You're right to point this out.

Having maintained and done tech support for both B2B and B2C products, as a small shop and often solo, B2B customers are far more predictable and less inclined to load you up with nonsense. And your weekends are always free. However, when they do complain, you're up at 6am on a Sunday. When you have a consumer complaint, you're welcome to sleep as long as you want.

This may seem trivial, but it's a proxy for saying that your feet are constantly to the fire with B2B deployments, in a way that you are not held accountable with B2C apps. I personally work better with the B2B stress and motivation... but it's not without its mental overhead.

> Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.

I'll admit I mostly don't care for subscriptions for this sort of thing. But to be more constructive, it seems to me like it's a hole in the market that doesn't have a really good solution right now. I mean, software like this which does need at least a little bit of ongoing support, but doesn't seem to generate enough ongoing value for customers for it to feel reasonable to have a subscription for. None of the solutions we have for that right now really feel great to anybody.

> there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.

This is correct thanks for the comment. You will enjoy my next post which is about exactly this. (HN will not enjoy it)

With B2B there’s also the big benefit that quite often, the person buying it and the person paying for it are two different people. That makes it easier for the one you built rapport with to still prefer your services over cheaper alternatives.

My arguably rather informative comment based on 10 years of running a sustainable B2B SaaS got downvoted to 0. I realize subscriptions are unpopular (nobody likes paying regularly), but downvoting what you disagree with means that eventually it will become invisible and you will only see what you agree with.

I think I need to take a break from posting on HN.

I also run a B2B SaaS and I could have written this word for word.

The only exception is that I do get a decent amount of word of mouth because many of my customers are individual franchisees in national networks, so they tell their peers who they don’t compete with about me. But that’s not really so much about customer support as the product itself.

The main value I get from doing customer support myself is the same that I get from doing sales myself: learning. I have my pulse directly on what my customers need, like, and dislike about the product.

Secondarily, I do think it helps with both close rate and retention to be able to talk to the business owner, but this might be less true in other niches.