Martin wanted me to meet with him for coffee, with the idea that this dispute could be settled. I met with him, and his story was that he had taken over Empery Software from Stripp. He said that his primary business was raising venture capital, and at the time, he had a site for it, raisingcapital.ca. I learned later that he is also in the business of buying lapsed domain names and re-selling them; you can read more about this at http://www.domainstate.com/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=50247. Although he operates this business as dropwizard.com, dropwizard.com itself is a lapsed domain. His inventory as of August 2005 included domains like accountpayables.com and bargainautomotive.com, but it also included some names like blackcocks.ca.
Anyway, what Martin proposed was to draw up a a new agreement that would pay about two-thirds of the money owed to me, but he also wanted some more work done on the project. I agreed to consider such an agreement. He sent it over a day or two later, and it was certainly the most unusual such document I've ever seen. It said that I would get paid $8,000 as capital becomes available. Well, my reaction to this is, “this guy must think I'm extremely stupid.” However, I showed it to Doug King. His suggestion was that, on balance, I had a better chance of collecting through an agreement like this as opposed to continuing through the small claims route. For one thing, having Martin's signature on such a document was a written acknowledgment that I was owed the money. So, I went back to Martin with the removal of the “when capital becomes available” phrase and some other changes suggested by King. We came up with a document that was mutually acceptable, and it was signed by both of us.
A couple of weeks later, I received the first of what was supposed to the three installments from Martin. It was $2,667.66. This was the only payment I got from him. Our agreement was that there were some things in Sales Sniper that were to be fixed after this first installment. I did this, working with Stripp. Then I waited for the rest of the money to come in. A 180-day deadline in the agreement came and went. A month after the 180 days had expired, I got a call from Martin, asking me to do some more work. I told him, “sure, as soon as you pay me the $5,332.34 plus interest that you owe me.” Martin didn't like this idea; his response was, “Do we have to come over and break both of your legs to get this done?”
