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12 Comments

Would you build a product for a single customer only?

Hi Indie Hackers,

I discovered this customer in a community forum. He's trying to find an SMS Autoresponder service that can work with a specific CRM and there's no tool that can do the work.
This issue is mandatory and urgent for him, and he's already paying (< $200) for a similar service.

For me, this seems to be a very small market, and it's unlikely that I can find the 2nd or 3rd customers.

The product is relatively easy to build, should take me 1-2 weeks, but I feel that the maintenance work afterward would be time-consuming and is not worth the profit

So, I'm asking for your experience, have you ever been the same situation and how have you dealt with it?

  1. 3

    Email the CRM company and see if their customers are having that problem.

    If they are, ask if they would be willing to partner up (could be as simple as they send some marketing emails when you launch the product)

    If they say no it isn't that big of an issue for most of their customers.

    1. 1

      Thank you @volkandkaya. This is a good way to validate the needs, I didn't think of this approach.

      1. 2

        Yeah we had a few companies reach out and they even recommend us in their customer support.

  2. 1

    I would make sure their atleast a medium sized company

    1. 1

      Thanks @oli_typified. Does it mean you expect them to grow and I can charge them more?

      1. 2

        Yep and also they wouold more seriously understand what they want not mess you around too much. (Our smaller customers are generally alot harder work and churn more than our larger ones). Hope that helps,

  3. 1

    It seems like what you are describing is the work of a freelancer. You are building a product for one customer, so the customer should cover the entire costs of development.

    If this will take you 2 weeks to build (assume 4h per day * 5 days * 2 weeks) => 40 hours of work. Let's say you will charge $30 per hour (kind of a bare minimum for a mid-level to senior engineer), then your customer should be ready to pay around $1200 for this product.

    If your customer is already paying <$200, they will likely be iffy about paying 6x that for a custom product.

    This is simple back-of-the-envelope math to see if it's worth building it

    1. 1

      Thank you @zeydrick, I never built anything like a freelancer work, so your answer really gives me a different view of the problem.

  4. 1

    I like what @volkandkaya wrote

    why do you think it would need a lot of maintenance?
    You can ask him to sponsor development + the maintenance cost if it's really important to him. (assuming you want to do it)

    my inclinations are this would actually have more customers..
    how big is the CMS? does the CMS has some kind of sellable marketplace?
    Can you do some half job of fwding it to another service? doing a connector only of some sort? work with zappier or something?...

    1. 2

      Thank you @hatkyinc, actually, I'll try to outsource as much work as possible to other services (Zapier maybe?). Strip out unnecessary things and deliver only the bare minimum product that works for them. Then I try to sell it in the marketplace to see if I can find another customer.
      If nobody wants it, then at least I don't spend too much time on the problem.

  5. 7

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      Thank you @Primer. But does it mean I need to somehow to price it differently? Like Zeydrick said below, think of it as a freelancer work.

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        This comment was deleted a year ago.

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