Building in the Dark

At Viva Labs, we built a consumer smart home product without ever meeting the users. Instead, we built a white-label consumer product for another business to sell. That Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C) approach is a sneaky go-to-market model. It feels like you’ve found a workaround for costly consumer distribution with a few salespeople and a great RFP submission. You don’t need to raise a bunch of money or create a clever viral hack to get started, you just build a great product and to convince a customer product team that you’re the right partner. Suddenly you have access to millions of potential users and endless marketing budgets.

Those are real benefits, but it has a downside because your customer isn’t your user. You are trading connection for reach. Your relationship is with the customer, but all the growth and potential comes from the user, someone you might never get to know. Since they are so distant, all the growth hacks and engagement loops people will recommend can often be worthless. Nimble experimentation and a “does not scale” approach might not be how your customer does things, and you are experimenting on their customers.

So don’t confuse rollout with full product-market fit, because there are two markets you need to fit. That’s why B2B2C models will feel successful before they are a success. You need to stay skeptical and ask: “What don’t we know?” Then design your product and approach from the ground up to help you succeed while doing business inside a black box.

Build Feedback Into the Contract

Don’t wait until after the deal is signed to start thinking about what information you’ll need to improve your product. You need access to customer data and the ability to run tests and feedback forms. The only way to guarantee that right is to make sure the contract covers it. That means thinking beyond the features list and asking: how do we continue learning once we’re live?

You also need to think about the second- and third-order consequences of contract terms. For instance, the way you count billable users might ultimately disincentivize your customer to share user data. A seemingly neutral KPI might turn out to turn you off from really digging into certain issues.

As you’re negotiating, push for terms that allow for anonymous user data to be shared, light A/B testing, and feedback loops that don’t require prior approval. If a customer flat-out refuses any feedback access, that’s a warning about how the relationship will turn out in the future.

Help Your Product Speak for Itself

Another thing is that instrumentation and analytics can feel like vanity projects. Why are we adding tracking to an event when the event doesn’t really work at the moment? If your user are vocal or quick to jump on a usability call, analytics might not be essential.

Unfortunately, with B2B2C, you might never know unless your product tells you itself. You’ll need to instrument everything far earlier than a B2C startup might need to. It might end up being as important as any other major feature, so you need to spend the product development time on it. Some useful analytics include:

• Usage Narratives Analytics that tell stories about individual user journeys rather than just aggregating clicks (e.g., “20% of users attempt feature X but never complete it”).
• Silent NPS that tracks interaction patterns that signal satisfaction/frustration without requiring explicit feedback (time spent on tasks, repeat attempts, abandonment rates).
• Health Dashboards that focus on “user health” metrics that aggregate signals of confusion or success (completion rates, time-to-value, session depth).
• Proxy Metrics that report on business outcomes your partner cares about and that your product influences (e.g., if your tool helps the partner upsell, monitor that correlation).

Make sure this data can be accessed by the team without using developer time. That means you’ll have to take the time to create useful and adaptable dashboards, but also get your hands dirty with database searches if needed. An additional benefit of having these tools is that if they’re in place during contract negotiations, there’s less arguing about the data collection.

You’re not going to get fast answers, so be explicit about what you think the user is trying to do, and why. Form hypotheses and see if your analytics can quietly prove or disprove them. Then iterate your self-reporting features to make them better at helping you learn.

Customer support is your secret feedback channel

You won’t get bug reports from users or long, thoughtful emails about what’s confusing. But the support staff at your customer will. While sales focuses on closing, support has one goal: make problems stop. They hear the raw truth about your product daily, and if you can connect with them, you’ll be able to tap into this feedback channel.

Customer support’s job is to make the user feel heard. Your job is to make that support team feel heard. Create a simple tagging system for categorizing issues and train support teams to use it. This makes it possible to see patterns across hundreds of interactions. Then ask for anecdotes. Support remembers the moments when users were confused or delighted. These stories will let you see problems your hard metrics will miss.

Just focus on making their lives easier. Quickly update your support tools if they need something. Offer to write up FAQs or review support documents. You’ll learn how your product is actually being used, not just how you think it should be. Depending on the size of their team, give them (or a few of them) direct contact with you through regular check-ins or a dedicated Slack channel. Show how addressing specific issues benefits them in their daily job.

Make your buyers look smart

Your needs and your customer’s needs overlap but aren’t identical. Booming sales and massive revenues will smooth over any difference, but until then, make sure that your internal champions have all the tools they need to handle internal politics. The insight you gathered through your analytics will be gold for them, as will market insight you have just by observing trends and competitors. By equipping them with materials that make them sound smart, you help them connect your company’s value to their boss’s goals.

The tradeoff

B2B2C can look like a shortcut to scale, but the trade-offs are real. You reach a wide audience, yet the relationship belongs to someone else. A big rollout might feel like momentum, though you don’t get the same feedback loops you’d have if you owned the user directly. What you deliver often gets absorbed into another company’s system, and so you won’t properly see what’s going on. If problems show up, they may not make their way back to you. If things work brilliantly, you might never know exactly why.

Product sense has been described as “making good decisions with incomplete data.” That’s exactly what B2B2C demands. You rarely get to see what’s really happening, so most of the time you’re piecing things together from clues. The job is to build systems that surface signals, ask questions that cut through the noise, and stay aware of the blind spots you can’t close. Done well, you can still uncover enough truth to steer the product in the right direction.