Bootstrapping B:B:C Style

I promised B:C entrepreneurs that if I saw any silver bullet that might help you bootstrap your ventures and access consumers quickly, I will be sure to flag you. Well, here’s one.

Last week, I spoke with Rearden Commerce, a company I have covered before.
They showed me an implementation of restaurant reservation service OpenTable, which they are bringing to their 500 odd business customers, and consequently to their 100,000 users.

What I found exciting about this is that this is an example of a B:B:C consumer marketing strategy that can be highly effective, and it appears to me, that Rearden is offering a great platform to make this happen.

Later, I referred an entrepreneur to Rearden, who I thought had a service (Managing Take-out Orders for restaurants) that corporate employees tend to use, to Rearden, as a test case.

I strongly encourage you, if you have a similarly relevant service that can be marketed in a B:B:C framework, and incentivized with a corporate discount of sorts, to test this opportunity.

Some examples:

* Financial Services like Personal Banking
* Healthcare Services like Personal Trainers
* Career Management Services like Coaching
* Travel Services like Group Travel
* Personal Services like At-work pick-up and delivery of dry cleaning