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.Contract Beast's customers were likely exclusively these "purchasing" people, and thus, that's where the feature requests and feedback were coming from.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.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.