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Losing a whale contract could have easily affected the profit margin by a huge amount. E.g. with a 10M burn rate and contracts of 5M, 5M, 10M, 20M. I have a profit of 30M. But if I lose the 20 my profit is 10M. I lose 2/3rds of the profit.

The smaller websites were there just to make use of employee output. The larger site ended up bottlenecked by more complex requirements but the lower skilled employees still were producing output. The newer sites were to take advantage of their output. Keep em busy...

Managing them was a chore however because they increased the complexity of the output chain. I would always give priority to the biggest site bringing in the largest amount of money.

Upgrading the big site is hard for multiple reasons. One is that every new feature has to be upgraded to the same level as the other existing features. E.g. if I had a basic feature at level 500, if I activated a level 1 feature user happiness would drop.

Reminds me of how everything Apple does has to be Apple quality. (also, innovator's dilemma)

Another reason it's hard is because the chain of requirements for the modules necessary for the more advanced features (for more potential users) is difficult to track. I ended up outsourcing huge blobs of it so I wouldn't have to trace through what each employee/group was doing

Even though every employee was kept busy, the final output was dependent on the bottleneck. The bottleneck is VERY difficult to track. It moves all over the place from team to team, department to department, especially as things change.

The managers in the game r stupid. I could only give them production targets instead of more high level goals like "Make stuff for feature A". I'd have to comb through production plans to track down the bottleneck and often find one time making hundreds of unnecessary stuff.