We Are No Longer Accepting Work from Individuals / Very Small Businesses

As of January 1^st, 2018, itoctopus will no longer be accepting work from individuals, or from very small businesses (less than 5 employees). Let us explain why…

As you may already know, itoctopus has been serving businesses of all sizes for over a decade now. That long period of time has provided us with some interesting statistics about individuals/very small businesses:

• They generate less than 2% of our gross revenue.

• They take just over 30% of our time and they are generally stressful to work with.

• Some of them are not very pleasant to work with, and all of the unpleasant clients that we have had were individuals/very small businesses.

• 100% of the billing problems that we have had were caused by them.

• Their retention rate is very low despite us doing our best to please them.

According to our statistics and observations, the disadvantages of serving individuals/very small businesses far outweigh the advantages. In fact, we firmly believe that if we continue serving them we will hurt our business, and we will hinder our huge potential for growth. As such, we came to a conclusion last Friday (December 22^nd, 2017) that we will no longer accept tasks/projects from individuals/very small businesses as of January 1^st, 2018. This decision was tough, because some of these clients are really nice, but the prosperity and the future of our business is at stake.

Will this decision affect existing clients?

Unfortunately, yes. All existing clients who are individuals or very small businesses will no longer be served by itoctopus as of 2018. There is an exception, however, and it’s those developers who send us subcontracting work.

Won’t that cause itoctopus to lose money?

Definitely not! In fact, we estimate a 30% growth because of this decision. And even if that’s the case (that we will lose money), we think that our health and sanity are much more important than 2% of our revenue.

We hope that we have objectively clarified our decision, and we hope that our very small clients will find something similar to the service they were getting here elsewhere.