I feel really sorry for the CEO. She's inexperienced, she didn't know to just pay the money, and in her first disagreement with a contractor, she got an internet lynch mob on her back. She did the wrong thing, of course, but the cost was much higher than this merits. Even if she does the right thing now, there are many who will consider this a black mark on the company indefinitely.
YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
121–130 of 175 posts
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
If what the designer saying is true, then Eligible breached contract. Verbal contracts are binding in CA. And he is within his rights to get paid for his work. It should not damage his reputation at all.
Oral contracts are binding everywhere in the US. What's damaging to his reputation isn't pursuing the invoice based on an oral contract. What's damaging to his reputation is if he jumped the gun, whipping up drama about a receivable that he reasonably could have expected to get paid if he simply invoiced persistently. I suspect this thread might be a bit of a litmus test for people who have done a lot of freelancing.…
Just because it happens doesn't mean it's right. Yes companies drag out payment and make you jump through hoops to get paid (the you here is a hypothetical freelancer).
The reason they do this is to hold on to your money as long as possible with the outside hope that you'll just go away and they get away with theft.
It's bad enough with larger companies where the people you're working with may not actually be the people who are writing the checks, but at a small company like this it is unacceptable.
Assuming the story is true, the CEO agreed to pay then decided that she didn't want to pay anymore. To accomplish this she's doing her best to get the designer to give up and go away.
How is this acceptable behavior? Again I realize it's common, but it's flat out dishonorable.
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even think we have enough context to learn that lesson. I can easily see the email from the CEO having been an apology/prayer (with the understanding that it migh not have worked out), followed by not just a stern "no, seriously" but instead including a threat of legal action. People throw these threats into all kinds I thins, whether it be something as simple as a request for a refund on a $1 purchase or a t…
Yes. It helps. You cannot whip up a storm of angry Redditors when you are told by a client "send this invoice to finance@", because that is where invoices normally go. From what I've seen so far, this client did two things wrong: * They scoffed at the invoice * They told the vendor to send the invoice to legal@ If the client had declined to do EITHER of those things --- not both, just not do one of them --- there wou…
No: all we have is that they said "please send your claim to our legal team: legal@xxxapp.com": key word being "claim". I can easily see the e-mail in the middle from the contractor being one of those massive supposedly-motivating "I will sue you if you don't do what I want, as I believe you did X and Y and Z illegally" e-mails.
If so, it wouldn't make sense to say "send your invoice to finance": the correct response is "send your claim to legal". I really don't think we can claim anyone in this situation can learn any lessons without the complete and full e-mail context, as I honestly have dealt with enough irritating people to not put even a single iota of trust that the contractor is explaining even the sequence of events in a way that isn't designed to make them seem like they didn't send a screaming pile of pain in their side of the conversation.
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#124[deleted]
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#125My advice? Get up, dust yourself off, and move on. These scenarios might result in a deluge of support from others in your field, but for a lot of managers, this puts you on a special kind of blacklist. We can't know all the details of the circumstance, but we do know for sure that you were willing to "name & shame" the client here on HN. For some, that's enough. Just to be clear, it definitely sounds like you got a…
Shut up and deal with it?
I really wonder what this world would be like if everyone who had a career, family, or life to risk over being a whistleblower took the safe, sure path and shut up and dealt with it.
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, this is a vibrant case study for both inexperienced founders and freelancers about the importance of doing the boring shit right. Sign a contract. Set a price. Get paid. Make sure there is a meeting of the minds , as the lawyers like to say. This, right here, is exactly why we do these things.
While I agree this is a good learning experience, and so deserves some attention, we disagree on the lesson. The actual lesson, for the founder, is this: >>Verbal contracts are binding. You cannot legally agree to something on the phone and then change your mind when it comes time to sign the written form of the contract. Period.
We don't even really know that this is what happened. Even if it were, we don't know the context or the tone of the e-mails leading up to this. You are jumping to a ton of conclusions from a post whose goal is just to induce a lynch mob... even the specific quotations, were they actually 100% accurate, are not things I can easily see having been totally reasonable if (and I personally find this much more likely) the contractor was being belligerent and was doing little more than threatening lawsuits and ownership claims in their side of the correspondence (possibly even /before/ there was the alleged billing dispute).
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#127Pay the guy his money, but man, that design is pretty bad.
It's not so much bad, per se, as it is just... well... inert. There's no there, there.
Presumably there would have been some further iterations and back and forth between the client and the designer had the contract continued.
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#128Without saying anything about this particular situation, can I just point out for the four hundredth time that $780 invoices generate far, far, far more stupidity than $7,800 or $78,000 invoices do? This is the fault of both people who send $780 invoices and people who generate work likely to cause $780 invoices. Many of you will be able to pick whether you are either of these types of people. I suggest being neither.
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#129Seriously? Please learn how to properly freelance before publicly flaming a bootstrapped startup. Always get your task/rate in writing before continuing..
So just because he didn't have the foresight to have a signed contract, it's grounds for him to get f*ed by a well funded startup?
Seriously?
Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Eligible sent confidential data to a contract designer for the purposes of a mockup then they deserve everything they get. I don't- for a second- think that they did.
Well they (Eligible) have already demonstrated a flagrant disregard for other people with this whole incident.
This is a good point - would _you_ trust your medical data/history to someone who'd screw over a graphic designer for $780? With no other indicators of reputation - what's everybody else's opinion on what this startup might do when a medical insurance company show up and says "$10,000 to see $persons medical history"?
Maybe the designer is misleading us all, and there's a very good reason with the company are reluctant to pay $780 for some work the designer thought they'd asked for. But surely in the field they've chosen, reputation and appearance of trustworthiness have orders of magnitude more value that this spat?