Joanna McFarland Q&A On Tips For B2B Marketplace Sales

I actually had a related question from a founder that sent me a message earlier, which is going to be on like on the B2B side. So, you know, are there any like initial kind of learnings from, you know, selling into those kind of first kind of school districts or maybe kind of government agencies that would be helpful for us as early-stage kind of founders who are selling into B2B?

So I think starting B2B and going B2C, every system you have doesn't work anymore. Right? And you're literally building the plane while flying it. So, you know, as a B2C marketplace, you just, you know, credit users put in their credit card and you process payments via Stripe. Well, a school district's not gonna hand you a credit card. So now you need a way to bill them. You need a way to create an invoice, right? Like, we didn't have that. We needed an accounts receivable team to make sure that we were collecting that payment. You need, you know, it's one thing to book a ride on a phone app if you're a parent and you have maybe 2 or 3 kids. Maybe you're really ambitious and have 4 kids. It's another thing for a school district to book hundreds of rides for thousands of kids. You know, they're not gonna do that on a phone. So now you need a dashboard that they can, you know, specifically. So the needs of the user are different. The sales cycle is very different. And so it can be a lot longer than you think it can be. Sometimes it requires an RFP process. Sometimes it can be direct procurement. So it can be really tricky to get into it, but once you're in it, it's great.