For those of us not working on cat photo sharing products for the ever shifting consumer market there is considerably less luck, throwing random stuff at the wall, and pivoting involved. B2B SaaS is pretty nice. Join us on the dark side :)
...but how do you know that? The principal disadvantage of B2B is that the long sales cycle greatly increases the time until you get feedback that your product sucks, so you either succeed (in which case, of course, you say "it wasn't luck"), or you fail (in which case, it's attributed to bad luck). Also, even then, it takes a fairly self-aware set of founders to admit that the reason that the product isn't selling is because it sucks, and not because (say) the sales team is bad, or because BigCo isn't buying this quarter, etc.
Say what you will about consumer startups, but the ability to pivot quickly in the face of consumer feedback is a feature, not a bug. You can sort-of get around this by doing a direct-sale B2B service (i.e. what you're doing with justworks), but in that case, you're still a consumer startup -- you're just selling a "professional" product with a niche market.
I couldn't agree more, but I'm not sure you're right about the feedback cycle. We did a ton of "lean startup"-ish stuff including launching minimal products to trusted beta users and expanding based on customer feedback.
But there is exactly a 0% chance that Justworks will ever fundamentally "pivot" to being a different product. The concept that this is even preferable is kind of crazy. A pivot should be a last chance "we got it wrong but we've got some money left so let's try something else" - not a matter of course.
In terms of knowing whether or not the product sucks vs. the sales team sucks, this is, of course, an eternal question in SaaS. Luckily our product is selling, but I would say that regardless trust and high amounts of communication between sales and product development is absolutely key. At any sort of level of maturity this is your prime feedback loop with the customer and we take it very very seriously.
Eh...perhaps "payroll" is a bad starting point for a pivot, but I think that if your product weren't selling, you'd be more eager to find a related product that did sell. Pivoting isn't a gratuitous thing, but neither is it a complete overhaul of your business model. Hence, the name: you change direction, keeping one foot firmly planted in your current business.
I think the devil is in the details of how you define "pivot" -- done correctly, it's just an intelligent reaction to new information. If you look at it that way, it makes no sense to avoid it.
Waiting to sell until after you've built something is just as foolhardy in B2B as in B2C.
The equivalent winning strategy in B2B is to pitch the idea to the first customers before it's even built. If you can't convince them to commit, you pivot. If you find excited customers, they become your close feedback through the whole dev process.
Atypical early adopters may steer you wrong, but that can happen in the consumer space too.
It is nice though to move people from paper processes to mobile/SaaS/cloud and near-real time data collection and see the lightbulb go up. Feels decidedly light-side.
Possibly, but doesn't quite have the ring to it :)
This doesn't mean you don't iterate. A lot of the lean startup stuff is still useful to us (a/b testing for more focused UI etc.). But generally speaking, we know where the product is going, and our customers' needs, often better than them.
You want to validate your business assumptions sooner rather than later and there's nothing wrong with that. You should also tweak your business based on the real world. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing really that new about that either. Other than that maybe Pivot is the new Agile?
What SV does have is a very large percentage of the successful internet start-ups. But there are so many more lines of business where untold billions are being made by companies that go for non-sexy non b2c approaches.
What works for YC and what works on the web is a very visible very thin slice of the software world as a whole. In a way you're making your life harder if you pursue that particular niche because even though that's where all the easy PR and the most visible success stories are it is also where the competition is fierce.
B2B is a lot less likely to make you billions. But it is more likely to make you tens of millions. So if you want to reduce the luck factor and increase your chances of success then b2b would seem to make good sense. It also works better if you will have to work without access to capital or a presence in a place like SV.
Way 2. Mix with people in the real world that work in the companies above. Listen to their problems, offer solutions, offer to pop in after work one day or on a weekend and look at their problems.
In a month you will know which problems stand out
Start marketing around that problem, build an audience, evangelise something valuable.
Take your own good advice :-)
There are a ridiculous number of them out there.
The only problem is it's a lot easier to post, comment, kibitz, criticize than to actually do. It's nice to read the good advice here, but at the end of the day it's still necessary to do something useful in a startup. This isn't a criticism of your post, it's a general observation.
In my country, faxes are legally recognized as evidence, but email isn't, so there's a strong incentive to fax documents.
A law recognizing electronic signatures might help things, but it's still pretty cumbersome.
I tried to build a solution for "escribanos" - the U.S. approximate equivalent is notaries, but they're specialized lawyers actually - and the legal hurdles proved impossible to overcome.
Stuff that is being done with fax machines out of ignorance would be a better place to start, but there you have to face conservatism (an admittedly easier barrier than legal obstacles).
The best entrepreneur IMO brings a combination of the technical expertise with understanding of the problem, preferably a personal/deep understanding. If you want to understand specific business problems for some specific businesses/industries you need to read about them, talk to people from the industry and/or work in the industry. Some problems are generic and cut across industries. Some b2b problems are the same problems individuals have in performing their work.
Some problems are easy, e.g. have easy solutions, everyone knows about them. Some problems are hard, a lot of work to solve. Some problems are very niche/specific, no one knows about them...