Ask HN: How do you find and sell to B2B customers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find and sell to B2B customers?

4 pointsjetprop2 comments

My startup is struggling. We built an awesome product. Our v1 is genuinely good. We followed yc book and did almost a year of manual work while operating as a manual service.

We did get some validation and we are generating low 3 digit revenue. But, that’s not enough.

I can clearly see that b2b SaaS companies could benefit a lot for their marketing effort if they use our product. However, I am getting mostly lackluster response or NOs these days.

Pivoting completely to a different domain will not help. While we are good at building we have limited domain knowledge of other industries.

Our software is built for marketing and sales team. How do I convince them to try it out and grow our revenue?

How are these new startups, whether yc or others, are generating tens of thousands of MRR with agents when it mostly seems like a hype. There is nothing Claude or ChatGPT can’t do that these agents are doing. Why are people buying from these companies with half baked product?

Our product v1 is ready.

I am a bit desperate for revenue and validation.

It could be a variety of things and we lack information, so I'll give a, hopefully useful, generic answer.

>We did get some validation and we are generating low 3 digit revenue. But, that’s not enough.

- Does your product save money, make money, or make life "easier"?

- Did your users find you or did you find them?

- How many people have you talked with and what have you learned?

- How did your users find you?

- How did you find your users?

- What do they have in common?

- Are they in the same industry?

- Are they in the same function?

- Have you talked with them?

- What is it that they're trying to accomplish with your product? (I'm not asking you what your product does, I'm asking what they are trying to do)

- How do they describe your product? Are there words that come up again. Do they describe it differently than you do?

- What is your conversion graph (or "funnel" with the different drop-offs) like?

- What's your product's sale complexity? (high touch? low touch? do they self-serve? Do they need a demo? Do they struggle?)

- Is the user the person who pays for the product or is it someone else?

- What's your features usage like? (are they using all the features and if not, why not and what are they using to solve the problem you built the features to solve?)

- What did the people who said "NO" tell you? What are the reasons they will not use your product?

You're generating low 3s, so you have (a) customer(s).

Talk to them and find out what you can do more for them. Literally talk to them on the phone, and ask what can you do to help them further, what pain points do they still have? Maybe don't even talk about your product at the start.

Ask why you're geting NO responses.

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