Ask HN: How do B2B startups exit the early adopter trap?
Explaining the trap:
1- Startups need early adopters to create a product that really solves problems
2- Companies usually are not early adopters (eg there's no Kickstarter for B2Bs) since they have to run a business and cannot use incomplete tools
3- B2B startups can find early adopters only when their product is good enough, which basically requires capital injections until then
4- Point 3 is completely against lean startup "rules": after you've received money, you could have created something that doesn't solve any problem, but you can't find early adopters due to point 2.
so..how do startups exit this trap and find early adopters?
3 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadWe solved point 1 by being our own early adopters, as we have built our MLOps platform, https://iko.ai, to solve a lot of the problems we face. We're in a privileged position of not coming at this from a background of web developers who want to build "MLOps platforms" or "data science solutions" with no domain/insider knowledge, but from the position of a team that has been doing this for quite some time for projects with actual stakes. This allowed us to gain experience and know what are the actual problems in the field.
>2- Companies usually are not early adopters (eg there's no Kickstarter for B2Bs) since they have to run a business and cannot use incomplete tools
We're a boutique machine learning company that works with large organizations that may or may not already have an internal machine learning team.
When you do good work and are reliable, you build trust and reputation with these organizations even if you are tiny, so people will tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. Some will also notice that you're delivering fast and will ask you how you're doing it because their team is struggling. This happens for example when we work with an org that has an internal team and we're augmenting them or helping them on a problem they don't have experience with and leveraging our experience from previous similar projects in a specific sector or industry.
For example, some huge organizations we have relations with and that already have internal data science and machine learning teams will sit with us and ask us how we're doing our ML projects, what our process is, how we're handling X issue, etc. These are opportunities to know more about their problems, and make them adopt your product.
>3- B2B startups can find early adopters only when their product is good enough, which basically requires capital injections until then
The conversations I described above will surface certain objections to adopting or sometimes even trying the product.
For example, one of the objections was that their team was really too busy to try our platform on a toy project. If they were to try it, they wanted to try it on something they were actually working on, but they couldn't because the information and data were sensitive. This was the objection of the CTO of a "Skunkworks" type organization of a +$500B company. The right answer here is to be polite, understand the problem for this non-adoption/not-even-wanting-to-try-it, and find a way to eliminate that objection either from an engineering stand-point or other ways.
My point is that every meeting is an opportunity to learn, and every objection is an opportunity to refine your product so these objections don't occur in the future and you have to remove these frictions and objections.
Note that these objections were rarely about the product not being "good enough" in terms of features, because when you're solving problems that are real and expensive, the suffering is so high and the tooling is so immature, that the objections will mostly come from a security/confidentiality/governance/trust than be over the fact your stylesheets are not slick.
One other point:
It depends how your product will be used. What are the implications of using it? Does using your product require an overhaul of their entire workflow and processes or even replacing them? Does it require buy-in from everyone? If that's the case, it's more tricky and the adoption and sales cycle will be longer and more "enterprisey". Many meetings, guarantees, contracts,and all the jazz.
Can your product be used by an individual without impacting the whole process provided it won't get them fired? i.e: using your product doesn't violate some policy [which you made sure of a...
How do you get B2B early adopters to bite?
- You can emphasize the marketing angle. Marketing dept’s may do things that ops won’t
- You can do side-by-side comparisons with a B2B provider, and send them the unflattering comparison
- You can post content specifically targeted at your B2B customers...this can be done by the right digital marketer
- You can work bottom-up: target the B2B’s users and get the “crowd” to help you convince the B2B to work with you.
Yep, this all costs time, effort and money.