Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup
Having some experience dealing with the "purchasing" side of the house at large companies, I can guess part of what might have gone wrong.<p>Contract Beast's customers were likely exclusively these "purchasing" people, and thus, that's where the feature requests and feedback were coming from.<p>But, in the end, the success of the product within a customer company is often more driven by the "non purchasing" users...the actual departments that are trying to buy (or sell) something.   It's not unusual for the wants/needs of these people to be completely different than the purchasing department.<p>I watched several attempts for contract management software fail because of this.   In the end, what won out was narrowing the solution down to the biggest pain point...implementing just e-signatures.  That got rid of all the manual print / sign / scan-or-fax cycle, which everyone could agree on.