customers expectation

There is a thin line between a product company turning into a service company. In the early days, when you have anchor customers, and you are developing to solve their pain point, it works. As you grow and own over a dozen customers, you have to be very careful about prioritizing customer’s feature expectations.

Some customers or trial users will ask you for everything. If you are a small team, it is going to be very difficult to keep them all happy. You have to prioritize the features and build ones that are solving pain for multiple customers. Also, you have to be careful with giving any timeline for delivery. It will fuck up your team, and everyone will burn out. It has more negatives than positives.

Sometimes it is alright to let go of some customers. You cannot fulfill every need of everyone. You are building a product which will be utilized by multiple customers as a SaaS product, listening and implementing everyone’s feature will result in making the product a sandwich.

In case some customer still insists and gets anal for a particular feature, ask him to pay for the development and when you make it generally available, offer him a rebate for the expanses they put.

Your customers are the users, not product or project managers. In the end, you have to survive, thrive, and grow. You have to prioritize what is best for your team and company. I have learned this hard way, hence sharing it out for others.