If you can feel a single customer leave, you’re in a delicate spot. If you have a customer you can’t afford to lose, you’re no longer an independent company making your own product. You’re tethered to that biggest customer, or others like them.
Many founders think having a "largest customer" is an asset. It's actually a significant weakness.
Where We Draw The Line
We have a handful of people paying just under 1,000€ per month. That's roughly 10x our average customer. They could leave tomorrow and we'd be fine.
That's the way it should be. After surviving the early days, every customer should be one you can afford to lose. You don't want to lose them, obviously. But you should absolutely be able to and get on with your day.
That's not how most companies operate. They celebrate landing the big account. Then they often start bending the product to keep it.
It Is A Slippery Slope
A good example in our product is permission management. That's usually the first request.
They want granular control over who sees what. Role-based access for every function. It sounds reasonable and, frankly, would be a cool technical challenge. However, the added complexity of a comprehensive permission management is something we are refusing to burden the majority of our customers with.
We have simple on/off switches that control visibility within a practice. Can other team members see my appointment details? Treatment notes? Invoices? Yes or no. That's enough for 95% of customers.
Sometimes that simplicity is a red flag for potential customers and we lose the deal. It might take a while to replace that revenue with smaller practices, but we are willing to make that tradeoff to stay independent.
The other problem: Build permission management and next month they want custom reporting. Then workflow automation for their specific setup. Then integrations with other tools. Demands because they got away with it the first time.
Each addition makes your product more complex. More settings, more edge cases, more things that can break. The simple toggles become a messy matrix on who gets to see what. Everyone pays the price for features built for a few.
The longer you go down that path, the harder it is to course correct.
Resilience By Design
Instead, we treat every customer the same. Same level of support. Same influence on the roadmap.
We listen to their feedback, of course. Sometimes we even build what larger customers ask for. But only when their request aligns with what was already on our roadmap and the feature serves everyone, not just them. We simply don't compromise on that, no matter how much they are willing to pay.
Our largest customers represent only a small percentage of revenue too. That's intentional. It means we can make product decisions without checking if our biggest account will churn.
Most companies realize that dependency is a problem after they’re already dependent. After their roadmap belongs to 10 large customers instead of thousands of small ones.
We built resilience in from the start. Every customer is one we can afford to lose. The alternative is dependency. And dependency, no matter how profitable it looks on a spreadsheet, is weakness wearing a revenue number.
