>When we started, we figured that customizing business software by ourselves was something we'd never be able to scale properly
This is the meaning of the badly put advice "do things that don't scale".
Regarding your vision of offloading the work to partners, my experience is that more time can be put trying to convince prospective partners than doing the work yourself if you are not careful.
My feeling is that you are anticipating hyper growth a bit too much. Start by doing all this work yourself, and you'll have no problem to scale with the income you'll earn.
This is assuming you price your product appropriately so that you are profitable on every transaction and customer.
> can be put trying to convince prospective partners
This is so true. Early on, I tried to sell our product through a system integrator channel. I hoped they would "do the sales for us." The systems integrator was super focused on sales, they talked to our target customer all the time, and they seemed super excited to sell our product.
But, it was a total flop. They didn't really seem to understand our product, and they would say anything to close a deal. Sometimes we did a lot of work, then got cut from the deal late in the game. More often, we ended up in the deal, but then had to deal with promises to the customer that didn't make any sense. It was like "the integrator said it would do what?"
I agree that you have to be really careful about selling through partners. Interestingly, the integrator channel was primarily for another, much larger software company. I told the CEO how excited we were to partner with the integrators. He looked at me and said "oh, we wish we could get rid of the integrators, but its too late because they control access to the customers." Luckily, we were small enough that walking away from the integrators worked for us.
If I were you, I would focus on identifying a few verticals where your product works well (say, car dealerships), then try to figure out how to sell to them. What are their concerns? What drives their decisions? How can you contact the right person to pitch your product? etc. If you can build a system around a vertical, you will feel so much better about sales. And once you build a system around one vertical, you can start looking for additional verticals to target.
> Regarding your vision of offloading the work to partners, my experience is that more time can be put trying to convince prospective partners than doing the work yourself if you are not careful.
That's a good way to put it. We also have an opposite fear: that building and customizing for the end clients requires expertise and focus on a particular market. This way we quickly become "just another CRM consultancy" which happens to have their own in-house product, and limits their growth to the (relatively) narrow market they are good at. Competing for new niches with the platforms that focus on building the partner networks becomes hard, considering all the ecosystem that these platforms develop around them. We have experience at running a successful MS Dynamics consultancy like that before, but this was its limit for us.
Whether our understanding on how to balance these two extremes is adequate is a good question that we keep pondering on. So thanks for the input!
This is the meaning of the badly put advice "do things that don't scale".
Regarding your vision of offloading the work to partners, my experience is that more time can be put trying to convince prospective partners than doing the work yourself if you are not careful.
My feeling is that you are anticipating hyper growth a bit too much. Start by doing all this work yourself, and you'll have no problem to scale with the income you'll earn.
This is assuming you price your product appropriately so that you are profitable on every transaction and customer.