Building for SMBs ? — 6 lessons from YC Startup School Delhi SMB Meetup #1

YC Startup School’s Delhi founders who work for SMBs met online to share the problems they were working on and what they learnt while building for SMBs. For the first meetup, we had mouve.app, restat.co, designforpeople.in, and Uplift Inc.

As we discussed how we discovered the problem we are solving, mistakes we have made, our markets and customers, we had some interesting lessons for each other. Here are 6 lessons for startups working for SMBs:

#1 Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean strategy

We revisited the famous blue ocean vs red ocean strategy. As many people are building software solutions for SMBs knowing whether your market is a blue ocean (aka a new market) or a red ocean (i.e. already filled with big players aka sharks) is important. Here’s a quick summary for you:

For example, accounting and sales software like ERPs and CRMs have been around for a while, red ocean, and you might encounter sharks. To win the “red ocean” market, you need to create the value-cost trade off very apparent for businesses. Also, know that you are agile, and quick, and can create market-winning product differentiation by addressing user needs that the sharks are not fulfilling. Looking at a “blue ocean” example, automatic content generation like…