1Password's growth illustrates the 'land and expand' model. Start with a B2C product individuals love, which they bring into their workplace. This creates organic internal demand, allowing you to then approach the company with an enterprise solution offering management and compliance.
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Avoid pursuing prosumer and enterprise motions simultaneously. The optimal sequence is to first build massive bottoms-up love and brand trust with individual users. This creates internal champions within target companies, providing crucial momentum and turning a cold B2B sale into a pull-based motion.
Password manager 1Password reached over $400M in annual recurring revenue while remaining profitable since inception. This durable growth was achieved by leveraging its strong consumer brand to expand into the B2B market, which now accounts for nearly 80% of its business from 180,000 customers.
Large enterprises don't buy point solutions; they invest in a long-term platform vision. To succeed, build an extensible platform from day one, but lead with a specific, high-value use case as the entry point. This foundational architecture cannot be retrofitted later.
Counter to the "do one thing" mantra, Simple AI maintains a free consumer app. This product serves as a potent marketing engine where amazed users become evangelists and introduce the technology to their workplaces, creating a unique B2B acquisition channel.
Jumping to enterprise sales too early is a common founder mistake. Start in the mid-market where accounts have fewer demands. This allows you to perfect the product, build referenceable customers, and learn what's truly needed to win larger, more complex deals later on.
Enterprises are comfortable buying services. Sell a service engagement first, powered by your technology on the back end, to get your foot in the door. This builds trust and bypasses procurement hurdles associated with new software. Later, you can transition them to a SaaS product model.
According to OpenAI's Head of Applications, their enterprise success is directly fueled by their consumer product's ubiquity. When employees already use and trust ChatGPT personally, it dramatically simplifies enterprise deployment, adoption, and training, creating a powerful consumer-led growth loop that traditional B2B companies lack.
Professionals use sophisticated consumer apps like Nest and Ring at home, creating a powerful psychological contrast with their clunky work software. Startups can win by delivering a consumer-grade experience, which makes the product feel modern and intuitively superior to legacy enterprise tools.
Sam Altman clarifies that OpenAI's path to enterprise success was deliberately consumer-first. The widespread adoption of ChatGPT in users' personal lives creates a powerful inbound channel for enterprise deals, as employees bring the tool they know and trust into their workplace.
Snyk combined bottom-up adoption with top-down sales in a 'pincer movement.' They leveraged existing developer usage within an organization as a powerful entry point for their outbound sales team to engage security leaders, turning user love into a compelling conversation with the economic buyer.
