From our Anonymous submitter:
Our company creates graphs to visualize data. We have many small fish customers, but we have one whale who uses our product that is 90% of company revenue. (WTF number 1.)
So if he is not happy, it's all-hands-on deck-mode.
He complained that our APIs and charts are loading slowly for him. For 3 weeks, we've tried a TON of optimizations, including WTF 2: spinning up a special server he alone can hit.
Today, we found out that he's always complaining when he's in his car, driving from home to the office. But since he "totally has the best wifi money can buy," that isn't worth investigating.
WTF 3: thinking wifi and data are always 100% reliable in a car driving around.
Our submitter highlights one of the major pitfalls of the so-called whale client: if they're a bad client, you're in for an extra-bad time.
As I lean harder into freelancing, I'm learning to scan the waters ahead of me for potential whales. My goal is to build up multiple small, diverse income streams, because I've had my own dangerous encounters with whales in the past.
At one employer of mine, there was Facebook, who acted as if they were our new owners rather than a new customer. They'd already produced flashy marketing videos of the sorts of solutions they planned to implement with our software, showing people delighted with the results. In meetings, these things were talked up as amazing game-changers. Meanwhile, I found all the things Facebook wanted to do horribly creepy and invasive.
Even worse, Facebook began dictating how our award-winning technical support should change to accommodate their whims, up to and including having a dedicated toady—er, support rep—who did nothing but field Facebook-related tickets, similar to a technical account manager (TAM).
That was the last straw for me. I left that company before I was forced to deal with any of Facebook's crap.
My second whale sighting occurred at a startup that'd landed Porsche, far and away their biggest client ever. All of a sudden, our timeline for adding new features and fixing bugs became Porsche's honey-do list. All of a sudden, the platform frequently crashed and became unusable for everyone because it couldn't handle the amount of traffic Porsche (and their clients) hurled at it.
On the other hand, there were several times in that startup's existence when a big wad of promised funding failed to materialize. Porsche kept the business afloat and literally kept my lights on.
I find it less than ideal to be at any company's mercy. I want a world that would neither spawn whales nor millions of startups named Sploink, Dink, and Twangle that promise to bring the power of AI to your dinner fork.
Have your own epic whaling adventures? Share with us in the comments!
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This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.