

Ask HN: Should I sell my side project? - mcorrientes

Hello Everyone,<p>I'm currently in a very bad situation and I'm not sure what to do.  I thought maybe someone could help me find a solution.<p>About two months ago I got in touch with someone who wanted to pay me about 5 grands to develop a software client which gathers ingame statistics of a game called "League of Legends" and eventually hire me later for developing a website to present some of those statistics. ( there was no payment in advance )<p>After working about 4 weeks fulltime, almost around the clock, I finally developed a client which does all the magic the customer asked for.<p>Well the client was working but the customer wasn't a programmer, therefore he paid only half of it and wanted an additional evalutation period ( about 2 weeks ) just to be sure everything works fine.<p>4 weeks later he still didn't payed the rest and I really got pissed off  ( you know I really had to pay my bills and worked very hard to develop the client at a low price )<p>With those anger feelings I started to build my own statistics site ( www.lolstatistics.com ), it went Ok the first days but really took off within last 3 days. ( from 5k to 80k pageviews per day )<p>Okay now to my problems.<p>The guy who asked me to develop the software client responded finally<p>I showed him the website ( which just had 5k views at that time ) and he finally agreed to buy the site for 6 grands ( splitted into 3 rounds ) and pay the rest of the client<p>Now my pain is. I still haven't seen any money yet and he's already spamming on boards and communities to get "more" visitors. 
I didn't gave him the site yet and he's already starting to ruin the sites reputation.<p>I also realized that I probably sold my first real successful site, underpriced<p>I worked hard on it, bootstrapped it out of nothing, I created the client, designed the website, did the marketing and took and still take all the risk  ( as the site may be shut down by the vendor of the game )<p>A platform architect from the vendor recently sended me also a email and wrote "I recently dropped by your awesome new site and it certainly looks great" and he wanted to talk with me with me.<p>So what should I do ?<p>Should I cancel the deal with the customer and take the risk to keep the site running on my own  ( I still need to pay my bills  ) 
or should I sell it and take the money for the website and maybe also some maintenance work ?<p>And what about the risk that Riot Games ( the vendor ) could take legal actions ?<p>Can someone give me an advice please ?
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mcorrientes
Riot Games just send us an email again, selling this product to someone who
might spam around with this site,

is out of question now; especially after they contacted me directly and know
me personally now.

Anyway thanks for putting my mind together.

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blackboxxx
Your client sounds like an insensitive scumbag, and you sound like a pushover.

I suggest you squeeze hard for the money owed to you and tell him you're going
to keep the site.

Is he going to like you? No. Will he at least have a shred of respect for you?
Yes.

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iamdave
First question, probably the most relevant: what do you have on paper?

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mcorrientes
no contract; just an invoice and half of the payment for the client

Bests max

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iamdave
Well, the good news is you're pretty much free to run this yourself, slap some
ads on it and bring in the bacon.

Bad news is: you're going to have a hard time collecting due from your client.

