Trust no one, and it doesn't matter if it's a Fortune whatever, a small enterprise, a small company or an individual.
A company or business of any size can axe a product they own at any time, unless they contractually promised you support.
Also some companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS etc are more trusted by “the enterprise” than Google.
Is there an easy process for your customers to move their data over to a similar service if they don’t want to renew the contract?
> then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to
Did you live in the same city? Or did you work remote?
Did they want to meet you in person first, before the escrow agreement?
Maybe that can be an addition to your answer: Start with big companies close to where you live?
As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
(I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story)
Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions.
The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc.
Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.