To B2B Or to B2C

I met an entrepreneur last week who was telling me about his startup. Their main vision/product is a social media/sharing app targeted at consumers. He added that they had media companies asking them to build white label versions for themselves to which I replied it’s tough to do both. Alas, perhaps I came across as unintentionally glib since he got defensive, talked about how others were saying to go for it, that it’s the same product and spluttered that they could go b2b if their consumer product doesn’t work out. Maybe.

But my point stands: It’s nearly impossible to do both b2b and b2c sub-scale. They inevitably involve different mindsets, roadmaps and DNA and I don’t know of any companies that have successfully done both until they’ve gotten to scale, Google and Square for example. I’d love to be proven wrong here though. Even then, if you’re doing a consumer-facing app and you start taking the meetings to white label it for corporates, I’d say the writing is on the wall — deep down inside, you don’t believe in the consumer play and you’ll end up going b2b. No shame in that and you can still have a good outcome but if you really want a widely adopted consumer product, resist the temptation to go b2b.

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