Why I Stopped Buying SaaS Tools

The SaaS explosion of the 2010s was built on a simple premise: software plays were scarce. If you built a better CRM or a faster CI/CD pipeline, the world beat a path to your door. You could afford to be just a "vendor"—a dispenser of technical utility.

That market dynamic has inverted. Today, software is abundant. It is practically infinite. For any given problem, there are fifty startups with indistinguishable feature sets, all fighting for the same budget. In this environment, being a vendor is a race to the bottom on price.

Selling wisdom offers the only escape velocity from this tool-saturated market.

The Credibility Crisis

Buyers today are skeptical. They have been burned by shelfware, by "digital transformations" that transformed nothing, and by roadmap promises that never materialized. They view feature comparison matrices with skepticism, assuming they are rigged.

What they do trust is expertise. They trust the entity that helps them make sense of the chaos. This is why the most successful tech companies of this generation—the Stripes, the Datadogs, the Atlassians—didn't just build great products; they built great content engines. They explained the world to their customers.

When you sell a tool, you are a cost center. When you sell a philosophy, you are a partner. The entire "outcome economy" is based on this shift. I don't pay you for the drill; I pay you for the hole. And increasingly, I pay you to tell me where to drill the hole.

Thought Leadership as Strategy

Real thought leadership goes beyond pithy LinkedIn quotes. It requires a distinct, provocative point of view on how your industry should operate. It is about being opinionated.

If your marketing content can be swapped with your competitor's logo and nobody notices, you have failed. Real thought leadership polarizes. It says, "This is the right way to do things, and if you disagree, we probably aren't for you." That confidence is magnetic. The C-Suite pays for a worldview that aligns with where they want to take their company, rather than just features.

Consider "The Challenger Sale" methodology. It taught us that the best salespeople teach the customer something new about their business. They challenge the status quo. Marketing must do the same at scale.

From Transaction to Transformation

When you position yourself as a Trusted Advisor, you change the unit of value. Instead of charging for seats or API calls, you charge for the outcome and the transformation of their business.

This requires a fundamental shift in how we build marketing organizations. We need more subject matter experts and fewer growth hackers. We need people who can hold a peer-level conversation with a CIO rather than just optimizing click-through rates. The modern CMO should look less like an ad buyer and more like the Dean of a university.

The era of the "solution provider" has given way to the era of the "strategy partner". Failing to teach your customers something new makes you a commodity waiting to be replaced by a cheaper API.