Business Type

"We make a collaborative document tool" tells you almost nothing about a company. Whether the pricing page says $9 a month or "contact us for a quote", whether the signup form takes any email address or only a company domain, whether one person can start alone or an administrator has to create the account first — all of that is still open. Change those three answers and the product changes, the way it gets sold changes, and the order the team hires in changes with them.

Before the term settled in, people had to unpack that context in every meeting. "The company pays, but the people using it are the employees, and a team lead decides to bring it in while finance handles the payment, and once we're in they stay three years." It took three or four sentences before the other person had a picture, and the picture came out a little different for every listener.

So meetings kept missing each other in the same way. A designer proposes cutting signup from three steps to one because conversion goes up. An engineer answers that their customers have an administrator who creates all the employee accounts in one batch. Both statements are true, and the two people are picturing different customers. One has in mind an individual who signs up and starts working alone; the other has in mind a company that signs a contract and puts 200 employees on the tool at once. Talk only about the screen and that gap never surfaces. The disagreement is not about three steps versus one; it is about which customer the company builds for, and that question never gets asked out loud.

Business type exists to put the assumption on the table before the discussion starts. Whether the product is SaaS — reached through a browser with no installation and paid for monthly by subscription — describes the frame the product sits in. Product form factor describes the shell: web, mobile app, or an API that other programs call. Business type cuts a different way, at whose pocket the money comes out of and who makes that call. Two companies can both run a SaaS web product and still be in different businesses.

The terms under business type fall into three groups. Each one cuts the same company with a different question: who you sell to (customer), what leads customers in (growth motion), and how large a single customer is (customer size).

Customer splits by who pays. There are four.

1. B2B — you sell to companies. The defining feature is that the person using the product and the person paying for it are not the same. A working-level employee opens the screen, an executive signs the contract, and finance runs the payment. That is why a deal takes three or four months to land, and why customers rarely leave once they are in. There is also more than one person to convince: the employee who uses it daily, the executive who holds the budget, and the security reviewer each ask about different things.
2. B2C — you sell to individual consumers. The user is the payer, so the decision takes minutes. In exchange, each person pays little, so the numbers have to come from volume, and anyone who changes their mind cancels the following month. Removing one step from a signup flow shows up in revenue almost immediately.
3. B2B2C — you sell to a company, but the people actually using the product are that company's consumers. Put a payment feature inside an online store and the contract is with the store while the screen is seen by the shopper. Two parties have to be satisfied at once, and their requirements collide: the store wants its own brand in front, the shopper wants one fewer step before paying.
4. B2G — you sell to government bodies. The selling process itself is different. You answer a public tender with a proposal and have to be selected, and budgets are tied to the fiscal year, which bunches contracts at the end of it. Security rules often mean the service cannot be used as-is over the internet and has to be installed on the agency's internal network instead. Maintenance obligations run for years after the contract closes.

Growth motion splits by what leads customers in. There are two, and the choice is set by the price of the product and the approval process for adopting it rather than by preference.

1. Product-led growth (PLG) — the experience of using the product carries the customer all the way to purchase. Someone signs up free, works alone for a while, and moves to the payment screen on their own once more people join. No sales rep is involved, so acquiring a customer costs little; in exchange, a product that cannot show its worth in the first five minutes loses the person outright. Attach a sales rep to a product that costs $10 a month and the cost of closing one deal quickly passes the money coming in.
2. Sales-led growth (SLG) — a sales organization makes contact, explains the product, and builds the contract. It is what you use when the price is large and adoption needs several people's approval. Revenue rises when you hire more reps, which makes planning easier, but each contract carries a high cost and does not pay off with small customers. A deal takes months, so you also need the cash to sit through that stretch.

Customer size splits by how large a single account is. There are two.

1. Enterprise — the territory of companies with thousands of employees. One contract can run into the millions per year, and in exchange you answer a 300-question security review and build features only that customer uses. First contact to signature can take a year. Once you are in, the contract renews on three- and five-year cycles and forms the floor under your revenue. That stability is why one enterprise deal can change how a company plans a whole year.
2. SMB — small and medium businesses, companies with tens of employees. Decisions are fast and adoption finishes inside a month, but when their own business gets hard they cancel just as fast. Each deal is small, so the numbers come from count. Serving 500 accounts one visit at a time does not work, which forces the product to do the explaining. Churn at this size is a normal cost of the segment rather than a sign that something broke.

The three groups are not a chain where picking one fixes the rest. They read more like coordinates laid over each other. Pagedeck sells to companies (B2B), lets people try it free and pay on their own (product-led growth), and mostly takes small and medium accounts (SMB). Another B2B company where sales leads and only large accounts count has almost nothing in common with it day to day. Whether the price list sits on the website or comes only as a quote, whether effort goes into the first screen or into the sales deck, is decided by that combination.

When the coordinates move, the build order moves with them. The day Pagedeck decides to take one enterprise contract, the top of the priority list fills with single company-wide login and an audit trail of who opened which document when — features that none of the several hundred existing accounts has ever asked for. Writing the business type down is a way of agreeing in advance that this swap can happen.

"We're B2B but going PLG, so fixing the first-run onboarding matters more than hiring a rep right now."

The customers are companies, but the person who starts the adoption is a working-level employee, so the product has to explain itself.

"That screen was built with a B2C instinct. It assumes the person using it is the person paying."

For business customers, where permission and budget sit with different people, that flow does not hold.

"We can't move up to enterprise on this price list. We need a separate contract track."

A published monthly plan cannot absorb what a large customer asks for or how it pays, so the suggestion is to build a second way of selling.

At Pagedeck the phrase comes up most often in quarterly planning. Sofia brought word that a company with 4,000 employees was evaluating the product, and Grace pointed out that the contract was worth about as much as the 200 paying accounts combined and said to take it. Mia named it on the spot as a decision that changes the business type. Until then Pagedeck had taken small and medium customers where a team lead pays by card; this one signs annually after a security review and a legal review. When the shape of the money changes, what gets built and who sells it change with it.

Putting the assumption on the table made the cost visible. Theo estimated two quarters of work to meet the security requirements, which pushes out the signup overhaul Noa had been preparing. Ravi's plan for free signups, which assumed that overhaul, slides with it. Grace decided to take the contract but cap it at two people and leave the rest of the plan alone. Without the phrase, the meeting would have ended in an argument about the delivery date for one feature.

The most common mistake is assuming a company has exactly one business type. A one-line description like "B2B SaaS company" makes it look like a fixed property. In practice it differs by product and even by plan inside one product; running an individual tier, a team tier, and enterprise contracts side by side is ordinary. Believe there is only one and you either push a signup flow designed for individuals onto business customers, or you show someone who just wants to try the tool a page with nothing but a sales contact form. Both lose the user on the spot. The one-line description names the largest chunk; what matters while building a screen is who picks this plan and who pays for it. Asking the question plan by plan is more useful than asking it about the company.

The second mistake is treating one option as more advanced than another. Product-led growth is the newer label, and the companies that grew without a sales team get told as stories, so it reads like the next stage. But this is a set of conditions, not a ranking. Where one person can see the value alone, product-led growth works; where adoption needs legal, security, and finance sign-off, no amount of screen polish gets that person to a payment page by themselves. Pick a motion without reading the conditions and you get a company that dissolves its sales team and watches revenue flatten for six months, or one that attaches ten reps to a product only individuals use and burns the payroll on it. Plenty of companies start product-led, pick up large accounts, and add a sales organization later; the reverse order is just as common.