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The B2B2C model
The “build and they will come” adage is, despairingly, rarely true.
You could (and maybe should!) grind your way to acquire each new customer by hand. Is there another, more elegant solution?
What if you could sell through someone your end-customer already relies on: an employer, a distributor, a supplier, or a service provider?
These intermediaries would act as conduits: aggregating demand, lending trust, and collapsing CAC into a smaller number of commercial relationships.
Below are how three startups (in Nigeria, India, and Pakistan) are using B2B2C as a customer-acquisition lever.
- Rivy (Nigeria): Using solar installers as the distribution layer.
Nigeria’s unreliable power grid has created demand for solar energy. That demand has been exacerbated by the removal of a subsidy on oil, which increased the cost of running the generators Nigerians use to palliate the deficient grid.
But solar equipment is expensive upfront, making the cost too steep for many homeowners and businesses. Rivy helps homeowners and businesses buy that solar equipment on credit. They also provide loans to solar panel installer companies for them to buy inventory.
Instead of operating two distinct sales strategies, Rivy relies on its solar installer to generate leads from homeowners/businesses.
As Dami Olawoye, the CEO of Rivy, explains,
“Working with installers also has a symbiotic effect: some of their clients might need loans to purchase the panels, so they send them over to us.
[...]
These companies, which we serve via the inventory financing product, are the largest lead generation driver for our asset and microgrid financing products.
As a result, a lot of our sales efforts are focused on acquiring these installers, since they are the kernel of our business model.”
Rivy takes the integration further. When extending a loan to an homeowner/business:
"The customer doesn’t actually see the money - we directly pay the solar installation company that quoted them.
Loan tenures are 12 months maximum. The longer the loan duration, the longer Rivy is exposed to potential panel deficiencies. This means dealing with customers who might want to pause repayments, causing complexity on our side.
Since we don’t actually source and install the panels, we didn’t want to take that risk, hence the loan’s short tenure. That being said, we are using our data to rank equipment brands and installers. This ranking is being used toward extending tenures to 18 months, in some instances. "
Excerpt from Rivy: financing solar in Nigeria
The asset-light nature of such a model is replaced by an operational-heavy one, as the complexity of granular, human coordination grows alongside this network of third-parties.
The tech startup's advantage is that, theoretically, it can build software that helps it efficiently coordinate this network.
- QuickLend (India): leveraging people's accountants to offer them loans.
QuickLend is an Indian fintech offering loans-against-mutual-funds (LAMFs). In other words: people take out loans, pledging their mutual fund assets as collateral.
This "secured" lending model dovetails into the Indian central bank's (RBI) desire to privilege that type of model over the "unsecured" (without collateral) lending type that proliferated post-pandemic.
To sell its loans, QuickLend does offer a B2C option (ie: someone comes to their website, pledges their mutual fund assets, and takes out a loan). However, the distribution channel they're more bullish is B2B2C.
Here's how Raghuram Trikutam, co-founder of QuickLend, explains how they set it up:
"With B2B2C, we work with third-party institutions like fintech platforms and mutual fund distributors (MFDs) who want to offer lending to their existing customers.
We have about 4-5 of these institutions at the integration stage, and they will go live this quarter. Conversation with these partners revolve around customer redirection, availing their services to our lending offerings. For instance, we work with Ashika Group, a brokerage, where their customers can pledge their mutual funds for a loan with us directly.
We also work with independent chartered accountants (CAs) and smaller MFDs (around 125 of them). Once again, we partner with them to offer lending as an additional service to their own customers.
For the B2B2C model, we share our revenue from the loan with the partner we plug our offering into. That model also renders potentially zero customer acquisition cost (CAC), since we rely on partners to get customers. They generate the leads, and we handle everything from fetching MF data to pre-loan and post-loan servicing.
That means we have minimal CAC ourselves, as we’re not spending money to acquire users directly. There is minimal cost for distribution if we co-brand or co-market with partners, but it’s marginal and focused more on customer reengagement than direct new customer acquisition."
Excerpt from QuickLend: safer B2C lending in India
Conceptually elegant. The whole game seems to be incentive alignment here.
The volume you drive is dependent on how strongly your B2B2C partner pushes your product internally. For that to happen, their vested interest (ie: the commission you pay them + the positive externalities they gain from offering your product to their customers) must be extremely strong.
If you get that wrong and have bet your whole sales strategy on B2B2C partners, you have little leverage to boost sales yourself (except if you have a separate, direct B2C channel you can double-down on).
- BusCaro (Pakistan): Selling the commute to employers, not commuters.
Public transport options in Pakistan aren't up to par. Women in particular face terrifying rates of sexual harassment.
For many people, individual ride-hailing is simply too expensive to use daily. Previous attempts to solve this problem through B2C bus-hailing attempts failed when customer acquisition costs crushed low margins (combined with unlucky macro timing).
Pakistani mobility startup BusCaro approached the same problem from a different angle. Instead of convincing individual commuters to pay, it sells directly to corporates and academic institutions. These entities aggregate workers and students and have a vested interest in punctuality and safety.
Maha Shazad, CEO of BusCaro, explains
“BusCaro opted for a B2B2C model (employers subsidize their employees’ commute) rather than a B2C one. This reduces our customer acquisition costs (CAC), because we’re going after a couple of big fish rather than individuals. It is also logistically easier: since all users from a similar employer are going to the same place, route optimization smooths out.”
Excerpt from BusCaro: reinventing commuting in Pakistan
The "make something people want" maxim is deceptive. Or rather, incomplete.
In Pakistan, bus-hailing companies like Swvl clearly made something people wanted. That wasn't enough. A robust business model, one impervious to macro-economic shocks, was lacking. Although the company seems to be operating a comeback, the faulty business model clearly stung back then.
The brilliant nature of a startup's idea sometimes steals the limelight from the meticulous, iterative crafting of a business model that can allow that brilliant idea to flourish.
Startup world at time professes a disdain for "strategy" as a boring corporate term. One should test, iterate, move fast, try, fail, etc.
Yes. But a little long-term planning cannot hurt either.
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Tim (founder) & Aakash (COO)
Disclaimer: the articles quoted here were posted in 2024 and 2025.
While what the interviewee expressed at that the time was their current thinking, it might've changed. We believe their thoughts are valuable nonetheless.