What Do You Sell to Mid-Market Companies?

01 /The Concept

Catalog helps B2B companies process more orders with less manual effort.

The target customer is small companies selling goods to dealers or wholesale buyers – specifically, companies doing between $5 million and $20 million in annual revenue. Current customers include manufacturers of interior components, home goods, and baby products.

These are businesses that have grown past the point where email threads and Excel spreadsheets can keep up with order volume – but aren't yet large enough to justify the cost and complexity of a full ERP implementation.

Catalog built something in between: a lightweight solution that doesn't require significant resources to deploy, but meaningfully reduces manual work.

Setup starts by connecting a product catalog, price list, and customer database. These can be imported directly from existing Excel files, or synced from existing systems. Some customers have been fully onboarded in under 24 hours.

The first output is an order portal – an online storefront with the company's catalog, pricing, and a direct checkout. Orders arriving through the portal are structured and clean: SKU, quantity, notes. No interpretation required, which alone saves significant processing time.

The portal also enables sellers to create custom product collections for individual customers – curated picks, new arrivals, clearance items. Links to those collections can go directly into emails and newsletters, streamlining customer communication and improving conversion on outbound campaigns.

Many customers will still send orders by email, though. For those, Catalog has an AI engine that connects to the company's inbox and continuously scans incoming messages for anything that looks like an order. It matches senders against the customer database, maps the requested items against the product catalog and price list, and generates a structured order draft – attached to the source email so it can be reviewed and corrected before confirmation.

The result is a single, standardized order queue. Staff review and confirm; confirmed orders sync automatically into the relevant accounting and operations systems via Catalog's integration layer. Manual data entry is eliminated along with the errors that come with it.

One customer reduced average order processing time from 10 minutes to 2. Every customer who had the option chose the portal over email going forward.

Catalog deliberately doesn't charge per transaction – to give companies full incentive to route all orders through the platform. Instead, it charges a flat subscription, with pricing presumably scaling to catalog size and order volume.

Founded in France, the platform launched 11 months ago. The company already has paying customers and has just raised its first €3.2 million.

02 /Why It Matters

Small and medium-sized businesses make up 99% of all companies in Europe and the US.

The very smallest – still running everything manually in spreadsheets – are often not worth targeting commercially. They can't pay much, and their failure rate is high.

The more interesting segment is the companies that have grown past "micro" but haven't yet become enterprise accounts. That's exactly where Catalog is focused.

A key lesson embedded in this approach: not all small businesses are the same. If you're building products for them, target the ones that are already generating real revenue – because they have real problems and actual budget to solve them.

Catalog's founders believe SMBs have strong potential as software customers precisely because the people running them are often ambitious and still engaged in growing the business. They haven't calcified into large-company bureaucracy. They can move fast and make decisions.

There's also a product segmentation principle embedded in Catalog's approach.

Very small businesses buy only one thing: new customers. But they often can't convert new customers because their product or service isn't good enough – which means there's a ceiling on how much you can help them anyway.

Large businesses buy savings. At their scale, even marginal efficiency improvements translate into meaningful money. But selling them new customers is nearly impossible – they've already exhausted most acquisition channels themselves.

Chasing growth for companies that can't execute on it is a tough business that gets harder over time. Selling operational savings is more reliable – and stickier, because once your solution is embedded in a customer's workflow, the switching cost is real.

That's the logic behind Catalog's positioning: sell process efficiency to companies that have outgrown their current tools, not customer acquisition to companies still figuring out their product.

03 /Opportunities

The broad direction: build platforms that help mid-market SMBs save money through automation.

The target customer needs to be past the early stage – companies that have real revenue and real operational friction. You can't sell savings to a startup still searching for product-market fit.

Why now? Because AI makes it possible to automate workflows that weren't automatable before. The question is which workflows in which types of businesses are absorbing disproportionate manual effort.

Where are mid-sized companies still doing things by hand that are obvious candidates for AI? What are they not getting to – not because they don't want to, but because it takes too many person-hours to do consistently?