Too Many Layers Between the Bread and the Butter
Helly Shah on margin stacking: why B2B layering keeps innovation from reaching consumers, and why Ralo builds its own tools so the efficiency lands with the borrower instead of vendors.
Every morning, my inbox looks like a trade show.
“Helly, automate your compliance.” “Helly, automate your growth with smarter campaigns.” “Helly, automate your marketing workflows.”
Fifty-plus emails a day. All promising to make my business more efficient, for a fee, of course. None of them mention the people we actually serve.
The funny thing is, I get more emails trying to sell to me as a company than I do as a consumer. Maybe that’s because, as a consumer, I’m already locked into a half-dozen subscriptions that bill me quietly while I’m asleep. They don’t need to email me; they just need me to forget. But as a business owner, I’m the belle of the ball. Everyone wants a slice of my margin.
The B2B Boom That Stopped at the Consumer
Over the past few decades, our economy has layered itself into a tower of B2B (business-to-business) relationships. From the outside, this looks like progress. Each tool, each vendor, each platform promises to save time. Collectively, though, they sometimes create a kind of economic gravity, pulling money and attention upward into enterprise infrastructure instead of downward to the user experience.
We call it “innovation,” but a lot of it is just repackaged overhead. Each layer adds its own markup. Economists call this margin stacking. In digital markets, the numbers can be startling. The cost of “productivity” starts to rival the cost of the product itself.
Consumers don’t realize they’re paying for the tools we use to run our companies: the CRMs, analytics platforms, compliance engines, ticketing systems. It’s baked into the cost of doing business, which means it’s baked into the cost they pay. It’s a polite form of trickle-down inefficiency.
Why B2B Feels Safer Than B2C
It is easy to understand why many founders move upstream. Consumers are unpredictable. They expect world-class service for free. They are emotional, impatient, and sometimes completely illogical. Businesses, on the other hand, are rational and willing to pay. They see value in dashboards and metrics. They send purchase orders instead of complaints.
So most innovation ends up trapped in that safe zone. All the big advances in automation, AI, and process efficiency live inside contracts between companies. Consumers see a slightly nicer interface, but not the real gains happening behind the curtain. It is like everyone is upgrading the plumbing, but no one is improving the water.
A Chance to Simplify
Automation and AI are finally giving us a way out of this loop. Tasks that once required armies of people and a stack of software can now be handled by smaller, smarter systems. A full-stack business-to-consumer (B2C) company can automate compliance, customer service, and analytics internally, often faster and cheaper than a patchwork of vendors could.
This changes the equation. It allows companies to serve consumers directly without carrying the weight of B2B overhead. The value that used to get trapped in the middle can flow back to the ends of the chain, where it belongs.
That does not mean B2B disappears. Great B2B companies will always exist. They build the pipes, the rails, the infrastructure that make everything else possible. The problem is not their existence. It is the excessive layering that turns infrastructure into friction. The future, I think, belongs to leaner chains: fewer steps between a problem and the person who feels it, more vertical integration where it makes sense, and more transparency about where the money actually goes.
My Rule: Build, Not Buy
At my company, our thinking is simple: if we can build it ourselves, we should. Not because we want to reinvent the wheel. Because we want to own the efficiency and pass it forward.
Most of the tools being pitched to us could be integrated in a few weeks. We could build a custom version in the same time, one that fits exactly how we work, and one that doesn’t keep charging us per seat, per month, forever. We automate our own workflows so we don’t end up automating away our margins.
It is not the right choice for everyone, but it keeps us honest. Every line of code we write has a direct line to the end user.
The Real Customer Is the Consumer
If innovation does not reach the consumer, it is not really innovation. It is just margin moving sideways.
So we build our own tools, not because it is fashionable, but because it is the only way to make sure the benefits land where they should. That is the measure that matters. Not how many integrations we have, but how much of the value we can give back.