Underpromise, overdeliver is the mantra of keeping customers happy, so it’s said.
But in startup land, customer happiness falls slightly further down the line than keeping your company alive, especially in the early stages.
So what happens when you sell to a large customer, with high expectations early on and then can’t possibly deliver what you’ve sold? As I’m finding out, you lose more hair, more sleep, and gain more weight.
We’re alone in our market segment, which is great. But we’re also largely alone with the single engineer who’s a gifted programmer (really) but has a very different definition of what the word “Today.” means. He doesn’t mean it in the “sometime before midnight tonight” sense most of us would take it to mean. He means “it’s coming some day.”
We’ve got one engineer, and a microphone. May it someday soon turn into two engineers, and may that someday be before our single customer fires us.