Ask HN: Why Does the European Tech Industry Have Such a B2B Focus?
Compared to say, offering a product or service directly to customers/users? Because from what I've seen over here, the vast majority of tech companies seem to be obssessed with delivering work for corporate clients or attempting to be the next Moz rather than offering a service for average Joes. You don't see many Uber/Airbnb/Facebook/Twitter/Apple/whatever type deals aimed at normal people.
So why is this? I did hear at one startup event (from a VC) that UK investors were hesitant to back user facing companies like their US counterparts, but that can't be all the reason, right?
Why are European tech companies so much more interested in being B2B businesses?
98 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadFirst, Europe is not, historically, the center of consumerism. Most smaller companies, the famous Gean Mittelstand for example, which is usually run by the founder focuses on corporate customers (apart from small electrician and construction companies and the like). So the whole infrastructure and financing through banks is comfortable with these companies. I could imagine this spreads even to VCs to a certain degree.
Second, at least in Germany, we don't have a great failure culture. Esentially, you fail once and you are burned. Unless you are well conected in the corporate and political spheres. Which again makes launching B2B endevours less risky.
In the end that means that B2B become somewhat a strength of European companies. But that is juat my opinion.
As one counter example to the above, Germans did come up with Flixbus.
When I lived in the US I was employed so I can't compare, but when I founded a small business together with a friend banks (yes, plural) were only willing to "Lend" us exactly the money we already had, and that is a general policy for them when "lending" to small new businesses. It means, we had about 100k - so if we gave them the 100k and put it into a no-withdrawals account they would lend us 100k. Okay.
Yes, I get it, "tax reasons". This is just silly. First, you have plenty to write off at the start anyway, second, if you are worrid about paying a lot of taxes it means you are making a lot of money. I actually don't mind paying taxes at all (I do mind the many fees many organizations want from my new company, from GEZ for public TV to IHK - none of which do anything for me, unlike the state as a whole, plus taxes are coupled with income, those many fees are not). The main point is that you only get the money that you already have anyway.
2) Banks ARE in the business of risk, very much so. What are you talking about??? They make risky investments all the time! They just prefer 200 million over 100k because they've become too big to care about anything but mega-projects.
Financing was the main reason I didn't, besides the fact that I reallsy suck at sales. Banks wanted basically everything I had to cover the initial purchasing of goods with the goods itself not being sufficient. Public funding, in the scope of increasing the number of young comapnies, fell short because my idea was not inovative enougj. Never mind the a start-up selling locally sourced vegetables via app was inovative enough for them... And I didn't want CV founding to gwt the initial cash flow issues solved. So here I am, employed again.
It feels good to be not alone in that situation, so!
That seems really hard to come by in Europe (especially if you don't have prestigious education or extensive work experience), small exception for the UK.
People don't really go into business if the idea has not been tested by someone else, and that's a shame, and one of the reasons why the US is so far ahead.
European investors are all ex-banking / private equity spread sheet modelling morons who do not understand risk capital and are looking for risk free bets.
When you have this lens u eschew anything that can harm you holding onto your career. That is why.
B2B businesses have a very clear path to revenue / margin / profit.
A B2C business is effectively a punt, yes a punt, US VCs arent some sort of fucking oracles. If you look at the analysis Social Capital did for who backed the biggest co's at the series a level its effectively spread evenly so there is no "science" here.
And that's not prudent because?
Why don't you go there with your investment money and show them how it's done?
There are tens of thousands of money making consumer facing businesses, the division - in my practice - between b2b and b2c is roughly 50/50.
What the USA has that Europe does not have is a huge advantage in terms of one language and currency to be able to address 300M+ people, and if you just look at the language you can add another 45M or so. That's impossible to compete with for anything with network effects or a market to launch a product in.
The more interesting question would be why are Google and Facebook American and not Chinese or Indian.
Bollocks.
Nestle, BMW, Volkswagen, Ikea, LEGO, Phillips, Bosch, Fiat, Zara...
You may want to rephraze your rationale.
Is there always a segment of the population that believe the economic apocalypse is about to happen (or in this case happening)? If you want me to believe your doom and gloom try providing actual statistics that back up your assertions instead of vague hand wavings.
> Many thousand businesses moving €500k/year and using money locally is much better for local communities than 5 unicorns moving €50b/year
Do you have a citation for this claim? Also why should we be helping "local communities" and not simply helping people?
That's because those things are increasingly more creatively measured to paint a nice picture.
For example today any crap job regardless of quality/wages/precariousness etc is measured as "unemployment", whereas in the past you could have the same number of jobs but they would be much more solid (the "company man" and so on. Heck, a GM factory worker in the 50s could buy a house and raise 2 kids earning the only income in his family).
People who given up looking for work, because they can't find any, are also not counted, while still unemployed and struggling to make ends meet.
"The stock market, for example, has completely recovered from the financial crisis, and then some. Stocks are now worth almost 60 percent more than when the crisis began in 2007, according to a inflation-adjusted measure from Moody’s Analytics. But wealthy households own the bulk of stocks. Most Americans are much more dependent on their houses. That’s why the net worth of the median household is still about 20 percent lower than it was in early 2007. When television commentators drone on about the Dow, they’re not talking about a good measure of most people’s wealth.
The unemployment rate has also become less meaningful than it once was. In recent decades, the number of idle working-age adults has surged. They are not working, not looking for work, not going to school and not taking care of children. Many of them would like to work, but they can’t find a decent-paying job and have given up looking. They are not counted in the official unemployment rate."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/columnists/great-...
>Do you have a citation for this claim? Also why should we be helping "local communities" and not simply helping people?
For one, because tax havens (where that money go instead of local communities, e.g. Apple's Ireland's cash stock) aren't "people".
Second because those local communities where the business is located are what should thrive first and foremost. You can't help "people" without first helping yourself.
They are measured the same way they always have been
>For example today any crap job regardless of quality/wages/precariousness etc is measured as "unemployment", whereas in the past you could have the same number of jobs but they would be much more solid (the "company man" and so on. Heck, a GM factory worker in the 50s could buy a house and raise 2 kids earning the only income in his family).
Oh this talking point again. Never mind the two world wars that made it all possible
>People who given up looking for work, because they can't find any, are also not counted, while still unemployed and struggling to make ends meet.
You are aware that there are multiple unemployment statistics that are tracked and that discouraged workers are included in some of them? Nobody is purposefully ignoring discouraged workers they are just not relevant to the market because they aren't participating in it.
>For one, because tax havens (where that money go instead of local communities, e.g. Apple's Ireland's cash stock) aren't "people".
What do you think happens to money in those tax havens? Do you think they convert it all into gold coins and lock it into a scrooge mcduck style vault? It's reinvested, they purchase treasuries with it, they do research and development with it. Governments then use that money to build roads and pay employees. Those employees then go and eat out and buy cars.
As I explained in the very next paragraph the creativity is in determining which people are in the workforce and which are not. Measuring the "same way they always have been" when work today is unlike it has "always has been" is like measuring inflation by the cost of commonly bought 1940s items.
>Oh this talking point again. Never mind the two world wars that made it all possible
A fact doesn't change based on what made it possible.
>You are aware that there are multiple unemployment statistics that are tracked and that discouraged workers are included in some of them? Nobody is purposefully ignoring discouraged workers they are just not relevant to the market because they aren't participating in it.
You're aware that the officially circulating numbers (U3 et all) don't show the impact of the problem by a very large margin? And that those people who "are just not relevant to the market" still need to put food on the table, pay rents, and pay medical bills...
>What do you think happens to money in those tax havens?
It gets further removed from the communities that fostered the companies that made it and their control, and on to the company's (or private owner's) discretion.
To the contrary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/magazine/americans-jobs-p...
The U6 is back to where it was in 1999. Wages are growing at the fastest pace in a decade, with a labor market that keeps getting tighter, driving wage gains faster.
The poverty rate and homelessness rate are both near record lows. The poverty rate has contracted rapidly in the last several years. That's due to the dramatic improvement in the job market over the past decade and a vast expansion over time in the US welfare state / social safety net, which is paid for by taxes from an aggressively expanding economy.
Since January 2010, the US has added a Germany + France in terms of economic expansion ($6 trillion in GDP), while only adding 16m in population.
US manufacturing, which is a critical supplier of decent blue collar jobs, has been persistently adding jobs for nearly a decade (1.3m manufacturing jobs added over that time). It's the first sustained period of manufacturing job growth since the late 1990s. It was widely proclaimed to be impossible that that could occur.
If you want to bolster the conditions for the bottom 1/2, you do it with jobs, wage pressure through a tight labor market, and a strong social safety net paid for via taxes from a booming economy.
The answer to the economic problems you detail is worker owned cooperatives. The reason is that small business capitalists have too much incentive to being bought out by a larger conglomerate. They're also easy to run out of business with the Walmart model of running a loss for years.
We won't all have or be able to bank on a capitalist coming in to give us all jobs. Keeping the money local is imperative as you said, especially for the majority of economic activity worldwide, which consists of guaranteed, proven business models. An example would be your local 7-Eleven, there's no reason all of these essential services should have a board of directors in Japan rather than every worker being the board. You might get better service too.
I intend to turn my sole proprietorship into a worker owned co-op and at least coexist with Accenture if not run them out of the city with far more caring employees producing superior product.
If you want a healthcare.gov debacle go with an inefficient capitalist enterprise, which has a singular goal of selling you the most expensive product made by the cheapest possible employees. Otherwise support your local worker owned co-ops.
They'll go so far as to feign "diversity" efforts (in quotes because the only diversity corporations are interested in is diversity of wages).
It'll be a lot of work as there are many details to work out but I've bookmarked your comment to let you know when the day comes.
Good luck
Love the diversity comment
In a cooperative, joining means buying a share in a company (not public stock), or bringing a share, and leaving means either letting the share go, or selling it back to the company. Since the company us co-owned, it involves everyone.
This is not bad per se, and does have its upsides. But fast growth is hard with this model, so is market domination.
And if your company is not pushing for market domination, your competition still is.
You would also have performance reviews and management just as in any other enterprise. You can get fired even as a worker-owner. Everything would be democratic and transparent, if you're not doing your job it'll show and you may get voted out. Yes there would be better job security than the dominant capitalist business model, which is a good thing. I'm assuming that would mean you'd be repaid for the value of your share upon your exit.
What this would do is attract the best employees to begin with. Between Accenture and a co-op where I get an ownership share and vote, and equal share of profits, I know which I'd prefer.
The great trick that is played by the current capitalist model is that there's a few great enterprises like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook that pay well and treat people as good as if they had a union bargaining team. That doesn't exist for anyone else. These few dominant standouts build the reputation for other businesses that are a shadow of them.
It would certainly cut the fat out of inefficient models that include more middle management trying to justify their jobs and directors doing doing the same.
As far as growth, my view on that has always been that the size of companies that exist today are monstrosities. Many are propped up with government subsidies, defense contracts and such. Core government functions should be nationalized anyway, due to conflict of interest. The obvious one being folks who build bombs doing whatever it takes to encourage more wars and arms sales. That one is the most serious because it's not just waste, it's peoples lives being lost. Government has no such profit incentive conflict. There should be no such thing as perpetual contracts with the government. If it's a one-off and no co-op can meet the demand, there's options to scale quickly with contractors, and even in that case the co-op cares more about ensuring quality results than the capitalist enterprise. But you raise an important point, I'm suspicious of these mega-corps and their ties to government. I can't imagine a 10-person co-op bumbling healthcare.gov as Accenture did. In fact, I'm pretty sure with 10 hand-picked technologists, my cooperative could have outperformed Accenture's healthcare.gov job by a wide margin.
That is really a prime example of capitalism's inherent inefficiencies. Get the contract, possibly through favorable previous Accenture/gov't deals, and who cares about the result. For the people that work there, it's not their business, it's Wall Streets.
Accenture doesn't have to worry about their reputation after all, they're too big to fail. Where have we heard that before? We shouldn't encourage and participate in a system that enforces such mediocrity out of humanity. I'm one who expects excellence out of myself and those around me, and I can't see our current mode of production as encouraging that out of the majority.
I'm not sure in a capitalist enterprise's efforts to dominate that they'd be able to bring in the best people when candidates can be essentially on the board of directors somewhere else either. Basically I believe that your point about competitors attempting to dominate an industry will be very difficult with widespread co-ops. Not without gov't collusion (or similar tactics). Employees at capitalist enterprises will be even more demotivated than they are today, knowing they're stuck as non-owners and without an equal payout of quarterly profits as their cooperative competitors enjoy. I can't see capitalism as a mode of production holding up very well once the ide...
So a cottage industry of small, inefficient businesses is preferable to a large, efficient corporation because...? They naturally employ a lot of redundant workers? If that’s the case just skip the middleman and go with UBI if you want to just give away money to people for adding nothing of value.
Not everyone thinks corporations are a net-positive for societies.
Uh, that wasn't the question?
I have worked for and with some German and Scandinavian companies, and inefficiency is not a complaint that I would throw at them. Neither is lack of innovation.
YMMV, I guess.
The parent comment's question still stands: if the benefit of inefficient businesses is redistributive, why not just explicitly redistribute the gains from efficient businesses? This is a Pareto improvement when implemented properly (or more likely Kaldor-Hicks).
This isn't a rhetorical question, and there are theories as to why am efficient economy plus explicit redistribution isn't a good thing, but a lot of them depend (explicitly or implicitly) on Dickensian views like "the lower classes need pretend work to build character". You can hardly take this for granted without making a case for it, as your low-effort comment does. Hell, even if you _do_ take the Dickensian view, there are UBIish policies that may fit it better than the decentralized inefficiency you're talking about, like "govt as employer or last resort".
I'm not personally arguing in favor of inefficiency. I'm fairly neutral on the topic.
I'm only saying that not everyone values efficiency. And some people never will and will never be argued into valuing it.
Also,
> You can hardly take this for granted without making a case for it, as your low-effort comment does.
You should be more charitable. I wasn't arguing for anything.
> decentralized inefficiency you're talking about
I never said any such thing and I'll thank you for not attributing words to me that I never said.
How can you be neutral on the topic of efficiency?Efficiency is better full stop. Might as well say you are neutral on famines and poverty too.
Efficiency in doing what, exactly?
Efficiency might measure output of X as a function of input Y. Is having more X actually helpful or harmful?
How will the overall system respond if it suddenly becomes possible to more efficiently transform Y into X? (This can lead to higher rate of consumption of Y)
Does a strategy for increasing X / Y happen to damage some other valuable things A, B, C that aren't captured in the definition of the subsystem of X and Y we're trying to optimise?
I care about a lot of things. I don't care about everything.
In all, I am probably neutral on way more things than I favor or oppose.
I certainly don't care about efficiency for efficiency's sake. There may be some cases where I am pro-efficiency, and some where I am not.
I would not agree that "Efficiency is better full stop". There is nothing that is "full stop". There is always a dark side.
My grandmother's neighbor being allowed to install a 1000-head livestock operation 1 km from her house would have been more efficient than what she fought for and ended up compromising on with them. That less efficient compromise may have even contributed to greater poverty and possibly some future famine for all I know.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course you need to make sure that companies don't privatize all the profits without giving back something to the community, but that's (IMHO) not an issue of company size but rather a taxation issue.
That's an easier starting point, while the average European country has less than 60. (Germany has 80)
Except the US is a federal system, so one can argue that rather than facing the same law, you actually have 51 legal systems (states + federal government) and 51 different legislatures - most certainly not universally the “same government”.
As another commenter pointed out, this rears it’s head for US startups all the time, with many different sales tax implementations, drug policy (marijuana legaliszation) etc etc. Even while at work the law varies enormously - my paternity leave rights as a father in California are vastly different than many other states.
The US isn’t as obviously simpler than the EU than one might expect in this regard, ~28 legal systems (if we ignore pseudo-federal arrangements like the U.K. etc) with a common core of business law established via EU statute, not 100 miles away from the common body of federal legislation found throughout the 50 states.
Cultural, language and custom differences can certainly be argued to be simpler in the US though.
That's not remotely close to being accurate.
If I start an image sharing service, an Instagram, and I'm based in Ohio, I have extremely few considerations about the state governments of Alabama, Florida, Maine or Arizona as it pertains to launching and operating the service.
For most Internet businesses, you can tilt up a start-up tomorrow morning and access all 50 states and never give a single thought to the individual states. If there's a regulatory issue, it's usually only going to be an issue later with scale.
It's radically easier to launch across the whole of the US than it is the four dozen countries in Europe, or 28 countries of the EU. It's not close to comparable. You do not deal with 51 legal systems to launch start-ups in the US, unless you're operating in a very narrow set of industries with very high amounts of regulations (and even in that case, you're still not dealing with 51 different legal systems, there's overlap and commonality in regulations state to state).
I’d argue it’s damn close to a statement of fact rather than an opinion; there are 51 legal systems and legislatures at work here whether one likes the fact or not - that one State’s statute is not enforceable in another is prima facie evidence of this. Whilst the impact of this is of course variable, there are concrete examples of the issues that can arise. Heck even the income tax we pay as citizens isn’t the same accross all states.
This is simply a reflection of the "structure of production": for any given consumer product, there is a vast graph of exchanges and transformations that lead to it. Most of the inventory and money is not passing between consumers and consumer companies. It is in the structure of production.
Consider: manufacturing is not instantaneous. Primary resource production is not instantaneous. Transportation is not instantaneous. Tertiary services are not instantaneous. Per Little's Law, average items in a system = average throughput * average item latency. The consumer market is the throughput. The structure of production represents a multiple of the consumer market.
The reason we overweight consumer brands is because they are consumer brands. Within each industry and niche, everyone knows who the leading firms are. But outside the niche, nobody knows that a) the firms exist or b) that the niche exists.
But all of us are in the consumer market, so we all know about consumer brands (they literally make it their business to ensure this is so).
Every journalist can write about a consumer brand. Every reader can read about the consumer brand. So on sheer volume, consumer brands are vastly overrepresented in the media relative to their total share of the economy.
So even a relatively small lead in consumer-facing firms will seem much larger than it actually is. B2B is a massive segment in the US software market. But it's the invisible dark matter of our industry: it constitutes almost all of the mass in the software universe, but few folks realise it's there unless it's pointed out.
There are plenty of companies most people have probably never heard of which are basically setup as infrastructure or support for the Fortune 500.
No? Leading consumer brands are a lot bigger than B2B brands for the most part because B2C in the aggregate economy has to be bigger than B2B (in $) and because B2B is a more fragmented and specialized market than B2C (i.e. harder to gain large market share). Just look at the biggest tech companies by market cap/valuation: Apple (B2C), Amazon (mixed, debatable), Google (B2C-designed products), Microsoft (mixed, more B2B), Facebook (B2C-designed products), Alibaba (B2C), Tencent (B2C), Oracle (B2B), IBM (B2B), Netflix (B2C), Uber (B2C), Baidu (B2C). You don't find a pure B2B company until Oracle, which is ~20% the size of the Apple.
This makes sense as well. The ultimate source of private sector profit comes from selling to the consumer. There's no point of a B2B company if there are no businesses selling to consumers (ignoring governments). If the B2B space is bigger than B2C, businesses would, on aggregate, be buying more from other businesses that they would be selling to consumers. In other words, they'd be losing money and such a system wouldn't sustainable for long. Of course, we're focusing on tech, and tech is a subsegment of the overall economy, etc., so it's possible that tech as a sector is more B2B than B2C... but this a question that will have to answered with data, not assertions.
Google and Facebook are advertising companies - literally b2b?
Every line of COBOL in a bank basement, every SCADA gadget, every drill screen on a wildcatter rig, every MS Access database responsible for the work of 3 people in an office in rural England ... the sum value and volume of software we don't see and don't recognise is staggering.
More to the point, it would be mathematically impossible for the structure of production to be smaller than the consumer market. Unless you are producing something from nothing, or producing instantaneously, or both, then the absolute minimum possible size for the structure of production is to be precisely equivalent to the consumer market. This is clearly not what we observe.
- Access to huge amounts of capital that can support businesses that focus on consumers for a good period of time before they start worrying about profit.
- A large domestic consumer market. Europe is fragmented.
However, having traveled around a lot of the US, and a good portion of EU, my instinct is that the US is pretty fragmented too when it comes to a whole lot of things.
Regional cultural differences in the US can be really strong. Though maybe that doesn't affect markets as much as EU with probably more diverse cultures and certainly more diversity of languages.
Anyway, really interesting to think about! Maybe I'll research it sometime.
Far far less. Different languages mean the large majority of a countries population is largely culturally isolated from its neighbors. No one watches a pan-european news channel, read a pan-european newspaper or browse a pan-european website. They don't exist.
Different way of doing business, different mindsets, different world view, different media systems, different politics and different economic markets and conditions.
Netflix is a good example of how it's very different.
The price of Netflix may be totally different in every country in Europe, because the cost of living etc. is different.
In the US the price of Netflix is the same regardless of what state you live in.
That's just a small example.
Yes each state has different regulations, taxing etc. too, but overall they're mostly the same.
In Europe everything is different, the cost of living, the language, the culture etc. and thus you cannot have a product with the same price in every European country (Well you can, but most likely you wouldn't!)
Spotify, Skype etc are addressing an international market, so the exact situation in Sweden wouldn't affect that much, and also I don't know if e.g. Spotify is even really making that much money yet from customers.
That said there are enough success stories to know that you absolutely can do it in Europe. It's really more about how few are even trying rather than how impossible it is.
Wow.
I'd argue the opposite is true. There's a lot of innovation going on in Europe - but a) it takes a long time for 'innovation' to filter through to the consumer, and b) successful consumer companies tend to win on brand, not tech.
The big problem in Europe (vs US) IMO is the risk tolerance of VCs, capital available, valuations, and large market size.
I personally know quite a few founders who started consumer tech companies in Europe and quickly moved at least part of their operations to the US as soon as they were ready to scale.
I'm no expert on how you'd measure tech innovation. Perhaps patents - but US patents are much easier to get and much more easily awarded than in the EU, so probably not a great indicator of innovation (especially considering that more patent applications were filed in China in 2016 than the rest of the world combined).
Elite research universities might be a good indicator. I haven't got the rankings to hand, but am willing to stand corrected that the EU is at least on a par with the US in that regard.
Consumer banking is probably one area where 'tech innovation' has been much more widely embraced in Europe than in the US. Is that the kind of thing you meant?
If not, perhaps you could give me some examples of technical innovation which is common in the US and rare/lacking in Europe?
Traditional industries are perhaps doing better, not sure. I hear that Europeans tend to be more innovative in manufacturing, factory tech etc. But I wouldn't know enough to have an opinion. If you look at the GDPs something must be going okayish. But it sure isn't startups.
I agree on VCs and capital but that's just a symptom IMO. The risk aversion goes all the way down. So does the conservatism.
Moving to the US is easier than changing the culture.
There's lots of innovation in Europe, or otherwise, Europe would not have a market as large as the US and China. Technology in Europe just simply happens to fall into the pharmacological sector, manufacturing, transport, the automotive industry and others, rather than digital ad-tech.
Moviepass might have generated a lot of shareholder excitement for a year or two, but whether this amounts to deep innovation is in my opinion questionable.
A hidden champion somewhere in the German south that nobody has ever heard of but who underpins global manufacturing seems to me ten times more innovative than yet another scooter sharing app.
With a B2B business, you see more revenue earlier. That revenue then goes on to fund the next stage, product, market, whatever. In B2C businesses, it takes quite a bit more effort to become profitable and you're likely to scale long before that point.
If you're in an ecosystem that is used to making bets on B2C companies (not just investors but founders, leadership, and employees), you know and have lived this difference and plan accordingly. If your ecosystem has less venture capital and less people who have lived that, you need cashflow sooner and something resembling profitability earlier.
* I worked for a London-based startup that moved to the US midway through it's life.
(While this thread is about Europe, the same distinction applies for SF vs US Midwest ecosystems.)
Happens in other businesses as well. McDonalds, Starbucks etc.
That's not true. The added value to the passenger is that he can now travel across the entire Europe using a single ticketing system and a unified bus standard, saving a lot of time and hassle. But I agree, that it made a competition almost impossible. Flixbus competes not with other bus companies, but with trains and flights: in terms of price, time, and comfort. Sometimes in wins, sometimes it loses.
I guess that depends a lot on the market. Because certainly in Sweden Flixbus absolutely competes with the existing bus companies.
[1] https://global.flixbus.com/bus-routes
developed countries - dealing with individual consumers is a pain in the neck - documentation, guarantees, consumer rights, complaints, multiple languages, requirements research, various app stores which are entirely US based and controlled, certain transparency as the services portfolio is available publicly. Why bother with these when one can just sell something to German/French/British industries or telecoms, relax, hire some engineers, and implement whatever the minimal acceptable form is? There isn't a problem which cannot be solved during a "conference" of lawyers and sales people somewhere on Balearic Islands or in Swiss Alps, or by a brand new BMW discreetly shipped to a certain address - try solving product/service-related problems in a similar way when thousands or even millions of customers are looking at your hands.
Individual consumers are pariahs in Europe.
And in software, the B2B market is just bigger. Consumers buy/use off the shelf software, businesses can pay you to create custom software. The margins are lower but the to risks are also lower. It's just nobody talks about the latter.
Anything in enterprise level costs loads of money. From developer perspective think about all consulting companies which do body leasing. How much companies pay for having hands to work is alone insane. Price for custom B2B development goes really high. Then you have to pay high price or your business is going to loose money in the future. Where consumers don't care, I am not going to loose money because I don't have someones app.
B2C businesses traditionally need more funding to scale. Less funding, fewer B2C businesses. Bootstrapping a B2C business is even harder. B2B just makes more sense economically.