In 2014, [Christoph Janz wrote a post](https://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build-100-million-business.html) — "Five Ways to Build a $100M Business" — that's still the cleanest mental model I know for picking your B2B customer. He followed it up with [Three More Ways](https://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/11/three-more-ways-to-build-100-million.html) because the framework worked too well to leave at five. Read both. The frame is simple: you can build a very large company by selling to very few huge customers, or to many tiny ones, or to anything in between. Each tier has its own physics — pricing, sales motion, financing, defensibility. Janz called the tiers animals. 
   ARPU / year         animal               who they are
   ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   $1M+               🦕 dinosaur          a government, a national telco
   $100k+             🐋 whale             Fortune 500, sovereign banks
   $10k+              🐘 elephant          insurance, mid-market enterprise
   $1k+               🦌 deer   ←★      a car dealership, a mid-SMB
   $100+              🐰 rabbit            a single mall storefront
   $10+               🐭 mouse             a solo microbusiness
   $1+                🦠 microbe           end consumers, freemium individuals
The first rule: **you don't pick your animal once a quarter — you pick it for a decade.** Moving up or down the chart takes 5 to 15 years. The infrastructure you build for one animal is wrong for the others. Sales motion, support, pricing, integrations, billing — all of it bakes the choice in. Most companies stay in the lane they started in. A few break out: - **Tienda Nube** started near the mouse — solo entrepreneurs and microbusinesses needing a storefront. Today they have much bigger merchants. The trip up took years, and their CEO tells the story in stages: prehistory, the long climb, then explosion. That kind of move is rare and slow. - **WhatsApp / Meta** is the opposite playbook: start at both ends of the chart at once. Consumers (microbe) on one side, the API for dinosaurs and elephants on the other. Big-tech can do that because they have the capital to maintain two product lines from day one. You almost certainly can't. ## why the deer is the right starting animal I'm biased, but I think most founders should start at the deer. ARPU around $10k a year. The math gets very nice very fast: - 20 customers → default alive - 80–100 customers → $1M ARR - 300–400 customers → multi-million-dollar company That's a real business with a manageable number of customer relationships. You can know each one. Your sales motion is human but not bespoke. You're not building custom software for every account. The bigger reason: **the deer is the only animal that keeps optionality**. - Once you've built for the deer, going *down* to rabbits and mice is a product simplification problem. You already understand the workflow; you strip it into self-serve. You know enough about the segment to know what to remove. - Going *up* to elephants is a customization layer on top of a real platform. You know your engine works; you wrap it in services and SOC 2 and a sales rep who flies on planes. Either move is hard, but they're both *available*. Start at the elephant and you're stuck building custom forever. Start at the mouse and you spend years burning capital before the flywheel even decides whether it'll spin. ## what kills the other ends - **Elephant-first** companies often hit $5M–$10M ARR fast in LatAm and stall. The deals are big and bespoke, and they accidentally build a consultancy with software attached. Hard to escape. - **Mouse / microbe-first** companies need very deep funding for very long periods. They have to nail self-serve, get distribution at scale, and survive the early years where revenue is thin. When they work, they go enormous; the survival rate is brutal. Neither is wrong, but both are bets on a specific kind of capital and a specific kind of operator. The deer is the bet for someone who wants the company to be *durable* before it's *huge*. ## the rule Pick your animal on purpose. Build the company for that animal. Plan to spend a decade with it. If you're unsure — start with the deer. You'll thank yourself when you need to move, in either direction.