If I could offer you only one tip for the future, “Found an enterprise startup” would be it.

Mind you, the race will still be long and it is indeed only with yourself

In November I attended Indie.vc Founder Field Trip hosted at the offices of Wistia in Cambridge MA. At the kick-off dinner, I said something that Jeff Vincent suggested I should write a Medium post about. I laughed and said it would be a very short medium post (perhaps a tweet would be better) but that I would. So here I am!

Jeff was quizzing me about the merits of Mint’s unusual model of creating multiple startups and what I had learned from that over the years. I laughed and said “start B2B companies” before referring to the better exit count of enterprise over consumer startups.

Why?

Here’s why I think B2B companies have such higher chances of success:

1. Businesses value their time, individuals don’t. How many times have you spoken with a friend that’s boasting about how much money they’ve made from some scheme or other (eg a house renovation)? They talk only about the $100K they have made, not the 140x weekends they have spent or the opportunity cost of this labour. Businesses are the opposite of this. They value their time and if you can save them time, they will pay for your product/service;
2. Consumers say they want and like everything, businesses default response to any (especially cold) approach is “no”. I’ve done enough user testing to know that most individuals are optimists and supportive of new ventures. When I was CEO of Picklive I had someone contact me to tell me how much they liked the game. I thanked them and asked them some questions before they confessed that they didn’t yet have an account;
3. Businesses apply higher levels of materiality to ongoing buying decisions. Mint is an SME and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve found ourselves paying for services where nobody in the organisation is certain what the underlying service is for or who set it up (this doesn’t happen much any more but for a while it was quite frequent). Individuals never look at a cost on their bank statement and dismiss it as something that someone somewhere must want (so no need to interrogate).

If you look at the cohorts of Company builders such at Y-Combinator or Entrepreneur First, or incubators like Seedcamp you will see this bias toward B2B companies. It’s much easier to conceive of, validate and show early traction in B2B areas. Avoid consumers, they don’t know what they want. Until they do.