Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup
Hi. Tim here.<p>I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly.<p>1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.<p>2) I'm not saying there was no solution. There might have been, but the team and I could not find one. Think of it this way. You and a team decide to summit a mountain. It's a high-risk endeavor. After weeks of going over your maps and equipment you just can't see a plausible way up. Do you call it off or set out hoping you'll be able to figure it out.  It doesn't mean no one can do it. I means I could not do it with that team and that equipment.<p>3) Why didn't we leverage the contract approval features that customers loved? We tried. The problem was that those kinds of approvals were not core workflow for SMBs. It was useful when importing contract templates, but was not used much after that. Nice feature but not important enough to get companies to sigh up for multiple seats, which is what we needed.<p>4) Whats going to happen to the code and to Tim?  No decisions yet. I'm open to suggestions on both counts.