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- 🪦 The death of SaaS returns – again
🪦 The death of SaaS returns – again
Three perspectives on the debate and how the narrative impacts you today
Ian Ito
February 08, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
ISSUE #280
B2B SaaS growth plays, right in your inbox
Happy Sunday 👋
Three reads to think about this week:
The “death of SaaS” narrative and the rationale behind it
How Vercel ships internal GTM agents
12 different GTM motions to learn from
Let's dive in!
Ian at SaaS Weekly
THIS WEEK IN SAAS
Interesting LinkedIn posts and industry news
The "Death of SaaS" narrative
This past week, public software companies saw a “sharp” selloff, sparking a "SaaSpocalypse" debate across the timeline (RIP).
It seemed like every investor with a Substack or X account published their own eulogy. While some (in my opinion) are more of a satire than others, three pieces stood out to me – each offering a different lens on the narrative:
Janelle Teng Wade mapped the AI fears driving what she calls the “SaaSacre of 2026” – UI bypass, seat-based pricing pressure, and build-vs-buy shifting toward build.
Dylan Reider posed the key question: does business logic stay inside systems of record, or migrate upward to the agent layer? He calls it "Software's Two Futures" – dumb pipe versus AI-enabled application.
Jamin Ball tried to reconcile a strange disconnect: earnings are beating estimates, while the median NTM revenue multiple hit the lowest level in a decade.
Why the "Death of SaaS" debate is back
It was a big announcement week for AI companies (Opus, Codex, and Frontier), which added to the narrative. But the common arguments across the perspectives relate to a few compounding pressures:
Value shifts toward agents and away from UIs (harder to defend premium pricing and expansion when the agent owns the interface)
Work gets automated, seats get squeezed (seat-based pricing takes a hit as fewer humans need licenses)
Code gets cheaper, build-vs-buy tilts (more internal tools, weaker vendor lock-in, tougher net-new deals)
All of which lead to reduced pricing power, slower growth, and lower terminal valuations.
While I think this is an important discussion (I had it on my way to work), this debate has now become a narrative tax for Founders and GTM leads.
Whether you’re raising a round or speaking to customers, you’ll need to weave in messaging pillars to address the SaaS gloom – even if the hysteria may be ahead of the timeline.
HOW COMPANIES GROW
Examples of growth plays and GTM Agent usecases
How Vercel deploys GTM agents internally
GTM Engineering | Lenny Rachitsky, Lenny’s Podcast
There’s a lot of value being created with AI coding agents right now. But the more interesting question is where the delegation model shows up outside of engineering.
The Problem: GTM is the obvious candidate. And while there’s no shortage of GTM AI hype, the buy-vs-build calculus is simpler: do you buy a stack of tools that approximates a workflow, or build agents that mirror how your team truly operates?
The Solution: Vercel took the second path. Their COO, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, shared that they started with inbound because the workflow is “legible” – meaning you can write it down and run it the same way every time.
Vercel treated this constraint as the starting point. GTM engineers shadowed the highest-performing reps (those with seven or more tabs open at once) and encoded that workflow into multi-step agents. The agent decides whether a lead is worth qualifying, determines what to say, pulls from internal data, and drafts a response. A human still reviews and hits send.
The result: Ten SDRs previously worked inbound, but now only one QA’s the agent, and the other nine were deployed on outbound. What’s crazy is that one GTM engineer built the agent in six weeks, spending roughly a quarter of his time.
ARTICLES TO BOOKMARK
Resources to build your next growth play
100 unicorns: 12 different GTM motions
GTM Strategy | Ali Abouelatta, First 1000
Bookmark this for when: You're early-stage or re-evaluating your go-to-market motion and want a mental model for how different companies matched their channel strategy to customer intent.
Why this matters: Ali mapped 12 GTM motions across 100+ unicorns, organized by one useful filter: is your customer already searching for a solution, or do they not know they need you yet?
High-intent customers require showing up where they're already looking (forums, SEO, distribution hacks). Low-intent customers require earning attention before the need exists (community, influencers, building in public, cold outreach with a hook).
Each motion gets a definition, ideal use case, and a few real examples – Zapier scouring forums, Notion launching on Product Hunt, Canva courting design influencers.
Key takeaways: This is more of an inspiration catalog than a tactical playbook – it stays at the surface level by design. The value is using it as a jumping-off point. Pick the motion that resembles your GTM strategy, then go deeper into how that company executed the playbook.
How AI is changing marketing attribution
Marketing Strategy | Carilu D., Hypergrowth Leadership
Bookmark this for when: You're a marketing or GTM leader trying to defend budget decisions to finance, and your current attribution model feels a bit hand-wavy.
Why this matters: Attributing channel influence across the pipeline has always been a challenge. Last-touch attribution overvalues the final click and undervalues everything upstream – brand exposure, partner referrals, internal forwarding chains that never touch your CRM.
The old way to reconstruct these journeys was bespoke and time-intensive: manually stitching together deal timelines, one by one, with no scalable structure behind it.
Today, LLM workflows and data orchestration tools can now pull signals from calls, emails, and unstructured data to reconstruct deal stories at scale.
Key takeaways: From my experience, there are three cuts of attribution you can run:
Direct attribution within Salesforce (one channel, based on Lead Source)
Multi-touch attribution generated by LLM workflows (split by channel as a % of deal value)
Influenced attribution (split by channel, based on individuals not directly associated with the deal – prone to double-counting deal value).
None of these cuts are conclusive on their own, but together they give you a directional view on where to double down and what to pull back.
FROM THE TRENCHES
Perspectives from industry operators
Message mobility: moving between the "how" and the "why"
Marketing Strategy | Mike Northfield, Artifacts of Influence
For many B2B companies, there are a lot of internet discourse on messaging features vs. benefits. People tend to lean toward one of two extremes: high-level promises or granular technical functionalities.
The Abstraction Ladder is a simple way to audit your messaging by travelling up and down the spectrum.
Asking "why is this important?" moves you up – turning technical details into a meaningful result for a non-technical buyer.
Asking "how does it work?" moves you down – grounding an abstract benefit in the reality of your product's capabilities. If you claim you can improve productivity, descending the ladder forces you to articulate the exact use cases that give evidence to that claim.
The goal is message mobility. Regardless of who you're talking to (an executive, manager, or IC) you have the language to show them exactly where the "how" connects with the "why."
Executives want to know why something is strategically necessary. Managers want to know how it improves operations. ICs want to know the technical details and how it integrates into their workflows.
To do it well, you have to evaluate your product deeply and be honest about where you're being too vague or getting caught up in the weeds.
TOP READS FROM LAST WEEK
The most clicked-on links
Clay’s new ads play [Everett Berry]
G2 acquires three vendor review sites [Godard Abel]
The buyer's orbit [Artifacts of influence]
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