
Why are you still building consumer apps? Enterprise pays 4x more - MatosKap
http://www.developereconomics.com/still-building-consumer-apps-enterprise-pays-4x/
======
bradleyland
We're in the enterprise space. While I'm constantly amazed at how much we're
able to charge for our product, I'm equally amazed at the reasons deals go
sideways.

In the consumer space, you're working with averages over large quantities. The
number of potential buyers is huge, so you need to build a product that, on-
average, will result in more sales than non-sales when the customer reaches
the point of making a decision. This decision point might happen tens of
thousands of times -- sometimes millions -- a year for consumer products.

In the enterprise world, the number of sales opportunities are smaller by
orders of magnitude. Every sale becomes a huge gamble, and as a result you
tend to throw an immense amount of resources at every sale. This is also one
of the primary reasons enterprise software ends up so bloated and
unmanageable. On the front-end, the decision making process for purchasing
enterprise software is driven by checklists and "due diligence" procedures
that are horrible at accounting for software quality. You're more likely to
win an enterprise contract by saying "sure, we'll add that feature" than you
are carefully explaining how maintaining product focus results in a more
usable product.

This makes enterprise software a high-stakes game. A sale results in windfall
revenue, but a non-sale can severely strain cash-flows. At the end of the day,
you're still trying to beat the averages, but you're working with a much
smaller number of opportunities, so wins and losses move the needle in a big
way. I think this is a significant incentive for small shops and independent
devs to avoid the enterprise space. You need a larger bank roll to attack the
enterprise market. We bootstrapped our company, and we hit several gut checks
along the way. The days of writing large checks to my company are not quickly
forgotten.

~~~
mattzito
Exactly - at my last startup, revenue "lumpiness" was the worst part of the
whole thing. In the early days, we'd have $0 in bookings one month, and then
next month, a check for $800k would come in.

Building an enterprise sales funnel is also a challenge. It takes real
discipline to be able to say "100 leads->25 opportunities->5 POCs->3 deals at
an ASP of 450k". With consumer apps, the volume is so much greater that you
can have conversations about A/B testing the homepage to drive a few extra
percentage points - for enterprise apps, odds are not enough people will ever
visit your website to be able to gather enough data to A/B test anything.

And deals will fall apart for the most random reasons - a regime change at a
big bank. A bigger company releases a product that uses some of the same words
as yours, so the customer decides to evaluate it. Your EU channel partner gets
bribed to tank a deal by a competitor. Anything can happen.

True story: we lost a deal once because the customer did a POC, and then fired
the engineers who evaluated our software. With the departure of the engineers
who evaluated the software, management lost the use case doc and evaluation
criteria that was used by the fired engineers, so they wrote a new use case
doc without telling us, scored us based on the new doc (despite never having
used our software), then had a competitor come in and execute their POC with
the new engineers and new use case doc. Unsurprisingly, the competitor "won".
The call with the customer was amazing:

Them: You lost because of X, Y, and Z reasons

Us: Those weren't use cases in the pilot, but even if they were, we can do
those things

Them: Well...we didn't know that you could do them. But it doesn't matter. We
picked the other guys.

Us: Where are the people who looked at our software?

Them: We had to let them go. Unfortunately they didn't have time to write a
report before they left, so we based our evaluation of your software on your
user manual.

This is one of the reasons why SaaS apps are so appealing on paper. They have:

\- Recurring revenue stream

\- Freemium models allow leads to self-select

\- Less sales friction (no need to send a sales engineer onsite, just spin
them up a free 2-week trial)

But there's still a ton of money to be made in on-premise enterprise software,
it's just a long, annoying, dangerous sales process.

~~~
mattzito
Self-replying to add: The other thing to think about with on-premise
enterprise software is that while it's a huge pain to sell, it's incredibly
sticky. If you build up a sufficient volume of customers, you can basically
fund operations off of renewals, and invest all of your net new income in new
R&D and development.

Many companies will renew support contracts for years, even if they're not
heavily using your software anymore, because the risk associated with their
being out of support and then running into a critical issue is greater than
the $100k it's going to cost them to renew. But if you've got 100 customers
paying $100k/year to renew support, that's $10m in basically guaranteed
revenue, which means that _now_ you've got some breathing room to plan and
grow sensibly. That's when the lumpiness goes away.

~~~
greenyoda
Having a predictable income from support contracts is also a buffer against
seasonal sales cycles. The company I work for sells software to large
enterprises that tend to go on buying sprees during the fourth quarter, when
departments have to use up their yearly budgets or lose them. Many years we
don't know if it will be a horrible year or a great year until we've hit the
fourth quarter.

------
6cxs2hd6
It seems like there are a variety of challenges:

\- Selling costs are high.

\- Sales cycles can be long.

\- Harder to MVP and iterate.

\- Domain expertise required.

I think the last one is the biggest challenge. To be successful with any
product you need to understand the customer. Usually that means, you _are_ the
customer. With a consumer app, it's easier for you to be an example of the
customer. With an enterprise app, you need to know that sort of enterprise --
its ostensible and implicit product needs, but also the decision-making
processes and culture and so on.

As a result, you probably need to be an ex employee of that sort of company.
Who became ex only after having been there long enough to understand the
business and to make enough contacts at that company and its industry. And who
became ex on sufficiently good parting terms.

So I would guess that's the "funnel" narrowing who can pull this off?

~~~
greenyoda
" _Harder to MVP and iterate._ "

Once you're established though, the difficulty of creating an MVP becomes an
_advantage_ , because it makes it much harder for competitors to enter your
space. If your product is an iPhone game, then a couple of college kids can
compete with you. If your product is enterprise software, your competitors
need to raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars just to have a chance to
compete for your customers. The risk is that if your market segment becomes
too large, it may attract competitors that are huge, well-funded companies
like Microsoft or Oracle.

~~~
rscreative
I agree it's an advantage once you're established. And even well-funded
companies like Microsoft and Oracle are often so overly-bureaucratic that even
with hundreds of millions in support their "me too" offering can (and often
does) miss the mark.

They copy once an idea shows traction, but having not done the legwork
themselves, they won't necessarily understand why the idea was successful in
the first place. This is why you see huge companies like that wasting tons of
resources trying to catch up or, if they're smart, simply acquiring the team
with the winning idea.

~~~
greenyoda
But Microsoft can afford to spend years throwing resources at their product if
they really want to get into that market. Release 1.0 may be crap and not a
serious threat to you, but Release 4.0 might blow you out of the water.

------
jmathai
We recently made a switch from the consumer space to the b2b space.

There are two things about the change which are very refreshing.

First, we're talking with people who _want_ to pay us money and the amount
doesn't even really matter. We're priced 10-100x over what we were charging
consumers.

Second, the support overhead of supporting a crapton of free uses has dwindled
and we're now able to provide significantly better support to paying business
customers. We do phone support even.

All I've ever done in the past have been consumer startups. I don't think I'd
ever do one again.

Edit: It's no silver bullet by any means. But it just feels much saner than
the homerun derby which is the consumer Internet.

~~~
bmelton
Are you referring to B2B, or Enterprise?

I've blown my proverbial load on Enterprise, and while I appreciate the money
to be made, I've found that my psyche is more suited to 100 small wins than
one win worth 100x the others. In short, enterprise isn't for me, at least,
not if I'm involved in the sales process. The sheer arbitrary-ness of it was
so mentally exhausting that it affected my productivity.

I can work on enterprise software, but if I'm in any way involved with the
sales channel, it's a hardship.

For me, the happy middle ground is vanilla B2B, e.g., the same general
demographic that 37Signals sells to. You still have customers that want to pay
you money, but while cost is a factor, it isn't usually the driving factor --
there's likely little difference between $25 a month and $125 a month,
assuming you're solving a problem that isn't cost-centric, and you're saved
from the mental turmoil of enterprise whale-hunting.

~~~
jmathai
B2B, really. We did have quite a few conversations with enterprise customers
and the B2B conversations were so much better.

We haven't ruled out enterprise but I hope and imagine that our sweet spot is
B2B.

As you said it has much of the benefits of consumers (little friction to get
in the door) and enterprise (willing to pay).

------
tannerc
Well, the word is out.

I have a friend, we'll call him Jon. Jon has been making apps for the past
three years. He never learned to code, or design, or market, but he somehow
managed to pickup xcode and started making fun apps for his nieces and
nephews.

Eventually a day came when his sales skyrocketed, roughly $5,000 in a single
day (a figure I made up, but he has stated before is realistic for him).
Seemingly by chance. As Jon dug around a little he realized that a school --
who regularly provide iPads to students -- had bought his app in bulk.

Now, years later, he specializes in developing apps not for children or
parents, but explicitly for schools. That's where the money is right now, he
tells him.

You can make a lot of decent money selling quality apps or tools to consumers,
but if you want to make boatloads you have to think in terms of those who
would buy what you make via bulk purchases; from organizations large enough
who need the thing you've made.

Isn't this how 37signals found their way?

~~~
beachstartup
> He never learned to code, or design, or market

sounds to me like he was never _taught_ how to code, design or market. he sure
did learn it though.

~~~
nomedeplume
Thanks for the value adding clarification, genius.

~~~
skeoh
That was uncalled for.

~~~
nomedeplume
I disagree.

------
saturdayplace
From Joel Spolksky's "Camels and Rubber Duckies" (which is a great read in its
own right):

>The joke of it is, big companies protect themselves so well against the risk
of buying something expensive that they actually drive up the cost of the
expensive stuff, from $1000 to $75000, which mostly goes towards the cost of
jumping all the hurdles that they set up to insure that no purchase can
possibly go wrong.

Personally, I'm just not interested in playing that game.

*Edit: Yet. Not interested in playing that game yet.

------
pg
Enterprise customers pay a lot once you get them paying, but selling to them
is brutally hard.

~~~
apaprocki
Cold selling a large org is brutally hard. Usually what winds up happening is
that internally in the org, there are people who follow what options are
available in a particular space and are in a position to champion them.
Companies need to find these people and then help these people make the
convincing argument. If users internal to an org want to use product X, they
will do much of the hard part of selling for you. You can find these people
all over the place -- meetups, confs, blogs, etc.

~~~
tptacek
That's true, but what you can't really do is target those people passively.
You need hunter-gatherers to find them, corral them, and set up a
collaborative sales process with them. Graham calls this "brutally hard", but
what it really is is expensive: it requires direct sales teams, which in turn
requires a founding/managing team that knows how to (a) hire and (b) manage
direct sales teams.

 _Those_ tasks, tasks (a) and (b), are probably what's really brutally hard
about enterprise sales. When an inexperienced founder/manager hires a direct
sales team, the sales team sets to work on selling the founder/manager instead
of the customer base.

An alternate path to getting a beachhead in an enterprise market is
consulting. It's much easier to sell services to bigcos than products.
Delivering services to someone gets you ~60% of the way to being able to sell
products to them. The other 40% you can do on your own. That's worked for us
(to greater/lesser extent depending on the specific offering we're talking
about). But "consulting" is toxic to the species of startup we talk about on
HN.

~~~
apaprocki
> You need hunter-gatherers to find them, corral them, and set up a
> collaborative sales process with them.

I guess it depends on what the product is. I've initiated contact in a bunch
of cases (mostly situations where the product is a public SaaS or already
well-liked) and in others, evaluating a product stems from of a conversation
at a meetup or conf.

IMO, the best thing anyone can do is make the product discoverable. If it has
competitors, write blog posts and clear feature comparisons (they don't all
have to be positive, either). If performance matters to whatever it is, write
objective benchmarks and discuss performance aspects/tradeoffs. If it is
something with an API, try to ensure there are a variety of platforms
supported. This stuff is all good-to-have anyway, but many companies might not
realize that people from large companies are browsing their sites and leaving
unsatisfied.

I think developer-evangelist roles actually play a big part in this. Having
someone set up real-world use cases and blog about them or post code somewhere
can really help a customer out who just wants to try something but doesn't
want to spend a lot of time doing it.

If the product is private, maybe have an easy way to generate an expiring VM
image with some kind of demo setup so that you can quickly send it to leads.
There's not a single person on earth that wants to do rounds of conference
calls and in-person visits to just play with something.

> It's much easier to sell services to bigcos than products.

I've found the exact opposite, but maybe it depends on what you're referring
to exactly. Carving out budget dollars for "3 people @ X/hr" is much harder
and more scrutinized than product. "Product" is a loose term, though. "1-yr
license" or "1-yr maintenance contract" are products, not consulting, even
though the company selling them might not view them that way.

When it comes to SaaS products, we typically want to buy an appliance (read:
VM image) that just works, deals with some form of standard
authentication/authorization tech (LDAP/AD, OAuth, SAML, OpenID), and x-yr
support contracts. Per-seat licenses usually involve more effort. Purchasing
professionals are looking to mitigate risk. They don't want to enter into a
purchase that has an attractive up-front price, but open-ended potential rate
hikes down the road.

~~~
tptacek
It may be the case that developer offerings are easier to sell into bigcos
than other services. For my part, I have (a) had no luck selling products into
enterprises using passive sales techniques (blogging "developer
evangelist"-type strategies being an example of passive sales), and (b) talked
to a bunch of other people who report similar results.

Regarding consulting: yes, 3 full-time consultants as staff aug is hard to
sell. But most consulting projects aren't like that. Our typical project is 2
people, 2 weeks; we scale down to 1 person/week easily. A 1 p/w project isn't
hard to sell at all.

------
g8oz
Because consumer apps bedazzle VCs who in turn bedazzle Wall Street which uses
them to bedazzle institutional investors who need unrealistic growth
projections to pay for unsustainable pension promises. The money being sloshed
your way for obviousbullshit.io is a Hail Mary pass by a society facing a
demographic tsunami.

------
agibsonccc
B2B is an interesting animal. I find I can only do enterprise sales. I frankly
suck at consumer.

I love having a sales pitch being as simple as: my product saves you this much
money and time or gets you this much profit.

It's a gigantic numbers game. Aside from that, get an internal project
champion to gather all the necessary stakeholders necessary to make a sale.
(Yes I just threw out a lot of buzzwords there, sue me) Those are usually how
you speak to bigger customers though. If you want, internalize the lingo as
something you'd think of it as( a guy on the inside who becomes my sales guy!)
.

This may take a while, so budget your cash flow accordingly.

I've found if your product offering is compelling enough you 'll get calls
returned.

Many people just try to throw a bunch of buzz words out there to random people
working at a place and think that's sales.

Talk to the right people who would want to use your product and build up
internal evangelists. The rest will play out in the form of meetings and other
random exchanges.

Typical SaaS businesses also seem to think that you can just put up a pricing
page and expect that to close a sale.

There will be contracts going back and forth, custom pricing negotiations,
SLAs being signed, among other things.

I typically attribute the sales cycle being similar to freelancing. Just
replace that with a product.

------
famousactress
Sure. Lots of money to be made. The reason I got out of enterprise though is
that the feedback loop is flawed. Your users are rarely your decision makers,
large capital investments and stickiness that comes with adopting an
organization-wide solution means the best product is less likely to win than
the best sales force. I want to build the best products, so I chose to go find
a company who's business model was better aligned with that value.

~~~
swills
Good point about the feedback loop. My experience in the educational software
industry was that it was the worst of both worlds: the broken feedback loop,
but slower because of yearly cycles, plus they don't want to pay as much as
enterprises.

------
booop
In my experience SMBs are a much bigger cash cow than enterprises.

~~~
wudf
Likewise. Their demands are practical and they retain their humanity in
dealings... probably even moreso than mass market consumers.

~~~
sourc3
This is an area where I have tried and failed with my SmartPointment (online
appointment scheduling). Are there any words of advice you can share in
reaching out to SMB market?

------
sosuke
How do you get enterprise clients? I'd love to have some tips or direction
because all I can find reliably are small fries.

~~~
sbarre
It's about who you know more than how good you are.

~~~
csmuk
This. Certain disreputable companies in my sector are recruiting staff from
competitors just for their contact list.

~~~
sbarre
I'm sure this happens in all industries and sectors..

The takeaway I feel here is that if you are considering working at an
enterprise-focused company (or especially startup), try to get a feeling for
how well connected the leadership is, because that will make or break a lot of
deals.

~~~
csmuk
Not all industries and sectors although it's more common than not. I've done a
bit in most industries.

The most successful companies I've worked for have no contacts and sell
directly. The most politics-filled and most likely to fail enterprise products
have always been sold via the "old boys networks".

------
mamcx
Not only because is very hard to a sale, you also become a kind-of-employee
where your work for them, and have less freedom. And the requeriments change
all the time. And the development can (and WILL) take years.

Plus, the corruption. Without "sales comissions" you can't even get the foot
in. And you need to know people, and give them vines, go to a fancy
restaurant, etc.

IF exist a enterprise somewhere that just do this: I need x, you can do it,
let's do it, then I love to get in. I'm not afraid of "boring" CRUDs apps and
that stuff.

But without the social connections and bribes,is a not start for me.

------
benoitg
When discussing B2B sales on HN, I often see black and white arguments. Either
you're in the B2C space, or you sell your products for north of 50K.

This is IMHO a false dichotomy, there are lots and lots of opportunities
between these extremes. I'm currently in a project at the intersection of
software and shipping, it sells like hotcakes, we currently have a conversion
rate (inbound prospects to signed clients) of more than 75%.

This is far from easy to pull off, and there are a few points I'd like to make
based on my current situation (we're pulling a gross margin of $500 to $5000
by client):

* Selling pure software is hard. At the most basic level, we sell shipping rates and the accompanying software is the cherry on top (I'm saying this even tough I run the technical side of things). We're doing well because our target market understands the value proposition even better than we do, we manage to offer a free product and make money on it.

* Co-founders matter. I couldn't even have had the idea on my own, much less the resources (contacts, skills, ...) to launch the business. I'm very fortunate to have met co-founders that are beasts on the business and shipping & logistics sides of things, we form an awesome triptych, which is a very delicate balance to have.

* Everything takes much more time than you expect. You're at ease in the technical domain, this won't be much of a problem while developing your core product. But selling will take much of your time, it's is a time-consuming activity and you don't know anything about it. Plugging your product in your client's systems will take time, either because your client hasn't any in-house developer or they're less than half as skilled as you are.

If you're a solo hacker selling pure software in the B2B space, you are, I
believe, in for a rough, rough ride.

------
joeblau
If you're just building products and your end goal is making money, then
Enterprise is the way to go. While innovation comes from both spaces, I feel
like the consumer market has a better more realistic feedback cycle. In
enterprise, it's usually a small group of people making large decision deals
which impact a large group.

Salesforce is a great example of a company that's widely successfully and
their products are critical in enterprise, but I've never personally heard an
Enterprise consumer say "Oh I love the Salesforce software." By contrast, I've
heard people rave about apps like Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat even
though none of them are profitable businesses.

For me, If I wanted to build a money making product, I would go enterprise,
but I choose consumer because I want to make a great product--very rarely do I
find great enterprise products.

~~~
UVB-76
> Salesforce is a great example of a company that's widely successfully and
> their products are critical in enterprise, but I've never personally heard
> an Enterprise consumer say "Oh I love the Salesforce software." By contrast,
> I've heard people rave about apps like Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat
> even though none of them are profitable businesses.

I think there is a certain inevitability to these things when you compare
software that people are required to use as part of their job, and software
they choose to use in their spare time.

It strikes me as a vicious cycle. People don't enjoy using enterprise
software, so developers don't enjoy making it.

The incentives are all wrong, the purchasing decisions are made by the wrong
people, for the wrong reasons, and it's near impossible to avoid locking
yourself into a particular solution or provider. Welcome to enterprise
software.

------
jarjoura
Working in the consumer space is not just an easier sell from a sales
prospect, it's also easier to persuade talented people to join your company.
Great engineers and designers want to show off their work to friends and get
bonus points for working on cool stuff.

Working on an enterprise application/system tends to be process heavy and
requires lots of QA before shipping. It's driven not by the engineers or
designers working on the product, but by requirements outside of their
control.

If you're someone who just wants to work on hard problems, then enterprise is
a no brainer. Though the common theme I hear amongst startup folk is that they
want to be part of the decision making process too. They aren't interested in
being handed a list of requirements and just asked to make it work.

------
PaulHoule
Because the selling costs to the enterprise are 16x!

~~~
tannerc
Not always. Look at the app marketplace, for example. Businesses are in dire
need of better quality apps for managing employees, HR, payroll, networking,
etc. And to get your app into their hands is as simple as making a unique app.

~~~
calinet6
> And to get your app into their hands is as simple as making a unique app.

No, it isn't. It's about marketing to them, selling to the decision-maker,
working through existing competition, wining and dining, proving your value
with an on-site sales team, proving your integration...

and most of all, _proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will not fail or
disappear in the next 5 years._

The problem with getting into Enterprise is not product-related. You can
imagine all kinds of better products than what exists today. It's easy to
build that better product that solves the same problems but prettier and with
better UX. And make a great demo for it. Sure. I've done that.

The hard part is proving that your startup will be around in 5, 10, 15 years
and won't leave them high and dry, proving that you will have a support team
serving their every need, and ensuring you have the ability to implement and
customize to the specific company's process and requirements (because every
large company is so different and with such ingrained processes that it's not
_them_ that will change, but _you._ Or else.)

It seems easy, but it isn't. This isn't even a problem of the "build it and
they will come" fallacy—it's on an entirely different scale. And you'd have to
be ready for all of that if you want to enter into enterprise.

~~~
tannerc
To a degree, I completely agree with you.

But then, on the other hand, we see that making something unique does often
propel the "build it and they will come" mentality. Because it works.

What marketing have you seen from Snapchat (not directly related to the
enterprise discussion though)?

I'm reminded of the words of the great Steve Martin: "Be so good they can't
ignore you."

It this always the case? Absolutely not, which is where I do agree with you.
But when an executive walks into a quarterly meeting and asks: "I keep hearing
about xyz app/tool, are we using that?" you've won a huge part of the battle.
_Possibly_ with no marketing.

Make something unique, something a good majority of people will want to use
and talk about, and your marketing/selling is half-way done for you.

~~~
calinet6
Statistically speaking, that's not an average experience. It's an outlier.
Don't count on it.

------
wandernotlost
Because I'm not solely motivated by money.

------
Aloha
The market for consumer apps is several orders of magnitude larger however.

~~~
greenyoda
In terms of number of customers, yes. In terms of money, enterprise software
is a much bigger market. Oracle's revenues alone were $37 billion in 2013.

------
sputknick
Everyone is making good points about why enterprise is harder. Another one is
barrier to entry. You need to have relationships in a given space in order to
get in.

~~~
vidarh
Relationships helps, but you can make good money even by cold-calling.

------
tn13
The enterprise product we built cost us close to $1m in building it and around
300k per year for maintenance. [The engineering costs].

Each sale was supposed to bring in around $50k for a two yearly contract. A
dedicated team of 25 people could barely make 20 sales per year. Bringing
around $1m in revenue.

Remember the salaries of these 25 people ended up being the biggest cost
component which made the entire business into a loss making proposition.

------
badman_ting
Well - have you _worked_ on enterprise software? It's not fun.

------
elorant
In the enterprise market you have to talk to 15 different people inside a
company before you can make a sale. And often you have to go out of your way
to convince them trying to cover every little insecurity they have and learn
to live with the anxiety of failing because of actors outside your influence.
You also have to dine them and wine them and laugh with their stupid jokes and
generally try to be as pleasing and understanding as possible. The hell with
that. In the consumer market things are a bit more straightforward. You focus
your energies on the product and marketing and that’s all there is.

------
jmount
Your startup will never live long enough to survive the procurement process.

------
m3mnoch
to put it succinctly and in gamer terms: would you rather have a giant sword
that does 16 points of damage with a 10% chance to hit? or a dagger that does
4 points of damage, but with an 80% chance to hit?

it's all about the dps, baby.

note: that metaphor obviously assumes "A little over 12% of the money-making
developers" means that it's 8x easier to actually make money in the consumer
space. not that 80% of consumer plays make money. not to mention it's way, way
easier to build a company with 10 people than 45.

------
jannes
Really? How do you target enterprises? It seems impossible to me to know which
companies are actually willing to pay decently for apps. All the enterprises
that I've encountered generally didn't like to pay more than ~10k euros for an
effort of roughly two months of work, which isn't that much if you factor in
the expenses (mostly wages).

It seems to me that the enterprise app development space is a low-margin
business. At least over here in Germany. There seems to be quite a lot of
competition in this space.

~~~
freehunter
It depends on what kind of product you're selling. Certain budgets in
enterprise are seemingly unlimited, generally when it comes to improving
sales. If you're selling security products (outside of the compliance-driven
market), you won't find much appetite for large margins. If you're selling CRM
products (which are a dime a dozen), you won't find large margins.

You have to find out where a business is willing to invest no matter what the
price. I know it exists, unfortunately each industry (and each subset of each
industry) is going to have a different area where price is no concern.

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wellboy
Because you can't be passionate about B2B apps. When we're reading about that
to become an entrepreneur you can't be after the money, you have to do
something you're passionate about, something you would die for.

All this, passion, solving a problem to die for, disappears by doing B2B and
you're only going for the money again.

Of course there are exceptions, but that's the difference between B2B and B2C.

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msrpotus
Find an aspect that you are passionate about. There are a lot of niches,
whether it's specific types of companies, specific problems, or whatever. It's
like saying "you can't make money with consumer apps." The space is far too
large to permit such blanket generalizations.

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wellboy
I agree, you can't make blanket generalizations. However, there is just a
stark difference that are few consumer apps that the founder ISN'T passionate
about and there are few B2B apps that the founder IS passionate about.

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alien3d
To me, it just break even. It might be large sump value but the process of
approval payment and user acceptance are way to long. There aren't much
diffirent 30 buck subscription accounting software and 30 million erp
software. The way much diff is building for enterprise system take lot of time
doing discussion and reporting rather then make software itself.

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tn13
Enterprise might pay 4x more even for a product that is crappier by 10x than a
consumer product but enterprise is also 100x smaller than consumer in sheer
number of opportunities to make a sale.

Not to mention there are too many legalities around B2B sales some of which
might threaten the very existence of your business.

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neakor
A lot of us are in it not just for the money. Sure enterprise companies can
pay many times more, but who cares? Literally, who cares? You will never be
"cool" by building the next oracle. And that's why most of us don't want to be
the next oracle.

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krapp
It would be a rung up the ladder from "wordpress plugin builder and PHP monkey
for hire"

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Bahamut
With enterprise, you end up supporting IE8 :(

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jpkeisala
Well we here in enterprise space are just starting to warm up to jQuery.

