Last week, one of our biggest customers asked for a “small customization” to our contract management platform. They wanted a special workflow that would save their legal team maybe five minutes per contract. The development would take our engineers three weeks.

Five years ago, I would have said yes immediately. Today? I didn’t even let them finish the pitch.

“No,” I said. “But let me show you how to achieve the same result using our existing features.”

The customer was shocked. Here I was, turning down a paying customer who wanted to give us more money for custom work. But saying no to that request was one of the smartest decisions I made that week—and it’s a superpower every software founder needs to develop.

The Seductive Trap of “Just This Once”

When you’re building a SaaS company, every custom development request feels like validation. A customer cares enough about your product to want it tailored to their specific needs! They’re willing to pay extra! How can you say no to that?

Here’s how: Remember that today’s “simple customization” becomes tomorrow’s technical debt nightmare. I learned this the hard way at Concord. In our early years, we built custom features for any customer who asked. One wanted a special approval matrix. Another needed a unique contract automation software integration. A third requested a completely different way to handle contract versioning.

We said yes to all of them. We were young, eager to please, and convinced that being “customer-centric” meant building whatever customers asked for.

The result? By 2020, we had features hidden three layers deep that even our own support team had forgotten existed. We were maintaining code that literally one customer used—code that broke every time we pushed an update, code that required specialized knowledge to fix, code that slowed down our entire development cycle.

The Hidden Cost of Yes

Let me paint you a picture of what custom development really costs:

The 1% Problem: After analyzing our usage data, I discovered that 90% of our users were using just 20% of our features. We were maintaining massive amounts of code for edge cases that barely moved the needle on customer satisfaction.

The Maintenance Monster: That “10 lines of code” a customer swears will solve their problem? It never stays 10 lines. It needs documentation, testing, maintenance, bug fixes, and updates every time you change anything else in your system. My developers now laugh when they remember how I used to advocate for “just adding this small thing.”

The Innovation Killer: Every hour spent maintaining custom code is an hour not spent building features that benefit all your customers. We were so busy keeping our Frankenstein’s monster of customizations alive that we couldn’t innovate on our core product.

The Power of No

Something magical happened when we started saying no to custom development: we became a better company.

Instead of building the best contract management software for just one enterprise client, we built a better general OCR feature that thousands of customers could use. Instead of creating bespoke workflows, we made our standard workflows more flexible.

We adopted a new philosophy: stick with the frameworks we use out of the box. No customization. Make it work within the constraints. These constraints, rather than limiting us, forced us to be more creative and build better solutions.

How to Say No (And Keep Your Customers Happy)

Saying no doesn’t mean being unhelpful. Here’s how we do it:

Understand the real problem: When a customer asks for a custom feature, dig deeper. What problem are they trying to solve? Often, there’s a way to achieve their goal using existing features they didn’t know about.

Show them the path: Don’t just say no—demonstrate how they can accomplish their goal using your current product. This often reveals that your product is more powerful than they realized.

Channel feedback into product development: If multiple customers ask for similar customizations, that’s a signal to improve your core product—not to build custom solutions for each of them.

Be honest about why: Explain that custom development would ultimately hurt them too. They’d be stuck on a special version, potentially missing out on new features and improvements.

The 80% Solution

Today, 80% of my job as CEO is saying no—to features, to customizations, to complexity. I remove more than I add. I kill projects that are already built if they add complexity without proportional value.

This might sound harsh, but it’s actually the kindest thing we can do for our customers. By maintaining a focused, simple product, we can move faster, innovate more, and provide a better experience for everyone.

That customer who wanted the custom workflow? They’re still with us. Turns out our standard features solved their problem just fine once they understood how to use them. And because we didn’t waste three weeks on their customization, we were able to ship a new feature that benefited all 1,500 of our customers.

The Ultimate Superpower

In a world where everyone says yes, no becomes a superpower. It’s the power to maintain focus, to preserve simplicity, to move fast. It’s the difference between building a product and building a mess.

So the next time a customer waves a check in your face for custom development, remember: the most expensive code you’ll ever write is the code that only one customer uses.

Your future self—and your future customers—will thank you for saying no.

Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Before founding Concord, Matt worked with Nicholas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential campaign and later for a major telecom company, where his frustration with manual contract management inspired him to transform how businesses handle agreements.