Check out Sturgeons law... 90% of everything is crap. Some think he was an optimist! :) You've hit a few nails on the head, especially with the loudest compla

Check out Sturgeons law... 90% of everything is crap. Some think he was an optimist! :) You've hit a few nails on the head, especially with the loudest complainers being the least likely to spend money and the unwillingness to expend any effort. What I noticed with the few clients I visited for the POS vendor was that the owners weren't busy, they were lazy and cheap. If your idea man's idea involves getting people to do anything besides say yes or no on the phone, I wouldn't bother unless you meet face to face with a few people that are really enthusiastic and prove they're willing to make an effort. They will just frustrate you and make you hate life otherwise. This is especially true for any kind of banking or financial business such as mortgage brokers or credit reporting agencies. I have yet to see a group of people less willing to spend money or to try to cheat you out of it. Restaurant and bar owners would be second on my list. I didn't see much of the support portion of the POS business because the majority of the people were in a different state, but, more than 1/3 of the employees were in the training and support department at this particular company. A support contract was required for any big business simply because the customers wanted a neck to choke when something went wrong. Developers could intuit a fair amount about what was going on with the customers due to the problem tickets and CRM entries we saw. If not for the support/training revenue I suspect the POS corp I worked for would have been out of business years ago. However, they had some huge customers that just wouldn't buy anything without a support contract. The mom-and-pop customers paid per incident and screamed and hollered the whole time. The large corps are locked into the POS support dept. The mom-and-pops are not, but... I don't think you want to deal with them...