Init: 12.05.2025 | Last edit: 12.05.2025
"Being reality-slapped on succeeding with mobile apps, especially consumer social, I was looking for something more: "I want fucking money""
After one dinner @superchat's HQ something struck. It was served on a golden plate. An founder told us about how he's crushing metrics with his verticalised voice-agent SaaS. In short, it was a light frontdesk worker, that manages and collects customer requests on the phone 24/7.
He was an uni alumni, so super willing to help. I asked him about his thoughts on other industries that would benefit and there was a clear "Makes totally sense, it's just an execution game."
So with this new golden baby born, I went to the office full off excitement. 3 guys were there. I told them about it. They were hooked. These 3 guys became my cofounders. Yes, that's probably fastest team ever formed. After doing the cliché founder questionare, we got rolling.
Our first mission was to find out wether we can whitelabel the solution from aforementioned founder. It didn't went anywhere, I only have room to guess, but I assume a team formed in a day, didn't leave a lasting impression. Reality is, if it would have went through, they would have had us by the balls. A SaaS that doesn't have it's own software - what a bad joke.
So we're going on our own. We're going fast. Really fast. 2 weeks in we got a site, an demoproduct and first interested clients. This momentum was such an enlightenment on how startups could possibly stab big corps. Every day, Every Night. Progress. Progress. Progress. Experienced "The Momentum™" once, its the bar for every new thing now.
We tried many industries, ran many tests. Meta is the best thing I've experienced in a while. It's magic. Literally. At a certain point you put in X-money and get Y-revenue. I heard they call it ROAS. Meta is the momentum-machine, you can test things so incredibly fast, I'm still in shock how easy we have it these days. Roland, a prof. of mine rightly said speed is essential in startups. So thanks zuck, for giving us this speed-like drug called ads manager.
"Our result: ai phone agents for car dealerships. Why? Gut. A lot of gut. It always sounds better to say: data. I love data. I love being rational. Data did support us, but gut moved the needle. The salesmachines (two of my cofounders) were really "feeling the vibes" when cold-calling those customers."
So we scaled our first ads in that niche and got first leads. They were interested and already said yes to >500€/month packages. Pricing was no issue for them. Shocking for someone who try-hards to get consumer to pay >5€/month. The sheer ticket proportions, this 100-1000x difference, makes it clear to me that B2B is undoubtedly easier. B2C founders are playing in hard mode.
"The past few months were a journey. An journey that ended. But before I tell you why, let's share some fun stuff: We needed creatives for ads, so we were bold. More precise, my cofounders were bold. Even though we're not a team anymore, I have the uttermost respect for there willingness to just ask anything. They literally went into random offices and asked if they can roleplay their jobs. They said yes. A little trick for everyone trying: use the student card. It increases your conversion almost anywhere. "This recordings seem like an ad for B2B Software? Naaaaaaa. It's an uni-project. Trust me bro.""
"Another takeaway: Customers, even in B2B, are humans. They can be super progressive and hyped about "AI" or just incredibly wealthy legacy assholes looking to replace employees. If you're bootstrapped and just starting out, you're everyone's bitch in a way. Your trying to make ends meat, so as long as they pay, you do what they want. They will start insulting an AI as if it were an actual human and not an llm wrapper. You're smiling it away, trying to close the deal."
The end? There wasn't one "reason". Most interestingly it wasn't because we didn't think it'd make money. It definitely did. That's why the salesmachines will continue. I personally, won't.
I won't because the team dynamics weren't perfect. Me being on the engineering and product side, I had to trust what sales said the customers wanted. But our team was fresh, there wasn't much basis for high level of trust. It was too much of an chinese wall. I will never do that again. While not being found of meetings, I need them. I need them to understand why the fuck I'm building what I'm building. The more I hear from customers directly, the more fuel is in my tank. I ended up running dry. But even with fuel…
I won't because I had zero care for the customer. I don't care about cars. I don't care about who sells them or how. Heck, I don't even have a license. I had next to no empathy for them. I was too focused on the financials. I realised that I'm not able to do the mental gymnastics to pursue years of my life on something I care nothing more about than cash.
I won't because it didn't seem streamlined. Reality is, while we could sell the product, what most of them wanted is not a standalone webapp, but an extension. An extension into legacy software. Integrations into called DMS-systems or more precisely DogshitMilleniaSoftware. This wasn't the clean hands off approach. This was high maintenance. There's a fine line to being an agency and I didn't like how close we were.
I won't because design was to low of an priority. I know design isn't just about beauty. But the stuff I saw will haunt me in my dreams. The software is old, but most importantly the philosophy seems utility over everything. I get why, but I also hate the results. While B2B is stuck with MVPs, B2C delights with MLPs. Speaking of delight, I sense a correlation that the more tarpy an ideas is, the more sophisticated the design as well as disgusting the viability is, with B2B it seems vice-versa.
"From what I see, the endgame is to build an outstanding B2C experience that carries itself into organisation. I coin it the Notion way. The trojan horse. Anecdotally the folks at edtech RevisionDojo are also going by this playbook. They penetrate all students of a school with an b2c product. They become your personal army of salesagents. Then you just walk to director: "90% of your students and almost every teacher is using it. Bro, at this point just by a license.""