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Comment by hodgesrm | Hacker News Reader

This article left a lot of questions open--what's 'large', what kind of product are you developing and how are you building the company? Depending on the answers the article's advice may be completely wrong.

Fer instance: when creating a product that depends customer design partners, small companies typically cannot afford to make the investment necessary to hold up their end. You'll lose the deal and burn a customer in the process.

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p.s., Oracle and the CIA deal is a canonical example of 'one big customer' working out. [0]

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...

Yeah, but that's both the defense market (very unlike regular market) and the CIA (In-Q-Tel is unlike defense market). Quite an outlier that tells you nothing about the topic unless we're specifically trying to make that one, big customer be an organization that drops boatloads of money on unproven suppliers with a VC arm looking for them. In-Q-Tel is cool in that they've done this for a number of firms with great products. They're just really, really different from the norm.

There is also a similar story for Siebel (Northwestern Mutual I think?). In enterprise software, buying from small companies is not the norm, so if some large organizations invest in your product, it can trigger the larger market to believe in you. I believe the trick is to make sure the "big" accounts you take on aren't ones that are going to take you too far off your normally planned roadmap. If you find yourself building one-off features, one for each customer, you are in for a world of hurt. If your big customers drive you to build your roadmap faster or more aggressively, that isn't always a bad thing.

For enterprise products the obvious 'large customers' to avoid are companies like Google and Facebook. They operate at such enormous scale that the problems you see there are unlikely to pop up in normal corporate use. If the article had mentioned these I would agree completely.

In my last company we had one particularly large customer that really put us on the map. It was grindingly hard to get things to work but fortunately they had a problem they really needed solved and just enough patience to let us solve the teething problems of new software. Once we had them as a reference it made a huge difference both in terms of product quality as well as validation of the company.

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