It’s a great model and I applaud it, but I would much rather have 1000 (preferably 5000!) consumers paying me $100/ea/year than have 10 businesses paying me $100k/ea/year.
My own experience is the polar opposite to this. I run a small software business selling to enterprise customers where the minimum subscription is €5k per month and even my most demanding customers require less customer service and make less demands than I used to get for a $1 android app I used to sell.
- You may only need to be responsive to customers during business hours. Of course this changes when you sell globally.
- User-facing upgrades (new features) are not necessarily expected. They might be perfectly content with the product as is, barring a few (hopefully low-priority) tweaks/bug fixes here and there.
- If businesses are dependent on your service for mission critical jobs and can hardly tolerate outages, charge them accordingly. They should be willing to support measures that ensure your continuity and reliability. This might enable you to hire others.
- If a business has trained its people to use your offering, or spent time integrating it, they are probably not going anywhere for many years. This is even more true with highly specialized software for which there is little or no competition. This means once you have reached your threshold of customers, you shouldn't have to invest much time in acquiring new customers if you don't want to.
I’ve been on both sides of the issue. I worked for a struggling startup that got one large customer who was 80% of our revenue. They insisted on the code being put in escrow and released to them under certain conditions.
When the company was sold for scraps, they exercised that clause and hired me as a contractor to help them transition.
On the other side, I was the dev lead at a company who was looking at using the software of a solo developer as a critical component to our business. I suggested the same clauses be a stipulation to us signing the contract. We were going to be 80% of his business.
I like to have more diversity than just 10 customers, but on the other hand, having $1M of income seems very preferable to $100K ;-).