How hard is B2B SaaS?

Validate your Ides asap. This is the only way to test out your SaaS. No other way round.

If you are solving the really problem then the halfway already completed. B2B is lot more easier to scale up compare to B2C.

Try to build audience. It's not that expensive. There are few SaaS group on Facebook, join them & share your thoughts with them. Join some forum similar to IH, like Reddit, ProductHunt.

Keep on learning & evolving everyday 🙂

I am from product/development side so i don't have much experience in selling but i have found B2B Saas to be very HARD. cold emails don't work. Networking doesn't works, people will give you time as a courtesy because you reached out to them via your network but than it is silence. In my case users of the product are different from the people making the decision so there is another problem where i have to identify who is the actual decision maker and than try to convince him to buy. This is despite having users from their company asking for the product and i have actual product not promise to deliver the product. I have paused it for the time being until i am clear on my sales and marketing strategy.

I don't want to discourage you i am just telling you my experience. It is possible that i am not good at selling because my past experience is not in sales and marketing.

Your success will also depend on the actual product, its price point and access to the channel where your product can be sold. Before creating a prototype be clear on how will you sell? how will you identify the purchaser? how will you get access to the said purchaser? how would you convince them?

Try lining up just 5 customers before starting on protoype you will know if your product makes sense or not. Your product may still be valuable however without sales it is of no use.

If you have a product where there is demand, B2B is extremely easy, much easier than B2C.

• For B2B you know the owners name, address, business email etc.
• As a business you are constantly looking for ways to stay ahead of the competition
• Most businesses especially local area that have even a few employees have 5 figure monthly expenses.

Just be a normal person, talk and don't be a weirdo, you will easily get sales. The hardest thing is having the right product for the right customer. Once you get that, it's just matchmaking.

We are building churnfree.com which is completely B2B, and we have found that solving a very important problem for companies (which is reducing churn in our case) has helped us get clients quickly.

So I would focus very much on solving a problem and solving it well. If you manage to do this, it will be easy for you to find clients. You can always do something better or cheaper than your competitors

I've worked in b2b for 10+ years. It's easier and it's harder in some ways. If the pain point is real you only need to attract a handful of customers and contrary to popular advice, no you don't need 10+ features to make it happen. Here are some questions for you:

• Did you talk to customers? at least 200 of them? Did you figure out who's the user vs the buyer? Are they the same person? Can you make something for the buyer that helps them have oversight on the tool? Think tasks for developers vs burn down charts for managers in Jira? Building designs and validating the idea is much better than building an mvp hoping someone will buy it. Dev time is expensive even if you're a dev. Lots of people can have the same problem but the solutions they prefer can vary so that's a bit tricky and ideally you aren't guessing this.

• On pmf, here's a great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDaj6r5GYM8

• Don't listen to most users here. They aren't either in sales, have not spoken to customers or are working in some other market which isn't your market. If you've build the prototype, you don't have much to loose at this point. Just be ready to modify it based on real feedback.

• It will take a while and lots of nights and weekends. Can you raise funds on seedinvest.com or any crownd-funding site based on LOIs. Can you take cash advances?

• Use workOS to build enterprise grade requirements if you need it. Use retool for non customer facing stuff. Don't think like a dev and build everything yourself.

• Good websites don't sell but users are pretty shallow so ugly ones def won't. More design isn't better either. Less chrome is more functional. But the actual users of the site will outright know if this is useful. If they don't buy at the end of the demo, ask them why? Read momtestbook.com to learn how to do customer interviews.

• Are there competitors in the space who have this and giving it for free? Sounds like that's not the case or you would have used that already.

• Your pricing is your GTM. If you are going to hire sales at some point make sure the price > $1k/minimum/month. Its fine to do outbound sales even if it's $10 a month b/c you need to learn from your customers initially. But try to not sell anything less than 1K /year.

• If your audience is not on twitter/facebook/snapchat don't build an audience. lol. That takes a long time. Start with sales.

• Cold emails absolutely work but these are human you're dealing with. Treat them with respect, do your homework on them, and only reach out if they fit your criteria. If you have a specific ask - show demo, send a 1 pager, get a 15 min quick call, it absolutely will work.

Lastly, ask for $ you will get advice, ask for advice you might get $.

I am a B2B CMO and I do make CC purchases. This is possible because we do not have centralized purchasing, I purchase for my team, and the purchases fall under a certain price limit that I have the authority to approve.

Both purchases I did last year were SaaS and supported by proper content marketing strategies that guided me through my decision process and answered most of the questions I had to make a decision. One provider offered the freemium model, one did not.

So, to answer your question: yes, SaaS can be purchased the “B2C way”, but it depends on several things: (1) the size of your target company (big companies mostly have centralized purchasing making CC buying unlikely), (2) does the decision maker you are targeting (in my case it was the CMO) has the authority, (3) is the price point below a certain limit, (4) do you have a good content strategy (well-explained value, SEO so I can find you when I research your category, credible partners that link me with your content, etc ...).

I have a boutique startup studio, so working with both B2B and B2C products.

I just want to give you a different angle to think about:

• are you sure your product is really B2B?
  I mean: today the lines between business and consumers are blurring every day more.
  There's the huge market of creators and freelancers or small businesses of 1 to 4 people that is not real B2B but neither B2C.

I urge you to think about the market of PROSUMERS.
I'm also re-positioning lots of my brands in that space.
In the end, isn't the fortune of selling to PROSUMERS what made Apple what it is?
Apple is a lifestyle consumer company now.
But it has always sold professional tools. Before the IPhone, which is maybe it's first and only real consumer product, Apple computers are not for a typical consumer.
They are made for professionals, creatives, designers. So it's not real B2C.
What about IPad? Is a consumer really forking out 1600$ just to have a fancy tablet, when with 500 bucks you get impressive Lenovo or Asus tablets with twice the capacity? Maybe some affluent yes, but the rest are designers, musicians, freelancers.

So Apple built it's fortune on PROSUMERS product, the overlapping of consumers and pro stuff.
Today, with socials and pictures we are all prosumers in the photo and video space.
If a creative becomes an influencer, does he still a consumer? Or is a business now?

All the big consulting firms urge this mindset shift from a decade ago: B2B and B2C are blurring into H2H (human to human).
Of course, exceptions are the rule: Cisco is clearly B2B, Salesforce the same...

But Monday.com can be used by freelancers as well as bigger biz, but they proclame theirselves a B2B company.
Amazon? Is it B2C? Yes with the front of the marketplace, but it's B2B with sellers and AWS.

So, this is to let you brainstorm about the positioning of your product. You can take the best of both worlds or just widen your potential market.
Study your pricing, the solidity of your product, your backend processes, your UX.

Just my two cents.

We are building a product in the SAAS space and have started selling subscriptions so here's my take.

Depending on the product and market maturity (if the product you are building is already there in the market), sales can be challenging.
Our product has entered a saturated market so until we have a product on par with others in the market, getting sales is difficult.

Based on the industry, you may need a sales-led approach. But ideally product-led is the way to go. Think Netflix, Amazon Prime subscription. You don't talk to anyone to buy those products. They sell themselves.

TL;DR
If you really believe in your product, go for it. It may not be easy but at least you won't be wondering 'IF'. Don't quit your day job until you have a decent MRR. I regret quitting prematurely.

PS - This is just an opinion. Best of luck

We Are a B2B E-Commerce Problem Solving Company https://tech2globe.com/magento-development-company

I have started a B2B SaaS startup several years ago and we are at around 500k ARR. We were bootstrapped and still mostly in the phone and in person. We never got another way working and always felt that business clients are very hard to convince, take a very long time to decide but then stay loyal for a long time and bring in competitively large amounts.

I don't think small amounts paid by credit card are very typical. Who had a credit card in a company and can use it freely to buy tools? If in your niche this is common I think the approach is valid. If the payments are very small and the pain is big maybe people will even start paying privately. A friend of mine started getting into companies this way (it was a tool for developers).

Every case is different but this is our experience. We never built a convincing self service though.

In my experience it's hard to get early adopters and I don't think there's a rule, but my best advice would be to try to validate ASAP with your target.

We have just built a B2B SaaS. It's not that hard the B2B SaaS. You just need the right team but before that, you need to validate the idea.
I don't know if I should comment here or not but feel free to let me know if you need help with validation and development.
I can hook you up with someone.