What Every B2B Founder Should Know Before Going D2C

Tim Maliyil, CEO of PerkyPet, is an entrepreneur with 30+ years of experience in AI, cloud infrastructure and tech startups.

getty

​Before I co-founded PerkyPet, I thought I had a solid playbook: 30 years of building SaaS platforms, scaling a cybersecurity company to $40 million in annual recurring revenue and leading engineering teams across three continents. But as my co-founder, Dr. Dara Huang, and I began shaping PerkyPet, I realized something important: I'd never built a business for direct consumers, and that experience gap mattered.

Rather than assume my business-to-business (B2B) background would translate, I looked for opportunities to fill that gap. Taking on the COO role at Phoenix Technologies gave me firsthand experience with direct-to-consumer (D2C) operations and highlighted just how different the two models are. While B2B sales often follow a more structured, predictable process, D2C requires greater experimentation, faster iteration and a higher tolerance for risk.​

Know your gaps before you build.

​At the time, I was exploring several startup ideas, including a PropTech AI venture, another cybersecurity company and PerkyPet. Each had potential, but I realized PerkyPet would require skills I hadn't yet developed, particularly around consumer acquisition, subscription economics and customer retention. Those are very different challenges from building B2B platforms for enterprise or federal clients.

To close that gap, I joined Phoenix Technologies as COO, later stepping into the acting CTO role during a leadership transition. What followed was one of the most operationally intense stretches of my career.

If you're considering launching a business outside your area of expertise, take an honest look at your knowledge gaps and think about the fastest way to close them. Sometimes, gaining hands-on experience can be far more valuable than months of research.​​

Speed and scale teach what theory can't.

Every architectural choice you make will show up somewhere else, usually in revenue, conversion or customer experience. The earlier you internalize that, the better your prioritization becomes.

At Phoenix, this became unavoidable. We were transforming a legacy product into a modern e-commerce platform, moving from pre-revenue to $250 million in gross merchandise value (GMV) in roughly 18 months. Nothing operated in isolation. Refactoring a monolith wasn’t just about code quality; it affected site performance under live traffic. Payment infrastructure decisions weren’t just about reliability; they directly impacted checkout completion rates. Even small delays in page load times translated into measurable revenue loss.

This is where theory breaks down. In practice, speed and scale force clarity. You don’t get to separate “technical debt” from “business impact” because they’re the same thing.

If you’re operating in a high-growth or high-scale environment, pressure-test every technical decision against a simple question: What customer behavior does this influence, and how quickly will we see it in the numbers? If the answer isn’t clear, you’re likely underestimating the impact.​​

Consumer subscription businesses will teach you things the data alone can't.​

One of the biggest differences in a consumer subscription business is how quickly customer behavior translates into business outcomes. Working with Phoenix's subscription model provided firsthand insight into what drives retention, what causes customers to leave and how pricing influences long-term value.

Small changes can have an outsized impact. Confusing onboarding, for example, can increase churn, while targeted interventions can help improve retention. It also becomes clear how much more expensive it is to win customers back than to keep them engaged in the first place.

If you're building a subscription business, don't treat churn as a lagging metric. Monitor the leading indicators that contribute to it, such as onboarding completion, product engagement and early customer satisfaction, so you can address problems before they affect retention.​

Trust in consumer products is built through consistency, not messaging.​

Another lesson was how consumer trust is built. Marketing can create expectations, but lasting trust comes from consistently delivering on the product's promise every time someone uses it.

That consistency becomes even more important in categories involving health, finance or family, where customers have little patience for confusing experiences or unclear value. Rather than submitting feedback or support requests, many simply stop using the product.

If you're building in a high-stakes consumer category, organize your product roadmap around trust signals, not just features. Ask yourself: What does a user experience in the first 30 days that earns their continued belief in the product?

Prepare before the stakes are high.​

The most valuable takeaway wasn't a specific tactic but a shift in perspective. Enterprise customers and consumers often respond very differently to friction. In B2B, a frustrating experience may delay adoption or require additional support. In consumer markets, it can mean losing a customer altogether.

That asymmetry should change how you prioritize features, sequence onboarding, think about pricing and measure success.

Before launching a business in an unfamiliar market, take an honest inventory of what you still need to learn. Finding ways to gain that experience before your own venture depends on it can be far more valuable than trying to learn every lesson after launch.​​

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?