Avoiding the Fail Whale: Landing Big Customers Without Letting Them Sink You
May 15, 2015
Avoiding the Fail Whale: Landing Big Customers Without Letting Them Sink You
A Big Fish Can Drag You Down
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About Me
Matt TuckerCTO & Co-FounderJive SoftwareEnterprise Software since 2001
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Orca: Gentle Giant or Killer Whale?
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Big Early Customers are Awesome
• 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
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Big Early Customers are Dangerous
• 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
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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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What a Whale is Looking For
• Low Cost
• Exactly What They Want
• Low Risk
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What a Whale is Looking For
• Low Cost
• Exactly What They Want
• Low Risk
SOME PRACTICAL TIPS
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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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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