I think B2C is the best way to a successful B2B product

Some of the best B2B SaaS products I’ve used started out as great consumer tools. I have found that if somebody has a tool they can’t live without, they’ll advocate for it within their workplace. And let’s be real—people love nice things, especially when they’re free.

The Consumer-to-Business Flywheel #

That B2C experience means that your product is easy, intuitive, and useful. When people love using a tool, they bring it into their workplace. Not because the business sees “organic adoption” or “internal synergies,” but because employees push for it.

This has played out with some of the biggest SaaS wins in recent memory:

• Canva – A design tool that’s now a staple for marketing teams worldwide.

• Shopify – Started for small sellers, now powers global e-commerce.

• Notion – A note-taking tool turned enterprise knowledge hub & heart of teams.

• Calendly – A simple scheduling tool that’s now standard in sales teams worldwide.

• Airtable – A spreadsheet-database hybrid that enterprises run workflows on, and hilariously used to be the back-end of Mr Yum (now me&u)

• Blinq – Where I helped take a roll out a simple digital business card tool for a massive pharma company (I can’t say who but you definitely buy their stuff).

Scaling from business to Enterprise is still hard #

Scaling from B2C to B2E isn’t smooth sailing. There are the usual contenders:

• The Agency Effect – If you’re not careful, enterprise customers will turn you into their personal dev shop, asking for features that mutate the core product for them. The trick? Just say no - a power so easily acquired when you have such a huge B2C base.

• Enterprise Goo – SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, SSO, RBAC—the never-ending security and compliance acronym brigade. And let’s be honest, they don’t even read your documents. They send you their own spreadsheet of concerns and make sure you align accordingly. It’s annoying bullsh**, but necessary. Plan for it early in your product development - think “extra regions” and “scalable systems design”. (I will probably do a whole write-up in the future on how I think a lot of products need to simplify & add lightness… thanks Colin Chapman)

• The Growth Team Still Matters – Enterprise decision making is slow - not necessarily because they’re still deciding, but because they have so many stakeholders that need to have their say. Having existing users in that organisation early early means that the growth team has less work to do. It’s just nudging those internal champion to push the deal through.

Why does any of this matter #

This isn’t about VCs, investors, or engineers. This is just how I see it. It’s super specific to the kind of product that your Mum’s Etsy can use, but also a team of salespeople. If you’re building a SaaS product, start with consumers. They give you a huge testbed to experiment with new features before pushing them to enterprise. Look at Gmail—Google ships all kinds of weird experiments, but the enterprise version stays stable. Same playbook.

The best of the best enterprise SaaS products don’t start with enterprise buyers. They start with individuals who love the product. Businesses follow when their employees make enough noise.