Can you give an example where this course of action has ever worked out well for the designer?

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 exactly the same set of options with finance@, and your legal can still review the invoice, ping the vendor, or what-have-you, but you haven't escalated the situation.

I don't know the founders and I have no connection to the company in question (other than participating in a previous YC batch).

>I figured :)

It's hard for me to comprehend how little they value their reputation with such a response. $<1000 apparently. Shameful.

In a strange way I understand the position the CEO may be in. They may have thought because they weren't going to use it they shouldn't have to pay. In the past I've paid a designer for work only to change my mind on a product but that isn't the designer's fault. You still have to pay whomever completes work for you, even if you don't use it.

Just sounds like across the board naivety, rather than malice especially with the legal department comment. It's always best to sort problems out immediately and directly or they get in the way.

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 raw deal here, but I've only heard your side of the story. Experience tells me that people who find themselves in this position are there because they cut corners (work order and statement of work), or trusted someone too early. Both of these are poor judgement calls. Take ownership of that, learn from it, and go find new clients. If you're not in a financial position to take it on the chin, file your small claims paperwork and have your day in court. I just doubt that the name & shame approach is the best thing for the future of your career as a freelancer.

Is it just one of those things where someone's less likely to try to rip you off if they put their signature on something? Or is it more to make sure you get the words in front of a couple of lawyers who are much less likely to lie than the involved parties?

I'm glad to see 'court of public opinion'(AKA reputation) make a comeback. The concept of reputation is, in my humblest of opinions, more important than our legal system when it comes to keeping people from behaving badly. Being publicly shamed is a deterrent for unethical behavior in a way that our courts can not be because of the ridiculously high cost of litigation.

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.

Being young & stupid at the time, I blamed him for thinking he took shortcuts and refused to pay him all of what he was owed at first. But it was my fault for not being more specific in the original job. I eventually apologized and paid him the rest of the money. Lesson learned.

I believe design work is especially prone to this. But none of this is an excuse. If you have a signed contract, you honor it. Period.

The cost of attorneys and more importantly the distraction isn't worth the worst case invoice for three days work. It's not going to cost you your shirt, just one sleeve. Be glad it's a cheap lesson.

Both contracts in this story (the one possibly agreed to on the phone, and the one offered in writing by email) were verbal contracts--one oral and one written.

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?

Lesson: Get paid first when working with new clients. There just is no other way.

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 thousand dollar consulting bill. People even seem to believe that it helps: that it provides motivation to be heard.

On my end, however, the second there is a threat is the moment I cannot help you any more: I refer you to legal. If you threaten legal action, it is no longer a business decision, it is a legal one. Likewise, of I threaten legal action, it is because I've already given up on business and have already talked to a lawyer, and actually want to talk to yours.

Here, we just don't know. We have some sentences taken out of context that are designed to make this designer seem reasonable. ...but... that "I figured :)" from the CEO is, to me, really telling: it tells me that this person probably thought the designer was "over the top" in their reaction and of course would try to escalate with lynch mob...

So, in that possible context: does "talk to finance help"? If it does, I feel like it would send the wrong message: that you really are now in legal land, not in finance or business land. Again, though: just "possible context", as we don't have the entire email exchange (leading me to be stuck in "people who have reacted like this at me had these associated behaviors" world).

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.

At worst the invoice is for less than $2000 (3 days at top rate). No attorney can just make it go away for less than the cost of paying the invoice.

What should happen is that the attorney will say to pay it, and send their own invoice on top of it.

Your argument is a classic case of the correlation/causation fallacy.

A modest invoice does not "generate" stupidity. Millions of freelancers around the world make a good living doing relatively small jobs for satisfied customers and submitting modest invoices that get paid on time.

If you are in a position to work on higher-value deals, then naturally you will be dealing with other people of the same level. To get to that level typically requires a certain degree of professionalism, whichever side of the deal you're on. So sure, people working with higher-value contracts tend to have less hassle.

But being messed around by someone who won't pay your invoice doesn't mysteriously become your fault just because the invoice amount was under $1,000. That really is akin to saying that it's your fault you were robbed because you forgot to lock your home, or that she was asking for it because she was wearing a short skirt and had a couple of drinks.

Many of you will be able to pick whether you are either of these types of people. I suggest being neither.

I usually agree with your comments, but in this case, I'm afraid your advice is like saying "Make sure you run a successful business and deal only with great clients!" If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. In reality, even those of us who are successful today were the new guy once, and I expect that almost all of us have made at least one deal we would have preferred to avoid, so that we could pay the rent or fund a side project.

I've also never had anything even remotely approaching this sort of problem. It's jus so easily avoided by insisting on the basics of communication.

So I think you've got it backwards. People willing and able to work for $78k invoices have probably figured this out at some point (either the easy way or the hard way). People on the low end may or may not have. That's not a reason to avoid the low end. It's a reason to figure this stuff out.

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.

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, not just misunderstandings like this.

Obviously, if a company operator deliberately leads a vendor to believe there's an authorization to start work, they're morally on the hook for billed hours. But in reality, consultants go into engagements like that knowing that they're on the hook if anything goes wrong. This comes up a lot in consulting, because legal negotiation over master agreements can take weeks and sometimes threaten to ice deals that can be kept alive by just starting ahead of the contract.

People are way more likely to argue about what was agreed to, than about whether an agreement was made.

With verbal agreements, most people won't lie and say that no conversation took place. (The "whether" part.) But many people will misremember or distort the exact words that were exchanged. (The "what" part.) And those exact words are what count, legally.

Likewise, a person would have to be really slimy to claim that your signed, written contract is a forgery. Most people won't dispute that they signed it. (Again, the "whether" part.) And since it's in writing, and there simply is no room for disputing the "what."

To put it another way, getting a written agreement raises the moral and legal stakes for a potential welcher. They'd have to accuse you of forgery, instead of just shrugging and saying "I guess we remember the conversation differently."