SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, for like the last 15 years or so, the answer to almost every single marketing and revenue problem was the same. You go find a tool, you buy a tool, and you add it to your massive Martech stack. However, what we're seeing is something that we've never really seen before. The Chief Martech released a report, and the landscape of Martec went from 150 products from 2011 to over 15,000. Every year it's grown, but something different happened in 2026, which is kind of crazy.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Yeah, man, and this is a lot of people don't like this. I think it's cool. Um, I think eventually everything has to have a time and place. And honestly, I think like this whole software as a service, like the SaaS uh era, I think just peaked. Um, and that's like the title of this podcast. And that's what I mean. It's like now what you're seeing is that report just came out and we have 15,000 products. Sounds like a lot. Sounds like, oh my god, that's so much. Until you see the growth number from last year, it's only 0.79%. Effectively, it's flat. Like it's about closer, it's about closer to half a percent than 1% that has been. And after 15 years of just relentless expansion of people coming out with a product over a product over a product, the market finally just hit a fucking wall. And that is, to me, fucking cool because you have to understand what that's telling you. And the reason it hit that wall is that every kind of leader or non-leader or tech person or developer who had all of these cool ideas that had to wait for a product to come out, you had to onboard the product, and you had to play by that product's rule book. Now that's not the case, right? Now it's operations, and we need to understand what's happening right now and why it hit the wall. And the reason is is because I think people can just build build it themselves now.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

And and when you think about like, okay, it grew but not that much. You might be like, okay, well, it's a pretty mature market. You know, if you're looking at the last 15 years, just for some context, we went from about 14,000 solutions in 2024 to 15,300 in 2025. So you still have a massive jump, even just a year ago. What's interesting here as well is that as many products were added, almost as many products were removed. The market is churning pretty aggressively. So that 40% drop in a single year, it's not just slowing down, they're leaving and going for better things.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah, and uh and the problems aren't going away. It's the solutions to the problem, right? Organizations just stopped waiting for people to build stuff that it doesn't fit their organization, you can't customize it. You know, there's been so many times where a company has bought a product and even in the agency life, and we've had to fit it into a solution based off on their business use case, right? Now they're they just started building themselves. Like, remember back in the day uh when you know people had all these in-house teams that were like developing things, but the development cycle took too long? Well, it's almost like the pendulum analogy when it comes to fashion, you know, if the fashion just moves so far, and all of a sudden, like those weird like neck pokey shows that people used to wear when we were in high school is coming back, right? Bell bottoms are coming back, Adidas are coming back. I don't think they ever left, but I'm just saying, like even now in the tech space, it took 15 years, but it did. That last pendulum hit, and now it's just on its way back, is where people are hiring, you know, vibe coders that essentially, right? Like vibe coding jobs. And I have I saw one job posting that was a person who could use clawed vibe code and find solutions for an internal resource. And to me, I I think that's just the start. You know what I mean? I think that that's the conversation that we really need to be having is like that's that's just a start of a really, really big initiative of having like these in-house vibe coders with credits and build something that makes sense for the company based off on their goals.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

So let's explain what that kind of means because you know the headline might say something like consolidation is happening. So people are just consolidating their tech stack, but I think there's something else that's a lot more a lot more significant there.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Yeah, I think consolidation is a part of it. I I don't think that's the case. I think we talked about last year um about how everyone wants to reevaluate their tech stack and get rid of stuff that they don't need, right? And the reason is because we have there are so much products in the market. Like that CFO pressure to rationalize the stack is super real. But the deeper shift is like AI has removed that barrier from having it being a problem. You don't have to have IT to onboard stuff anymore of a third-party problem, third-party, you know, SaaS product. Um, building it solves IT's kind of in not when interference, I want to use the word interference, but their job to kind of vet it, right? It removes that. So now organizations are kind of maybe building homegrown agents, workflows, tools. Like two years ago, you would have required a vendor, a contract, uh, a six-month implementation cycle, or you know, if you were doing an in-house, let's just be real, with sprint planning and everything, 12 months to two years, you know, maybe a maybe three, who knows? That build capability used to only live in large enterprise engineering teams, and now it's accessible to anyone. You know, we we we just uh we have this exact same scenario happen, right? Uh, you know, Akani and I were going back and forth a little bit about like, hey, what are we gonna do with our chat bot? The chat bot's outdated, we needed a workflow because it was a chat bot that you know had a had a question response. And then, you know, we just built it. We just built something that ingests all of our website content data, our YouTube, our this podcast. And when you go talk to it, and if you get a chance, go check it out. It's on our website live at gnwconsulting.com. Uh, you know, it's based off on Claude. And we just built it. We built it in two days, right? With a little bit of refinement, a little bit of QA side.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

I mean, I'll say you built it more more specifically. I gave some feedback, but yeah, well, and and I I want to say that to highlight the point that this was a one-person show. You really needed a little bit of feedback from us, but realistically, this was something that one person who knew the platform, knew what they wanted to do, was able to create.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Yeah, and all of that was you know, vibe coded. And there you go. Now, you know, we we had a quote. I'm not gonna name the company, uh, you know, I'm not gonna name them the companies that give us quotes, but we got quotes anywhere from between like $15,000 to tell why you give us why are you laughing, Akonde? I'm not even gonna cut this part out. Why why are you laughing when I said I'm not gonna go?

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Because the quote, the the quote is from a very distinct vendor uh for a very distinct use case that mimics what we're talking about. That's why.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Yeah, right. You see, you can't see his face, I can. But yeah, I mean, we so we received a quote. I'm not gonna name the vendor, uh, and we got recotes anywhere from between 50 to $60,000 for a year. Right now, it's costing us, I don't know, if you take my build time and even if you take costs into it, maybe five to ten grand to maybe build. And that's really just saying like time investment, right? The actual cost of the product was maybe 500 bucks, and it's probably gonna cost us $300 a year to maintain it.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

And we don't have to build any kind of customizations to it because ingesting all of that information. Two years ago, Kande, that would be fucking impossible. You know what I mean? Like there's no way we could get something customized for our specific use case in the agency life, right? There's no way that would happen. So now all of a sudden, we just saved what X amount of money with a little bit of investment. And that's why I say that job posting of people who understand vibe coding and understand the business and really kind of take into account and run with it, like you're gonna see a lot more of those. You're gonna see a lot more of those vibe coders building solutions, you know, using all of these tools inside your companies. And guess what? You don't need IT approval because it's already approved by IT.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Yeah. Yeah. And the Martech that's being cycled out, it's worth noting a lot of the stuff that's leaving the market or you know, kind of facing extinction, if you will, it was from 2010 to 2019. So that was a big SAS wave where people couldn't necessarily vibe code. Like those were big businesses and not little tiny wrappers, but about 52% of the products that left the landscape this year came out between that window. So it's really a situation where you have these vibe coded, homegrown, built-out uh solutions that are unseating incumbents that have been around for 10, 15, maybe 20 years almost.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Um, and honestly, like that's the squeeze that most people in this conversation aren't like not naming clearly enough, right? If you're a mid-Martech vendor right now, you're kind of compressed into a couple two directions with companies I'm not going to name. Uh, however, you have different use cases uh in their existing platforms. And your best customers are, you know, maybe building a custom agent to expand to that knowledge and get them inside these big players of the game. So when we talk about tech stack consolidation, what we're saying is what do we absolutely need? And what can we build to feed those systems that we absolutely need? And I think that's the middle of the market. Like it's not disappearing, it's not coming back. There's certain, you know, chatbots that are probably, you know, companies that are focused on chatbots, I mean, they're probably gonna go away. You know, like there's like you have all of these things that have security baked into it. So the reality is like, what are you paying for? And what can feed into your core infrastructure? And I think that's the biggest, that's the biggest component that, you know, when we talked about Martech consolidation or tech consolidation that was happening in 2025 and a good part of 2026, what can we get rid of? Now it's what can we build? What we can't get rid of, that's what we build. The stuff that we build is going to feed into those components.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and and when you look at Martech capability utilization across the board, it's dropped about 49% across B2B. What that more or less means is they're paying for half of their stack and not using the other. That other half is not gonna stick around for nothing. And if you think about a practitioner or someone who's in operations, if they're like, hey, I really need a tool for XYZ, but we're not gonna buy it, well, now I have clawed code. Now I have these other tools at my disposal that I can bake the stuff that I need to. And we can we can cut our our spend by 50%.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah, and I think that utilization number is a little bit more important for a different reason, right? At the leadership level, it means that what it really means to leaders or executive leaders or boards or whoever it is, that we really weren't using any of those products, right? Like we weren't really getting the value out of it. We were paying, we were paying an X amount of dollar value for our product, and before we buy the next thing, or you know, let's just build it. Can we build it? Is it easier to build it? And I think that's the first question that generally is going to be asked. And the answer to that question is always gonna be hey, it's not a tech problem. It might have been uh operating model, it might have been something internally. And when we think about when we think about when people say it's an operating model issue for our business, it's just saying we don't know how to fit our business into the product that you created. And adding more tools on top of it isn't really going to solve it. And I think that's the big thing about, you know, once we get into governance and stuff, like there, there's a completely different uh aspect of that. But I think that's fundamentally the utilization thing that leadership always looks at before we invest in.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Yeah, absolutely. Um, one other thing that's worth kind of calling out, we're seeing this consolidation, this reduction. The report also identifies categories that are actually growing as well. So IPass and data integration grew 8%, which makes a ton of sense, right? Because people are connecting their existing tools more thoroughly. Governance compliance and privacy grew about 7%. Uh marketing automation grew about 6%. And now, if you look at it across the board, there's about 29,000 MCP servers that are popping up on registries just within 18 months. So systems that are sticking around need to talk and be connected better, and that infrastructure needs to exist. And that's really, at least right now, where the growth is.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

So that tells you exactly where the market is going, right? Like this app-centric era of buy our product and have it fit your, and you know, our product has to fit your ecosystem and you have to make it fit. I think that era is, you know, that that's what the Chief Martech report shows. Like that era is ending. And you have companies like Salesforce who are like, hey, we're going headless 360. Here's a bunch of API calls, just connect to whatever you want. I don't know if that gamble is going to pay off. No one really does. Uh, however, that is what you're talking about. The idea of these MCP servers connecting into everything and integrating into everything, that is kind of the next era, if you will, of where SaaS is going to go. So, you know, and it might change. And the cool thing about you know companies like Salesforce is that if it doesn't work, they're just gonna pivot and they're just gonna change because they have they have this entire machine of you know money essentially behind them. And if you're a smaller organization, then you don't.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

I mean, Roger, it sounds like the the era of you know, Martech and SaaS is is come to an end, but really like the era of like the one trick pony. Like, hey, we have an app that could do this, it'll plug into your existing stack. These larger organizations like Adobe and Salesforce are like, well, we've already built that out. You don't need to plug in. The pattern is no longer like a build versus buy, it's really build, buy, and borrow from the tools you already have. So orgs that are really excelling are doing all that you drift, like an at- you drift.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Like can't can't say sales loft.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Yeah, I mean, and and the reality is the question whether you have internal capability and governance to manage that that's one piece is the complexity gonna manage you. I think that's where the leadership question comes in, too, Raja.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Yeah, and I think that's where it's land. Like building all of this stuff isn't free. Like we can do it, I can do it, obviously, right? But it requires people, and it requires people with a very specific skill set. They can vibe coders, sure, I know we make fun of them, but they are who can define the problem, use some sort of system to solve it, whether it's clawed work, whether it's GPT, whether it's Gemini Copilot, wherever they're going. But even more important, you need people to understand why a company needs something and understand the goal of the company. And I think that's where all of these SaaS products really fit in, right? Like the whole sales point, like the whole sales, you know, journey pitch that all of these SaaS products used to use was we're solving for a problem. Your problem is you can't do this. This will help you do this. Now it's like, hey, we still can't fucking do this, and your product didn't help. We need to, you know, so now it's understanding that problem, but now you have a very quick reign of hiring someone that a can understand the problem clearly enough, use an AI system and build something that works for your organization. And at the very base level, like I said, maybe it's because I built it, but go look at our chat bot, it's pretty dope. You know, like it solves a very niche problem that we just couldn't get. And even for price, let's forget the price point portion of it, we still have to fit a mold, and we don't have to anymore. And I think that's the big difference that leadership really needs to understand is that all of this stuff requires you to have people and really good people that can essentially execute on it.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

So if we're thinking about the signal, what is this signal telling us?

SPEAKER_01 15:52

The era of business problems being solved by a product, I think, is over, right? Like, I think it's it's not disappeared, it's no longer the default. And the default is going to be what can we build in-house to help the bigger components? Like, I will say Adobe isn't going anywhere, you know, Salesforce isn't going anywhere. There's a reason those products are needed, but what can you build to really elevate that product, like elevate your sales cycle, elevate your marketing? How do you use these homegrown tools with purpose and intent to solve the problems that honestly some of these tools never solved, right? They band-aided them, but they never really truly solved it for organizations. And now for organizations, you know, the signal is like you have to invest in this internal capability in order to do well, or you're just gonna wait for someone to build it, you know, or and then you're gonna try to fit into your sex tech, right? You connect your operating model to a governed, rigorous, by the book product that is designed for multiple businesses, you know, and people and companies I think who have like that good middle ground of, you know what, let's not let's not reinvent Adobe's products or Salesforce's products, let's buy that, but then let's build something to essentially, you know, use our operating model and fuel it. I think that those are the ones that are gonna pull out a pull ahead. Those are the ones that are going to be very specific and understanding of how their business works in today's era.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah, so the the Martech landscape of app centric SaaS solutions stop growing because the market is building instead of buying. That's the signal.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, that's the signal.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Now, if that signal goes unaddressed, what is going to be at stake?

SPEAKER_01 17:40

You you just have to buy stuff. Like, you know what I mean? You have to you have to stay in the buying motion while maybe your competitors are building a different motion. Uh, you have to, you know, still get IT approval, IT validation, you have to have your onboarding, you have to have your training, you know, you have to have um all of these, like you just stay where you currently are. Like I think that's to me probably the the biggest the biggest thing of stagnancy is not not understanding why change is important and what's going on in the market, and you are just doing the same thing. You're waiting for someone to create the next product. Uh, between when that product is created to when you can onboard it, the way the landscape is that there's probably gonna be another product that's gonna come out, and then you're gonna have to switch products, you're gonna have to change products. So you're gonna spend all that time pretty much just waiting for products, onboarding them just to find out that someone might have created a better product and then you know move move from there. Or, you know, and this is like doom and gloom, mind you, um, or there just isn't a product anymore, you know. Like I mean, like this is a sharp decline in SAS products, right? Like over the years, like we it was going up and then boom, tanked to the very bottom. What if there aren't just products anymore and everyone just build it? Like, what if the landscape looks like you know, Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, and that's it? You know, like I mean, there's like sales agents, those are all being built in that like remember, like uh people were talking about last year, hey, we want to onboard these SDR agents, right? Like sales agents, like that. I think we tried the Salesforce one as well. Yeah, now people are building them, right? Yep. So in less than a year, that entire motion of a sales, uh, an AI sales agent is is gone. So what's what what else is going to be next to them? And and I think that's really what you're looking at if that if you don't look at the signal and address it appropriately.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Yeah, and and the capability compounds too, because if you're not if you're not doing this now, if you're not getting acclimated to it now, your competitors, they're already building that muscle. They're getting the right people, they're learning about what it takes to build out these tools internally, how to how to troubleshoot them, how to implement governance. They do better and they do better things and faster things over time. If you're not yet even doing your first build, you're just gonna be behind every single competitor as you get familiar. The cost of waiting is not one miss solution, it's the compounding deficit of a capability.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Yeah. And you know, the crazy part is that the the CFOs are already forcing this question internally, right? Like we're the utilization of what capability utilization at 49%. We're already saying, is it easier to add a new tool or can we build one in-house? Right. CFOs are already pushing back on the adoption of a net new tool and looking at what internal resources that there are and weighing the cost of building versus buying. And honestly, it's just going to have a it's just going to be harder and harder. It's not going to be any easier. It's going to be harder to get people to companies or CFOs. I mean, let's forget IT. You know, like a CFO has to approve something. And if the capabilities and IT says we can build this in-house, then the idea of onboarding something is a CFO even going to give you budget for it? Like that is, I don't know if that's going to happen, but like that is a very, you know, future state that could be in. So, you know, the question really has to sit in your organization that do we acquire a new SaaS tool? Do we have the capability to build it? And with the capability of building it, we can integrate it everywhere wherever we want and build it how we want. And if the answer is you don't have anybody that could do that or take the lead on that, uh, you know, I think you're missing, you're going to miss a strategic opportunity. And eventually budgets are going to get cut for these kind of software products that we've known historically haven't really helped. They've been band-aid solutions more so than anything.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Yeah, my question would be this if if you're not paying for half of your stack, uh what why are you going to buy another tool or start the next build? Just get rid of it and consider and reevaluate why you did it in the first place. A piece of that building yourself, you can iterate quickly. If you build something and it sucks or it doesn't do what it needs to do, or doesn't solve the problem, then you don't have to worry about spending uh X amount of thousands of dollars in a year-long contract before you get out of it. You're able to iterate and move quickly. But with that, everybody, this is Signals and Stakes. Every episode we service one signal the market is sending and name what's at stake if it goes unheard. If this conversation lands, share it with your leader and your organization who needs to hear it. And if you're looking at Martech Stack right now and wondering if you're building the right capability for what comes next, you already know what that first question is. We'll see you next time.