
Enterprise is sexy now. But B2D is sexier. - yonasb
http://blog.yonas.io/post/36534887793/b2d-is-sexier
======
ericflo
Nope, I totally disagree. Developers hate paying for things and love to build
things themselves. There are a few successes, like GitHub, but they are
outliers and on the whole developers are a terrible group to try to sell into.
Your best bet at getting a developer product to succeed is to sell the tool to
someone in another role (product, marketing, sales, etc) and have them
convince the developer to use it.

~~~
pbiggar
Developers do hate paying for things, but that doesn't mean you cant make a
business selling to them. You just need to make a much more compelling
offering than they could reasonably create themselves.

For example, my company (<https://circleci.com>) makes Continuous-integration-
as-a-service, marketed directly to developers. We have a lot of companies
using us with incredible engineers (Stripe and Zencoder are 2 obvious examples
who have agreed to be listed on our homepage, we have many more). Why - when
they can build it themselves? Because we have built a compelling product that
is much better than they could do themselves (and in many cases they tried)!

To give you one example, one customer has a test suite that takes 60 minutes
on his laptop. He just pushes to Circle when he wants to test, and he gets a
result in 13 minutes (blazing fast build servers, plus automatic
parallelization)! That would overload a single build server, so they'd have to
get a cluster set up. That sounds like fun , but only for the first hour.

~~~
carterschonwald
What is the pricing for CirclCI, I can't find any on your site, and that makes
me less intersted in trying it out :-)

(and is there support for not github based hosting?)

[edit] And I see that you dont support ghc (haskell). Oh well, I guess I still
need to wait for Travis CI to roll out there paid version :)

~~~
pbiggar
Pricing is $19/$49/$149 for 1/10/40 private repos. That includes unlimited
builds, unlimited test time, etc.

We don't support non-GitHub sorry.

We do support ghc, and have a few customers using it. I should write a doc for
that.

~~~
carterschonwald
why isn't the pricing listed on the site? That seems a bit odd! :-)

~~~
pbiggar
It is silly, yes. You see it when you log in. We're in the process of
reworking the front page, and part of that will be getting the pricing onto
it.

~~~
MartinCron
Please do. Whenever I don't see transparent pricing, I assume it's
prohibitively expensive.

Also, frictionless CI as a service? You are doing God's work. I hope you
succeed.

------
gfodor
The giant asterisk with B2D is that you probably need a service component.
There is a reason that github, mixpanel, etc, are all hosted services and not
standalone apps.

Selling developer apps that are not coupled with some proprietary, hard to
replicate service is risky because you are serving your entire dish to chefs
who may just decide they don't like paying for it and would like to just make
it themselves (and even give it away for free.)

There are plenty of opportunities for innovation in standalone tooling (like
editors and code factoring tools) but outside of the Microsoft ecosystem it
seems to be an uphill battle to get adoption of commercial software on
developers' desktops. Maybe this will change.

~~~
cynicalkane
I think there's a simpler reason for this. The criticism that developers might
just copy your software doesn't change for SaaS. Github doesn't need to be
SaaS, it's just sold that way, and plenty of Github-clones have arisen.

I think there's a much simpler reason standalone software is a rare beast
outside business and enterprise: piracy. It's an odd world where Oracle
database can be freely downloaded but IntelliJ requires a license and a
videogame requires Steam or an App Store or something. The broad pattern in
standalone software is the more consumer-oriented the software, the more
barriers to piracy there are in place.

The difference is that Oracle's customers are easier to sue. Oracle makes its
money selling five-figure server licenses and piracy is no threat, even if the
pirate gets some utility off the software. Heck, the pirate might eventually
be forced to buy a license if he locks himself in. On the other side of the
market, the piracy rates on consumer software are astronomical--as in 90%
being a typical piracy rate that I've heard--and pirates go overwhelmingly
unpunished. SaaS fixes the problem by ensuring the consumer never has a
physical copy to steal.

~~~
gfodor
I'm not following your point. By your own admission, installed software in the
enterprise is not as affected by piracy, so it seems to back up my point that
there must be some other factor that prevents a commercial, installed
application ecosystem to flourish in the developer tools sector.

I still think the service-oriented nature of github has a large effect. It's
one thing for a open source clone of github to exist, it's another thing if
it's something that IT needs to install and manage in your organization. On
the other hand, your text editor, debugger, etc, are all things that IT
doesn't care about beyond if it is installed and runs. So, the value of B2D is
beyond the functionality of the tools per se but it's also the additional
benefit of not having to run the service yourself to get its benefits. If that
additional benefit were missing, the github-clones would thrive because they
would be very close to equivalent in terms of time/cost/reward tradeoff for
all members of an organization.

------
jusben1369
I think it flows like this:

Software is eating the world = the cost of launching is coming down. Therefore
more and more developers are starting companies. That translates into a lot
more developers as decision makers. Developers who are serious about building
businesses understand the criticality of focusing in on competitive advantage
and not building every requirement they have for running the business.
Therefore the real emergence of a B2D market. (I think the ones that are still
in the "I can build this myself" mindset aren't going to scale much beyond
their own project.)

My feeling is Stripe is the poster child for the B2D movement btw but not
mentioned anywhere.

------
alexatkeplar
Calling B2D a subset of SaaS doesn't make a huge amount of sense.

Sure, there are some great SaaS products where developers are the main
choosers/users, like Twilio, GitHub, HipChat and Parse. But the amount of time
developers spend working with SaaS products is still small compared to the
amount of time we spend working with local apps (e.g. vim, Visual Studio,
git), programming languages/frameworks, databases, software systems (e.g.
SugarCRM, Unreal Engine, Hybris) and of course PaaS/servers (e.g. Linode, AWS,
Heroku). These are just as valid sectors of the B2D market as SaaS offerings.

Case in point: at SnowPlow (<https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow>) we are
squarely in the B2D market, but are not a SaaS business.

------
sputknick
Is it just me, or does the B2D market seem overstated here? How many
developers are their that you can sell software to? I'll take the enterprise
market over the developer market any day.

~~~
pbiggar
His point - which I agree with - is that developers are a gateway to
enterprise.

------
whatusername
Don't forget about B2M (Marketers). Companies like Wufoo, Mailchimp,
SquareSpace, etc. Make it so you don't need a Developer to send your email,
put up a response form, throw up a website.

~~~
jusben1369
That though could still be B2D. "Hey Mr Developer we need to do an online
questionare. How long would it take you to build something like that?" "Go
checkout Wufoo" (out of my hair so I can work on more important stuff)

~~~
mediascreen
Well, then you have pretty much defined all B2B SaaS as B2D since building it
in-house is always an option.

------
cageface
Now my 1999 deja vu is complete.

1\. Pour dumb VC money into companies with no business plan.

2\. Discover that revenue does actually matter.

3\. Pivot to the golden fields of B2B where money flows like water.

4\. Discover B2B is hard and slow. Run out of money. Crash hard.

~~~
dotmanish
and the vicious cycle then moves to B2D ?

------
tomblomfield
This sounds really appealing - build a great service with an awesome API that
developers love, and you're practically guaranteed success.

And there are a few good examples - Stripe and Heroku are killing it, right?

But the reality might be a little different. There are tonnes of businesses
out there using crappy software products. Those businesses are not
engineering-driven, and they'll continue using those products until a sales
guy from BigCorp sells them the next iteration of those products. Even if
there's a better product out there that "only takes 2 hours to integrate",
their understaffed tech department already has a 12-month backlog.

As a SaaS company, focussing on nimble, fast-moving startups means that your
sales cycle is fast, but you end up servicing companies with minimal revenues.
It's like the ultra-vocal tip of the iceberg. 95% of traditional businesses
still work on traditional sales cycles. It sounds crazy, but they freak out if
they don't need to sign an NDA to get your API documentation.

And maybe we have to adapt to that.

------
rdamico
We're in an interesting situation at Crocodoc (YC W10) where we're selling
both to B2D customers (individual developers / small teams) and B2D customers
(big organizations like linkedin and dropbox).

In our experience the trick to B2E sales is to make sure that (1) you're
solving such a difficult problem that you can get over the initial "we'll just
build this in-house" hurdle, and (2) you embrace the additional
security/privacy/compliance requirements that come with most B2E solutions.

#1 came as the result of years of work (what we do -- displaying Office and
PDF documents as viewable/annotatable HTML -- turns out to be super
difficult), and #2 came from lots of customer development and lots of actual
development (most B2D services don't have to worry about these types of
requirements).

------
bhntr3
I think "B2D" is risky. Here are some potential problems:

1) Success of "the cloud" / SaaS. Many people are moving important data into
the cloud but there are also more high profile outages, more high profile
security breaches and more lock-in/proprietary/longevity issues.

For example, I like Asana but when Asana is down, I'm screwed, especially
since they don't let me export my data. And it is down pretty often in my
experience. Are you reading this, Justin the server guy?

Obsolescence through acquisition is also a real problem. I rely on XYZ
service, they get bought and the buyer shuts it down. Now I have to extract my
data and somehow move it to another service provider. That happens a lot. I'm
sure we'll work through these issues, but I'd still peg a question mark on the
whole SaaS model.

2) The sales model. Enterprise sales are appealing because they're big dollar.
But they're hard. You have to get buy in at all sorts of levels in the
organization and anyone can veto. They take a long time.

B2D circumvents this by targeting single individuals and small teams. That's
good. It's the dropbox model. Get people using it, become viral, pervade the
organization and become a standard. The trouble is that it uses a backdoor and
backdoors can be closed. Many bigger organizations are fighting this tool
fragmentation and the SaaS model in general. If bigger organizations
successfully push ad hoc tools out of the company, then B2D basically becomes
startup to startup. Then B2D is successful when startups have money. We've all
seen how that pendulum can swing.

3) Myopia. Developers start startups. Developers know what developers need. So
developers start startups for developers. Meanwhile there are tons of
industries in need of powerful, easy to use, domain specific tools getting no
love. Yes, computing is growing. IT is growing. Digital is growing. But there
are lots of growth industries out there. It's the same reason B2C was big.
We're all consumers. Most of us are developers. There are a tons of software
project management tools out there. How many waste management tools are there?
We're creating more trash than we are software (lots of trashy software but
not enough trash software?)

------
eps
D = Developers

~~~
Osiris
I kept jumping through the article trying to find their definition of the term
but I have to infer it from reading the article.

~~~
yonasb
Sorry, updated the post.

------
jmount
Enterprise software is software purchased by people who will never directly
use it in a sales cycle longer than most startup lifetimes. So it isn't always
a great fit for startups.

------
PaulHoule
In a gold rush it's good to be the guy who sells the picks. The great business
model of Wall Street is to take a slice out of every transaction and let your
customers take the risk.

Watch out Hacker Newser, these products are aimed at you, so they represent a
smaller slice of the economic pie than is represented in your Bayesian prior.

There's a unique benefit, however, that one gets from being the center of a
developer ecosystem -- other people work to make your platform great. This is
as old as the IBM/360 and Apple ][, IBM couldn't capture the value of the PC
platform but Microsoft could. It's as new as Facebook and as demented as
Salesforce.com.

------
teekarja
One of the teams in our incubator batch had a product for developers. I
remember how Mårten Mickos (Founder of MySQL) gave them hard time:

"There are people who will spend any amount of money to save time, and there
are people who will spend any amount of time to save any amount of money, and
those are developers."

I saw where he was coming from. There is a reason why most developer tools are
free, and even Apple charges only 99 bucks for their developer program.
Developers are not a huge market and their willingness to pay is really low.

Later this team pivoted towards a much more lucrative space.

------
saosebastiao
I'm super happy I had an internship with a VC. I got to see first-hand the
Dunning-Kruger effect on a daily basis. I only wish I had the ability to short
VCs that follow silly trends like this one.

------
dbecker
Enterprise is lucrative in part because, at least historically, most
developers have been out of touch with big business (with the possible
exception of big software companies). So, the best ideas hadn't been picked
over.

However, developers tend to hang out with other developers and be comfortable
around other developers. So B2D is a very crowded niche.

Everyone who wanted to avoid learning about the problems of a new market has
settled on B2D. Why start competing with this huge group?

------
carloc
Oh please, market to me.

I won't pay you for taking away stuff I love. No vim replacements, please.

But I will pay you for taking away stuff I hate, or can't. Here's a few ideas
off the top of my head:

* cheap REST API based domain registration and DNS setup

* cheap rsync based backups (rsync.net minus support + cheap)

* pre-loaded legal cross-platform lightweight browser testing OS images, or hackable VNC based SaaS

* Strongly customizable imageless web site skeletons

* Mechanical Turk like service for design

* cheap REST based server encrypted file storage (Do a better job explaining the trust involved than S3)

* cheap raspberry pi co-location (low power, low cost, but dedicated). Optional 1TB USB drive and spindown code (I have this at home but it took me a day and I have 100Mbit broadband)

* cheap generic WLAN robot with REST interface (rolling hand with eye)

* Household chore automation devices

* Super fast shipping cheap 3D printing service with stress and durability certs

* Outsourced System Administration: Provide well tuned Debian based software stacks as simple pastable command line scripts in emails. Do the same for security upgrades. Be funny and edgy while doing so.

* Create designer raspberry pi case. Allow me to provide ROM and brand stamp. Ship to customers for me. Be cheap.

------
BjoernKW
B2D sometimes works for infrastructure providers like Atlassian or Github.
However, even those providers mostly cater for other businesses, not for
independent software developers. The majority of developers - whether
freelance or employee - has no incentive to pay for those services. They would
have to convince their client or employer to use these services, which can be
difficult especially if there are firmly entrenched incumbents.

Another problem for using services like Github is that most clients consider
their source code a valuable asset and don't want it anywhere else but on
their own servers.

Functional services like Twilio suffer from similar problems. It's hard to
convince enterprise clients to outsource such functions to external providers
even if their service is better than what can be produced in-house.

So, while there certainly is some value in B2D products, I disagree with the
notion that it's larger than B2E.

------
josscrowcroft
This holds true for my API at <https://openexchangerates.org>, which is to its
core a B2D service - I built it to service my own needs - whereas most of the
key players in the industry seem to be aimed at business people.

The truth about many APIs is that it's the developers who are generally the
ones _searching_ for the solution they need, who then ask for finance dept or
bosses to make the payment (this is true for at least 1/3rd of my customer
base, in my experience - developer signs up, finance does the payment).

It's also developers who spread the word more about services they use, link
back to things, write tutorials etc (where most of my traffic comes from).

Having said that, take with a pinch of salt - this is only from my personal
experience with my business and may not hold up for everybody/anybody else!

------
walrus
Is 'sexy' the new word now? How long until the 'sexy ninja rockstar developer'
jobs start showing up?

------
mweatherill
Selling to enterprise developers is a grass roots strategy into the
enterprise. Applications and services use a freemium model to get their
initial users with the hope of becoming business critical. Once the tools show
their worth, they are deployed at scale which triggers the paid version.

This approach has worked really well in the DevOps space since there is a
strong motivation to use the same tools in development and production. Rather
than being dictated from above about what tools to use, the developers are
going to their management and saying "we need this to do our job". The
enterprise ends up paying to keep their developers happy and productive.

------
capkutay
What does this even mean? Do we need to find a new buzzword to obsess over?

Application development tools are nice. However, they're hardly a disruptive
or new paradigm in the start-up world. How are people supposed to react to
this? "Oh man, I see you're building an enterprise product...but does it fit
the B2D model that the industry is dying for?"

Also, aren't the majority of enterprise products in some way or another
automating some piece that used to be the burden on a team of developers
within a company? I just don't like this type of fishing for new buzzwords and
defining new industries that really just belong within the scope of an
existing one.

------
skrebbel
The OP appears to equate "software for enterprises" to"software for developers
in enterprises". In that case, B2D is a great strategy for getting a niche and
building that out.

But I believe the real big money is in B2B solutions that _aren't_ aimed at
developers. It's a much bigger market, and it's easy to forget that most
companies, large and small, _aren't_ doing engineering all day. This does not
mean that a successful B2B, non-B2D product can't be highly technological. I
think Meraki has been an excellent example, for instance.

------
TamDenholm
I find it strange that its some kind of epiphany that businesses should have
some kind of actual revenue model when starting up. Certainly that was the
tone i got from the article.

~~~
yonasb
The sentence where I stated: "It seems like people are starting to wake up to
the idea that startups should more closely resemble traditional businesses and
actually make money by charging for a service they provide (radical concept)."
was meant to be sarcastic. Guess that didn't come across...

~~~
TamDenholm
Ah, my bad. Apologies.

------
jval
Great post, another classic example is Atlassian! Perfect example of a B2D
startup that has grown into a fully-fledged enterprise company with a very
small/non-existent salesforce.

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/16/atlassian-2011-revenues-102...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/16/atlassian-2011-revenues-102-million/)

------
elliottkember
Mmm. As others have said, developers solve their own problems. What I like is
Developer To Designer.

Designers work with the same tools as us sometimes, and every day we make them
trawl through the command line or install gems. It's fun to be able to solve
problems that other developers have created for designers.

------
alexfarran
Being able to program is not that uncommon a skill anymore. Just as you might
expect customers to have a certain degree of literacy and numeracy, you can
expect a growing number of them to be able to program.

------
bizodo
Still think B2E is way bigger market but B2D is definitely a nice niche market
with lots of room and more importantly helping developers build faster and
better.

We recently launched www.SignUpasaService.com to help Developers build their
registration, sign up and even payment pages in less than 2 minutes. One TC
article later we already have hundreds of beta users!

~~~
philfreo
Depending on how good the implementation is, this could be a good service, but
seeing that even your own signup form was outsourced, I am so far unimpressed.

~~~
bizodo
SignUpasaService was built by the bizodo team so it was not outsourced. It
will be a free service so hopefully you will give it a try.

