Although Ethereum is positioned as the infrastructure of the blockchain industry, it should not be separated from C-end users.
This statement by Mr. Meng Yan, the founder of Solv, gave me a lot of inspiration.
Ethereum is actually also a "company", but a very special form of organization that is more decentralized and community-driven, and therefore innovation can often occur spontaneously from the bottom up.
However, apart from the Bitcoin network, the industry's pioneer and a truly ownerless blockchain, all other public chains and all Web3 projects actually require one person or team to promote their development and cannot be separated from the existence of a soul figure.
Therefore, we can generalize such organizations into "enterprises" for analysis.
As a front-line practitioner in a Web startup company, I not only focus on making products every day, but also look up and see the direction, that is, consider the positioning and direction of products and businesses.
Here I would like to share some thoughts on different types of services for the B-end/C-end.
01 Why is the C-end market important?
Compared with the B-end market (Business, enterprise end), the importance of the C-end market (Customer, consumer end) is mainly reflected in three aspects:
- Market size: The size of the C-end market is usually much larger than that of the B-end market. Because the number of consumers far exceeds the number of enterprises, serving the C-end means reaching a broader user base and thus having greater market potential.
- Innovation driving force: The C-end market is usually the source of innovation. Consumer demand changes quickly, and consumers also respond quickly. Therefore, the product iteration speed in the C-end market is also very fast, and it is easier for innovative products to emerge.
- Economic effect: The C-end market has network effects and scale effects. The growth of the user base can increase the value of services (such as social networks), while the scale effect can reduce costs and increase profits.
02 Why must companies in the B-end market get involved in the C-end market?
The advantage of companies providing B-side services is that they have stable cash flow, and due to the complexity and professionalism of the services, there are also strong competitive barriers.
However, if you want to further expand your business and gain greater room for development, you should consider developing C-end applications.
More importantly, long-term focus on B-side services has major disadvantages: it is easy to ignore end-user needs and become slow to respond to market changes.
Over time, they are likely to be eliminated by market changes caused by technological innovation. Especially in areas where technology is changing rapidly, the situation of companies providing B-side services is actually extremely dangerous.
Therefore, while enterprises focus on B-side business, they also need to consider how to balance development through C-side business to maintain the enterprise's dynamism and market competitiveness.
Providing services to C-end users is not only an opportunity to increase market share and revenue, but also an important way to maintain corporate vitality, innovation capabilities and market relevance.
Companies that originally served the C-end sometimes also consider providing B-end services, because B-end services can provide more stable cash flow and revenue, and the customer's single value is higher, but the challenge is that the services are very complex and professional.
03 If an enterprise wants to transform, how can it succeed?
Let’s first look at a typical failure case, Yahoo.
Yahoo was once a consumer-oriented Internet giant, providing search, portal and other services. However, after failing to compete with Google and others in the consumer search market, Yahoo has tried many transformations, including transformation to enterprise services.
Corporate customers usually need to see professionalism, stability and long-term technical support, but Yahoo has already failed in the C-end market, so it is naturally difficult to establish sufficient market trust in these aspects.
Therefore, these attempts failed to reverse its decline, and eventually most of Yahoo's business was acquired by Verizon.
When an enterprise's own C-end business faces problems, it is difficult to transform into B-end services at this time, and transformation will only accelerate its own collapse.
Let’s look at another typical success story, Amazon.
Amazon was originally a B2C e-commerce platform, but with the success of AWS (Amazon Web Services), it became an important player in the B-end market of cloud computing.
The key to Amazon's success in entering the B-end service market is that it has already achieved success in the C-end consumer market. In the process of serving C-end customers, Amazon has accumulated a lot of technical capabilities, especially in processing large-scale data, optimizing logistics and providing reliable online services.
Amazon's success in the C-end market has helped it build trust in the B-end market, and corporate customers believe that Amazon can provide stable and reliable services.
As technology matured and market demand for cloud computing grew, Amazon commercialized its services and promoted them to other players in the industry.
Whether an enterprise switches from the B-end to the C-end, or from the C-end to the B-end, the prerequisite is that it has already achieved success in its original business field. Only then will it have a higher probability of gaining new business growth in the new field when it transforms.
04 Conclusion
Companies that originally targeted C-end users can consider packaging their underlying technical capabilities and commercializing them to empower other players in the industry once they have a large enough market share.
However, you must never give up your C-end business directly, because once you leave the C-end market, you will easily ignore user needs and market trends, and eventually lose competitiveness.
For companies that originally served the B-end market, once they have a solid foundation and a stable cash flow, they can consider expanding into the C-end market and directly building a product end-to-end based on their own technology. This way, they can directly verify and iterate their technology in the market.
More importantly, even if it fails, it still has B-side business and can retreat to its own base.
Therefore, no matter which kind of transformation it is, it proves the importance of the C-end market.
Only by making products for users can we truly form a closed value loop of technology-product-commercialization.
Where the users are, there is the market, and ultimately there is the capital.
