Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

danshipper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#31

Post by SudarshanP »

mindcrime wrote: post #10
vkatluri wrote: post #7

How does one enter the B2B market? Does B2B mean you're solving how two companies do business with each other?

> How does one enter the B2B market? Create a product that solves a need that businesses have and sell it to them. Steve Blank's The Four Steps To The Epiphany is a great resource that is heavily focused on the B2B world. > Does B2B mean you're solving how two companies do business with each other? No, it just means that your business ("B") is selling "2" other businesses ("B"). So, when IBM sells WebSphere AS to oth…

Thanks for that clarification. I too was under the wrong idea that B2B were somehow guys involved in connecting businesses to each other though their solutions. So B2B and enterprise software are the same? Does 37signals/Tello count as B2B or B2C?

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#32

Post by eli »

I'm doing an ad-supported B2B media startup now. So that's doubly unsexy since free ad-supported media is not a very trendy business model right now.

But it works because we understand our market, we understand marketers, and we've had a dedicated sales staff since day 1. You can make a lot of money with ads if you don't treat them as an afterthought.

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#33

Post by dgudkov »

>The biggest opportunities probably aren’t in social anymore

Economy struggles because there almost no new ways to increase labor productivity further. Making business tools more collaborative and social may boost labor productivity to next level. It's too early to dismiss social completely even if it's hit glass ceiling in B2C market.

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#34

Post by agwa »

mattmanser wrote: post #30
mindcrime wrote: post #3

Good stuff, and I agree with almost 100% of that. The only thing I take exception to is the (seemingly) implicit suggestion that "sexy" is defined by what college kids like: And that’s true. B2B is unsexy in that I don’t build things that my college friends want to use. Nah... if you're doing sexy technology, it's sexy even if not a single college kid has ever heard of it. I'd encourage everyone to NOT buy into the H…

I completely disagree with this, this isn't an echo chamber, and no-one's buying into that ethos. Let's be frank, b2b is boring as shit. It's not even vaguely interesting. The only challenge to setting up the ultimate competitor to Sage/Quickbooks is that it's so mind numbingly dull. B2B programming is an utter pile of mind-numbingly boring crap. It's not sexy because it's incredibly simple with a colossal amount of…

You're defining B2B too narrowly. You describe what sounds like a business logic app, probably mostly CRUD. And yes, that's pretty boring. But that's not the only software that businesses buy. Heroku, for example, is a B2B company because they sell predominantly to companies, not individuals. Heroku might not be something that the founders' relatives and college buddies would use, but it's far from boring.

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#35

Post by theatrus2 »

paulsutter wrote: post #28
diminium wrote: post #26

This feels like deja vu. I asked a similar question in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182993 B2B is also very dysfunctional. You almost have to operate in a different reality to survive there. diskdoctor answered with "Marketing and selling software to enterprises is the most dysfunctional cycle of decision making you will ever see in business. In almost all cases the individuals in the business who actually de…

Dropbox found a way around that. It's heavily used within corporations, but the adoption decision gets made by each individual acting alone. Ping Li has an excellent paper on this: http://www.accel.com/assets/resources/files/17/original_rena...

Apple and Dropbox are both successful in the "enterprise" (and more so in the small business) because of this. They didn't sell to the company, they sold to the users and employees.

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#36

Post by zcvosdfdgj »

mattmanser wrote: post #30
mindcrime wrote: post #3

Good stuff, and I agree with almost 100% of that. The only thing I take exception to is the (seemingly) implicit suggestion that "sexy" is defined by what college kids like: And that’s true. B2B is unsexy in that I don’t build things that my college friends want to use. Nah... if you're doing sexy technology, it's sexy even if not a single college kid has ever heard of it. I'd encourage everyone to NOT buy into the H…

I completely disagree with this, this isn't an echo chamber, and no-one's buying into that ethos. Let's be frank, b2b is boring as shit. It's not even vaguely interesting. The only challenge to setting up the ultimate competitor to Sage/Quickbooks is that it's so mind numbingly dull. B2B programming is an utter pile of mind-numbingly boring crap. It's not sexy because it's incredibly simple with a colossal amount of…

The only challenge to setting up the ultimate competitor to Sage/Quickbooks is that it's so mind numbingly dull.

Yes, the dullness of the topic is why no one has bothered to enter the market and compete with the $3 billion Intuit, or the $1.5 billion Sage. It's just too boring for them to bother with that kind of money.

You're fing kidding right?

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, the 17,000 pages in GAAP have something to do with it? Or maybe the 3000+ counties.. or the long list of county/city/state/federal rules and regulations? and not just accounting rules, but employment taxes, credit card processing, invoice generation, etc, etc, etc.

I think you don't understand the complexity of the topic and don't know the full feature-set of sage/quickbooks, and that's why you think it's simple software.

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#37

Post by spitfire »

philwelch wrote: post #19
pnathan wrote: post #8

Well put. No one has heard of the company I work for, and we do some seriously cool B2B stuff. We're 100% employee owned and are #1 in certain segments of our customers. No, we're not "sexy", we're not media darlings, and "social media" is really not in our genes. But our products are really awesome. :-)

You also have a rack of exotic blue hardware at every engineer's desk, can't complain with that.

SGI still exists? What are you talking about?

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#38

Post by bmelton »

diminium wrote: post #26

This feels like deja vu. I asked a similar question in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182993 B2B is also very dysfunctional. You almost have to operate in a different reality to survive there. diskdoctor answered with "Marketing and selling software to enterprises is the most dysfunctional cycle of decision making you will ever see in business. In almost all cases the individuals in the business who actually de…

That's a poignant quote, and also one of the biggest pain points in selling to enterprise / federal customers.

The less spoken, easier way around is to target smaller companies. The people making the decisions have more direct influence on the purchase, and are also a lot more likely to be involved in the actual use of the software. This has worked out well for FogCreek, 37Signals, et al.

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#39

Post by hkmurakami »

StavrosK wrote: post #29
karamazov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard the term '3 figures' before :)

Do you mean you haven't heard "three", or "figures"? Because you've definitely heard "six figures".

One of those cases where you've heard "three" and "figures" but not "three figures" :P

(I've probably heard it used only a few times in my life)

Re: B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It

#40

Post by hkmurakami »

SudarshanP wrote: post #31
mindcrime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does one enter the B2B market? Create a product that solves a need that businesses have and sell it to them. Steve Blank's The Four Steps To The Epiphany is a great resource that is heavily focused on the B2B world. > Does B2B mean you're solving how two companies do business with each other? No, it just means that your business ("B") is selling "2" other businesses ("B"). So, when IBM sells WebSphere AS to oth…

Thanks for that clarification. I too was under the wrong idea that B2B were somehow guys involved in connecting businesses to each other though their solutions. So B2B and enterprise software are the same? Does 37signals/Tello count as B2B or B2C?

Enterprise Software is a subset of "B2B". B2B encompasses any business that sells products and services to other businesses. The universe spans Alcoa (the world's largest aluminum producer) to Oracle (perhaps the world's most evil software producer).
Post reply on HN