Nicholas Saggese
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

I’ve spent the past year working on a product for the small businesses that make up the long tail of the Tours and Activities industry and had a similar experience to yours.

One caveat with T+A that does not exist with restaurants is that these businesses are often just lifestyle businesses to these owners. It wasn’t so much that these businesses were effectively tired of hearing how each new piece of tech would help them, it was that they didn’t care to improve in the first place. The margins in T+A aren’t quite as slim as the restaurant industry so it allows the owner to be a bit more lax in their operations.

This feeds back into their view of their business as a lifestyle: money is not the core motivator for them and time isn’t that big of a lever either as they truly enjoy their work.

I think a big reason entrepreneurs often first attack problems in small business is that they are personal to us, understandable, and easy to rationalize the positive benefit on the world. That passionate connection you get from your work and the benefit it provides to the world(not just in a B-corp sense) is a really important driver in a founder being able to push through each day’s brick walls as we have a vision of what will be on the other side.

So the question then becomes: how do we identify problems people actually care to fix and still derive that same level of meaning that will allow us to push to the finish line?

I shut down that tours and activities startup and started working on a marketing technology startup for enterprise. Not related in the slightest, but that wasn’t the hard jump for me, it was more about making sure I was deeply passionate about the problem I was solving and that it was something I could be proud to work on for the next ten years.

In many B2B SaaS companies it’s easy to get excited about the prospects of huge market opportunity with proper execution but that rarely manifests in real success. Rather the key to going the distance is to not see working with large businesses as purely a way to make real money, but to take that same passion for solving problems that manifested in looking at small businesses and understand that working with larger ones is only an opportunity to multiply the positive effect of our product beyond our own efforts.

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    Nicholas Saggese

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    Working on my overnight success.