The most reliable opening for a seed-stage B2B company is not a clever product. It is a group of customers who are being served badly and charged well for it. When we back a company into an existing category, the first thing we want to understand is not how the product works. It is what the customers already resent.
Where openings actually come from
Founders are taught to pitch the mechanism: the model, the architecture, the feature nobody else has. Investors are trained to evaluate it. Both habits make sense, and both miss where most durable B2B companies actually start.
Look at how a business decides to switch tools. It rarely happens because something better appeared. It happens because the thing they already pay for has become hard to justify. The invoice went up. The product stopped improving. Support got slower. The vendor's roadmap drifted towards customers ten times their size. Somewhere in the finance team, someone started asking why the line item is still there.
That is the opening. A new product walks through it, but the door was opened by the incumbent.
Why incumbents leave the gap open
It is tempting to read this as incumbents being lazy. Usually they are being rational.
A software company that has grown up serving large enterprises builds a cost base to match: enterprise sales teams, implementation consultants, account managers, a roadmap driven by its biggest contracts. Smaller customers on that platform pay for all of it, while the features they need get less attention every year. Cutting the price for them would undercut the large accounts. Building a lighter version risks eating into the core product. So the incumbent does neither, and keeps charging.
In Southeast Asia the pattern is sharper. Many of the tools businesses here run on were priced and designed for a buyer in another market. A mid-sized firm in Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok often pays close to a global list price for software whose defaults, formats and support hours were set for someone else. Global vendors are not wrong to put their largest markets first. But it leaves a large group of regional buyers paying for attention they do not get.
What the discontent sounds like
Discontent you can underwrite has a specific texture. It is not a vague sense that things could be better.
The customer can name the line item. Ask what they pay for and what they use, and the answer comes quickly and with some feeling: we pay for the whole suite and use one module; we pay per seat for people who log in twice a month; we pay for a tool that needs an engineer every time we want to change anything.
They have built workarounds. A spreadsheet that sits beside the official system. A freelancer who handles the part the tool does badly. A process that exists only because the software forces it.
And the complaint is shared. If one customer resents an invoice, that is a sales objection. If a whole segment resents the same invoice in the same words, that is a category waiting for a company.
What turns resentment into shopping
Resentment alone does not move buyers. Inertia is powerful, and most businesses will tolerate an overpriced tool for years rather than face a migration.
What converts discontent into demand is a trigger. A product is retired and its users have to go somewhere. A price rise lands at renewal. A regulation changes and the old tool cannot keep up. Two vendors merge and the roadmap gets cut back. In each case a group of customers who were quietly unhappy are suddenly shopping at the same time.
A founder who has already built for that group when the trigger arrives does not have to create demand. They catch it.
The opening gets you in. Something else keeps you there.
We are careful not to over-read this. Discontent explains why a company can get in. It does not explain why it stays.
Two other things do that work. The first is how much change the product asks of its user on day one. Evolutionary change, a tool that slots into how people already work and takes one painful task away, gets adopted quickly and meets little resistance. Revolutionary change can win too, but it needs a longer sale and a real change-management effort, and it has to be underwritten that way. The second is the unglamorous layer that makes the product trustworthy over time: the quality work, the data that is checked and clean, the workflow that brings something customers used to outsource back into their own hands. That is what is hard to copy once a competitor notices the same opening.
So the sequence matters. Discontent is the way in. Evolutionary entry is how the product gets adopted quickly. The quality and workflow layer is what holds the ground. A pitch that leads with the last of these and never mentions the first is explaining a mechanism, not an opening.
What this looks like in our portfolio
Mida.so, which we backed out of Malaysia, is a clean illustration. A/B testing has long been dominated by tools priced and built for large teams with engineers on hand. Many smaller marketing teams relied on Google Optimize as the free option, and when Google retired it in 2023, a large group of marketers had to find a replacement at the same time.
Mida's answer is a lightweight testing tool built for marketers who would rather not open an engineering ticket, with a small script designed not to slow the site down. The discontent was there before the trigger: heavy scripts, expensive plans, and a dependency on developers to run a simple test. The retirement turned that discontent into shopping, and the product was built for the people who were shopping.
What this means for how we underwrite
When we meet a company entering an existing category, we ask four questions before we ask about the product.
Who is underserved today, and by whom? Can those customers say, unprompted and in their own words, what they resent paying for? What has changed, or is about to change, that will put them in the market at the same time? And once they arrive, what makes them stay?
A founder with sharp answers to the first three has found an opening. A founder with a sharp answer to the fourth has found a company.
The challenge
If you are building into a market with an incumbent, try this. Write down, in your customers' words rather than yours, the sentence they say about the tool they use today. If you cannot write it, go and ask ten of them before you write another line of the pitch. If you can, and the sentence has some anger in it, you are probably looking at the opening.