Start small and trying to go upmarket is the normal playbook for a b2b smb company that is not growing anymore. Managing enterprise customers is easier than managing thousands or small companies. And it also create a natural barrier to entry
I would call this product discovery and development with early adopters, something I hope every startup is doing. I've also seen this be called a Lighthouse program.
> Managing enterprise customers is easier than managing thousands or small companies. And it also create a natural barrier to entry
I definitely get the appeal. To build a billion dollar revenue (not valuation) venture scale company, you can either get 1000 users paying you 1M dollars each, or 1M users paying you $1000 each [1].
It's just painful as a relative early customer to get priced out and no longer be the target market for a company, especially when it has set its eyes on exponential growth and starts to see the SMB market as a means to an end.
[1] https://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-buil...
So as a customer if you want the best product then you have to switch