Friday 5th July 2024

We lost our biggest customer.

They gave quite a bit of notice so we knew it was coming, but yeah. We lost our biggest customer in June.

This client accounted for just under 50% of our revenue (yes, I know) and they were one of the first we onboarded in what turned out to be our niche of block/property management.

Fortunately, they didn't leave because we did anything wrong which is always nice. Instead, they left because they were migrating platforms away from the one that we have automations on and they said the platform they're moving to will handle a lot of the things we automated. Fair enough in my opinion.

I don't generally feel too bad about it because they were on a legacy system that we no longer build new automations for and they had quite a few bespoke implmentations spread over a 5 codebases which were my fault for agreeing to, but hey, we needed some initial MRR to get things moving before we found our core platforms that we now build automations on.

I've listed some lessons that I've learnt from this below. As one door closes, another one opens...

Lessons:

  1. Write good code. Write especially good code if you're going to have to maintain it.
  2. No client should take up almost 50% of your revenue, but if they do, find out what makes them a proportionally huge client and aggressively find and market to similar companies ASAP.
  3. If you're going to build something, make it configurable for other clients within the same codebase.
  4. Sometimes you get done faster using third party tools vs building your own (google forms, google sheets).
  5. Only build bespoke stuff if it will serve as a tester for a new market that has potential.