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Question
Pivoting to B2B
Hey wip-ers.
I started BoltAI as a little AI experiment that focused on the "inline" AI integration. I posted on here asking for feedback https://wip.co/posts/roast-my-new-ai-product-ydpr48
@marc and @swizec gave some really valuable feedback. And they were right. That inline feature was fun but unfortunately it's not what people want.
So I pivoted and turned it into a native ChatGPT client with some added features such as context-aware AI command (run a prompt against highlighted text), or supporting local LLMs...
It's been doing pretty well selling perpertual license.
But I think I could sell this to teams & businesses for a much better price point. And that's what I'm struggling.
Are you using ChatGPT for your teams? What do you think a native GPT client like BoltAI could help improve your team's productivity? How should I approach pivoting BoltAI to B2B?
Thanks
I started BoltAI as a little AI experiment that focused on the "inline" AI integration. I posted on here asking for feedback https://wip.co/posts/roast-my-new-ai-product-ydpr48
@marc and @swizec gave some really valuable feedback. And they were right. That inline feature was fun but unfortunately it's not what people want.
So I pivoted and turned it into a native ChatGPT client with some added features such as context-aware AI command (run a prompt against highlighted text), or supporting local LLMs...
It's been doing pretty well selling perpertual license.
But I think I could sell this to teams & businesses for a much better price point. And that's what I'm struggling.
Are you using ChatGPT for your teams? What do you think a native GPT client like BoltAI could help improve your team's productivity? How should I approach pivoting BoltAI to B2B?
Thanks
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I don't have a team at the moment, but I used to lead a team of 5 engineers when I was still working in corporate America and here are my thoughts:
A native client that I still have to open separately much like a Chrome tab wouldn't drastically improve my productivity or my team's productivity. It would basically be the same as using chat.openai.com directly and I wouldn't buy it.
I would be more interested in something like Copilot for VS code - so for B2B I would suggest you approach this from a different perspective i.e. build tight integration into some existing workflow that has pain points (such as software dev -- and for that reason I think building an AI integration for VS Code was smart on GitHub/Microsoft's part), instead of trying to get businesses to pay for a separate app.
Then again, you're getting sales using the separate app approach so I can't fault you at all, but I do think the bar is different/higher for B2B if you're going to ask for a higher price.
For B2B, it also helps a lot to have some relationships to get started and get referrals for other businesses that might need this product. Sales cycles are quite long and I'm experiencing that now with one of my products (
#rmflags). Sometimes decisionmakers go on vacation, lots of different teams need to be convinced before a purchase can be made, etc. Just be prepared to deal with some bullshit that you wouldn't have to with a B2C business.
Thanks for the advice Ben. I was thinking of targeting small businesses, not enterprises. Hopefully that would minimize red tape and with shorter sales cycle :D
One direction I think could work is to keep BoltAI as a standalone app like it is now, then I started building more integrations. Though this seems to take a lot more dev efforts 🤔
Yep, selling to smaller startups definitely helps - I would still expect some of those issues, just to a lesser extent. Your pricing may also have to be lower since their budgets will be lower relative to a big company.
what about retrieval augmented generation with your team's wiki as knowledge base? You could even include a function to add info to the knowledge base through chat? :)
Ah good idea. I did receive a couple of inquiries about this but it was for PDF Pals, not BoltAI. Maybe I can merge the 2 products and offer this for businesses.
Small businesses would still buy it as individual license I think. They are very careful about what they buy.
Hmmmm good point actually. But I was thinking of providing collaboration features that won’t be available in an individual license.
My ideal org size is between 5-30 people (1-6 teams)
You need to build some interesting demo with the collaboration feature maybe? I am not part of a team now but thinking that for my last team it would be a hard sell. I'll watch what you'll do! :)