Then came The Disaster.
It started on an ordinary Monday morning when I received a very polite (but slightly terrifying) email from a client:
“Hey, just checking in—our contract renewal was due last month. Should we assume we’re working on goodwill now?”
I blinked. Wait… last month?
A cold sweat formed. I scrambled to find the contract. Not in my email. Not in my cloud storage. Not even in the infamous “Documents_Final_ReallyFinal” folder on my desktop.
Panic mode activated.
I stormed into the office and did what any great leader does—I blamed someone else.
“Who was tracking contract renewals?” I asked, as my team exchanged awkward glances.
“You were,” someone mumbled.
Silence. Betrayal.
Then, as if summoned by the gods of irony, my accountant walked in with another bombshell.
“Hey, just a heads-up—this vendor contract auto-renewed, and we just got billed three times more than before. Hope that’s okay!”
It was not okay.
It turned out that over the years, my contract management system had evolved into a beautiful, chaotic mess:
• Some contracts were in email threads from three years ago.
• Some were in Google Drive folders named after projects we no longer remembered.
• Some existed only in the form of “I think we signed something with them?” conversations.
At that moment, I had two choices:
1. Accept that I was a lost cause and hire a full-time “Keeper of Contracts.”
2. Do what any self-respecting IT founder does—build an app to fix my own problem.
And so, Contractli was born.
My team and I locked ourselves in a room (figuratively, because we still needed coffee) and started designing a platform that would prevent future me (and everyone like me) from ever experiencing contract-induced panic attacks again.
Fast forward to today: Contractli is live and free for everyone. Why? Because if I, a so-called “organized” tech entrepreneur, could mess this up, then surely others were struggling too.
So here’s my gift to you, fellow business owners, managers, and “I’ll-remember-this-later” professionals—a way to never lose track of your contracts again.
Because trust me, there are better ways to start a Monday than realizing you just accidentally donated three months’ worth of revenue to an expired contract.
I always thought I had things under control. After all, I was the founder of an IT company—we built systems, streamlined processes, and made businesses run smoother. I had dashboards, reminders, and a decent memory (or so I believed). Contracts? Oh, I knew where they were. Somewhere. Probably.
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