I've seen B2B startups become successful by doing B2B consulting, finding something they can replicate aka productize, and create scale that way.
I let them know that I build software and am interested in their industry. I asked them if they would be willing to try my app and provide feedback. They said yes!
So, I got to work formulating a MVP feature list. I presented it to them and we iterated back and forth for a while. Then, I started building. More months of feedback and iteration ensued.
Once they’d been using the product for ~6 months we launched to the public.
Fast forward 4 years and we have ~1k customers.
It can be done! The first step is to talk to people, relate to them, and empathize with the issues they face in their business.
If you ever want to chat one on one, my email is in my profile.
Actually, we started even one step earlier, by working on open source (Gensim), no money involved at all.