B2B SaaS

Why it matters

The B2B versus B2C choice sets almost everything downstream: pricing, channel, support load, and how many customers you need. A B2C product at $5 per month needs thousands of users before it pays rent; a B2B product at $200 per month needs about 100. Businesses also churn less than consumers when the product is wired into a workflow. The tradeoff is longer sales cycles: self-serve B2B closes in days, but anything above roughly $10k in annual contract value starts involving demos, multiple stakeholders, and weeks to months of waiting. Most solo founders should default to B2B because reaching 100 companies with a painful problem is a marketing problem you can brute-force, while reaching 100,000 consumers usually requires paid ads or virality you cannot control. The common mistake is picking B2C because the idea feels more fun, then discovering the unit economics never close.

Worked example

Two founders want $20k MRR. Founder A builds a consumer habit app at $5 per month and needs 4,000 paying users, which at a 2% visitor-to-paid conversion means roughly 200,000 visitors. Founder B builds an invoice-chasing tool for agencies at $250 per month and needs 80 customers, reachable through cold outreach and one niche community.

Common mistakes

• Running a B2C playbook (freemium, virality hopes) on a B2B product that needs direct outreach and demos
• Underpricing because you compare against consumer apps instead of the business cost of the problem
• Selling to businesses that feel the pain but do not control budget, like junior employees instead of managers
• Ignoring that even small B2B deals can stall for weeks on approvals

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