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Comment by ef4 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, you have the difficulty backward. It's just fear of the unknown that keeps too many technical people from attempting it.

If your product has a demonstrable return on investment, then it is far easier to sell to businesses. Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI, and consumers mostly don't.

Remember that to make a fair comparison, you need to do it per dollar, not per sale. Even if it's 10x easier to sell to one consumer than one business, if a business customer pays 100x more money, then it is still vastly easier to sell to businesses.

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This is only true if there is a cost-effective way to reach the businesses in question. Sometimes there is, sometimes it's less clear.

Sure, but the same objection applies to consumer-targeted products. If your product is for "everyone", you may need to spend large amounts of money to get attention.

You are mostly right, but then there are other issues to consider: why would a business buy from you who is just starting out? They would like to have some guarantee you will be around after a few years..

Reputation definitely counts for something. But there's a slew of businesses that would likely buy from you in the early stages. They may be much smaller businesses, and possible not even in your long-term/medium-term target market, but it's a stepping stone.

Selling can still be a challenge. But if you have a valuable product, and an A* sales team, it's much much easier.

>Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI

They like to say they do, but they very frequently don't. I'd say easily 80% of the software and hardware purchases I've seen corporate clients make are based on things other than ROI. Things like "the sales person for product X always takes me to nice lunches" or "everyone else is using Y so we need to use Y too".

Thus the evergreen adage, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

ie Gartner's Magic Quadrant...

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