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Who doesn’t want a big customer with a big appetite? It looks like easy money and a sure-fire way to grow your business. The holy grail of business wins is landing a massive customer. A company with impressive brand recognition and deep pockets.
At least, that is what social media and business books love to portray. Yet they do little to highlight the dark side.
Great points all around.
I’ve simplified it for myself.
Either I build a business to go after big customers or I don’t.
What kills a small company is multiple categories of customers.
One big one can turn into three, if you don’t have 5-10 smaller ones consuming your bandwidth.
It's a very general article, and appears to be based on the author's experience in custom software contracting.
But:
- Essentially the opposite lessons can be applied to SaaS or most hosted web software, where the marginal cost of adding a customer regardless of size is zero.
- Large customers are an excellent source of valuable feature requests since somebody on the client's team will have the expertise and time to communicate their requirements. They often have feature matrix comparisons with your competitors, too.
- Large customers make good reference customers from a PR standpoint, ideally one in each industry.