It depends. There can be several benefits of selling to businesses (based on experience):
- You may only need to be responsive to customers during business hours. Of course this changes when you sell globally.
- User-facing upgrades (new features) are not necessarily expected. They might be perfectly content with the product as is, barring a few (hopefully low-priority) tweaks/bug fixes here and there.
- If businesses are dependent on your service for mission critical jobs and can hardly tolerate outages, charge them accordingly. They should be willing to support measures that ensure your continuity and reliability. This might enable you to hire others.
- If a business has trained its people to use your offering, or spent time integrating it, they are probably not going anywhere for many years. This is even more true with highly specialized software for which there is little or no competition. This means once you have reached your threshold of customers, you shouldn't have to invest much time in acquiring new customers if you don't want to.
On the other hand, I would never become dependent on a solo developer or a small business for a critical part of my business.
I’ve been on both sides of the issue. I worked for a struggling startup that got one large customer who was 80% of our revenue. They insisted on the code being put in escrow and released to them under certain conditions.
When the company was sold for scraps, they exercised that clause and hired me as a contractor to help them transition.
On the other side, I was the dev lead at a company who was looking at using the software of a solo developer as a critical component to our business. I suggested the same clauses be a stipulation to us signing the contract. We were going to be 80% of his business.
- You may only need to be responsive to customers during business hours. Of course this changes when you sell globally.
- User-facing upgrades (new features) are not necessarily expected. They might be perfectly content with the product as is, barring a few (hopefully low-priority) tweaks/bug fixes here and there.
- If businesses are dependent on your service for mission critical jobs and can hardly tolerate outages, charge them accordingly. They should be willing to support measures that ensure your continuity and reliability. This might enable you to hire others.
- If a business has trained its people to use your offering, or spent time integrating it, they are probably not going anywhere for many years. This is even more true with highly specialized software for which there is little or no competition. This means once you have reached your threshold of customers, you shouldn't have to invest much time in acquiring new customers if you don't want to.