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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

SaaS isn’t consultancy and jumping through a million hoops for a single customer probably isn’t going to work when it comes to selling the software.

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I built a successful SaaS business for 12 years (~2,000 customers). Never once did we do something for a single customer. User consensus should drive your roadmap.

I worked at what was supposed to be a "SaaS", and the founder was always promising custom features. He sold the product to one customer where it was not a fit at all and had to cancel the contract. (Their use case would've required an entirely different product.)

Isn't this contradicted by "do things that don't scale"? If you have a product and product market fit, I agree. But when you start out you should basically be a consultancy and build the product around the actual needs of the customer.

I'm reminded how the Airbnb guys would fly to New York and personally take photos for customers trying to rent out their location.

They did the same thing for everyone though (until they figured out how to scale that thing). It's not wrong to do whatever you got to do to get your first couple customers but you should also be thoughtful on how it's going to impact your company. For example, our second customer wanted us to do a deep integration into their erp system to sign on for $2k/mo, instead we did an audit of their current process and saw they were doing manual imports and exports. We gave them import/export capabilities which still greatly reduced their daily manual work and has been a longstanding, heavily used feature. They're still with us and both their revenue and the account has grown over 4x.

100% agree. Don't ask customers for solutions, ask them for problems. If they knew the solution to their problems, they wouldn't have problems. They would often suggest solutions that are round-about or overly complicated.

I remember at work someone said they wanted a way to arbitrarily update a SQL table and clobber old values. After some digging I realized they just needed a task to scrape a particular page and throw it in a structured format. Of course when they did it manually they made mistakes and mismapped a bunch of fields

So very true. Now try arguing this point when there's a bird in the hand...

It’s particularly difficult if you’re in the place where your product isn’t well developed and you don’t have product-market fit.

Salesforce.com is a great case study, they executed with great discipline, fot a huge amount of funding in the first year

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/salesforce/company_f...

and they’re famous for resisting customer demands to change the way they do things. Instead they developed a model for customers to run their own code inside their platform, access it through an API, etc.

There’s another idea which fascinates me that I’ve rarely seen executed well which is to develop something that is a hybrid of custom and prepackaged software. I worked at a place that had developed in the early 2000’s a packaged web site for wineries to sell wine online and when I went driving around the finger lakes (where I live) I would always see the signs of wineries who were our customers. Despite having a few things like that the company struggled financially and collapse under the weight of technical debt. (For one thing they depended on a proprietary language called Tango which let you build web sites with an interface like Scratch. I told them they ought to hire a CS intern to help write their own Tango implementation but they weren’t ready to do so.)

The authors of this book

https://www.amazon.com/Software-Factories-Assembling-Applica...

wanted to make this happen. They were in charge of the enterprise version of Visual Studio and unfortunately it turned out nowhere near as cool as what they speculate about in that book.

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