One customer, 200 a month, has asked for an integration with a system I have never heard of that I would guess is used by maybe a few hundred companies. It is two to three weeks of work. They have implied, politely, that renewal depends on it. As a solo founder with three customers total, do I build it or do I hold the line on the roadmap?
Ask one more question before you decide, which is why they picked that system. If it is an industry standard in their vertical that you had simply never encountered, a few hundred companies is a target market, not a one off. If it is homegrown or their IT lead's pet, it is bespoke work and should be priced as bespoke work.
It is common in their industry apparently, which now makes me wonder whether I have been selling to the wrong industry all along.
That is the more interesting question in this whole thread. One customer dragging you toward a vertical where you are needed is a gift.
Whatever you decide, do not build it silently over three weeks. Ship the ugliest version that solves their actual workflow in four days, get them using it, then decide whether the polished version is worth the remaining fortnight. Half the time the rough one is enough.
Two hundred a month against three weeks of your only engineering capacity is a bad trade on the raw numbers, roughly seven months of their revenue. It is only a good trade if it buys information or a market. Make sure you can say which one before you start.
Also be careful with the implied renewal threat. Sometimes it is real and sometimes it is a negotiating posture. Asking directly, if we cannot get to this by March, does that change your plans, gets you a surprisingly honest answer most of the time.
And asking it does not offend anyone. Vendors ask that question all the time, it reads as professional rather than needy.
@corwin_ashby · 8mo ago · 3 replies
At three customers you do not have a roadmap, you have a hypothesis and a customer telling you it is wrong in one specific way. Build it, but build it as a negotiation rather than a favour.
What I would ask for in exchange:
If they will not do any of the three, that tells you how much they actually want it. And genuinely ask them how they do it today, because sometimes the real request is smaller than the integration they asked for, a CSV export on a schedule instead of a live sync.
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@backfill_bram · 8mo ago
About a third of integration requests I have taken turned out to be a scheduled export in disguise. Costs an afternoon instead of three weeks.
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@abigail_ruthven · 8mo ago
The CSV question is a good one, I jumped straight to how rather than why. Asking tomorrow.
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