u/shivajbd

Heard this one a lot when we started. Don't target small and medium businesses in India. Long sales cycles, low willingness to pay, high churn. Go enterprise or go abroad.

We ignored it partly because our product is built for a segment that's mostly SMBs.

What we found is the advice is half right. The willingness to pay part is real. Price sensitivity is intense, conversations go in circles, and getting to a yes takes way longer than it should for the contract size involved.

But the "go enterprise" advice assumes you can get into enterprise. For a early stage startup with no brand name, no case studies, no existing network in that world, enterprise is its own nightmare. Procurement, legal, security reviews, 6 month sales cycles. At least SMBs pick up the phone.

The honest answer might be that neither is great at the start and it depends entirely on whether your product solves something urgent enough that someone will pay despite the friction.

Curious what others have found. Is the SMB advice outdated or still holds? And for people who made the switch to mid-market or enterprise in India, how did you actually get that first foot in the door?

14 months in, product is working, have real customers using it. But distribution is the thing I keep hitting a wall on and I'm running out of ideas.

The buyers we're going after are small business owners in a traditional offline industry. They're not on LinkedIn. They don't read blogs or newsletters. No Slack groups, no forums, no communities. The only place they show up digitally is Instagram and WhatsApp and even there they're posting, not browsing.

Every channel I try runs into the same problem.

Cold email doesn't work because half of them don't have a business email, some don't have any email. LinkedIn is a dead end, they're just not there. Content takes forever and I'm not even sure who's reading it. Tried paid ads for a bit, burned through budget, the intent just wasn't there at that awareness stage.

What's actually moved the needle is cold calling and Instagram DMs. Manual, slow, hard to scale. The calls that actually go somewhere are almost always because I did something specific for that business before dialling, looked at their actual setup, made it personal. Anything that feels like a template and they're off the phone in under a minute.

I keep seeing the advice "find where your customers hang out" but genuinely what do you do when the answer is nowhere you can reach at scale?

For anyone who's done B2B in a non-tech or traditional industry, how did your first 10 customers actually come in? Would love to hear what worked that you didn't expect.

14 months in, product is working, have real customers using it. But distribution is the thing I keep hitting a wall on and I'm running out of ideas.

The buyers we're going after are small business owners in a traditional offline industry. They're not on LinkedIn. They don't read blogs or newsletters. No Slack groups, no forums, no communities. The only place they show up digitally is Instagram and WhatsApp and even there they're posting, not browsing.

Every channel I try runs into the same problem.

Cold email doesn't work because half of them don't have a business email, some don't have any email. LinkedIn is a dead end, they're just not there. Content takes forever and I'm not even sure who's reading it. Tried paid ads for a bit, burned through budget, the intent just wasn't there at that awareness stage.

What's actually moved the needle is cold calling and Instagram DMs. Manual, slow, hard to scale. The calls that actually go somewhere are almost always because I did something specific for that business before dialling, looked at their actual setup, made it personal. Anything that feels like a template and they're off the phone in under a minute.

I keep seeing the advice "find where your customers hang out" but genuinely what do you do when the answer is nowhere you can reach at scale?

For anyone who's done B2B in a non-tech or traditional industry, how did your first 10 customers actually come in? Would love to hear what worked that you didn't expect.

14 months in, product is working, have real customers using it. But distribution is the thing I keep hitting a wall on and I'm running out of ideas.

The buyers we're going after are small business owners in a traditional offline industry. They're not on LinkedIn. They don't read blogs or newsletters. No Slack groups, no forums, no communities. The only place they show up digitally is Instagram and WhatsApp and even there they're posting, not browsing.

Every channel I try runs into the same problem.

Cold email doesn't work because half of them don't have a business email, some don't have any email. LinkedIn is a dead end, they're just not there. Content takes forever and I'm not even sure who's reading it. Tried paid ads for a bit, burned through budget, the intent just wasn't there at that awareness stage.

What's actually moved the needle is cold calling and Instagram DMs. Manual, slow, hard to scale. The calls that actually go somewhere are almost always because I did something specific for that business before dialling, looked at their actual setup, made it personal. Anything that feels like a template and they're off the phone in under a minute.

I keep seeing the advice "find where your customers hang out" but genuinely what do you do when the answer is nowhere you can reach at scale?

For anyone who's done B2B in a non-tech or traditional industry, how did your first 10 customers actually come in? Would love to hear what worked that you didn't expect.

14 months in, product is working, have real customers using it. But distribution is the thing I keep hitting a wall on and I'm running out of ideas.

The buyers we're going after are small business owners in a traditional offline industry. They're not on LinkedIn. They don't read blogs or newsletters. No Slack groups, no forums, no communities. The only place they show up digitally is Instagram and WhatsApp and even there they're posting, not browsing.

Every channel I try runs into the same problem.

Cold email doesn't work because half of them don't have a business email, some don't have any email. LinkedIn is a dead end, they're just not there. Content takes forever and I'm not even sure who's reading it. Tried paid ads for a bit, burned through budget, the intent just wasn't there at that awareness stage.

What's actually moved the needle is cold calling and Instagram DMs. Manual, slow, hard to scale. The calls that actually go somewhere are almost always because I did something specific for that business before dialling, looked at their actual setup, made it personal. Anything that feels like a template and they're off the phone in under a minute.

I keep seeing the advice "find where your customers hang out" but genuinely what do you do when the answer is nowhere you can reach at scale?

For anyone who's done B2B in a non-tech or traditional industry, how did your first 10 customers actually come in? Would love to hear what worked that you didn't expect.

When we started most people said the niche was too small.

Ethnic wear brands, sarees, lehengas, bridal stuff, were genuinely doing well on Instagram. Real engagement, real demand. But the operations side was a mess. 2-3 people replying to hundreds of DMs every single day. Same questions on repeat. Price, size, fabric, availability, shipping. Someone on their phone till midnight before Diwali just going through it all manually.

We couldn't find anything that actually solved this so we built something ourselves.

14 months in, a few things caught me off guard.

The niche wasn't resistant to tech at all. Everyone I talked to before starting assumed ethnic wear owners would be hard to sell to. Older, not tech forward, skeptical. That wasn't what we found. These people knew their problem better than anyone. Demos were short because they got it fast. Show them something working on their actual products and the conversation changes completely.

Selling B2B in India at this level is nothing like what the playbooks describe. The person who decides is usually the owner, answering their own phone, and you have maybe 90 seconds before they move on. No procurement, no formal process. Cold outreach has been rough. Most calls go nowhere. The ones that actually convert are almost always because we did something specific for that one business before calling, not a generic pitch. The moment it feels templated the call is done.

Distribution is still what keeps me up. Product works, people are using it, but finding the right buyers consistently is the part we haven't figured out yet.

Curious if others building B2B in India for non-tech buyers have hit the same thing. How did you crack distribution when your customers don't really hang out anywhere online?

Something I keep noticing and can't quite shake.

Almost every founder I've spoken to has the same instinct, go as broad as possible. Don't say saree shops, say "retail." Don't say kirana stores, say "SMBs." Make the market sound huge.

I know why. TAM slide needs big numbers. Investors get nervous about small markets.

But the few people I've seen actually get early traction, they all knew exactly who they were selling to. Not "ethnic wear brands." Like, specific people. Names, cities, what their daily problem looked like. And everything became easier because of it. The sales calls, what to build next, how to talk about it.

The broad market guys I've watched seemed to spend months just figuring out who actually cared about what they built. By the time they had an answer the focused guys already had 10 customers.

So is "go after a big market" genuinely useful advice for building in India, or is it mostly just fundraising optics? Has anyone here actually tried both and have a take?

A saree brand in India posted a reel. It got traction. By the end of the day, their team had 1,000+ DMs from people asking about price, fabric, availability.
Three people. Manually replying. Every single day.

I'd never thought of Instagram DMs as a "sales operations" problem before. But that's exactly what it was. The brand wasn't struggling with marketing, In fact their content was doing well.

They were drowning in demand they couldn't process fast enough. Customers would DM, not hear back for hours, and just... move on.
When we built something to automate that first touchpoint, I assumed the hard part would be the tech. It wasn't. The hard part was that I'd completely underestimated how much of Indian retail actually runs through WhatsApp and Instagram DMs. Not as a side channel. As the primary channel.

There's no CRM. No ticketing system. Just a phone, an Instagram account, and people typing as fast as they can.

One brand ended up saving 300+ hours a month on DM handling alone. Which sounds made up, but 1,000 DMs a day x 30 days is 30,000 messages. Even at 2 minutes per message, that's 1,000 hours of labor.

There's probably a whole category of businesses like this. Not the Shopify-store type. Actual high-revenue operations where the entire sales funnel is someone's phone and a DM inbox. Nobody's really building for them.

Curious if others have run into something similar, a market that turned out to be way more analogue than it looked from the outside?