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That’s not what the article says. You’re being dismissive. I run a one-person business and its advice is spot on.

paxys 3y ago
I have done this as well and completely disagree with the advice. The key to success as an entrepreneur is to build a product that can be endlessly replicated without too much extra cost. If you have a large company paying you a large amount of money, they expect that your product is built for them and not everyone else. So your job ends up being that of an employee or at best an external consultant. Which may still be valid, sure, but your business is never going to scale in the way you’d like.
- willmadden 3y ago
  If you are bootstrapping a profitable product with mass appeal and get any sort of success your product will be replicated with VC funding and you will be outspent. The article is right. Small startups that are bootstrapping succeed via relationships, not scalability. The exception would be if you build a niche product that you can manage and scale yourself better than a well funded team could. That’s rare. A better approach is to have a solid base of profitable business clients, customize for them, and then unify the use cases & customization later on a single platform, and go big from there once you are on solid footing.
- detourdog 3y ago
  That is client management issue in my eyes. I prefer working with individuals. I find business often make political and erratic group decisions. This makes client management almost impossible. Any client large or small that understands what they are asking is a good client. I personally find dealing with individuals or coherent groups is the sweet spot. I'm also more or less done working specifically for others and I'm now pursuing a market that is measured in the 1s or maybe 10s if it's a real success.
  - j45 3y ago
    Definitely a preference Finding a niche problem in B2B is effective if you have the B2B experience. Technical folks who have consulted are especially in a good spot for this.
- jdlshore 3y ago
  The article does not say you should have one customer. It says you should choose a niche, target businesses, and aim for big dollars/small customer base rather than small dollars/big customer base.
- gitgud 3y ago
  > they expect that your product is built for them and not everyone else Exactly, build a few custom products for clients, then when they’re happy, build a platform to unify them, which will allow you to scale easily. A lot of companies try to do the platform first, which is harder to iterate and less appealing to client’s who want customisation…
- mozman 3y ago
  Except 1099 vs W2 has significant tax advantages
- hinkley 3y ago
  The last B2B I did we built a product for a couple of “whales” and then struggled making money off of the long tail. They had such peculiar business rules we had to thread a needle to get our top three working. We had one team pull a RedHat on us, essentially forking the code to make big changes for other customers, and didn’t tell us about it. When we started refactoring and rearchitecting to fix some of our biggest problems, we broke all of their stuff. Way to communicate guys. In the end it turned out the goal of the company was to sell it to deep pockets. Having prestigious customers is how you do that. But the employees including some of the salespeople thought we were trying to serve an entire global industry. If that had been the case we should have started with customers about 1 std below median size, and built momentum toward landing large customers. Because what happened is that we had contracts with the big companies we couldn’t net a profit off of, and they liked to keep paying what they were already paying. If we were solid with mid sized customers first, we could have asked for more from the biggest ones because we were selling a mature product. Instead they bought a fixer upper and wanted to pay the same as we fixed issue and added tons of functionality.

I have done this as well and completely disagree with the advice. The key to success as an entrepreneur is to build a product that can be endlessly replicated without too much extra cost. If you have a large company paying you a large amount of money, they expect that your product is built for them and not everyone else. So your job ends up being that of an employee or at best an external consultant. Which may still be valid, sure, but your business is never going to scale in the way you’d like.

willmadden 3y ago
If you are bootstrapping a profitable product with mass appeal and get any sort of success your product will be replicated with VC funding and you will be outspent. The article is right. Small startups that are bootstrapping succeed via relationships, not scalability. The exception would be if you build a niche product that you can manage and scale yourself better than a well funded team could. That’s rare. A better approach is to have a solid base of profitable business clients, customize for them, and then unify the use cases & customization later on a single platform, and go big from there once you are on solid footing.
detourdog 3y ago
That is client management issue in my eyes. I prefer working with individuals. I find business often make political and erratic group decisions. This makes client management almost impossible. Any client large or small that understands what they are asking is a good client. I personally find dealing with individuals or coherent groups is the sweet spot. I'm also more or less done working specifically for others and I'm now pursuing a market that is measured in the 1s or maybe 10s if it's a real success.
- j45 3y ago
  Definitely a preference Finding a niche problem in B2B is effective if you have the B2B experience. Technical folks who have consulted are especially in a good spot for this.
jdlshore 3y ago
The article does not say you should have one customer. It says you should choose a niche, target businesses, and aim for big dollars/small customer base rather than small dollars/big customer base.
gitgud 3y ago
> they expect that your product is built for them and not everyone else Exactly, build a few custom products for clients, then when they’re happy, build a platform to unify them, which will allow you to scale easily. A lot of companies try to do the platform first, which is harder to iterate and less appealing to client’s who want customisation…
mozman 3y ago
Except 1099 vs W2 has significant tax advantages
hinkley 3y ago
The last B2B I did we built a product for a couple of “whales” and then struggled making money off of the long tail. They had such peculiar business rules we had to thread a needle to get our top three working. We had one team pull a RedHat on us, essentially forking the code to make big changes for other customers, and didn’t tell us about it. When we started refactoring and rearchitecting to fix some of our biggest problems, we broke all of their stuff. Way to communicate guys. In the end it turned out the goal of the company was to sell it to deep pockets. Having prestigious customers is how you do that. But the employees including some of the salespeople thought we were trying to serve an entire global industry. If that had been the case we should have started with customers about 1 std below median size, and built momentum toward landing large customers. Because what happened is that we had contracts with the big companies we couldn’t net a profit off of, and they liked to keep paying what they were already paying. If we were solid with mid sized customers first, we could have asked for more from the biggest ones because we were selling a mature product. Instead they bought a fixer upper and wanted to pay the same as we fixed issue and added tons of functionality.