[DelaneyM]

Pick one single customer and fanatically meet their individual needs. Then add a second. Repeat until you’re no longer needing to tweak your system to delight a new customer. At that point you need sales and you have a business! :)

[DenisM]

You will quite likely end up with a non-scalable “services” business instead of a scalable “product” business. I did.

[robocat]

It's a balance.

We had a high touch service for B2B installation: we charged clients for consulting (business analysis) to configure and integrate our system.

The cost to clients for the consulting was approx 1 year of our SaaS fees. The up front consulting helped heaps with our cashflow, but it also significantly limited our growth rate.

But it worked for us at the time (mid 2000's).

Definitely hard to avoid over-customisation of software for one client: but you need to avoid that problem with any software product servicing multiple clients.

Previous company with a similar product depended too heavily upon ongoing consulting fees and that caused a variety of troubles for that business.

[altdataseller]

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because not many people can even reach that point.

[jumploops]

You need to be willing to “fire” customers.

I’ve also been here, and it’s a delicate balance.

[user_7832]

In the idealized solution that I would build/provide, I'd already be meeting the needs of many individuals with "just" one top-of-the-line product. The only issue, and the need for quotes, is because this no-compromise product that would likely be competitive with the best in the industry, would also be quite expensive.

This, fortunately or not, kind of circles back to the "make more expensive products" aspect.