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Comment by andyish | Hacker News Reader

Selling to businesses can be really hard. You can get stuck with ISO standards, data and server locations and SLAs. The lead time on sales can be many months, and there's a real chance it falls through.

And on top of all that there's the strangest perception of value that can drastically change from person to person.

Companies could happily pay thousands for access to data for a single brands segmentation, then baulk at the idea of paying $7 per user for something like Slack that gets used many times a day by many people.

and step 4, i'd do the opposite. Choose a MASSIVE market. It'll be easier to get customers.

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There are plenty of opportunities for a business that don’t require conforming to some standard. You also don’t hear about the multitude of businesses that had no problem selling to other businesses, only the times where it didn’t go as planned, i.e. who writes a blog post about a modestly successful business that does $1MM ARR with a 1-2 employee setup serving maybe 10-25 clients because they write a niche software integration that connects two different systems or some tiny internal tool that alleviates a pain point?

Per-user pricing for companies works very well if you want to sell to small companies because they only need to pay for what they use. Counterintuitively, larger enterprises would rather pay more per user if they can be guaranteed of a fixed price for a given term. It makes it easier to budget.

Conversely, when you sell B2C, the value prop can be considerably more challenging ("I can build this myself!", "This is too expensive, can you provide a discount?", etc) vs B2B where the customer will happily pull a credit card out, spend $500, and thank you for the value provided.

These standards can largely be abstracted away by using a cloud that already does it for you.

For example a good secret is using Azure. It seems more expensive until you notice it provides many security certifications.

I don't think the article was saying to choose a market with few customers, of course you want costumers. Rather choose a market with few competitors.

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