Building and marketing a B2B enterprise platform

Preface

In 2019 I quit my full-time job to pursue a path of entrepreneurship. I knew nothing about building a business, all I knew was I could create a product.

I’ve done absolutely everything wrong. I’ve set out a goal of building an influencer marketing platform, Sentiwatch. I’ve checked out the competition and figured out that I knew how to make a similar product. I started cracking away at the code. I hired a designer to make sure it didn’t look like shit (it still did). Very quickly I’ve realized the graveness of things I didn’t take into account:

• I chose to build a product in a space I knew nothing about - instead, I chose it because it seemed like an interesting technical challenge
• I started building a product before figuring out the numbers
• I didn’t do any marketing until the product was already done
• I wanted to simultaneously build a product and improve my tech skills
• I didn’t have a clear scope for the MVP

In essence, I’ve subconsciously skipped all the parts I didn’t feel comfortable with. It took me far too long to realize all of these issues, ultimately I’ve reconsidered and called it a day.

The next attempt was PRHunter, a web3 programming bounty platform - drawing upon some learnings from the previous failure, this time I decided to solve a problem I have encountered myself. Plenty of mistakes have been repeated, but at least I started to see a pattern in why I was continuously failing. Once again, I discontinued the project (as detailed in this IH post) - I knew something had to change.

The deep dive

Towards the end of 2022, it seemed like the stars have aligned for me to try once more. I decided to launch MLnative, except this time, things would be a lot different:

• I’ve started a product in a space I got to know well, including customer problems and challenges
• I partnered up with a Co-Founder to handle the business and marketing aspects of the product
• We did market validation by talking to potential customers before building out the product
• I delayed any coding until we somewhat knew that this was a sure thing

Over the past few months, we’ve scratched together a solid MVP, we’re able to prove that we have a superior product to our competition, as well as we know that we are positioning ourselves uniquely in the market.

Did it work out?

Not yet, but seems like we are on the right track. Since we started this project early this year, we’ve gotten a ton of VC funding offers, turned all of them down decided to bootstrap this as far as possible.

This is a very technical b2b product, mostly targeted at enterprise customers. We’re in talks with two large entities about implementing a POC. We know it will take a lot of time to sell this, but seems like the market and the timing is right.

The biggest problem we’re facing right now is figuring out a repeatable sales strategy:

• Cold emails have a very small success chance, at least until we already have some customers
• Using our network has been moderately successful - We’re in talks with some companies about implementing a POC, however, this will most likely not be a stable source of leads in the long term
• Content marketing - building out traffic and a brand name should work well once we’re more established

Currently, as we’re waiting for the POC processes to move forward (closing a b2b deal can take a few months easily) we’ve decided to focus our attention on something else.

We’ll become our customers. As we’re a platform for building scalable AI services, we’re going to build and publish a free AI services platform, targeted specifically at business individuals. This should work for us in several ways:

• We can always show how this product is currently being used (by us) in production when we’re in talks with potential customers for our core offering.
• The platform on its own will showcase what is possible with AI in your company - ideally, this will drive non-technical users to us, allowing us to offer AI consulting services and potentially also sell our product later on.
• It will also help us polish the MVP, as we’ll easily spot what’s missing from the feature set to have a more complete offering

This is completely against Lean Startup rules, and yet we feel like it’s a relatively small investment to make with plenty of upsides if it does work out.

We're going to launch the platform in 1-2 weeks, I'll definitely be sharing the results of how it turned out.

Did you come across something similar in your experiences? Do you think this makes sense from a strategic standpoint?