6. Big Early Customers are Awesome
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• Big customers pay a lot more than small
customers
• Provide critical credibility to your startup
• Often give incredibly helpful product and market
insights
• Battle-test your startup at a super accelerated
pace
7. Big Early Customers are Dangerous
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• May give you wrong signals on product/market fit
• Can be extremely demanding, hammering your
startup with support and customization requests
• Easy to fall into the trap of becoming a services
instead of product company
• The “big deal” might be right around the corner…
forever
8. Remember It’s a Partnership
An enterprise deal should be more than just a buy/sell
relationship. It’s should be a partnership with the goal of
mutual success. Like any partnership, evaluate your
potential customer just like they’re evaluating you.
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9. What a Whale is Looking For
• Low Cost
• Exactly What They Want
• Low Risk
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10. What a Whale is Looking For
• Low Cost
• Exactly What They Want
• Low Risk
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12. Practical Tips
• Try to convince your prospect or customer that they don’t
want/need customization
• Break delivery of project into phases; attempt to push
custom features into later phases
• Make a simple and generic versions of the custom
features that all customers can use
• Build extensive APIs to head off customizations before
they start
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13. Practical Tips (cont.)
• If you’re creating a code repo or branch for individual
customers then you’re doing it wrong
• Get paid for custom work via professional services; but try
keep services between 15%-35% of revenue
• Frankly, beware of East Coast banks
• Stating the obvious: SaaS will be easier than on-premise
• Find a champion
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