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Every startup/SmallCo I worked for seemed to fall into this trap. Sales finally finds a BigCustomer, and the company instantly transforms from a product company into a custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer. We're no longer building our own product vision: We're cramming everything BigCustomer is asking for while they hold a carrot tied to a stick in front of us. We no longer have a general product that can be sold to anyone. We have BigCustomer's wish list and they still haven't bought more than a handful of units.

by ValentineC59 minutes ago|

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On the other hand, if they'd focus on building their core product (an oven) while taking BigCompany's money, and without listening to the multitude of smaller requests from potential customers who might not even hand over a single cent, they might have eventually gotten somewhere.

I agree that being a "custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer" might not have been the ideal outcome, but at least the entire company would have gotten some expertise, and probably be able to pivot and finally build their own thing given more resources (*cough*moreVCfunding*cough*).

by felix-the-cat4 hours ago|

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> I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.

This entirely. I've been CTO at a handful of startups, most recently one that sold for a very large sum of money — and the successful ones are almost always led by people who keep things dirt simple: focus on the customer, execute quickly, communicate clearly, keep costs low, and keep the technology simple. That's basically it. Just a few simple things, applied relentlessly.

The ones that failed were always the total opposite — not listening to their customers, poor communication across the org, blowing their runway on "we need Google-scale infrastructure," switching languages or frameworks halfway through the project, and so on.