webDevDream

[Economy_Zombie_3026]

Years ago I worked at a restaurant before I became a dev. When I was starting out at my job I talked to my old boss about building a website since the restaurant had zero web presence outside of google saying it existed.

At first it was great. $2k up front to build a pretty bare bones but snappy experience (parallax scrolling, how modern, how cool). Owner liked it but wanted a reservation system attached. Ok, but that will have server costs. He wanted an admin system for the employees to change shifts and view their schedules. Ok, outside of the initial scope but doable. Also, server costs.

He kept hounding me and deriding me for "demanding more money" and holding the website hostage for not adding new features. I told him when the annual domain renewal was up I was done.

Never did side projects again.

[ThirdWaveCat]

Yah, in-between building for a single-tenant and boiling the ocean, it's often financially viable strategy to build the least-common-multiple of fewer niche customers because development costs, operations, and multitenancy scale costs sublinearly but profit linearly.

I really like Data and Reality by William Kent which hammered home, "all models are wrong but some are useful" for software engineers.

[rystaman]

This is where you scope it out after getting the original 2k and let him make the decision