After grinding for 5 years in different (many unsuccessful) early-stage B2B startups, I’ve come to realize that they often fail not because the product is bad, but because they are trying to sell to the wrong first customer(s).

So I built B2Bvibecheck as a gut-check: “Should we even bother pursuing this customer?”

Background:

For most startups the main bizdev strategy is to pursue big recognizable names that will look great on the testimonials section. But I’ve learned the hard way that those big shiny names, in most cases (unless you made it into YC), don’t buy from startups - in fact, around 86% of the market will not buy tech that looks like (especially when it’s actively marketed as) innovation.

Because it turns out: you can’t sell innovation to people and companies who try to avoid risk. And that’s the default mode for most people/companies. It’s a simple normal distribution. Some seek, some hate, and most avoid risk. Tech in general is therefore adopted sequentially, from left to right, from high-risk to low-risk seeking. The previous segment always de-risks and unlocks innovation/tech for the next segment.

So, as an early-stage marketer helping the founder sell, I’ve figured out that my main job is to find the tech enthusiasts and innovators on the far left — the ones who seek risk/innovation to get a head-start compared to everyone else in their industry. They are the ones I need to sell to first.

That insight hit me after too many failed pilots. The product worked. Value was clear (in some cases, even benchmarked and beating their internal status quo). Yet no deal. And worse: we’d waste time tuning the roadmap for a customer who was never going to buy, but asked us for all these enterprise features that did not improve the core product.

So I’ve built b2bvibecheck to avoid these mistakes and use it with the founders as a quick sense-check on wether we wanted to spend time on this prospect or not - built originally only for us internally, because I thought everyone knew this. But it might be widely known in the Bay Area, YC, and Crossing the Chasm circles - but still not the default way of building, especially in Europe/Nordics. Hence, launching it here.

For now, it’s still just a scrappy beta version. But hopefully useful. Let me know what you think.