Rich people, big companies

A technique for generating B2C startup ideas is to find something that only rich people have and make it affordable for everyone.

A similar concept holds for B2B startups: find something that only big companies can afford and make it affordable for startups. Or a slight variation: find something that only tech companies can manage to implement and make it accessible to non-tech companies.

Examples:

• Carbon tracking - Stripe and Google built in-house software to manage their carbon footprint. Persefoni and Watershed are building a product to make that available to everyone.
• IT provisioning - Google built in-house software for IT. Rippling provides that to startups.
• Compliance - Startups typically waited until they had substaintial commercial traction before going through the pain of a SOC2 audit. Vanta and Drata make it easy for early stage startups to do the same.
• Self-driving automation - Tesla built an in-house self-driving team. Applied Intuition makes it possible for startups and legacy players to develop their own self-driving tools.

Sometimes, all that’s needed here is to innovate the go-to-market strategy to make it easier to market and sell to startups.