The Customization Curve

Description
Customers often want that businesses do specific things for them as individuals. Businesses find themselves in a sticky situation because they are having to do unscalable tasks, but on the other hand they find that as they try to meet expectations of individual customers, their time spent trying to achieve a coherent product is lost.

This is common for startups and not easy to avoid. This could be partly because we too often think that making customers happy is black and white. It's important to remember that there's nothing you can create that will make every customer happy. Founders instead have to continuously optimize what they can build and provide support for, against what the customer wants.

This PDF includes a customization curve for which the objective is to find what level of customization makes the most customers happy whilst not running up too many support costs.