I'm responding purely to the title, here, because the meat of the article dealt with a slightly different situation than I have experience with.
After my last attempt at building a product, I'm going to be very careful to keep customers at arms length in the early stages. I fell into a trap where I had one big customer who was paying a disproportionate amount of my bills, and getting to close to them kept me from getting close to other customers (or potential customers). At some point, I effectively turned into an employee who just so happened to be paid as a vendor.
This seems like a natural trap to fall into when trying to bootstrap something. It's awfully hard to turn down revenue, making it easy to become basically a consultant to one particular master.
Your problem is not that you were depending too much on customerS. It was that you were depending completely on one customer.
I'm going to be very careful to keep customers at arms length in the early stages
That sounds like a very scary strategy to me. How do you plan to know if your product will be of use once built?
By all means, don't become a consultant to one customer. But you don't have to become a consultant in order to get valuable feedback from multiple customers that are representative of your larger target market.
That sounds like a very scary strategy to me. How do you plan to know if your product will be of use once built?
Well, you never really know, do you? In many cases, potential customers don't really know either. I basically know what I want, or think I want, and can build that. The goal is to build it quickly, watch people use it, and then adjust based on that.
I knew exactly what my one big customer, my 3 smaller customers, and a few potential customers wanted. I couldn't produce all of that, and erred towards producing what the people who were giving me the most money wanted.
The important goal (for me) is to have some buffer time where earning ze monies isn't a life or death problem, thus giving me the ability to insulate myself a bit from people who can give me money (you know, assuming it makes sense). "Arms length" doesn't mean I don't talk to people, and I don't spend time watching how they work. It means we're not financially linked right away.
That's a quote from the days when Joel Spolsky wrote really interesting stuff.
Before I tell you how we prioritized our list of
features, let me tell you two ways not to do it.
Number one. If you ever find yourself implementing a
feature simply because it has been promised to one
customer, RED DANGER LIGHTS should be going off in your
head. If you're doing things for one customer, you've
either got a loose cannon sales person, or you're slipping
dangerously down the slope towards consultingware.
After my last attempt at building a product, I'm going to be very careful to keep customers at arms length in the early stages. I fell into a trap where I had one big customer who was paying a disproportionate amount of my bills, and getting to close to them kept me from getting close to other customers (or potential customers). At some point, I effectively turned into an employee who just so happened to be paid as a vendor.
This seems like a natural trap to fall into when trying to bootstrap something. It's awfully hard to turn down revenue, making it easy to become basically a consultant to one particular master.