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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

I made a similar point a few weeks ago, though minus the amusing anecdote:

http://chester.id.au/2013/01/05/on-selling-to-consumers/

The point is that most of the money in the world is actually in the hands of businesses. They are using it to do whatever it is they are responsible for doing in the overall structure of production.

And most of the software they rely on is terrible. Or non-existent.

The reason, though, that everyone works on consumer applications it's easy to put yourself in the place of the customer (for a similar reason it seems that by law every dozenth web app firm is peddling some sort of issue tracker tool). Plus all our hero figures are consumer-facing.

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great post.

you, like me, are in a non-US-sized market so I wonder if that has something to do with it.

perhaps like me you've been watching local, globally-facing B2C startups fail over the last couple of years when there's tons of enterprise problems to solve right at home.

Hi Yongfook,

  I think this is an excellent post on why startups should start exploring more B2B opportunities. However, do you think that since many startup founders are still relatively young with little working experience, they may not have experienced the state of enterprise software and the enterprise sales cycle?

  Being based in Singapore too (let's meet up for kopi some day.. =) ), I feel that there is a lot of opportunity in exploring industries that are considered non-mainstream and traditional by B2C. For example, marine, logistics, healthcare, fashion, PR, construction, interior design, food & beverage..

It's just that people don't realise how big the non-consumer market is. In the essay I referred to, Hayek fairly neatly demonstrates that quite small increases in a consumer market can have multiplicative effects on the structure of production.

In this very thread people are griping about the "difficulty" of selling to businesses. I don't know what to make of that.

When you sell to a business you still sell to a person, it's just that said person feels like they are paying with monopoly money. They have a psychological distance that a consumer just doesn't have.

I'm interested about your observation on the size of our domestic markets changing our thinking. Possibly. It would be interesting to see where the Chinese startup scene are focusing their efforts; they are already dealing with a USA-sized middle class and it will only get bigger.

You are not selling to "a" person. You are selling to a group of people, with a variety of biases and self-interest, not all of whom you will necessarily even meet. That's what makes sales complex.

A lot of the time, there is a particular individual who has the cheque-signing power up to $X. For such a person there is a psychological distance from the act of spending -- it's not a personal loss if the purchase doesn't pan out. Whereas for individuals spending their own money, the simulation heuristic makes purchases of unexperienced goods or services much scarier.

Hence my "monopoly money" remark.

I think you have correctly reflected that a purchasing decision may have input from many different parties. But these people matter from a sales perspective only so far as they influence the decision of the person with the chequebook.

The flip side of that is there's usually little for that particular individual to personally gain from spending that monopoly money, even if it actually helps department X cut costs or raise sales dramatically, whilst a conspicuously bad change to companies' spending patterns may still get them fired.

I believe one of you is writing about the psychology of the buyer, and the other it writing about the sociology of market penetration, or the sociology of corporate decisioning.

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