mountaindewelg
Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Texas. So here's what happened. About a year ago, a friend of mine asked me to help him make a website for his business. I agreed, and charged him a small amount for a basic website. Once i was done building his website, and got to know his business a little bit, i noticed that he needed some help running his shop. Because it was a new business, i offered to help him as an office manager in exchange for room & board (renting a loft in his house) and part ownership of the company. Flash forward a year. I built up "our" company website with more and more features under no direct supervision or request on his part, worked 40 hour weeks, sometimes more, and did countless personal favors making me more of a personal assistant and office manager. As he "ran" his company, i constantly had to get on him to do work so our monthly income could out weigh our monthly expenses. After putting a year into "our" company, he lined up some investors to throw us some funds. Upon the reciept of these funds, i met with him & explained that things had to be run differently if we were going to be using their money. I was told that "i'm the owner, i don't care what people have to say, im going to run the business how i want." So i decided to leave the company & take my website with me. I offered to replace the current site with the one he had directly paid for unless i recieved payment for the current site. I have now been threatened with litigation if i remove/regress the site. I'm at a loss, because he breached our verbal agreement of part ownership in the company, & has gotten away with not paying me for my services for the past year. what am i entitled to if anything? can i take my pet project (the website)? I ran the numbers through my head, even if i was paid minimum wage, i am still owed money after room and board for this past year, not to mention the specialized task of creating the company website (which was my project, my friend only wanted basic information on it, i built it up to an ecommerce giant). Please help me, because if i can take down the website, i need to because i have not been paid for it.