Founders Guide to Establish & Grow a B2B Startup

Working for a B2B unicorn is the holy grail of silicon valley.

It’s lucrative, mainly because you get quite early validation to your business. You don’t have to reach a hundred laymen to know it doesn’t work for thousand others. Instead, you have exactly 87 businesses worldwide as your potential customers.

Nailing just 3 of them can trigger a chain reaction to your success in the industry. If you don’t succeed for those 3, however, they can still shower you with the most valuable commodity: feedback. You don’t get it that easily in B2C, because your sample size maybe too small.

So here goes some basic tenets to found and grow your B2B startup:

Identify the Business Before You Begin to Develop:

This step can drastically make or break your budgets. If done well, it could make your efforts extremely targeted at every step.

Understand the value of developing step by step — it’s like a recipe. Just add enough of everything as it heats up. Anything more than needed, and you have ruined the dish.

If you are building a productivity dashboard for corporate clients, tackling access control along with security + privacy is a no brainer. Even handling LDAP based login is given. Why implement a separate authentication system with their money? In fact, it’s not even a USP. You must treat it like it’s required, and build other stuff around it. When asked about it, claim that you do the best in the industry, with a polite shrug.

If, however, you are building next enterprise messaging app, roles may have little role to play. If any, it can be built as you grow, unless it is your sole USP against an existing competitor.

If the same messaging app is targeted for schools, roles become important again. Enabling messages between students will be the bandwidth money that will go down the drain, while you know quite well that you are never going to monetize them by selling Mario Kart ads.

Grind yourself for every product decision that has long term financial impact.

• Is it a turn-off?
• Is it something you could add later?
• Is it something that must be included to win over the competition?

Consider price points as you design the offerings. Is pricing something that you could reduce in the future? Are you going to alter the pricing model as you grow? If there is ever a chance of making annoying pricing changes, what value will you be offering to your existing customers to make them willing to upgrade?

Do this beforehand, or you will see your dream ruined just before it has begun to take off.

It’s worse than watching it die in the womb.

Identify Your Customer:

Yes, it’s enterprises. But you aren’t going to sell to deaf walls or transparent glass doors. For every target organization, there is exactly a role that you must target in order to make your first sale. For a job portal or employee benefit app, Human Resources Manager if your target role. For an ad platform, that role is Marketing Manager.

Identify that role.

Target your e-mail marketing towards that role. Target your LinkedIn campaigns with that role filter.

Next, identify those people. If you plan on meeting them, only select those that hold power to spend the budget. (unless you need someone to introduce you to those people, of course)

But the key thing is to identify them well before you meet them.

Are they African? Are they mostly women? Is he an immigrant? Is she a mother already?

Well, those are not the things to spy upon. It’s just the things to look for. There are many more observation data points that you could make prior to meeting your customer face to face. Use those points wisely and smartly to your advantage in weaving your story.

The story that you are going to sell your product / service with.

Create Your Story in Shower, Execute it in Meetups:

Being founder, you must be equipped with two sales pitches at any given time.

You may rehearse it when you are at your creative best. And idle. Minimize words, maximize the message, and make them look like you are talking, not pitching.

Do it in your bathroom, against a mirror.

The first one is one sentence intro to you + your startup. This version is useful when someone casually introduces you in a meetup — be it an investor summit or a social gathering.

It could be a parents meet at your daughters’ school too.

Something like:

Founder of emojiChat — a timesaver App for enterprises.

Observe that it describes both: You and your product.

The second one includes little more piece of information, where you can begin to carefully slip your USP.

I am the founder of emojiChat, an AI based app that lets you use an extremely wide range of emojis to convey your emotions.

(Wait for their acknowledgement. If they are interested, carry on.)

At first, you won’t realize it’s useful for a company like yours. I mean Slack and MS Team are doing quite great!

But when you look at all the time your employees save typing out that git commit emoji, you will see some serious productivity dollars on the right side of your balancesheets.

I mean, who would imagine typing reaching in 5 minutes amid traffic when you could say it with a watch emoji + number 5….it’s ultimate time saver when it’s time to pick up your kid from school.

That’s that. No mission statement bullshit. No objective wordplay. Your prospect client is a lead.

Conclusion:

Growing your B2B startup not only requires industry knowledge or tech know-how. It also requires people-skills, and your ability to gauge your market before you invest your first cent.

If you suck at those, you should delay spending your dollars, and acquire those things with experience + someone else’s money.

While B2B clients can quickly fill up your pockets, a lost lead can take forever to convert back. With some media exposure, it could ruin your remaining chances to succeed in a limited market.

A good founder goes very far with his / her deft planning + well-rehearsed execution when it comes to growing a B2B startup.

Originally Published on Medium.com - follow Pen Magnet on Medium for regular updates.