[reggieband]

> then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valuation?

I suspect a lot of startups sell their investors on enterprise from the get-go. Self-serve can be seen as a foot in the door, a way to prospect potential enterprise opportunities. They watch self-serve sign-ups for a bigcorp.com domain and then hand it over to account sales and swing for the fences.

I think a big problem is differentiating your self-serve from your enterprise offering. You don't want bigcorp.com to feel happy enough with your $20/month foot in the door offering. And at the same time enterprises aren't stupid money fountains and they don't just sign $100k/year contracts unless they see major value. I think this creates a volatile business where a dozen or so enterprises make up the lions share of revenue for a startup and the thousands of self-serve customers are just kind of there like background noise.