Have you considered the B2B search space?
Yes, we have. Here’s my take on it:
Hi <Name Redacted>,
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I am hearing the enterprise suggestion a lot, and I want to understand if I am missing something fundamental.
To begin with, I want to go B2C because I believe we have the opportunity to capture the consumer market and make Google obsolete. I believe if we don't do this, someone else will. I am open to enterprise if we are using it as an intermediate step to position ourselves better to go after the consumer route. Though, I am not okay with enterprise as an end game because the consumer opportunity is simply too big to ignore.
I define enterprise as a place where more than one person makes the buying decision for a large number of people (the whole org). The key characteristics of enterprise business are:
1. It’s a sales driven process. Someone from our org has to go to their org and convince them why buying our software makes sense for their business.
2. The contract values within customers are highly non linear. It's not rare that a single big customer contributes to upto 30% of the ARR.
Implications of being sales driven is that Enterprise businesses are easier to get off the ground but harder to scale. Easier to get off the ground because you'll always find some company for whom you can do something to make their business better. It's harder to scale because sales is usually the bottleneck in growth, and you can only scale sales by hiring more people.
Implications of non linear contract value is that the big customers end up having a lot of influence over the product direction.
My fear is that if we go with the Enterprise route, we'll get stuck there because a lot of our energy will go into scaling the sales org and meeting the custom requirements of the big customers. None of which lead to a better product or positioning for the general consumer.
We are either becoming FAANG, or going bust. Nothing in between!
Thank you Priyanshi Gaur for reading draft of this.