Am I Righting a Wrong or Chasing My Tail

I’ve had about a dozen or so products I’ve launched since I learned to code. However, only two of them I’d consider “hits”. My first project, the one that forced me to finally learn to code, was one of those hits. Graphite Docs was a privacy focused alternative to Google Docs. It was built for me and only though the sheer peer pressuring of friends did I launch it for the public.

Thank goodness I did.

Graphite managed to get tens of thousands of users despite being a pretty niche tool. I learned so much and became a better founder because of Graphite. But I also made what I think is one of my biggest mistakes in running a company. I went after the wrong market.

I had a built-in consumer market that I didn’t even try to nurture. I, instead, chased the b2b market, building features for businesses that my existing user base didn’t really care about.

I had tons of b2b sales demos, some of which were with big name companies. But I made exactly one sale for $19.99 a month. I received one payment at that price before the customer churned.

What I realized is that I was solving a real problem for my niche consumer-market user base and should have focused my efforts there. I likely (can’t prove this now) could have charged for what I had provided them rather than building separate tools for the b2b market that I never captured.

With my current project, Perligo, I am trying to take some of the lessons from Graphite and apply them to the revenue model for this product. Perligo is largely a consumer focused product. It’s for writers looking to find and build better critique groups. However, there is a sort of b2b play available as well. I know from experience and from talking to people, that creative writing departments at colleges and independent creative writing workshops have poor tools for managing group feedback digitally.

Rather than build separate tools and have separate plans, I’m thinking about introducing pricing that applies across the board regardless of whether you are an organization or an individual. To me, this solves the problem I faced with Graphite where I ignored most of my user base. It allows me to build and market solutions to problems without having to figure out if it is exclusively a b2b problem or a consumer problem.

Would love to hear feedback on this whole thought process.