Your product has a vision, a roadmap and you’re in control of it. You’ve worked hard to build a niche and now you’re faced with the dilema that faces too many small companies: Company X wants your product to do something else - but unlike the other tire kickers, they’re willing to pay for it.
Here there be dragons!
Bootstrapping is hard work, and sometimes you’ll have to do other work to pay the bills but resist the urge to allow customers to pay for features in your product. It makes a very subtle change in the relationship, suddenly the feature is now your customers and they’re paying for it, so they’re dictating how it should work; not just today, but tomorrow as well.
the devil is in the details
Even if you’re in the rare situation that the next big feature on your list to implement is the feature you’re being paid to build, beware. While you might agree on the feature in principle, you might not see eye to eye on the implementation details. They will more than likely want things to match their internal processes. Which isn’t likely to match that of your other customers, or your vision.
When a user sits down to plan out a feature they’re paying for they have specific goals in mind, those goals aren’t going to be keeping things simple and they’re not going to be looking at how to achieve most of the needs of all your customers. They’ll be looking to achieve all of their own and wont care a jot about anyone else’s. They may pay lip service to caring but in the end why should they? They’re paying to have the feature developed and if someone else wants it to do something else - let them pay.
no control
So in the end you’ve developed the feature, been paid for it but probably compromised your vision for the product in the process. You’ve also painted yourself into a corner, because now that someone has paid for this feature updates, changes and even taking it away at a later date isn’t really going to be at your discretion.
Compound this when the strategy works the first time and you try it out again. Now you’re totally loosing control of your product and your vision is a thing of the past. Your nice simple product is growing tentacles and doesn’t quite work the way an average user would want it to work. Your edge cases are taking over and your vision is becoming bloated with £10,000 buttons one person clicks once a week that confuse everyone else.
rules must have exceptions
I have seen selling features actually work in practice a few times. There have been some notable examples of open source software developers doing this.
The difference here is the features have already been requested by the community and a bounty is paid or the customer is paying to fork the code. Forking code is an option, even for a company developing closed source software or a service offering, but it’s not really an attractive one. You want to keep things as simple as possible and trying to maintain more than one product is orders of magnitude harder than just maintaining one.
it’s not worth it, just don’t do it
My very strong recommendation is to keep it simple, one code base, one product, one vision - keep it simple and don’t sell features.
