B2B, short for business-to-business, describes any company whose customers are other organizations — a payroll platform sold to HR departments, a payments API sold to other startups, or office supplies sold to a chain of stores are all B2B. The buyer in a B2B deal is rarely one person acting alone; it’s usually a decision involving a budget owner, an end user, and sometimes a procurement or IT team, which is why B2B sales cycles tend to be longer and more relationship-driven than a typical retail purchase.

This matters for how a startup should be built from day one. B2B products are usually priced higher per customer than consumer products, but require more effort to close each deal — meaning founders in this space need to think in terms of a smaller number of higher-value relationships rather than mass-market volume. Contracts, service-level commitments, and dedicated customer support also become more important than they would be for a consumer app.

A nuance worth understanding: many companies are not purely one or the other. A “B2B2C” company sells to a business, but that business then puts the product in front of its own end consumers — a common structure for embedded fintech or logistics tools serving Philippine SMEs and their customers.

🇵🇭 Philippine Example

Two of the Philippines' best-known homegrown tech companies are squarely B2B: Sprout Solutions sells HR and payroll software to other businesses rather than to individual workers, and PayMongo sells its payments infrastructure to other companies that need to accept payments, not to individual shoppers.

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