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As soon as you start dealing with large customers, these things become inevitable. People can’t start doing whatever they like because it becomes riskier to do
by physicsguy 3y ago
As soon as you start dealing with large customers, these things become inevitable. People can’t start doing whatever they like because it becomes riskier to do it. What might be good for that one customer may not be good for the big customers you actually need to keep to make a profitable business. Big customers always want to know about the roadmap.
- kijin 3y agoThat depends on what kind of large customers you're doing business with. If a customer is large enough, and their pockets deep enough, you can absolutely justify building what is good only for that customer, and shipping it only to that customer. Keep that branch separate from the general-purpose product you're selling to the pleebs.
- physicsguy 3y agoI've seen several companies think this is a good idea but in practice it's a really bad idea to do this because you get captured by the customer and effectively become an arm of them without the benefits. And you end up dedicating so much time to them that other customers won't be happy and if that big customer ever cancels or leaves (which is often a board cost cutting decision rather than a user decision), then you end up absolutely screwed.
- kijin 3y agoDoesn't matter if you have multiple large customers and "other customers" are rounding error at best. Case in point: Palantir.