zlacker

Yes, I agree—especially when it comes to larger corporate entities. With smaller companies, I’ve often found myself face-to-face with key decision-makers, owners, VPs, and others—where I at least had the opportunity to discuss (or pitch) a service or product. In my case, though, I usually didn’t have anything to promote during those networking or social situations. Still, I believe it’s generally easier to connect with small businesses than with large corpo's. It’s just a matter of putting yourself out there as much as possible.

As for the elephant in the room: large corporations are riddled with bureaucracy, inflexible policies, and, frankly, executives who often don’t give a hoot. Not impossible—but definitely more difficult. Speaking from experience (and this may be hard to believe, especially after being accused of being an LLM agent): one of my SaaS web apps I developed last year is currently in use—at no cost—by a top Fortune 500 company. I can't name them, but I maintain the app through a small fee charged to one of their 3rd-party vendors I work with. Now, to be clear: the number of users is barely worth mentioning, but the collective data and its operational value are huge for that corporate department. In short, they love it. Ever since launch, I've been trying to convince them to take on the fees directly and scale the app across all their branches. Even though their internal team, including IT department, has endorsed it and approved internal use, they have too many barriers to jump even before thinking of adopting it as their own tool. Anyway—just sharing. Sorry for the long comment! Amen.