How to make B2B SaaS products to behave like B2C products?

It's all about tenant provisioning. Learn about balancing between creating new vs joining existing tenants.

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Jun 05, 2024

Enabling Self-Serve for a B2B SaaS product inherently has to deal with a cost problem. Every Tenant created increases hosting costs and decreases the potential to climb the pricing escalator (from Individual to Teams to Enterprise plans).

If tenants are created for every new user who signup to your product, then you are not managing it well. We learnt it the hard way, by spending a lot more on our cloud hosting costs.

But we learned and fixed it.

Let’s dig in deeper…

Insight: What’s the proportion of real users signing up to a SaaS product?
About 53% of the users are real users.
The rest are either duplicate (~20%), Fake/Temporary emails(20%), Bots (~10%)

Sources: 1. Growth Unhinged: Stop fake accounts, 2. Prevent Free-Trial abuse

For B2B PLG products, a user’s email domain holds the key, especially new users from existing domains can be (potentially) clubbed together into a tenant.

Let's begin by understanding the anatomy of a user’s email address,

Anatomy of an email address

A typical email address is made up of a username and an email domain.
In this article, we will focus on using the email domain to make decisions on whether we should provision a new tenant or not.

Tenant Provisioning in a B2B context

A tenant is the most fundamental construct of a SaaS environment. Typically it represents an entity that a Payment plan can be applied to.

Some example tenants

Organization / Company: This is the typical entity for a traditional B2B SaaS product.
Project/Workspace: Prosumer products typically charge for a group of users collaborating on a project (e.g. Figma for Professionals/Teams, Canva Pro/Teams)

A registered email domain can be used to determine the root entity of the Organization. Any new tenants created can be associated with the email domain, this helps later in determining the no. of workspaces/teams/projects that the organization create and use.

Tenant Management Challenges for B2B SaaS

In the B2B SaaS domain, tenant management architecture poses significant operational and financial challenges:

Elevated Infrastructure Expenditures: Assigning individual tenants for each user significantly raises infrastructure costs due to increased resource and administrative requirements.
Organizational Alignment: B2B SaaS platforms are designed for entire business units or organizations, necessitating a unified organizational framework rather than isolated user management.
Collaborative Efficiency: A single tenant for multiple users enhances administrative ease and collaboration, enabling integrated workflows and resource sharing.
User Authentication: Using work emails for registration filters out non-serious inquiries, ensuring access is granted to genuine, engaged users from recognized organizations.

How can ThriveStack help?

ThriveStack helps in managing the Tenant provisioning strategy at the very outset of a user signing up to your B2B SaaS product.

In response, our platform employs a tenant creation strategy based on organizational affiliation derived from work email domain (e.g., joe@acme.com). Upon registration, the platform identifies the user's organization (e.g., Acme) and checks for existing tenants.

New Users (jill@acme.com), at the time of signup, can then join an existing tenant, create a new one, or opt for both, depending on their needs.

This approach controls infrastructure costs, promotes organizational cohesion, and ensures a high-quality user base by restricting access to legitimate users, thus enhancing the platform's overall functionality and efficiency.

(B2C) Every user is a new Tenant: This is a traditional B2C approach. Every new user acquired gets a billing plan attached at some point of time in the subscription lifecycle.
(B2B) Join Existing Tenant: Users are allowed to join an existing tenant or account. This is particularly useful in organizational settings where multiple users need to work under the same tenant, such as employees of a business unit.
(B2B)Tenant Creation on Demand: Users have the option to create a new tenant whenever needed. This flexibility is beneficial for accommodating different project teams or business units that require separate environments.
(B2B) Hybrid Approach: Users can both join existing tenants and create new ones. This strategy offers maximum flexibility, catering to varied user needs and scenarios.

Enable Tenant provisioning TODAY!