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axod | 15 years ago

One of the things I dislike about B2B is the lack of fine grain control.

With B2C, your revenue grows over time as you grow your userbase. It's pretty predictable, and not too risky.

With B2B, it's more binary. You might go months with 0 revenue, then get some deal and suddenly be profitable. But then there's added risk, as losing a single client can have a massive impact on your bottom line.

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asanwal|15 years ago

Sorry and this may get me downvoted, but this comment shows significant naivete about both B2B and B2C business models.

First, neither is easy. But "B2C is predictable and not too risky" is patently absurd. It requires attracting users, keeping them and figuring out a way to monetize them in some economically sensible way. And this is while competing with 1000s of other services trying to attract attention as well. VC portfolios are littered with carcasses of B2C startups that never caught on (and those are the well capitalized ones)

With regards to B2B, I think you're describing B2B in a consulting context vs. B2B SaaS. In SaaS if done right, you have people with a pain and with real money to solve that pain. As a result, you don't require millions of users to make good money.

Of course, one is not better than the other. Depends on what you know, what gets you excited, etc.

axod|15 years ago

I've always found B2C advertising supported relatively easy. Perhaps I'm just lucky at it :/ Perhaps I'm just very bad at B2B.

However, I'd much rather have a million customers paying me $1 each, than have 10 customers paying me $100k each.

But I agree with your last point. Depends what gets you excited. For me personally, B2B is as soul destroying as it gets.