CreativeMornings HQ
12 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2015–2026
37:54 · 860K views · Jul 7, 2012
Mike Monteiro's CreativeMornings talk on getting paid for creative and freelance work, covering contracts, working with lawyers, and refusing to work for free. It is delivered with blunt humor.
HN regulars send freelancers and consultants to it whenever clients don't pay or contracts come up.
20 comments from Hacker News
Please watch this: Fuck You, Pay Me: this video The $1250 I spent once to have a business attorney draft up a template for my services agreement is the best $1250 I ever spent in the past 7 years. That $1250 makes me money , because I never have to harass clients to get paid, because they know I have legal recourse if they don't. Since then I've maybe paid him $1000 to deal with things clients wanted to redline in my service agreement. That $2250 total (which is a legitimate business expense) is a pittance compared to what I would lose for a single unpaid invoice. Meanwhile, I always hear from freelancers that don't get paid, but claim lawyers are "too expensive". You know what's really expensive? Getting $0 for the last N days you worked instead of $X. $X is a hell of a lot more money, and unless you have a contract in place, you expose yourself to that possibility every time you engage with a client.
You really need to watch this (very famous) talk by Mike Monteiro, called "Fuck You, Pay Me": this video Especially the section where his attorney starts talking (at about 7:20).
Fuck you, pay me for those of you uninitiated, this talk by Mike Monteiro is awesome - about not getting paid in creative services: this video
I watched this video from Mike Monteiro and I always refer to it since. It's about getting paid for the work you do. this video
That really depends; some company's legal department might go overboard with the stuff they make you sign 'or no deal'. Mike Monteiro talks about this in his "Fuck you, pay me" talk [1]. He says that a lot of companies have boilerplate contracts which have outdated provisions like requiring you to hand over printouts of source code, or delivering software on floppy diskettes. The proper response is to have a lawyer yourself who can review the contract and explain to the company's legal counsel that 1) these contract provisions are unreasonable and outdated and 2) that striking these provisions will not create additional liabilities for the company. The reasons these contracts go overboard is because every time the company gets burned, it adds some scar tissue to the contract to prevent that same eventually from occurring again, regardless of whether it's applicable to the task at hand. Maybe it works different in different parts of the world, but we signed some crazy things (which were dealbreakers if not signed) in the past and no-one ever sued us for it I will be extremely honest. You got lucky. You put your head in the mouth of the lion, and it didn't bite. It doesn't mean that what you did was a good idea, it just means that you got away with it. [1]: this video