4 Tech Startup Challenges to Consider When Moving From B2C to B2B

4 Tech Startup Challenges to Consider When Moving From B2C to B2B

• In 2018 we built the fastest growing app out of South East Asia.
• In 2019 we’re building the fastest growing interactive live video provider in the world.

This blog is about the technical challenges that we face during this major transformation.

We know that this is not going to be easy.

There’s no manual for tech companies pivoting from B2C to B2B. This isn’t something that happens overnight. This transition was an organic process for us over here at Panya Studios .

Our engineering team built an amazing live trivia app that engaged millions of consumers and now we are tasked with the challenge of providing this state of the art technology to empower other businesses.

These are 4 Technical Challenges that We are Considering When Moving from B2C to B2B

1. Infrastructure

How can we scale our cloud infrastructure to support N businesses?

From a high level architecture perspective, we broke it down to two main choices: single vs multi tenant.

Single-Tenantis one client per one application and database.

Multi-Tenantis multiple clients using a shared application and database.

There are pros and cons to each choice and we ultimately decided to opt for multi-tenant architecture in the interest of lowering cost and maintenance i.e. shared resources is more affordable and easier to manage than many individual resources.

Going with multi-tenant architecture, however, raises a new set of questions.

2. Tracking Usage

How can we track the usage of X company?

This is an important question to ask as it relates to billing and managing resources. For single-tenant, it’s relatively straight forward as each client has their own respective server that we can easily track. However, for multi-tenant, it’s not so clear.

Fortunately there’s a solution. Since we’re using AWS as our cloud provider, they have a tagging feature that we can use to assign metadata or label to track usage and manage resources. The challenge then is to properly tag each moving part accordingly.

3. Database

How can we effectively store and retrieve data from N companies in the same database?

By using a company_id column (SQL) or key (NoSQL).

If your database was already designed to support multi-tenant, then you should be fine. Else, be prepared to create new indexes, execute bulk update scripts, and update your APIs to support this requirement.

Another database-related question is: should we use separate databases for each company?

Multi-Tenant Architecture with Separate Databases

We are thinking about going down this route. If we separate each database by company, then we wouldn’t need to update the schema to support multi-tenant. Moreover, backups and recovery would be easier to handle.

4. Mobile SDK

How can we build a world class mobile SDK that is easy for developers to use?

Our mobile team is strong. We have experience building top charting native Android and iOS apps. Now we have to take what we did and transform it into a plug-and-play SDK that other apps can seamlessly integrate it with.

Simplicity, size, compatibility, documentation, initialization, versioning, security, UI/UX design, and APIs are some of the things to consider when building a quality mobile SDK.

Think. Plan. Execute.

Moving from B2C to B2B is a big step to take. It requires shifting not only your business model, but also the tech behind it. This brings about new challenges that we have to carefully think aboutwhen moving forward.