One Customer Was 40 Percent of Our Revenue. Then They Left.

For most of 2021, one customer paid almost 40 percent of our bills. They were a large grocery wholesaler with six distribution centers in the Netherlands, and they had been with us since our first year. We built features for them, adjusted our roadmap for them, and celebrated every renewal as if it were a holiday.

In February 2022, their new operations director decided to consolidate all warehouse software under a single large vendor. We got ninety days' notice in a polite letter. I read it in my car outside a client site in Tilburg and did not start the engine for about twenty minutes.

How we got there

It did not happen through one bad decision. It happened through a series of reasonable ones. They were our second customer, back when we had almost nothing. They were generous with feedback and patient with bugs. When they asked for a feature, it usually made sense for others too, so we built it.

Over two years, their share of revenue crept from 20 percent to 38 percent. We noticed, but it felt like success, not risk. Every board meeting showed revenue growing. Nobody asked where it was coming from.

The ninety days

The first thing we did was the arithmetic. Without them, we had about eleven months of runway instead of twenty-two. We did not panic publicly, but we made three decisions in the first week.

• We paused two open job positions immediately.
• I personally called every other customer to ask how we could help them more, which led to four upsell conversations.
• We asked the departing customer for a proper exit meeting, which they kindly gave us.

That exit meeting was painful and valuable. Their director was candid: our product was good, but he wanted one vendor, one contract, one support line. It was not about us. That helped, a little.

What saved us

Honestly, a mix of hard work and luck. The upsell calls produced about €140,000 in new annual revenue within four months, because several customers had been quietly wanting more and nobody had asked. We also signed two new mid-sized distributors who had been in our pipeline for a while; the deadline made us push harder.

By the end of the year we had recovered roughly 80 percent of the lost revenue, spread across nine customers instead of one.

The rule we live by now

We now track one number in every monthly review: the percentage of revenue from our largest customer. Our internal limit is 15 percent. If any customer gets close to that, we do not turn them away, but we deliberately invest more in finding others.

We also changed how we handle feature requests from big accounts. Any feature built mainly for one customer has to be useful to at least three others, or that customer pays for it as a separate project.

The wholesaler, by the way, came back eighteen months later for one of their smaller sites. The big vendor was not good at the odd things small warehouses do. I was glad to have them back. I was also glad they were now about 6 percent of revenue.