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.
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..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.
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.