My worst experience working with a founder

I'm sharing my experience with a founder so that others could learn from it. A brief intro about me, I'm a freelancer and a software engineer with an year of experience, I have a small friends group and we do projects for startups specifically.

So here's the story, I met this founder at a event. He said he was building something travel agent stuff. I was like cool. Later he reached out to me on LinkedIn for building the same travel agent for him. We had a good discussion. He wanted me to be a part of his team, I said I have other projects i cannot commit to your thing alone. You hire me project wise,give me a project and pay me after project. He was like I don't want in that way, I want to form a team. He suggested me to do part time. I was like fine. I said I would take some monthly payment like an employee around 10-20k ik this is very cheap, but I had a full-time job and other projects, so based on the time could commit, I said this. He was like cool we'll do this. So i kinda unofficially became an employee in that startup. Here's the mistake this was an MVP stage thing, we didn't have any agreement nor his startup was registered, it was just a verbal thing. Over the month things moved very slowly, much time spent on discussions and how to do stuff and all, rather than making stuff. I spent a good amount of time in meetings with him, went to his place for discussions, built some APIs, but he wanted more specific and tailored stuff. This whole development was going on the backend side no frontend, for which I was irritated. I always said him let's make UI and backend together. He was like no you make backend first then frontend, because he didn't have anyone to do frontend. That direction was not progressing. He used to tell me in companies we make backend first completely then we start frontend. I was like man, in startups it's not the same way, you build fast and build things simultaneously, in startups it wouldn't be like you build the whole backend first then you'll build frontend.
At the end of the month, i realized I can't work like this and said him that I'm gonna leave and focus on my other things. He was like okay, cool! He doesn't take out the topic of my salary. I was like he'll pay anyways. Then while discussing he takes out the point that what we thought we couldn't make and all, this that. I make all the commits of my code and push it to the GitHub and end this thing. Next day he says can you help in deployment and stuff of whatever you made, I was like see i don't have much time, I will charge for this. He says okay and doesn't come back to me for 2 days. In these two days, I had a document with me in my google docs, I remove his access. This doc had basic stuff of what we discussed over all meetings. After two days, he said I cannot access this document and give him access. I was so angry, does this guy thinks that I'm his puppet and work for free according to what he wants? I engage him in a discussion and he says I'm very unprofessional and stuff like that. I removed the access to this document for money and all. I'm like damn you man, if I had money thing I would have messed up your codebase, I had access to that all. I had access to all credentials till then. But don't you realise that you owe me something, I felt that guy was so cheap, i couldn't bring myself to say man, you made me work, however this was for a month and then at the end of it, you don't pay? Like seriously. Then he says what we thought half of the work was done so I'll pay you half amount, I'm like no don't pay at all. And I don't want a label ki this guy did half work and took full money! Cause he thinks that he hired me on project basis, which was never true. He hired me on monthly basis.

Now what he does is he pays me 5k, saying thanks for your help. I'm like damn dude, what's help, what's this nonsense. There's nothing help, I worked because I wanted to, I did this for some salary not for free. And i send him back his money, the person who doesn't recognise my efforts, i don't want money of his. I'm not a begger.

I don't understand why people in India are like this really, why do they think everything is help and monetary terms are not required to discuss.

My lesson from this incident, always make sure you take things in writing before doing any work for anyone(and don't trust people easily). And make sure to talk things properly espically regarding terms and conditions, whether for a small project or large.

Thanks for reading my rant.