| "The real cost is your time." -> this. we've been doing this for the past 4 years, but as i really started to enjoy sales, things are going quite well, so i'm just adding my 2 cents: From my experience the sales process is the only thing that matters. No client cares about the software (at least initially).
Although this is/was tough to hear as a softwareenigneer (i didn't believe it either), if you're in B2B and trying to solve a serious enterprise problem, most of the readily available info on "how to start up" on the web is not applicable.
All the talk about "build a fancy landing page", "build an MVP", "test your market first" did not help us. This is because we found that our target audience is not really active on the internet and the amount of potential DECISION MAKERS/BUYERS (not users!) is in the thousands to tenthousands not in the millions. Therefore we needed direct sales, whether we liked it or not. And initially that's a founders job.
See this as a hint for my claim: B2B companies that are turning over many millions of dollars per year often have "a website" (which looks like it's 1999) but that's basically it. Why? The clients are in B2B as well, so the level of doing business is mostly person to person, establishing a relationship. You don't need a fancy website for that.
The reason is actually pretty simple: If you are solving a relevant business problem in B2B the duration of the anticipated business relationship is 5-10++ years. Depending on WHAT problem you solve the dependency on the clients new supplier (=you) is very high. Therefore a client cares much more about WHO that supplier is. Building that trust takes time and interactions, and that is why B2B is so fundamentally different from B2C where you have everything from one-off interactions to product-lifecycles of 1-3 years (max). It was therefore always clear to us that building a viable B2B business takes 10 years. So what did we do? Initially none of our clients cared about the software but about the business problem we solve and the people/the company who they are doing business with. We funded our product development by doing a mixture of pre-financed dev work & "contract software dev/consulting" with the IP remaining with us. This allowed us to build a product and use the references to get to work with the next clients. Over time this lead us to our (now SaaS) product. B2B is tough, but as soon as you're in, you're in. edit: typo |