Hey all,
Happy Sunday. Pick your poison:
Do you want to build in Consumer or B2B right now? Over the past 5 years, I've done both (including prosumer and B2G = aka Business-to-Government).
A few years ago, long before I started this newsletter, there was a time when I couldn't even get B2B companies to truly consider hiring me after the first few calls because my background was so deeply in consumer.
Don't believe me? Ask Ava from 8VC. I must have turned the 8VC portfolio inside and out, talking to different teams about building together.
The reality is that when you're interviewing somewhere (vs. building on your own) someone has a very specific need and is looking for a very specific person to fit that need.
When I decided to build on my own, I was naturally interested in both, and that became my superpower.
My approach to B2B was applying all the viral in B2C to make companies stand out. And we've done amazing stuff at Knight Vision:
We're super early to B2B creators and have built insane programs and hundreds of relationships (shoutout to my favs like beehiiv). If there is a list of B2B creators circulating on LinkedIn, chances are we know them and have worked with them.
Built B2B creative in a very B2C style way for so many companies, including BoomPop, which just got acquired by Navan
Work with incredible VCs and their sick portfolio companies. Shoutout to friends at a16z, Thrive Capital, 8VC, Lerer Hippeau, Crew Capital.
And it's been an insane past few weeks in the Knight Vision world.
Lightfield raised a $47M Series A. I was connected to Keith when the product was still in stealth. He was Head of Data Science at Citizen 2 leadership cycles before me. And Matt Serna brought on Knight Vision as Lightfield's first marketing partner almost 1 year ago.
Forus raised a $150M Series C. We are building a massive customer creator program with Forus right now, turning their 11K+ doctors, physicians, medical assistants, and more into creators. We were intro'd to them by our friends at Thrive Capital; love that team.
Crossed our 1-year anniversary with beehiiv. I'm a ride-or-die for beehiiv.
We built beehiiv’s B2B creator program from scratch and, now with their incredible team, have shipped 2K+ pieces of content and have signed some of the biggest B2B creators in the world to long-term deals, and migrated them to products in our portfolio (Kyle Poyar, Andrew Yeung, Adam Schoenfeld, Demand Curve, and more).
Many portfolio companies at Knight Vision now have a newsletter that we've automated with beehiiv’s MCP because I think they are that important for company visibility + industry domination. Newsletter = unlimited upside.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to Matt Serna from Lightfield when he asked what my long-term vision was for Knight Vision. "To grow it as big as possible," which is the default setting programmed into my brain. You get it free with the Delaware incorporation😭
"I think that's the wrong idea, and if I were you, I'd keep this as boutique and high-end," Matt replied.
And although Knight Vision is a services business, we work across the spectrum: B2B, B2C, B2G. People typically stay in one vertical. I get to see all of them at once and cross-apply winning strategies.
And if I wasn't building Knight Vision, I'd work in govtech. Citizen, where I previously ran marketing, is a consumer-facing govtech company, and crime marketing is so niche, but we cracked it with billions of views and millions and millions of customers.
If you want to see the B2C playbook run in the least likely category on earth, look at Anduril. They market a defense company like a consumer brand. Palmer Luckey crushes it at founder-led brand, launches get staged like hardware drops, and their recruiting content does more top-of-funnel work than their sales content, which tbh makes sense when your customer list is tiny and mostly classified.
So if I had to pick between building in B2B and B2C right now, here's how I would approach each vertical to win.
HOW I WOULD BUILD IN B2B SOFTWARE NOW
If I were starting from scratch.
Path 1: Prosumer bootstrap to sell
Approach + reasoning: Amazing plan but hard if you continue to raise capital. Only do this if you're confident you can get super growth with just a few million. There's typically not a moat besides users so feel free to sell ur product and users. For this reason, user retention = critical.
Funding: Raise a few million. Under $3M.
Growth: B2B UGC, guerrilla-style marketing with Facebook Groups and Product Hunt.
Sale: Target $15M exit.
Examples: Submagic ($8M ARR, bootstrapped). OpenClaw is a good example of a prosumer product that sold.
Path 2: Raise as much as possible, AI for domination
Approach: If you believe what Greg Jensen (Bridgewater CIO) is saying about valuations being B.S. because VC and PE are using capital for world domination vs. returns.
Funding: As much as possible. Growth for domination.
Growth: Everything and anything. Profound style.
Sale: TBD. Used to conquer a domain vs. to sell.
Examples: Profound. Early AI martech company. Is beyond capitalized with over $335M raised in the last 2 years. They are, without question, the biggest winner in AEO.
How they did it: Zero Click Summit, Profound University, and they started the job title: Marketing Engineer. When you name the category, the conference, and the role, you get to define what good looks like for a vertical.
Profound’s funding history. Five rounds since founding in 2024.
HOW I WOULD BUILD IN B2C SOFTWARE NOW
Only Path: B2C only has one good path rn. Here’s why.
Approach + reasoning: Raise a tiny amount to get the engine started (under $1M) or bootstrap. You can use tools like Replit and Cursor to build pretty good consumer tools with low-eng skills, but running a good organic UGC engine per month is like $25K-30K minimum so you're gonna need to raise capital.
Funding: Under $1M to get the growth engine started.
Growth: I'd focus on one product for the absolute longest 6 months. If you can't get traction, then (assuming you've tried multiple product pivots and marketing angles) kill it. You're looking for viral growth and immediate wins.
Sale: Do you even want to sell, or do you want to cash-flow MRR after paying back the capital and interest?
Examples: Parrot (I'm an investor) has over 600K users and is just cooking on product and growth.
WELL, HOW'D I DO?
Capital is flooding into AI right now, which is why you're seeing bigger rounds than ever. That's Path 2 in B2B, and it's pulling attention away from every other path on this list.
Don't let it.
Pick the path that matches what you're good at and the outcome you want, not the one with the biggest headline or biggest numbers attached.
Hit reply and tell me which path you're on! I read every one.
Have a great and productive week.
Julia
