Shawn Anderson: Building B2B Ecosystems

Imagine a B2B customer army policing every corner of the internet taking issue with anyone that bad mouths your product. Companies build ecosystems to increase customer value, drive revenue growth, and create a competitive moat. 

Building ecosystems is hard, particularly in B2B. Do your users really have anything in common apart from your software? Shawn describes how his company, PDQ, built an ecosystem for SysAdmins, the core users of their product. It became one of the strongest and most active in B2B. He discusses what worked for them and what might for you.

You will learn whether your product deserves an ecosystem, how to design your ecosystem model and strategy and create an ecosystem roadmap that works.

If your SaaS stands strong alone, an ecosystem makes it unstoppable. If it’s shaky, an ecosystem will break it.

Shawn Anderson PDQ
Shawn Anderson

Shawn Anderson

Co-Founder & ex-CEO, PDQ

Shawn is co-founder of PDQ.com A SysAdmin at heart, he’s spent his career making life better for his peers by building excellent software for them. PDQ.com came into existence in 2001 after the founders spent their professional lives supporting IBM Tivoli Framework and Microsoft SCCM for very large organizations (10,000+ systems). They decided to take a different road and they created a systems management solution for the SMB market.

Bootstrapped by necessity, (noone would fund them), PDQ grew slowly, then more rapidly before taking PE investment in 2021 where Shawn transitioned from CEO to his current role on the board. Shawn attended every BoS Conference since we started until he missed his first in 2022 as he was on a cruise after selling his company. His talk, ‘From Bootstrapped to a Billion’ is a tour de force.

More from Shawn.

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