[gizmo]

Enterprise customers are a double-edged sword. They have money and they're very professional. That's the good part. The bad part is that they can pull your product in a direction that will kill your startup.

SaaS software -- with very few exceptions -- can be made either for SMB or for enterprise customers. Very rarely you can keep both happy. For SMB you need a funnel and volume, for enterprise you need sales and handholding. For SMB you need to optimize onboarding for Enterprise it's about integrations and certifications and audits.

Do you have a strategy and a desire to serve many enterprise customers? If not, this enterprise customer will just be a giant distraction and not worth the headache. Your SMB customers won't care about the enterprise features you develop. And likewise, you won't attract many enterprise customers with the kind of casual and friendly website that appeals to smaller businesses. Your vocabulary will need to expand to include words like "webinar" and "turn-key solution" and "Soc2 compliant". And some enterprises need 6 or 9 months to figure out if they actually want your product and are ready to sign that check. Enterprise sales requires stamina.

When an enterprise customer approaches you they're asking you to throw away your existing business model and to serve them instead. Is that what you want? Do you realize that's what's going on here? Do you know how to get the next 10 enterprise customers? If yes, go for it and charge at least 5000x the single-seat cost. If your typical customer is 50 users, then you want to charge about 1.5 * (5000/50) = 150x what you charge your typical 50 seat customer. Then maybe offer them a discount from that headline price if you think that's appropriate. But I would try to anchor them on higher per-seat costs for an enterprise license.

But then again, what you charge this customer is pretty insignificant compared to the real question: do you want to throw away your business model and become enterprise SaaS?

[seizethecheese]

Great comment, obviously informed by experience.

However, they recently launched this product, and this new client will be worth $3mm in ARR. Unless the SMB biz is seeing great early traction too, it would seem crazy to even consider not jumping at the enterprise opportunity.

This also depends on how many similar enterprises there are, of course.