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YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

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Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#51

Post by dmix »

soup10 wrote: post #42
_delirium wrote: post #19

I'm going to go out on a limb and register a slight discomfort with the increasing use of HN as a "court of public opinion" in very fact-bound disputes like this one. I can sort of see resorting to it out of desperation, but I'm afraid the Internet Lynch Mob has a very high ratio of outrage to effort spent actually investigating. This post has 84 upvotes in 21 minutes, which suggests a very quick investigation! So, t…

Honestly, that screen looks like 5 hours work, max. Summoning an internet lynch mob over a dispute like that is incredibly unprofessional.

I disagree. It's impossible to tell from a screenshot how long something took.

I could easily recreate that screenshot in a couple hours in photoshop - but that doesn't mean it TOOK a couple hours in photoshop.

The majority of design is thinking through how the app will be used, researching similar apps, figuring out intended user goals, etc etc. Then theres a long process of experimentation until you get to a point where you're comfortable to send it to the client.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#52

Post by kennywinker »

soup10 wrote: post #42
_delirium wrote: post #19

I'm going to go out on a limb and register a slight discomfort with the increasing use of HN as a "court of public opinion" in very fact-bound disputes like this one. I can sort of see resorting to it out of desperation, but I'm afraid the Internet Lynch Mob has a very high ratio of outrage to effort spent actually investigating. This post has 84 upvotes in 21 minutes, which suggests a very quick investigation! So, t…

Honestly, that screen looks like 5 hours work, max. Summoning an internet lynch mob over a dispute like that is incredibly unprofessional.

Sure. 5 hours @ somewhere between $67-20/hour* is $337-$100. Since the post doesn't mention a specific amount, we have no way of knowing if their bill was for more or less... all we can guess is it was > $100 (three $'s used when blanking the price).

*http://www.howdesign.com/design-business/pricing/hourly-rate...

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#53

Post by qq66 »

tptacek wrote: post #37

I don't understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn't going to get paid and jump the gun? But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it's very simple: If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@. You have…

Yeah, the whole story is missing the part where the legal email address says "we won't pay you." Could be that's the person who is going to pay.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#54

Post by veemjeem »

consultutah wrote: post #15

The op has, hopefully, learned a valuable lesson: don't work without a signed contract. That said, the comp should have just paid or, at very least, tried to negotiate the amount thought I don't think that's worth the effort either. This is such a paltry amount as to not be worth the effort to fight.

Are emails legally binding in CA? See here:

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/corporate-law/cont...

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#55

Post by sudonim »

tptacek wrote: post #37

I don't understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn't going to get paid and jump the gun? But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it's very simple: If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@. You have…

Do most YC S12 companies have a legal department? Or a finance department for that matter?

Im sure this particular situation is nuanced, and both parties seem to be unhappy. I haven't worked with many contractors yet, but my 2 rules of thumb are:

Don't ask people to do work for you unless you plan to pay them for it.

Pay promptly and in full.

It's pretty simple. If the CEO was never planning to pay, the conversation shouldn't have gotten that far and the contractor shouldn't have had the idea that they should go and make something.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#56

Post by cmelbye »

prezjordan wrote: post #17
ebzlo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like eligibleapp.com

Uh they literally stole Path's design. Look at the bottom left corner.

A lot of people have attempted to copy that UI element from Path. There's a few open source libraries for the iOS SDK that will accomplish that. Of course, it looks much better in Path in this case.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#57

Post by Cushman »

tptacek wrote: post #48
Cushman wrote: post #35

How much does it really matter in these situations whether or not you have a "signed contract"? My understanding is that any agreement to do work for compensation is a contract, and these days even a "signed" contract is likely to just be a PDF which is as easily faked as an emailed "$65/hr? Sounds good, go ahead and get started." Is it just one of those things where someone's less likely to try to rip you off if the…

It matters a LOT. A you-said they-said dispute over a verbal contract can be expensive to resolve --- almost certainly way more expensive than the total value of this dev contract. Startups who hire outside vendors should be very careful to foreclose on any potential verbal contract --- "do not start working for us until we have a signed master agreement and a statement of work" --- and that's for a lot of reasons, n…

But it's not a verbal contract if it's over email, right? It's right there in writing, we both have copies of it, it can (theoretically) be verified by a third party.

If I go to small claims with a copy of an email, what can they say that they couldn't say just as well if I go in with a piece of paper I claim they signed?

I've never seen someone say "Don't start working without a notarized contract", but that's the hidden message, right? Otherwise we're just playing at semantics.

Edit: As above, I notice now the OP did have a purely verbal contract. I was referring to emailed agreement which is common in our line of work, though.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#59

Post by kika »

alttab wrote: post #28
kika wrote: post #9

I don't understand this, people. They're YC funded, in the worst case they have how much now, 10k? Risk your reputation for a few hundred dollars, having a few thousand in the pocket, why?

They didn't sign anything, and the "CEO" of any YC startup early enough to need to outsource product development isn't promising anything despite their words.

I outsource my startup development heavily and I didn't bother signing anything either. Yes, I've lost a few hundred (probably even a couple of thousand) this way, paying for the job that went directly to the dumpster. It's a cost of doing business. And I didn't raise money this time, this is all my consulting revenue, I could have paid an income tax on it and put it in my pocket. But if you want to build a beautiful house there will be sawdust. These money is the sawdust.

Re: YC S12 company refuses to pay for my design. "Send your claim to our legal team"

#60

Post by Silhouette »

tptacek wrote: post #37

I don't understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn't going to get paid and jump the gun? But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it's very simple: If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@. You have…

Surely the lesson for start-up CEOs is even simpler: you are responsible for everything in your organisation.

Like most here, I wouldn't have let myself get into the position of this freelance designer or chosen to air my dirty laundry in public. On the other hand, if I had sent a legitimate invoice and a CEO tried to fob me off with the kind of attitude claimed here (he says, noting that we haven't heard the other side of the story yet) then I would be extremely unsympathetic to flippant comments and requests to mess around with underlings. I imagine my response would be to send the final claim letter by registered post with a note that legal action would follow if the invoice remained unpaid after a reasonable period.

Of course, in this case, it doesn't matter: the Internet hype machine has been started, and if the reported claims are accurate, it is presumably a matter of time before everyone who has anything to do with this start-up starts forgetting to return their calls. Who wants to be associated with someone who thinks it's funny not to pay their bills, particularly when it's a small business working with another small business?

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