Don't let anyone overpay you

Would it be better to treat these enterprises customers' feature requests as Kickstarter stretch goals instead of a separate sales pipeline? If BigCo really wants a feature, and it is a feature all customers could use, maybe let them pay you to implement it and then roll out the feature to everyone.

Some enterprises would still want special attention; you can ignore them. You still have the problem of unstable funding, but that is also true for Kickstarter or even VC type funding.

A lot of companies get large by serving whales -- Oracle, IBM, Microsoft. Also it is well known that there is an 80:20 rule in customers, 20% of customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue. He seems to be saying do not serve these 20% of customers. I think you need to achieve balance. No one should say no to money, especially when it is a lot and you can align it with your long-term interests.

You should say no if the projects are not aligned with your long-term interests though, because you are then a consulting company.

one-off projects for 'special' customers can turn into support nightmares and drain your personnel resources. So besides taking some big $ for NRE, it would be smart to require, for example, a 5 year support contract with a hefty price tag.

And on basecamp homepage i see references such as NASA. They pay the same low price?