[CharlieDigital]

Most startup -> enterprise deals are like this in nature. Enterprise buyers are already wary of small startups (for various reasons). A 1 person startup? Wouldn't even get a meeting with the buyers in many cases even if your software was 10x cheaper and exactly solved the business problem.

[pc86]

I worked for a public health care Enterprise early in my career and I make a joke to one of the VPs once about how it seemed like the real career success would be finding one of our pain points as a patient or employee, leaving to start a company that solves that, and selling it back to us. He laughed and said several people had done that but you better take a half dozen executives with you or you'd never get the first meeting no matter how good the product was.

[CharlieDigital]

    > you better take a half dozen executives with you or you'd never get the first meeting no matter how good the product was

I spent ~16 years of my career in life sciences and this is also my experience. There's no way you get into an enterprise account with a pharma as a startup without a lot of deep connections; life sciences space is very high in regulatory requirements and risk and the risk/reward ratio with startups simply isn't worth it.

In my specific space, clinical trials can run for years. A company that might fold if they run out of runway? Non-starter. I was a member of a small company that did make this work and it required that we put our code in escrow with a large multi-national IT company that owned the support contract (customer paid us for licensing, paid multi-national IT company for support, our source code went into escrow).