✍️ Essay
Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it Before you say yes to the custom features nobody else wants, this essay makes you sit with the real risk: one account that pays a lot can quietly take over your roadmap and turn you into its in-house vendor. McAfee tells the story of a company that let one customer reach 80 percent of revenue, bent the product to that customer's demands, and collapsed when the customer's funding dried up. It is a starting point for weighing when a big customer's asks are worth it and when they are a trap dressed as a win.
The One Big Customer Trap
From Startup Patterns (Medium) by Sam McAfee
- A single dominant customer can mask the fact that you do not yet have real product-market fit, so the revenue feels like validation when it is actually dependence.
- Every custom request pulls capacity away from the product you meant to build; if you lose that one customer, you lose the revenue and the roadmap you traded away for it.
- Keep some engineering capacity reserved for work that serves the whole market, not just your biggest account, and be wary of open-ended custom scopes.