Lean B2B · Starting Up

📄 Article

✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it If your market is big on paper but nobody is paying, the first thing to check is whether a real budget line for this problem even exists, and who controls it. Garbugli walks through finding the economic buyer, the person who can actually release money, and separating them from users who merely feel the pain. That distinction is often the difference between a market that looks huge and one that will actually pay.

The Economic Buyer in B2B Customer Development

From Lean B2B by Étienne Garbugli ~10 min read

The person who feels the problem is frequently not the person who owns the budget to fix it.
Map the buying unit and find who can release money before you conclude the market is real.
Interest without an identified budget owner usually means there is no budget line yet, which explains why nobody pays.

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Answers My market is huge on paper but almost nobody is actually paying for solutions today. Good sign or bad?

✍️ Essay

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Why we picked it Most "validate your idea" advice was written for consumer apps, where a landing page and a few hundred signups tell you something. This piece is B2B to the core: it walks through free pilots, letters of intent, and upfront payment, and is honest that a signed LOI "can't be taken to the bank" while a verbal yes means nothing. A good starting point for understanding what evidence actually counts when your buyer is a company, not a person.

The 3 Ways Startup Founders "Sell" Their First Products in B2B

From Lean B2B by Etienne Garbugli

In B2B, a prospect can love your idea and still never buy, so the real validation signal is a contract and money changing hands, not enthusiasm in a meeting.
Free pilots often stall because budget size dictates attention inside a company: something nobody paid for tends to be something nobody uses.
You usually need far fewer, deeper signals than a consumer app does. A handful of companies committing beats hundreds of anonymous signups.

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Answers How is validating a B2B idea different from validating a consumer app?

📄 Article

✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it The people who cancel are telling you exactly what is broken, and most founders never ask. This Lean B2B guide shows how to catch that signal at the moment of cancellation with a short, low friction survey, then go deeper with a switch interview to hear the real reason someone left. It comes with a usable template, so it is a starting point you can ship this week rather than just theory.

How to Run a Customer Exit Survey to Improve Retention

From Lean B2B by Etienne Garbugli ~15 min read

Trigger the survey inside the cancellation flow itself, when the reason is fresh, and lead with one blunt question: the single biggest reason for canceling
Segment the answers by plan, persona, and tenure, since a churn reason from a trial user rarely means the same thing as one from a two year customer
A short survey tells you what happened, but a jobs to be done switch interview tells you why they moved, which is the part you can actually act on

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Answers How do I keep learning from customers after launch instead of only doing research once at the start?