We recently had another Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup where both of our guests spoke about how they thought through going B2C (sell to individual consumers) or B2B (sell to businesses). It obviously depends a lot on your specific solution, but here were a few of the general takeaways.

B2C

B2C can be the easiest to start as you can more quickly sign up a customer. Depending on your product, consumers often have minimal time involved in purchasing. This allows you to get some quick early feedback and iterate your solution. If you do it right, you can also create tremendous virality and word-of-mouth to grow your user base with great content. The challenge becomes as you want to start scaling B2C, you often have to deploy larger marketing campaigns and constantly ensure your ratio of lifetime value to cost to acquire makes sense. B2C customers also tend to have higher churn and less upside within their own share of wallet.

B2B

B2B can have longer sales cycles, but much higher opportunity to grow within a given customer (i.e. increase the number of users) as well as tend to be much stickier. These customers often have more ROI and logic involved in their purchasing decisions. B2B customers tend to have larger ACV (annual contract value) than consumers. B2B solutions also usually require more implementation and support resources.

Potential Paths

Great companies can be built with either path. Some companies start B2C and then move to B2B and vice versa. Some have channels for both or hybrid options. In the case of our Meetup, both companies started with B2C and got some great user feedback, but ultimately realized to scale they needed to focus on B2B. 

What is the right path for your business?