I gave them data from my company, and they gave me things in return. Through a bunch of sales that database ended up being the core of a large mobile app that's a household name, but you'd never know it from the outside.
When we got bought the founders complained about how it wasn't enough to retire on. Aww, poor babies. We were too early (Apple introduced a similar product 6+ years after we started ours), so the payoff was only enough for them to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Except they immediately got condos downtown with unobstructed water views so I doubt that lasted very long.
I think you had the same problem we did. Potential investors take competition in a space as validation. Legitimate competition just solidifies that validation. The moment you folded, the screws got tightened on the other company. Either they didn't get any offers at all, or with terms that were terrible. Founders don't want to be treated the same way they treat their employees.
(This thing where companies get bought out and discontinue their flagship product is, in my mind, a failure mode. That's not success if you make things for a living. Somebody, not us, got rich, while we have a project on our resume that was a failure by our standards, but makes us more attractive to the next guy who wants to pump and dump a company. An attractive little cog for their big wheel. And maybe, just maybe, enough from shares or bonuses to get a loan on a new car)
Yep. I worked with a startup that, after a few months, obviously had this as its primary motive. They made an app similar to another big-name (at the time) app, with the intent of having that bigger app buy them out.
When the big fish didn't swallow their little fish they blew all of their remaining cash on a big party in New York and flew in all kinds of bold-faced names to bring attention to themselves. And it worked. A few months later they were eaten by another company, everyone lost their jobs, and the founders retired at 31.
The irony is that a few months after that, its only competitor "pivoted" and abandoned the space it was competing in. If the small fish had held on, it would have owned that market.