Consumers hate getting sold to, companies love it.
a 🧵
1/ Many failed B2C products might have worked out if consumers had the patience to understand what the product might do for them.
2/ But consumers are impatient and if the value is not delivered immediately and continuously, they stop engaging and abandon the product that could have been valuable later.
3/ History is filled with complex gadgets with thick user guides that have failed spectacularly.
4/ In contrast, for B2B products, the customer is habitual to getting sold.
In fact, they prefer a sales process where a human explains to them the benefits and costs of the product.
5/ This preference to being sold allows a B2B-focused entrepreneur to communicate the total benefit of her product in a way that’s impossible to do in the B2C world.
6/ Imagine if you go to sign up for Facebook, and they start a video telling all the small and big features of the platform.
As a consumer, you’ll immediately hit the back button.
7/ But for a B2B product, if you get their initial interest, prospects will want to watch videos, discuss and request presentations to understand what they will get for the investment they’ll be making in your product.
8/ This is why B2B companies are dominated by salespeople while B2C companies are dominated by product and design people.
9/ Sidenote: businesses invest in products while consumers buy them
10/ The lack of sales process for B2C products means that there are a lot more ways for them to fail: bland marketing messages, confusing first few seconds of onboarding, boring look, and feel, lack of habit building, etc.
11/ In fact, for a consumer product, the design of the product has to do the job that a human salesperson does for a B2B product.
12/ Remember 🧠:
if your consumer app needs an explanation, it won’t work. Similarly, if your B2B app doesn’t have a process to explain its total benefits, it won’t work.
13/ That's it!
I'm posting ~1 new mental model for entrepreneurs every week.
Notes from the #book "Dreams of a final theory" by Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979 for unifying electromagnetism and weak nuclear force.
a 🧵
1/ First, a brief on Steven Weinberg.
What amazed me was that he kept working as a professional scientist until the very end.
His last paper uploaded on Arxiv was in Jan 2021 and he passed away in July 2021 at the age of 88.
Your product’s price determines your business playbook
a 🧵
1/ The price of products determines all other components of the business.
This happens because price influences the number and type of available customers in the market (higher the price, lower the number of customers and the corresponding premium positioning that’s required).
2/ This in turn determines:
• the distribution channels you need to tap in order to reach the target market,
• cost of customer acquisition,
• cost and nature of sales and service process, and
all that in turn determines the organizational structure.