B2B: What platforms / marketplaces are best for growth and user acquisition?

These are kind of "enterprisey" platforms in a way - you may want to consider others like Shopify, WordPress, etc. if you're looking to bootstrap something and start making revenue quickly.

Why?

Because enterprise = longer sales cycle, more complex features, and more headaches in general for bootstrappers like you and me.

A company that is on Salesforce, for example, almost automatically falls into the enterprise customer definition.

That could very well mean:

1. Your end user is not the decision maker
2. You have more than one decision maker
3. You have a longer sales cycle, including demos and maybe even committees
4. You have to deal with enterprise purchasing and vendor policies (annual contracts with PO numbers and lawyers and training programs)
5. Many of your potential customers are going to want some pretty gnarly and complex features that pretty much nobody else is going to need
6. You're going to have to charge (much) more to offset these costs (which feeds into the whole vicious cycle)

By going with a platform that serves the SMB market:

1. Very often, your end user is with the decision maker
2. You have shorter sales cycles, and people may engage more like "prosumers" rather than matrix-driven committees
3. Charging a credit card monthly or annual is the norm (or, like Shopify, billing is baked right in)
4. Self-service is the norm with some email support
5. You don't have to charge as much (potential for higher volume and more upsell opportunities)

Just some thoughts.

Best of luck.

First of all, you have the right mindset: there are so many platforms and options out there that you should choose depending on the biggest ROI (marketing-wise and related to your customers success) rather than pure tech.

This being said, I would start with smaller platforms that you can access and connect with more easily, building marketing partnerships and doing some co-authored blog posts, shares on social media or being listed on their partner pages (example, might not apply to you: https://www.aweber.com/partner-offers.htm - this is already an average one tho)

Once you have established yourself as a trusted partner for these platforms, you can start targeting larger ones and repeat this cycle even more effectively.

Comfi is BNPL for B2B SaaS which helps to close 2x more annual deals (according to our data).

In the world of B2B SaaS, most businesses have several subscriptions and every SaaS wants to close as many annual deals as they can. But the thing is that going annually with all subscriptions costs a big piece of the budget, therefore there are to keep paying monthly. Here Comfi helps them to split the annual plan into monthly payments without any interest rates and discounted prices (if annual price/12<monthly price).

Here's a good read about that from our blog on Medium:
https://medium.com/@amal_abdullaev/what-happens-when-saas-companies-sell-with-and-without-comfi-as-a-bnpl-payment-method-b54e62e580f4

To be homestead, it depends. There’s a lot of factors like your product, your customers, your business model, etc. There’s no one “right” platform.

We integrate with Slack at Tettra.co. It’s great for us, but might not be great for you.

I wrote this article about our experience integrating on Slack that includes a lot of what we learned and how we chose their platform. Might be helpful to read and happy to answer questions: https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-94953fdaf27a

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