Glossary
B2C
Meaning and details
B2C means your customer is a person, not an organization. Decisions are individual and fast, price points are low to modest, distribution is self-serve, and the funnel is a volume game: many visitors, small conversion pe...
B2C meaning
Business to consumer: products sold directly to individuals, with self-serve signup, low prices and high volume.
What is B2C?
B2C means your customer is a person, not an organization. Decisions are individual and fast, price points are low to modest, distribution is self-serve, and the funnel is a volume game: many visitors, small conversion percentages, revenue assembled from thousands of small transactions rather than dozens of contracts. Consumer apps, games, creator tools and direct-to-customer shops are the shape.
Why it matters to an indie builder: B2C is the easiest door into software business, no sales motion, no security reviews, anyone with a card is a customer, and the cruellest economics in software. Churn runs high because switching costs are near zero, acquisition costs rise with competition for attention, and a 5 percent monthly leak turns any growth engine into a treadmill. The indie products that survive B2C pick their sub-model deliberately: subscription with a habit loop, one-time purchases with a catalog, or free-plus-premium with a whale tail.
A concrete example: a meditation app at $6 monthly with 4,000 downloads a month. Signup-to-active: 22 percent, active-to-paid: 3 percent, so 120 new subscribers monthly at a blended acquisition cost near $2.40 each. Against a 7 percent monthly churn, expected tenure is 14 months, LTV about $84: the unit economics work only if organic acquisition keeps flowing, because paid ads at realistic $1.80-per-install prices eat the entire margin. The B2B sibling with the same product aimed at HR departments, corporate wellness at $4 per employee, needs 30 accounts to match the revenue, with a tenth of the churn. Same code, different business.
Common mistakes: pricing at consumer levels while burning support hours a $6 month cannot fund (B2C survives on self-service or it does not survive), relying on a single acquisition channel, algorithm changes on one platform have erased entire B2C businesses overnight, ignoring churn because gross signups are exciting, and shipping breadth instead of a habit, a consumer product without a reason to return tomorrow has no business model, only a launch. The dtc entry covers the commerce flavor; the b2b entry the other side.