80.00 dollars. I couldn't drive to bear valley and back for $80.00 dollars. They must be desperate because they sent me three emails. I told them to add $220.00 to the $80.00 and I would do it. I sure I won't hear back from them.

If you can't make a decent profit, why mess with it?
 

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