
B2B Is Unsexy, and I Know It - dshipper
http://danshipper.com/b2b-is-unsexy-and-i-know-it
======
mindcrime
Good stuff, and I agree with almost 100% of that. The only thing I take
exception to is the (seemingly) implicit suggestion that "sexy" is defined by
what college kids like:

 _And that’s true. B2B is unsexy in that I don’t build things that my college
friends want to use._

Nah... if you're doing sexy technology, it's sexy even if not a single college
kid has ever heard of it.

I'd encourage everyone to NOT buy into the HN echo chamber mentality... there
is a _LOT_ more to the business world than consumer facing geo-local-social-
mobile-photo-sharing-cat-picture startups.

Do cool shit that solves problems for people, charge for it, and make money...
that's not a half-bad formula.

(disclosure: I'm a founder of a very sexy B2B enterprise software startup).

~~~
mattmanser
I completely disagree with this, this isn't an echo chamber, and no-one's
buying into that ethos.

Let's be frank, b2b is boring as shit.

It's not even vaguely interesting.

The only challenge to setting up the ultimate competitor to Sage/Quickbooks is
that it's so mind numbingly dull. B2B programming is an utter pile of mind-
numbingly boring crap. It's not sexy because it's incredibly simple with a
colossal amount of edge cases. B2B is mindbogglingly complex simple software.

B2B is just the edge cases.

It's not in the remotest bit interesting to most people. It's often bound by
the most ridiculous laws and covenants.

But it'll make you a lot of money.

Do you want to read about it? No, because it's so ridiculously shallow and
dull. That why no-one talks about it.

(disclosure: I am also writing b2b software)

EDIT: There was a very recent post by Intuit about the 10 million lines
they've written for Quickbooks and how they manage it. That says it all to me
really. 10 million lines means something has gone very, very, very wrong to
me. Would you want to write a 10 million line essay about accounting? Think
about your average words per line programming, that's nigh on a 50 million
page essay. Just to do accounting.

Joy.

~~~
zcvosdfdgj
_The only challenge to setting up the ultimate competitor to Sage/Quickbooks
is that it's so mind numbingly dull._

Yes, the dullness of the topic is why no one has bothered to enter the market
and compete with the $3 billion Intuit, or the $1.5 billion Sage. It's just
too boring for them to bother with that kind of money.

You're fing kidding right?

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, the 17,000 pages in GAAP have something
to do with it? Or maybe the 3000+ counties.. or the long list of
county/city/state/federal rules and regulations? and not just accounting
rules, but employment taxes, credit card processing, invoice generation, etc,
etc, etc.

I think you don't understand the complexity of the topic and don't know the
full feature-set of sage/quickbooks, and that's why you think it's simple
software.

~~~
jacobn
I think he understands it rather well - it's "complex simple software".

You can think of any software as consisting of a set of problems of varying
degree of "difficulty". Sort them in ascending order and plot them. This graph
will give a very tell-tale signature as to what you're facing.

B2B / enterprise / call it what you will software has an infinite number of
individually easy but collectively mind-numbingly painful problems. Yes, a lot
of that bs comes from laws/rules created by "others".

"Interesting" software has a small-ish number of _very_ difficult problems and
then a manageable number of easy ones. These are the type of problems where
you can take a small team of very smart people and really knock it out of the
park. They are most unfortunately very few and far between.

Social cat photo software I can't speak to. I'm certainly not implying that
it's in the "interesting" bucket...

~~~
zcvosdfdgj
No, he definitely doesn't understand what quickbooks is. He says 10million loc
is an indication it has gone "horribly wrong". That tells me he doesn't have
the vaguest idea what the feature set of quickbooks is.

I've been programming for 15 years, and have personally used sage for 7 years.
10m loc is definitely within reason for the number of features the app has.

If he doesn't understand WHAT the software IS. Then how can he sit there and
say what the level of difficulty is.

He DOES NOT KNOW. because HE DOES NOT KNOW what quickbooks is.

~~~
0x0
I parsed his "something's gone horribly wrong" as to mean "wrong with the
accounting laws in this country", not "wrong with the software development".

~~~
jacques_chester
Law is complex because the world is complex. We're talking about "essential"
complexity; it exists in the domain and it can't be wished away.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
I have to disagree. Law is complex largely because politicians need to feel
like they are doing something. They make changes so they can claim in their
next campaign that they've improved things. They make changes to benefit their
likely donors/voters. The cruft keeps piling up and it rarely gets wiped away.

Consider tax-advantaged retirement savings. Why do we have: traditional IRA,
Roth IRA, SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, 401k, Roth 401k, and 403b, all with different
requirements and different benefits? The need to have a reasonable amount of
savings when you retire is universal, so why this complicated mess? Why are
two people doing the same job at two different companies able to save
dramatically different amounts based on whether or not their employer chooses
to offer a 401k? Why force every taxpayer to do a 10-line (or whatever it is)
calculation to determine eligibility to for an IRA just so we can prohibit a
few rich people from having a benefit (hint: it would be a lot easier for
everyone to make it universally available and just bump the rich people's tax
bracket by a hair if you really feel the need to wipe out the pittance in tax
savings that they would obtain). This isn't necessary complexity, it is
pointless stupidity that we all suffer for (except for the accountants that
gain employment from it).

~~~
jacques_chester
Sure, that's one source of complexity in _legislation_.

But really, seriously, the world is complex. Every day people stumble on
combinations of circumstances that _have never occurred before in human
history_. Some fraction of those people get into an argument about what
happens next. Some fraction of those go to a judge and ask her what the answer
is.

The judge takes the existing principles, cogitates a bit, then extends the
case law to cover the new scenario based on analogy with older scenarios.

This creates a new piece of law. It's never been seen before. But it might
turn out to have profound consequences.

Before switching to computer science, I studied law. It's complicated because
people are complicated.

------
bdunn
I wouldn't ever consider building a product for consumers.

Why?

* Businesses are used to paying for services.

* Businesses can typically make judgements about the ROI of software (X saves Maggie 5 hours a week. That translates to $200 in pay. Sure, $100/mo is worth it.) Consumers can't.

* Businesses pay thousands of dollars a month for each person on staff. If you can eliminate the need for a position, a business will probably willingly pay 3 to 4 figures for your software.

~~~
karamazov
I've never heard the term '3 figures' before :)

~~~
StavrosK
Do you mean you haven't heard "three", or "figures"? Because you've definitely
heard "six figures".

~~~
hkmurakami
One of those cases where you've heard "three" and "figures" but not "three
figures" :P

(I've probably heard it used only a few times in my life)

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, right. Same here, come to think of it. I wonder what other cliche phrases
we can ruin.

------
diminium
This feels like deja vu. I asked a similar question in
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182993>

B2B is also very dysfunctional. You almost have to operate in a different
reality to survive there.

diskdoctor answered with "Marketing and selling software to enterprises is the
most dysfunctional cycle of decision making you will ever see in business. In
almost all cases the individuals in the business who actually derive value
from the technology are entirely disconnected from those who make the
purchasing decisions. Many times those purchasing decisions are made based on
"perceived" synergies with other software systems already owned from the same
vendor, having never been vetted by the actually consumer in the business."

This is probably the biggest difficulty in B2B.

Steve Jobs even said something similar "What I love about the consumer market,
that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a
product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for
themselves. They go ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and if enough of them say ‘yes,’ we get to
come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works. It’s really simple. With the
enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t
decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are
confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for
people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether
we’re on track or not.”

~~~
paulsutter
Dropbox found a way around that. It's heavily used within corporations, but
the adoption decision gets made by each individual acting alone.

Ping Li has an excellent paper on this:
[http://www.accel.com/assets/resources/files/17/original_rena...](http://www.accel.com/assets/resources/files/17/original_renaissance_of_business_software.pdf)

~~~
theatrus2
Apple and Dropbox are both successful in the "enterprise" (and more so in the
small business) because of this. They didn't sell to the company, they sold to
the users and employees.

------
pnathan
Well put. No one has heard of the company I work for, and we do some seriously
cool B2B stuff. We're 100% employee owned and are #1 in certain segments of
our customers.

No, we're not "sexy", we're not media darlings, and "social media" is really
not in our genes. But our products are really awesome. :-)

~~~
philwelch
You also have a rack of exotic blue hardware at every engineer's desk, can't
complain with that.

~~~
spitfire
SGI still exists? What are you talking about?

~~~
pnathan
We both used to work at the same company. It makes custom hardware. The
company's "preferred" color is blue. Hence, blue boxes at every engineer's
desk.

~~~
spitfire
So what's the company?

------
AlexBlom
I'm unsure the perception of B2B among VC's is as bad as commonly thought.

My last startup was pure B2B, and during our valley runs I found most
potential partners / vc's / workers were very excited (in part because of the
opportunity, in part because of perceived market movements, and in part
because B2B can be fun) at the prospect of growing in B2B.

B2B companies may not spawn a media darling, but it doesn't make the business
itself unsexy.

~~~
debacle
The problem with B2B is that it doesn't follow the standard startup model.

In B2C, if you have 10,000 users, VCs will just start to look at you. In B2B,
except in some specific instances, if you have 10,000 users you're already a
million dollar company.

Thus, in B2C the risk/reward inflection point occurs much later
chronologically than in B2B, and for a B2B business, I, personally, think that
there is far too much ambiguity before that inflection point.

~~~
mindcrime
> The problem with B2B is that it doesn't follow the _standard startup model_

Is there even such a thing? Anyway, it's not that VCs don't fund B2B
startups... they absolutely do, and there are even firms that specialize in
that space (or at least have a heavy focus on it). A16Z, for example, are
known for investing heavily into enterprise plays:

<http://a16z.com/portfolio/portfolio-enterprise-companies/>

~~~
hkmurakami
If there _is_ such a thing as _the standard startup model_ , then I'd argue
that it would be the B2B model.

The current mold of web/social/mobile/location startups is the exception to
the norm in the history of high tech startups.

------
rickmb
There seems to be an odd notion that B2B must be about accounting and such.
Most B2B stuff I've been involved with the past few years has all been
"social".

Because, like soylent green, companies mostly consist of _people_...

------
j45
This article speaks to a point that most miss:

The business model can be as sexy, or sexier than the idea itself.

When we build something that is boring to some, I wonder if we forget the
magic of what we do.

What is boring to us is magic to someone, stuck suffering with managing
details. It's nice to see the maturation of developers who do for the world
what's being asked of us: help everyone everywhere, with software.

About B2C or B2B:

1) It's a preference. A reality is, there is not as much B2C out there as we
think. Too many consumer facing "successes" do not take money from
"customers". Why? The users are the product that are sold to advertisers. They
often ask businesses to pay, maybe by advertising, and it's a lot of work.

2) Consumers are quite fickle, irrational and emotional decision makers. They
will often think about any decision over $5/month.

Small businesses, on the other hand, don't think about $50/month too much.
They're fairly logical (a good fit for developer's tendencies), and very much
understand and make decisions based on value -- saving them, or making them
money. They'll also be more forgiving about understanding features-based
marketing instead of benefit-based marketing if you can't dial in your
copywriting. In short, there's more flexibility to learn and still do well
enough to keep improving.

3) If you let a sliver of your talent tackle a B2B problem that customers will
pay for, you get to keep the panacea much easier: Work on what you want every
day without fear of paying the bills, or pursuing a swing for the fences idea
without fear of failure or running out of money. Not everyone gets to live in
the Valley. I'm sure I'd be open to other possibilities if I lived there, but
I don't right now.

If you're out for the first success or two of your life, consider this: check
any ego and immature thought habits to fit in. Exchange them with discipline,
to learn what you need to about the fundamentals of building a business, it
will serve you very well when going after the B2C ideas.

Almost everyone who tries to fit in, inevitably gets left behind. Do what
others aren't willing to do to build a business that makes money, because it's
worth way more, to customers, and VC's.

As every single person on HN gets older, they will have more responsibilities
because of the other things in their lives they want, and cost money every
month. There's a chance now to address those very easily and get some great
business development experience. That doesn't sound like much to some, but
startups are a longer haul game than anyone ever admits.

~~~
the_cat_kittles
william carlos williams couldn't have said it better

------
unimpressive
To me, a sexy business is one that helps people and makes money.

By this definition the majority of social startups are as unsexy as possible.

------
jsiarto
We're a B2B shop and have been profitable from day one. Sometimes it takes a
while to get paid from the big guys, but once you're in, cash flow is great.
There are some downsides (control, last minute BS, corporate things)--but it
seems to be easier to get companies to part with their cash than your neighbor
or suite-mate.

~~~
jacques_chester
The secret to B2B is that it's almost never somebody's actual personal money.

If I as the manager approve the $5000 WooFiz 7 Platinum purchase, I might feel
a some concern to ensure that the ROI is defensible.

But that's it. Because it's not _my_ money. If WooFiz turns out to be junk ...
well, that sucks. But I'm not personally out of pocket.

------
pilif
We're working since 2001 on a b2b software. While it might seem boring, it's
not in the least (minus some rare low points, but you get these everywhere).

It's also very rewarding to see users be productive with the software and be
grateful for making their lives easier. In fact, many of the end users are to
this day computer illiterates and making great software they can use is a very
interesting challenge.

Also the technical stuff. Just because it's b2b doesn't mean you can't make it
interesting for you. Whatever new technology comes around, I make it a point
to try it out and apply it in production where it helps.

We've done AJAX before it was called that. We've been running node.js since
the 0.2 days and we've solved interesting scaling problems.

There is nothing we can't do that makers of consumer products can do. The
difference is that we are getting paid handsomely ever since and that we don't
have to deal with advertisers or, god forbid, VCs.

Thanks mainly to our product Switzerland was and still is one of the countries
with the highest percentage of electronic orders among dentists (I only have
numbers there. The restaurants numbers might be even bigger).

Combine that with the cool technical challenges to solve and you are left with
a very interesting job that just never gets old.

~~~
jacques_chester
I agree that solving people's pain points is one of the best parts of doing
enterprise-y stuff.

------
nbashaw
My response: [http://nbashaw.com/post/28654441223/consumer-internet-
isnt-d...](http://nbashaw.com/post/28654441223/consumer-internet-isnt-dead)

In a nutshell, I think there's still a lot of value in creating web and mobile
apps for consumers, it's just that there's been a glut in the market,
especially for mobile. Too many apps that aren't very differentiated.

In the long run I still think consumer is a good play, though.

------
DRMacIver
So I've done a B2B company before and am doing one now (current place isn't
intrinsically B2B but that's our main focus. It's certainly not something
normal consumers would use).

I think this understates what incredibly hard work selling B2B can be. Large
companies will pay you a lot of money, but are ridiculously high maintenance -
they expect custom work on your product (often of the "Can you integrate it
into our ActiveDirectory/Exchange/etc" form) and the sales process to them is
incredibly long.

Small companies on the other hand are often strapped for cash and have weirdly
distorted views of the value of their time - If what you're selling them is
something they can "do now" by spending 3 hours of an employee per day it can
make it very hard to convince them to pay you at a rate you'll be able to
sustain a profit on.

Neither of these are impossible to overcome of course. People can and do do
extremely well with B2B businesses. I just want to point out that there are
real problems with selling B2B as well, and that it's not nearly as easy as it
might sound.

------
eli
I'm doing an ad-supported B2B media startup now. So that's doubly unsexy since
free ad-supported media is not a very trendy business model right now.

But it works because we understand our market, we understand marketers, and
we've had a dedicated sales staff since day 1. You can make a lot of money
with ads if you don't treat them as an afterthought.

------
vkatluri
How does one enter the B2B market? Does B2B mean you're solving how two
companies do business with each other?

~~~
mindcrime
> How does one enter the B2B market?

Create a product that solves a need that businesses have and sell it to them.
Steve Blank's _The Four Steps To The Epiphany_ is a great resource that is
heavily focused on the B2B world.

> Does B2B mean you're solving how two companies do business with each other?

No, it just means that your business ("B") is selling "2" other businesses
("B"). So, when IBM sells WebSphere AS to other businesses, that's a B2B
market.

B2C, conversely, is when you sell something to consumers. So, Wal-Mart is
mainly B2C.

The lines aren't always clear, and there are other models that don't _quite_
fit either definition.

~~~
SudarshanP
Thanks for that clarification. I too was under the wrong idea that B2B were
somehow guys involved in connecting businesses to each other though their
solutions. So B2B and enterprise software are the same? Does 37signals/Tello
count as B2B or B2C?

~~~
hkmurakami
Enterprise Software is a subset of "B2B". B2B encompasses any business that
sells products and services to other businesses. The universe spans Alcoa (the
world's largest aluminum producer) to Oracle (perhaps the world's most evil
software producer).

------
rodolphoarruda
Lots of Jason Fried's influence in the subconscious, I should say. Two or
three segments seem to be extracted verbatim from 'Getting Real' book. Nice
text, congrats.

~~~
dshipper
It's funny I've never read that book but love Jason Fried. Thanks for the
comment :)

------
codexon
The huge advantage of B2B is that businesses get to write off your payment as
an expense, so they are much more likely to pay you more.

------
dgudkov
>The biggest opportunities probably aren’t in social anymore

Economy struggles because there almost no new ways to increase labor
productivity further. Making business tools more collaborative and social may
boost labor productivity to next level. It's too early to dismiss social
completely even if it's hit glass ceiling in B2C market.

------
robwhitley
B2B = better to bet for VCs in the coming years.

------
malkia
What's B2B?

~~~
andrewflnr
Business to business.

