Journey of feature from B2C to B2B

2021/22 – Our early customers were mainly solo business owners who were frustrated with juggling too many different tools. They came to us looking for a better way to manage their client relationships.

By mid-2022, we had gathered lots of feedback from our customers and carefully tracked what features they wanted most. After we’d built strong basic features for managing schedules, online presence, and client information, we noticed something interesting: many of our customers were asking for a way to work with companies.

Gathering feedback

The need for company management became impossible to ignore. Jeremy (our Product Manager at the time) and I dove deep into conversations with our customers who had requested this feature. These discussions happened naturally - through video calls and email threads - with customers who’d been with us since the beginning. Having gone through our personalized onboarding, they already trusted us and were excited to share their experiences. Being mostly coaches, they were particularly passionate about explaining their challenges in detail.

Our customer conversations revealed a simple but critical need: the ability to connect multiple clients to a single contact responsible for billing. Think of a company paying for employee coaching - HR handles the billing but doesn’t need service access, while employees need to book their own coaching sessions. This setup ensures clear tracking of service usage.

First draft

At this stage, we were still exploring what worked best for our market, so we stayed strategic with our development efforts. Instead of investing heavily in building new systems, we enhanced our existing foundation with minimal tweaks. This let us help customers connect billing contacts with service recipients, while keeping our options open for future improvements.

The client record sits at the heart of our software. It tells the complete story of each client relationship - past interactions, upcoming tasks, services provided, payments, and scheduling - all in one place. Think of it as a digital home for every client relationship.

When creating a new client, customers now had a choice: they could set up an individual client, a business, or a family. This choice would be clearly visible throughout the platform, making it easy to understand the type of relationship at a glance.

We organized clients into separate tabs for easy management. While we could have expanded our group feature, that would have required complex changes to how services worked - while we considered it, we steered away from it for now.

A service (or package) would only show up on organization record.

Cutting corners

We kept our initial solution focused: one service per family or business. This matched our customers’ immediate needs, even though it wouldn’t handle more complex billing scenarios.

As an early-stage startup, we had to be strategic about where we spent our development time. When it came to purchasing services, we intentionally kept things flexible.

At this stage, our packages simply tracked sessions - customers managed their own billing with families and businesses however they preferred. While this approach evolved as we developed our package features, it was the right choice for getting valuable features to customers quickly without overcommitting our limited resources.

Now it’s 2023

In 2023, our product grew in two directions: we launched a Pro tier with enhanced features, and introduced a basic team offering - essentially linking multiple Pro accounts together. As more customers joined our team tier, we spent the summer rebuilding the app to make it truly collaborative.

But this growth revealed a limitation: our simple family feature wasn’t meeting the needs of our expanding enterprise customers, particularly those offering tutoring services. Many of these tutoring businesses worked extensively with families, and they needed more sophisticated tools than our initial family feature could provide.

Many tutors many clients

We gathered B2B feedback, facing pressure to prioritize their requests. Our approach? Build high-ROI features benefiting both current and future clients. The common ask was a robust company/family feature. While delivering this meant intense timelines, it was a calculated investment in our B2B foundation.

My job as a design lead but also the one of Jeremy (PM) was to keep us grounded - building not just for one client, but for our next 10. We had to advocate for scalable solutions, even when it meant tough conversations and trade-offs with engineering.

Tabularasa

As we wrote use-cases and requirements for improvement of this feature, it was clear that engineering needed to own part of the initial solution. Product and design would then think of a coherent experience to match a revamped architecture.

Organizations and their clients each have separate records, allowing clients to be linked to both organizational and individual service packages. This model flexibly handles any billing or service configuration.

Based on feedback about limitations in the initial design, we revised the record creation process to make a clearer distinction between individual and organizational records.

While client and organizational records share some basic structure, organizational records include additional features to define key roles: who receives services, who handles payment, and most notably, which team member manages the organization account.

Since client record is the foundation of our application, we included comprehensive information while maintaining a clean, uncluttered interface.

Across billing information

To ensure clarity in billing, we clearly indicate whether services are being charged to an individual client or organization. This is demonstrated in both our invoice previews and accounts payable panel.

Putting It All Together

The project’s success is reflected in its strong adoption among our B2B accounts and its role in securing new B2B clients. While not perfect, it represents our startup’s evolution from B2C to B2B markets, teaching us the value of lean launches and rapid iteration. Above all, we learned that pragmatic, iterative design better serves our clients than striving for initial perfection.