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I was recently watching a YT lecture from Geoffrey Moore, and one student raise their question about MVP. Their argument is that MVP doesn't work in B2C becaus

I was recently watching a YT lecture from Geoffrey Moore, and one student raise their question about MVP. Their argument is that MVP doesn't work in B2C because no one wants to use your shitty product. Everyone expected everything to be complete. I think this makes sense from my experience. If you have web, people will ask if you have mobile. If you have iOS, they will ask if you have Android. And given the YC have shifted their focus to mainly B2B Saas companies, I couldn't help be think the student was right in some way. B2C is so much harder to crack because expectations are high and attention spans are very low. If it doesn't click within 5 seconds, customers just move on. People's tolerance for trying new products compared to a decade again has decreased substantially. This isn't the case for B2B. If there is a business need, people are much more willing to tolerate your shitty product as long as they receive a net gain. Of course, B2B comes with its challenges. It was an interesting perspective.

anaccountexists 5y ago
I don’t think it’s necessarily true for B2C. It just depends on who your target audience is. It’s pretty normal for a game, shopping app, etc. to start on iOS and make its way over to Android months later. The only place where you need more completeness is if you’re building a social app, in my experience. People want to be able to respond to messages everywhere.
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  Completeness isn't just about cross platform. It is just one example. Completeness can also mean content. If your shopping app doesn't have vendors, no one is going to use it. Try getting vendors to join your no-name shopping app and I bet you will be 100% ignored other than desperate mom and pop shops. And for games, it requires a huge investment of talent to develop, and very few games succeed. So completeness here would be getting game designers, graphic designer, software engineers to work together for low pay and high possibility of failure. The only games that don't require huge investments are puzzle games like tetris and 2048. Completeness is the bar where the end users feel there is sufficient value to use. If Uber Eats only had 10 restaurants, very few people would ever use it. So the bar is very high to get people to start using it consistently.
jldupinet 5y ago
Interesting, I had the opposite idea. I come from doing B2C product and now work at a B2B SaaS company and my first thought was that B2B is so much harder to crack because existing solutions are really feature complete and clients are not going to tolerate for your service to have quirks or errors. I guess B2B and B2C are not that much different regarding user tolerance and it just comes down to how much unique value is your solution giving to the customer.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  This is probably just a lack of familiarity with the playbook for selling B2B. People that have been doing it a long time can intuitively navigate around these obvious objections. Outside of some rare cases, there are standard positioning techniques to avoid being evaluated for completeness relative to whatever the business has. For example, not positioning your product as a replacement for existing products -- "and" not "or" -- is an effective approach. Trying to be a feature for feature clone of an existing product they already use is a losing proposition, so having a strategy to reframe the discussion away from that perspective is a requirement.
ako 5y ago
The best way to tackle that specific problem i've found is by applying Geoffrey Moore's advice in crossing the chasm: slice the market in niches of customers. And then make sure you have the best possible solution for that niche. Customers want a complete solution for their use case, but not all customers are the same, and not all use cases are the same. Say you want to create a sports tracking app. You can focus on all sports, or just a few, you can focus on all forms of one sport, or just one particular.

anaccountexists 5y ago

I don’t think it’s necessarily true for B2C. It just depends on who your target audience is. It’s pretty normal for a game, shopping app, etc. to start on iOS and make its way over to Android months later. The only place where you need more completeness is if you’re building a social app, in my experience. People want to be able to respond to messages everywhere.

nowherebeen 5y ago
Completeness isn't just about cross platform. It is just one example. Completeness can also mean content. If your shopping app doesn't have vendors, no one is going to use it. Try getting vendors to join your no-name shopping app and I bet you will be 100% ignored other than desperate mom and pop shops. And for games, it requires a huge investment of talent to develop, and very few games succeed. So completeness here would be getting game designers, graphic designer, software engineers to work together for low pay and high possibility of failure. The only games that don't require huge investments are puzzle games like tetris and 2048. Completeness is the bar where the end users feel there is sufficient value to use. If Uber Eats only had 10 restaurants, very few people would ever use it. So the bar is very high to get people to start using it consistently.

jldupinet 5y ago

Interesting, I had the opposite idea. I come from doing B2C product and now work at a B2B SaaS company and my first thought was that B2B is so much harder to crack because existing solutions are really feature complete and clients are not going to tolerate for your service to have quirks or errors. I guess B2B and B2C are not that much different regarding user tolerance and it just comes down to how much unique value is your solution giving to the customer.

jandrewrogers 5y ago
This is probably just a lack of familiarity with the playbook for selling B2B. People that have been doing it a long time can intuitively navigate around these obvious objections. Outside of some rare cases, there are standard positioning techniques to avoid being evaluated for completeness relative to whatever the business has. For example, not positioning your product as a replacement for existing products -- "and" not "or" -- is an effective approach. Trying to be a feature for feature clone of an existing product they already use is a losing proposition, so having a strategy to reframe the discussion away from that perspective is a requirement.

ako 5y ago

The best way to tackle that specific problem i've found is by applying Geoffrey Moore's advice in crossing the chasm: slice the market in niches of customers. And then make sure you have the best possible solution for that niche. Customers want a complete solution for their use case, but not all customers are the same, and not all use cases are the same. Say you want to create a sports tracking app. You can focus on all sports, or just a few, you can focus on all forms of one sport, or just one particular.