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Built a SaaS on the side, now worried my B2B contract is a problem
I'm a contractor (B2B, not full-time employee) at a large US corporation. The division I work in does something pretty specific and unrelated to what I built on the side. On evenings and weekends I built an AI-powered BI tool. Closest comparison would be Metabase or Hex, but with an AI chat that can actually look at your data, write queries, and build notebooks for you. Users connect their own datasources (Postgres, BigQuery, Google Sheets, etc). The product is fully built and ready to launch. Here's the issue. The parent corp does have analytics products in their broader portfolio, even though my division does something completely different (different team, different product, different customers). And my contract has the standard IP and non-compete language. I got nervous and already took down my landing page and put the staging environment behind basic auth. A few things I'm trying to figure out: * Has anyone actually gone to their employer or client and disclosed a side project like this? How did the conversation start, and what happened? Did they greenlight it, try to claim it, ask you to drop it? * I've been considering just selling it on acquire\[dot\]com and walking away. Anyone done that with a pre-revenue product? The price ranges I'm seeing online are all over the place. * How much weight does the "different product, different segment, different customer" argument actually carry in practice? Is it a real defense or just something founders tell themselves? I know that I should go to talk with my lawyer but for now i want to hear about your stories. On a side note, since the product is sitting there done anyway, if anyone here works with data and would be open to giving it a quick look or doing some early validation, feel free to DM me. Would genuinely value the feedback from people who use BI tools day to day, and at this point even a 15 minute chat would help me figure out if this thing is worth fighting for or just selling off.
The venture faces a critical 'kill-switch' risk due to potential IP claims from a large corporate employer, which currently overshadows the technical achievement of building a functional AI-BI tool solo. While the market for AI-driven analytics is massive, the lack of traction and the founder's legal uncertainty make this a high-risk, pre-seed prospect that requires immediate legal resolution before it's investable.