Time and misalignment. It's distracting and hard to scale. Seed money buys time for small team to find product/market fit, and growth money for customer acquis

Time and misalignment. It's distracting and hard to scale. Seed money buys time for small team to find product/market fit, and growth money for customer acquisition with a delayed payback period... and the ceiling is how reality-distorting your CEO is. Consulting is limited by your hours, and likely takes away from your experimentation, product refinement, customer success, and marketing $ + hours. In addition, it biases the product/processes towards the service as consulting immediately makes serious money and saas takes months/years to make even $100/mo. The only exception we did was limited consulting around customer success and co-design of features already on our roadmap. Super painful decision, revenue-wise! Despite strong interest, we resisted consulting services for our GPU visual graph intelligence platform for years to avoid the misalignment. Due to the recent demand for graph AI for analyzing problems like security /fraud / customer behavior / digital twins, and our interest in bundling those capabilities into our platform yet realizing we need to learn alongside our users, we flipped that decision. However, we have a base product, are being super picky on projects aligned with graph AI, and our clients also want that product goal realized long-term (vs more consulting.)