[nthj]

A 1-person operation can do things that don't scale. When you read PG's story about Viaweb, their small operation played in their favor, because their customers would call up, and PG would solve their problem while they were on the phone with them. Customers love this kind of experience even more than not having any issues in the first place. One way to differentiate yourself is to offer this high level of customer service.

Also, large operations have higher overhead, and have to grow more quickly. This is usually at the expense of quality. Success for them may require $2M/year revenue or their division will be shut down. You may only need $200K/year to live quite comfortably. That means you can solve a small subset of the problem really, really well, and a lot of people will be very happy to use you because your product works every single time and you always answer their questions right away, and the other company just has a bunch of extra bells and whistles and upsells and annoying growth hacking stuff that gets in their way.