But there's a certain kind of nitpicky person you can never make happy.
When your company is young and immature, there's still a decent concentration of actionable feedback in the nitpicks. Eventually it gets harder to mine gems out of it.
Aye, you've nailed the point. Early on, a particularly nitpicky and oversharing customer can help identify problem areas or get feedback on the product in greater volume than the quiet, happy users. "Early on" being the keywords here.
Nit picky can be fine. Even if they are on a free tier. I have some customers that pay me nothing, and are quick to highlight anything and everything. It's frustrating sometimes, but the product is better for it.
A much more serious issue for us is customers who abuse our staff. And these are sometimes high-paying customers. Shouting and swearing on the phone and on site. And worse.
We've learned the hard way to recognise companies with this culture, and actively (but politely) remove ourselves. Even if it costs a significant, potential 7 figure deal.
The bottom line is that our staff are our greatest asset, not the code, and not the customer - and even one staff member leaving over a bad client is a net loss, regardless of the deal.
We haven't fired many, but we've never regretted it.
I should also point out that we differentiate individual bad behavior from company culture. Sometimes we get a different point of contact, but at some companies it's a culture where everyone does the same thing.
If I was starting a company, I'd prefer to have at least a few nitpicky customers. You might not solve all of their problems, but their over-communication might highlight insightful decisions you could make, that would otherwise be opaque from customers who don't ever talk to you. Emotional, verbose feedback is better than no feedback.
Actually not just free QA
They literally pay you to build what you should be building anyway.
The problem is that you can’t just “fire” bad customers because you don’t want to face a lawsuit. They paid you to launch the results, and you have to be willing to do what it takes to finish development, get it launched and then go and fix the bugs. You can re-use most of that in your SAAS later.
> Actually not just free QA They literally pay you to build what you should be building anyway.
If your customer is a business then their needs and desires are probably unique to a degree. A high-maintenance customer will mak a ton of requests that specialize your product to them only, and be little value elsewhere. If you don't know yet where that line is, that's fine. You can learn as more customers come along. But I certainly wouldn't call it being paid to build what you should be building anyway. More like being paid to operate as an independent contractor while you learn the industry.
> Reporting bugs doesn't make someone a bad customer.
Depends on the bug. Complaining about problems with Windows 7 or demanding good performance ancient tablets and netbooks that emulate either 32-bit X86 on ARM or ARM on 32-bit X86 and then complaining loudly in public when these things aren't supported isn't a sign of good customer.
But there's a certain kind of nitpicky person you can never make happy.
When your company is young and immature, there's still a decent concentration of actionable feedback in the nitpicks. Eventually it gets harder to mine gems out of it.