The double-edged sword of big initial customers with Taco Potze

About this episode

The episode discusses the challenges and strategies of transitioning from a services company to a product company, particularly focusing on the implications of landing large initial customers.

This week I’m back from vacation and I have a new episode of The Business of Open Source, with Taco Potze ! Taco is the co-founder and CEO of Open Social. A couple interesting takeaways from our conversation: When you’re transitioning from a services company to a product company, it’s much easier if the product you work on is connected to the services your clients are already paying for. Landing a huge customer, particularly if it’s your first customer, can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you have a lot of revenue, but you also risk becoming your customer’s servant and losing control of your product’s roadmap. You can’t do everything; and particularly you can’t build a product that meets the needs of small, medium and large organizations. Sometimes you need to re-launch / reposition. Open Social recently completely changed their positioning earlier this year in response to changes in the marketplace and how their customers were use the product. Customers might not care about open source, but they care very much about lock-in, exit costs, and data sovereignty. This is all a part of risk management that CIOs are thinking about a lot. Some organizations use both the…

People in this episode

Host: Emily Omier

Guest: Taco Potze

Topics covered

• open source
• business strategy
• customer management
• product development
• risk management

Keywords

• open source
• product company
• customer roadmap
• risk management
• codebase

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Open Social

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