Comment by lumost

Most B2B firms live in the grey area between consultancy and product for most of their lives. I’ve known of more than one database company with greater than 50% of their HC tied to bespoke asks from top clients.

In my opinion, the difference is really in whether the core founders can scale super-linearly with HC, and whether you can maintain a wide enough spread of clients that you can afford to lose a few of your biggest and not care beyond the signal you get on how your product is doing in the market. Practically, every top B2B startup fails the latter test to some degree.