Business to Consumer

Companies have always differed in who they sell to, but with no name for the difference the same discussion restarted from scratch every time. A company selling software to businesses and a company selling an app to individuals set prices differently, reach customers through different channels, and hold onto leaving customers in different ways. Explaining any of that meant unpacking the whole situation from the beginning.

The friction showed up in scenes like this one. A salesperson who had only ever handled company accounts joins a company that makes an app for individuals and opens the first meeting with "let's book a meeting with their contact and send a proposal over." But this company's customer is someone who sees an ad on the way to work and types in a card number three minutes later. There is no contact to meet and nobody waiting to read a proposal.

Business to consumer (B2C) bundles that mismatch into one word a team can agree on ahead of time. Fix the payer as an individual and pricing, ad channels, the way support is run, even the order features get built all follow from it. Set it beside business to business (B2B), where a company pays, and a new hire picks up the entire premise from a single line: we're B2C.

B2C runs on the condition that one person makes the decision. Whoever will use it picks it and pays for it, so there is one party to convince and the time to purchase drops to minutes. In exchange that one person pays a small amount, so headcount has to make up the difference, and the month they change their mind is the month they disappear.

The path one customer walks has four steps.

1. Discovery — an ad, a search, a friend's recommendation. No salesperson makes a visit here, so the cost of this step leaves as ad spend rather than as salary.
2. Trial — using it before paying for it. Freemium, where the basic features stay open at no charge, is the common shape. Fail to show the point at this step and the person is gone.
3. Payment — register a card and it's finished. Every step added visibly lowers the conversion rate, meaning the share of people who reach that screen and go on to pay. It's why deleting one field from a signup form turns up directly in revenue.
4. Retention — it renews automatically each month and cancels with one button. Nothing is locked in by a contract term, so a month that delivers nothing is a month people leave.

Whether the whole thing pays comes down to two numbers. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the money spent bringing one customer in, and lifetime value (LTV) is the estimate of what that customer leaves behind before going. Spend $25 of ad budget to acquire one customer on an $8-a-month product and they have to stay four months to break even. On a product people abandon after two months on average, running more ads only widens the loss.

So B2C counts churn, people leaving after having used the product, every single month. Company customers are locked into a year and cancel only at renewal; individuals leave on any day of the week. Lose 3 percent a month and fewer than two thirds of a group are still there a year later.

The phrase turns up in documents that set the direction of the business and in the meetings that change how people work to match it. Three places mainly.

It comes up when the team decides where the price list lives. B2C puts the numbers on the website. The customer has to look and decide alone, and making them ask for a figure loses them on the spot.

It comes up when acquisition channels get chosen. With individuals on the other side, ads, search, app stores, and referrals become the main routes. Bringing one person in costs a few dollars, so the same approach can be repeated across hundreds of thousands of people, and which wording works can be settled by experiment rather than argument.

It comes up when the build order gets set. In B2C the onboarding screens that help a new user settle in alone and the subscription billing that collects quietly each month sit at the front of the queue. Nobody is assigned to walk a customer through rollout, so the product has to do the guiding itself.

"We're B2C, so the prices just go on the homepage. Put them behind a quote form and people leave right there."

Hiding the number turns into a drop-off point when the customer is an individual.

"That request isn't from the B2C side — one company customer asked for it."

It came out of a single contract rather than from what most individual customers need, so it deserves a separate priority call.

"Opening an individual plan means starting a second B2C business."

A warning that it isn't one more pricing tier but support volume, refunds, and failed-payment handling arriving with it.

At Pagedeck the word came up for real in a pricing meeting. Ravi proposed opening a $5-a-month plan for individual users. Tens of thousands of people already use the product alone for free, and even a slice of them converting would add revenue. Grace asked about what comes attached rather than about the number. Pagedeck's customers today are companies that pay as a team, and support runs around twenty tickets a day, most of them tidied up by one contact on the customer side.

Open an individual plan and those tickets turn into hundreds, with refunds and failed-payment notices handled by a screen instead of a person. B2C here didn't mean "we sell to individuals too." It meant a commitment to build the structure that selling to individuals drags along behind it.

The most common mistake is reading B2C as the easier side to sell on. No contract, no executive to convince, so it looks that way. What actually happens is that the cost moves rather than disappears. Money that would have gone to a salesperson goes to ads instead, and thousands of $8 payments have to pile up to match one contract worth tens of thousands of dollars. Left in place, this belief has teams growing user counts while treating ad spend as revenue, and the moment acquisition started costing more than it brought in gets noticed long after it passed.

Reading a large user base as proof of B2C is the other frequent one. Everybody on the screens is an individual, so it feels right. The test is not who uses it but who pays. Pagedeck has tens of thousands of individual users and is still B2B, because payment happens at the team level. Miss that distinction and the number of individual users becomes the metric on the wall, while the person who decides on payment never opens that screen at all.