Getting It Ready to Scale

Entrepreneurs are a fun bunch.  They look at the world differently.  Or, as my friend Tom aptly describes them, “They are doers”.  I love that description.  They come across problems, then they try and solve them.  Sometimes when you are around them it can be uncomfortable because they ooze intensity.

However, solving a problem and building a business are very different things.  Just because you built a better mousetrap doesn’t mean you are going to get wealthy selling it.  This is the huge trick in entrepreneurship.  How do you find product/market fit?  How do you get your business ready to scale?

In the B2C world, the path is pretty well beaten.  Get a bunch of users using a freemium model.  It might be an ad play.  It might be a lead gen play.  You have to tap into a big enough user base that you can generate the money on the other side of the equation.  Market sizes vary, and it can be very difficult to find a target market.

Companies make mistakes as they search for product/market fit.  Snapchat is the most recent one I can think of.  They changed their UX and killed their user base.

In the B2B world, things can be a lot trickier.  Problems are more apparent in the B2B world. Entrepreneurs can find them all over the place.  Market sizes can be gigantic, and the beauty of B2B is that the market is often easily targetable.  They can build solutions to those problems.  Then what?

Figuring out how to build a repeatable process that fits inside your company and simultaneously grabs the market that you want to go after can be a frustrating process.  As seed investors in B2B, we see it all the time.   There are different ways to segment and attack markets.  How you look at them will 100% influence your success or failure at getting to product/market fit.  The other problem that happens in B2B is you think you have product/market fit and then all of a sudden you run into a brick wall and you realize you don’t.  Or, you do have product/market fit but the internal process you are using to attack the market doesn’t fit.  Or, you don’t segment the market correctly and you pick the wrong one.  All those problems burn through cash and put the company at risk of survival even though you have built a solution that works.

That’s where the good entrepreneurs lose their stubborn streak and pivot.