Written by Sashi Reddi, Managing Partner, SRI Capital
OK, so let’s get the acronyms out of the way first. B2B refers to a business selling to other businesses. B2C refers to a business selling to consumers. This article is about how to build a successful B2B SaaS (software as a service) business. I believe my new acronym B2C2B2B essentially captures what I believe to be a winning strategy to build a large enterprise SaaS business: Build your business as if it was a B2C business if you are going to be successful at B2B. Why do I believe this?
When Amazon launched its AWS cloud offering, that was when “shadow IT” entered our popular imagination. Low level and mid level executives in large companies who were tired of begging their centralized IT departments for resources, began to buy the compute power they needed directly from AWS. AWS was trying to win business customers but marketed itself almost as if it was a consumer offering. This consumerization of enterprise tech was visible in other ways, such as when we got rid of our Blackberrys and went with iPhones and expected our enterprise apps to be easy to use like the consumer apps we were hooked on.
