1. Avoiding the Fail Whale:
Landing Big Customers
Without Letting Them
Sink You

2. A Big Fish Can Drag You Down

3. About Me
3
Matt Tucker
CTO & Co-Founder
Jive Software
Enterprise Software since 2001

4. 4

5. Orca: Gentle Giant or Killer Whale?

6. Big Early Customers are Awesome
6
• Big customers pay a lot more than small
customers
• Provide critical credibility to your startup
• Often give incredibly helpful product and market
insights
• Battle-test your startup at a super accelerated
pace

7. Big Early Customers are Dangerous
7
• May give you wrong signals on product/market fit
• Can be extremely demanding, hammering your
startup with support and customization requests
• Easy to fall into the trap of becoming a services
instead of product company
• The “big deal” might be right around the corner…
forever

8. Remember It’s a Partnership
An enterprise deal should be more than just a buy/sell
relationship. It’s should be a partnership with the goal of
mutual success. Like any partnership, evaluate your
potential customer just like they’re evaluating you.
8

9. What a Whale is Looking For
• Low Cost
• Exactly What They Want
• Low Risk
9

10. What a Whale is Looking For
• Low Cost
• Exactly What They Want
• Low Risk
10

11. SOME
PRACTICAL
TIPS
11

12. Practical Tips
• Try to convince your prospect or customer that they don’t
want/need customization
• Break delivery of project into phases; attempt to push
custom features into later phases
• Make a simple and generic versions of the custom
features that all customers can use
• Build extensive APIs to head off customizations before
they start
12

13. Practical Tips (cont.)
• If you’re creating a code repo or branch for individual
customers then you’re doing it wrong
• Get paid for custom work via professional services; but try
keep services between 15%-35% of revenue
• Frankly, beware of East Coast banks
• Stating the obvious: SaaS will be easier than on-premise
• Find a champion
13

14. PARTING ADVICE:
Don’t fear it, go get
some whales!
Matt Tucker
matt@jivesoftware.com
@MattTucker
14