[ndarwincorn]

An alternate POV: you can sell boutique software as a means of getting paid to do initial iterations on an idea while simultaneously building out an impressive set of logos to slap on your site when you release an off-the-shelf version down-market to capture what the smaller companies are paying LOB/plugin devs to do.

The shop I'm at is in the first half of that, TBD whether it works out. Which is about as much anecdata as the OP has in support of their claim.

If I had to guess, I'd say the amount of consulting you're providing to your customers to supplement the software, or the gap between the process of using your software vs. just automating existing workflows probably has a lot to do with which approach is preferable.

The other note is that if you have a decent amount of domain expertise/networking, you can do the above and not take on VC funding. You may not eat the world but you'll do a hell of a lot better than most lifestyle startups.

[jermaustin1]

A company I was at for nearly a decade did just this, a few times... kind of. We never fully transitioned to the SaaS versions of whatever software we were building for customers, and ended up with a "base" software that we would then just tweak to the customers spec.

It wasn't a bad model by any means, and we ended up turning what had been 3-4 month projects into 1 week, and charging the same amount.

One product was an emergency communications platform for city government, another was a CMS/CRM/Website Builder for RV dealers, another was a blogging/sales platform for interior designers. We had a half dozen base products that we sold to hundreds of clients for a few thousand a piece.

We had enough individual customers in each of these spaces to build all these semi-custom solutions based on shared codebases, but we could never find enough customers paying a LOT less per month to afford spending time on the SaaS versions.

We were a tiny team of only 3 though, if we had some venture capital maybe things would have turned out differently.

We eventually moved out of doing "custom" software though, and into consulting on SEO and Brand Reputation, then finally into launching our in-house software as SaaS offerings, growing our service business from around $200k ARR to between $30k and $90k MRR.

You can read some of that journey in the second half of a blog post I wrote a while back[1].

1: https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/05/my-first-product.h...

[code_biologist]

That approach is sound, but challenging, IMHO. The two major issues you run into are "how do we allocate resources between the boutique and the off-the-shelf version?" and "how do we manage the functional differences between the versions?"

Both can be overcome but require really good, disciplined people.

On resources, the "right" answer is to have your core team focused on the off-the-shelf version, and then have revenue from the boutique version fund its own additional labor. In my limited experience, software salespeople crumble on putting out the big price tag ask to make boutique development work in this way.

On functionality differences, there's a spectrum of customization. Extreme customization often comes at the detriment of the overall evolvability of the software. So for boutique customization you need judicious devs who build carefully, you need PMs who can push back on the customer delicately, and sales folks who don't overpromise. A good friend's uncle sold his otherwise thriving software company because his boutique product had fragmented into a dozen products (one for each client) and it was impossible to maintain.

If the boutique version is a coat of paint with a custom page or two, life is great! If they're completely different, you're essentially a consultancy working on your own product on the side. That's a grind and I've seen it burn people out.

[bitcoinmoney]

What’s boutique software?

[ldjb]

Bespoke software; software tailor-made for a particular client/customer, according to their specifications.

As opposed to off-the-shelf / generic software that is put out to market and is then purchased by whomever thinks it would meet their needs.