Ask HN: Small, solo and bootstrapped. What if you land a massive client?

4 points by throes_death 5 years ago | 4 comments

I run a small SaaS and am the only employee (I have plenty of industry advisors though).

We currently operate with less than 50 accounts in total. Word of mouth has led to discussions with a very large enterprise and the numbers being thrown around are staggering (for me anyway).

How would you tackle suddenly scaling from 50 to thousands of accounts? Would you even consider such an account given the circumstances? Has this happened to you?

I'm way out of my depth here so any advice is greatly appreciated.

davismwfl 5 years ago |

I went through this twice (being super small and getting a large enterprise sale), first time was scary, and while I'd love to say second time wan't, honestly it was just as scary but I felt somewhat more prepared.

In my case we had about 100-125 small business accounts on the platform and suddenly had interest from a Fortune 500 firm that had revenue in the 4-5 billion annual revenue and 4000 employees. I had a few more people then just myself (I think 4 FTEs, 1 Part Time), but not enough to support all those users or the needs of an enterprise.

To be fair, enterprise deals can ruin you if you try to approach it like any other sale. They aren't like your SMB sales. Enterprises are wiling to pay because they know their demands are not the same as the local small business. One key thing I learned, you should be honest with the enterprise in saying (something like this), hey we absolutely can support you but as you can imagine it will also mean I need to scale my team to give you the kind of support you deserve and that fits my standards... They love hearing this because it also answers one of their key worries.

There are so many details, learnings, comments, if you are curious and want to hear more of my experiences I am happy to share the good/bad and share. You can find my email in my profile if you want to connect.

Good luck, you are obviously doing something right!

throes_death 5 years ago | |

Thank you. The advice about explaining your need to scale is great. I've made them aware that we currently don't service accounts of their scale but we can scale up. If talks proceed I'll be sure to expand on this.

Thanks very much for the email offer, I will take you up on that (putting out a fire right now though).

edgartaor 5 years ago |

I think this is one of those problems that are nice to have. It could be challenging, scary and difficult but it's also a nice opportunity.

Just be careful and good luck.

7thaccount 5 years ago |

I hear it can be great to have these kinds of clients, but it also sucks as they can really throw their weight around and force you to go in a direction you don't want to go.