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When half your revenue comes from one customer's custom asks, the real risk is not the roadmap slipping, it is quietly becoming a dev shop wearing a software costume. This piece names that trap plainly and gives you a litmus test: if you added 100 customers tomorrow, would software handle them or would people? That is the question to hold up against every custom feature that big customer requests.
Service as a Software: The Startup Trap That Looks Like SaaS but Scales Like Consulting
From Startup Folsom by Rich Foreman
- Scalability comes from repeatability, so treat manual, one-off custom work as temporary learning, not the business model.
- Use a simple test on each ask: would this still be handled by the product if you had 100 customers, or only by human effort for this one?
- Revenue concentrated in a single customer's bespoke needs can look like traction while quietly locking you into a services business.
