Patrick’s recent business of software roundup included a fascinating paragraph about classifying founders (and hence the applicability of their advice). Apparently Jason Cohen partitioned people like this:

Patrick explains it better than I can:

There are two competing motivations for people who start software companies: wanting to maximize one’s financial outcome as quickly as possible (you want to be Rich) and wanting to sculpt the perfect personal niche in which you will be respected and enjoy your day-to-day work (you want to be King).

The Rich vs King concept was first floated by Noam Wasserman in 2005; if I’d read it earlier it’d have saved me reinventing the concept as Emperor Palpatine vs Han Solo, but there you are.

So Am I B2B or B2C?

Everyone likes to talk about being Rich or being King (or being both), but nobody talks much about the difference between B2B and B2C. This is odd, because it’s more important. Patrick simply says:

There are two fairly well-known markets for software: B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to customer)

For a long time I wasn’t really clear about the separation. Some cases are obvious - Foursquare is B2C and Visual Studio Professional is B2B - but how do I evaluate ideas? Is productivity software for dentists B2B or B2C? What about software to assist translators? Or teachers? What about an easy-to-use profiling tool?

This morning it finally became crystal clear: it’s B2B when the user is not the person making the purchasing decision.

This is the only distinction that matters, but it really matters. Your entire sales pitch and cycle look very different if your customer and your user are not the same person. You’ve got to make the users happy enough to push for a purchase, but you’ve got to reassure, hand-hold and sell to the person with the money. You’ve got to know who your users are and who your customers are, because they might not be the same people.

Be sure. Decide. Any confusion about this will kill a product faster than you can say but-I-A/B-tested-everything.

Postscript: here’s a link to the Hacker News discussion