B2B Commerce Enablement: Reframing a Platform Thesis Through Primary Research

Manas took on this engagement with a brief that looked straightforward: assess whether a client should build a B2B commerce enablement platform for the general trade and distribution layer. The published market size numbers existed, but he identified early that they were the wrong question. The real question was where margin sat in the chain today, and who would have to pay for it once the platform rearranged it. There was no dataset for that.

He framed the entire study around a single falsifiable claim: distributors are structurally squeezed and would trade margin for working capital relief and demand visibility. Everything he designed was built to break that claim, not support it.

He ran three streams in parallel. Expert interviews covered distributors, super stockists, national sales heads at two major FMCG players, and two operators who had exited existing B2B platforms. He deliberately over-indexed toward ex-operators and people who had lost money in the category, reasoning that failure stories carry more signal than incumbent pitches. He led roughly 20 to 25 of these calls himself.

The retailer side checks were a structured field exercise across tier one and tier two towns, anchored on observed behavior rather than stated intent. He ran the first set personally in Delhi NCR and one tier two market to write the guide before scaling it. A tier two pass changed the guide meaningfully: the credit questions he had initially written were too abstract and produced polite non-answers. He revised the guide and analysts ran the remaining checks with network partners while he reviewed transcripts on a routine cadence.

The distributor P&L rebuild was his alone: he reconstructed it from interview transcripts rather than filings, sitting with a spreadsheet and the raw notes.

The research killed the first hypothesis. Price was not the wedge. Credit was. The distributor P&L showed 4 to 6% gross margin against 30-plus days of stuck working capital, and the retailer checks showed switching was almost entirely credit-driven. That finding reframed the platform from a marketplace into a financing and fulfillment layer, where take rates ride on the credit product, not the transaction.

The output was structured as a value pool map showing where roughly twelve billion dollars sit across chain nodes, which node is positioned to capture each slice, and what capability is required to own it. He added a right-to-win test and an EBITDA bridge showing roughly eleven percent uplift. He also included an explicit page on what would have to be true for the thesis to be wrong, and incorporated the disconfirming view from two ex-operators who believed the credit thesis was how the previous cohort of B2B platforms had blown up, alongside his own reasoning for why underwriting could be different this time.

Leadership pushed hardest on that page in the client presentation, which he considered the right outcome.