>When we started, we figured that customizing business software by ourselves was something we'd …

> 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 a…

> 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 excite…