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You might want to add the best kind of "investor" to the mix: a really large, patient and interested customer. They might understand they are underwriting 1.0 w

You might want to add the best kind of "investor" to the mix: a really large, patient and interested customer. They might understand they are underwriting 1.0 with a large check and work with you closely on tailoring the system. Their incentive is to get the service to themselves as quickly as possible hitting all their required features. The downside is that they may insist on over-fitting the solution to their particular needs.

pc86 10y ago
That's a pretty big downside, especially when you need to go counter to their wishes in order to serve a broader market, or pivot to something different entirely that won't serve them at all.
- projectramo 10y ago
  Indeed it can be. I was at a company that was the big customer asking for special features etc. It was great for us, and I think the provider really appreciated the steady paycheck, the massive patience and customer testing and so on. We definitely had our own way of doing things and we had to sort out if this made sense. (Should we change our way of doing things? Should they incorporate it in the software?). Maybe they felt much worse about it in their private time and complained about us after we left. I never felt it.
- akg_67 10y ago
  > That's a pretty big downside Or it might give you a huge upside. I worked in one such situation where a small group at megacorp did pilot our alpha product and drove a lot of feature requirements. I was main point of contact for pilot. It was lot of work and some frustration but after a year of this pilot work, referral from this little group resulted in over $20M in revenue for the product from other groups within Megacorp. Over $100M of revenue from other customers in next few years was easily attributable to referral from this small group at megacorp.
twblalock 10y ago
> The downside is that they may insist on over-fitting the solution to their particular needs. They will have a strong sense of entitlement regarding this, considering how helpful they are being with their investment and their willingness to deal with pre-1.0 bugs and instability. That just means you have to choose this kind of customer carefully, because you'll have to do what they want, and you should make sure that what they want will also be wanted by other customers in the same space.
angersock 10y ago
> The downside is that they may insist on over-fitting the solution to their particular needs. This cannot be restated enough. In certain fields--especially healthcare EMR--this can kill you.

pc86 10y ago

That's a pretty big downside, especially when you need to go counter to their wishes in order to serve a broader market, or pivot to something different entirely that won't serve them at all.

projectramo 10y ago
Indeed it can be. I was at a company that was the big customer asking for special features etc. It was great for us, and I think the provider really appreciated the steady paycheck, the massive patience and customer testing and so on. We definitely had our own way of doing things and we had to sort out if this made sense. (Should we change our way of doing things? Should they incorporate it in the software?). Maybe they felt much worse about it in their private time and complained about us after we left. I never felt it.
akg_67 10y ago
> That's a pretty big downside Or it might give you a huge upside. I worked in one such situation where a small group at megacorp did pilot our alpha product and drove a lot of feature requirements. I was main point of contact for pilot. It was lot of work and some frustration but after a year of this pilot work, referral from this little group resulted in over $20M in revenue for the product from other groups within Megacorp. Over $100M of revenue from other customers in next few years was easily attributable to referral from this small group at megacorp.

twblalock 10y ago

> The downside is that they may insist on over-fitting the solution to their particular needs. They will have a strong sense of entitlement regarding this, considering how helpful they are being with their investment and their willingness to deal with pre-1.0 bugs and instability. That just means you have to choose this kind of customer carefully, because you'll have to do what they want, and you should make sure that what they want will also be wanted by other customers in the same space.

angersock 10y ago

> The downside is that they may insist on over-fitting the solution to their particular needs. This cannot be restated enough. In certain fields--especially healthcare EMR--this can kill you.