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One of the most common failures in early-stage venture building is not knowing who the customer actually is. Founders say 'our customers are pet owners' when they mean 'our users are pets, our customers are pet owners, but the person paying is actually the vet clinic.' Those are three different people. They have different motivations. They require different conversations. Building for the wrong one wastes months.

The person who uses the product, the person who pays for it, and the person who decides to buy it are often three different people. Confuse them and you will build the wrong thing, price it wrong, and pitch it to the wrong person.

Four Distinct Roles in Every Market

Before you can design a business model, you need to map who is actually in the system. There are four roles to distinguish:

User

The person who interacts with the product or service directly. They experience it. Their feedback is about usability and value delivery.

Consumer

The person who 'consumes' the end benefit — even if they don't interact with the product themselves. In B2B2C models, this is often the end customer of your customer.

Payer / Customer

The person or organization that provides the money. Their evaluation criteria is not 'do I enjoy this' but 'does this solve a problem worth paying for.'

Decision Maker

The person who ultimately authorizes the purchase. In B2B, this is often not the same as the user. In B2C, it can still be a household decision rather than an individual one.

These roles can overlap — a person can be user, payer, and decision maker simultaneously. But in many markets, especially B2B and B2B2C, they are separated. Building without mapping them clearly leads to building a product optimized for the user while pitching it to the decision maker without speaking their language, or pricing it for consumer sensitivity when the buyer is an institutional procurement team.

A Real Example: The Veterinary Tech Case

I worked with a team building a digital health platform for pets. The product monitored pet vital signs, food intake, and exercise patterns. The team described their target customer as 'pet owners who care about their pet's health.'

When we mapped the actual structure, four distinct parties emerged:

• The pet — the user in the most literal sense. The device was attached to them. They experienced the product most directly.
• The pet owner — the consumer. They cared about outcomes (a healthier pet, fewer vet emergencies) but were not naturally in a buying mindset unless a problem was visible.
• The vet clinic — the most likely payer and institutional customer. Vets already charged for consultations and had a clear incentive to recommend tools that reduced emergency visits, improved diagnostic accuracy, and increased owner trust. They were willing to pay a practice fee or recommend the product to owners.
• The pet insurance company — an often overlooked potential payer with a strong financial incentive to reduce claims through preventive monitoring.

The same product, four completely different business models depending on which party you treat as your customer. The D2C model (selling direct to pet owners) requires mass consumer marketing, lower price points, and emotional storytelling. The B2B model (selling to vet clinics) requires clinical evidence, integration with existing practice management systems, and ROI calculations for the clinic. These are not the same pitch, the same pricing, or even quite the same product.

The B2B2C Complexity

In B2B2C models, confusion about users, consumers, and payers is especially costly. You are selling to a business (B), who then delivers your product to their end customers (C). Your direct customer is the business. Your end user is the consumer. Optimizing only for end-user satisfaction without solving the business customer's commercial problem is a common reason B2B2C startups fail in go-to-market.

A health platform selling through hospital networks has two sets of criteria to satisfy: the hospital administration (who evaluates integration, compliance, cost, and operational simplicity) and the patients (who evaluate experience, trust, and outcomes). Winning on patient satisfaction while failing on hospital integration means you never get deployed at scale.

The Revenue Clarity Test

For any venture you are designing, run this test before finalizing your business model:

• Who uses the product? What do they care about?
• Who pays for the product? What do they evaluate before deciding to pay?
• Who makes the decision to buy? What does the procurement or decision process look like?
• Who experiences the primary benefit? Are they the same as the person paying?

If you cannot answer all four questions specifically and differently, you have not mapped your market yet. Go back to interviews.

'Our customers are everyone who uses smartphones' is not a customer segment. Neither is 'health-conscious millennials.' Specificity is what makes a business model testable.

Why This Matters for Your Business Model

The person who pays determines your revenue model. The person who uses determines your product design. The person who decides determines your sales process. When these are different people, you need a strategy for each.

In the pet health example, if you decide to sell to vet clinics: your product design should make the vet's job easier and more profitable, your pricing should be clinic-level (not consumer-level), your sales process should be direct and relationship-driven, and your marketing should speak to clinical outcomes rather than emotional attachment to pets.

If you sell direct to pet owners: your design should be consumer-intuitive, your pricing should be accessible, your distribution is online and retail, and your marketing is emotional, social, and visual.

Same product. Completely different company depending on which customer you choose to prioritize first.

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✦  A Note for GVP Students

In your Block D BMC, the Customer Segments box is not a demographic description. It is a commercial decision. Who is your primary payer? Who uses the product? If they are different people — which they often are — your canvas needs to reflect that. The business model structure changes based on who you are ultimately solving for and who is handing you money.

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