Moats. Copycats.. The list goes on. There's a lot of reasons to hate being in SaaS.
We discuss the most common headaches in todays episode.
This episode is brought to you by by Fullcast, the only AI-powered platform that streamlines your entire sales lifecycle — from plan to pay. With modules like territory and quota management, routing, and capacity planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs — whether you need one solution or an all-in-one platform.
Ready to see the difference? Visit Fullcast.com and mention the Revenue Formula Podcast to unlock an exclusive premium gift, just for listeners!
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We discuss the most common headaches in todays episode.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (04:22) - "It's so easy to copy us now"
- (08:51) - Do you have a.. moat?
- (16:00) - We need to be efficient
- (18:55) - More pipeline, fewer deals
- (21:47) - SaaS Selling to SaaS
This episode is brought to you by by Fullcast, the only AI-powered platform that streamlines your entire sales lifecycle — from plan to pay. With modules like territory and quota management, routing, and capacity planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs — whether you need one solution or an all-in-one platform.
Ready to see the difference? Visit Fullcast.com and mention the Revenue Formula Podcast to unlock an exclusive premium gift, just for listeners!
Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com
Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
TRF - 179 - why saas sucks
[00:00:00] Mikkel: Hey everyone, you're listening to the Revenue Formula with Toni and Mikkel. In today's episode, we share the five things we hate about SaaS.
[00:00:07] Amongst them are being copied, not having a moat, and a bunch of others. Enjoy!
[00:00:13] Toni: Before we jump into the show, today's episode is brought to you by Fullcast. The only AI powered platform that streamlines your entire sales cycle from plan to pay.
[00:00:25] Customers report up 80 percent cost savings, 20 percent growth in pipeline, and 30 percent boost in RevOps efficiency.
[00:00:32] With modules like Territory and Quota Management, Routing and Capacity Planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs whether you need one solution or an all in one platform
[00:00:44] Visit fullcast. com, book a demo, and mention the revenue formula podcast. To unlock an exclusive premium gift just for listeners
[00:00:55] And now enjoy the show.
[00:00:57] So for all the folks that are watching this actually on, on YouTube or on Spotify, Spotify, there's also kind of good video now.
[00:01:05] Mikkel: Yeah, that's true.
[00:01:07] Toni: They might've noticed that surprisingly Toni is kind of a very, you know, is flush with hair, right?
[00:01:13] Kind of look
[00:01:13] Mikkel: Yeah, where did that come from?
[00:01:14] Toni: at this,
[00:01:16] Mikkel: You went to Turkey, didn't you?
[00:01:19] Toni: So it's, so in Germany now, maybe this is not a German thing, but in Germany now it's called Turkish hairlines, you know, did you also take Turkish airlines,
[00:01:27] hairlines?
[00:01:27] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
[00:01:29] yeah.
[00:01:30] Toni: no, no, you know, I, I still have some actual hair left plenty actually, I mean flush. Flush but just didn't get to kind of cut it back for it feels like over a month now. So now I'm kind of running around like, like everyone else besides you,
[00:01:43] I guess
[00:01:44] Mikkel: a normal human
[00:01:45] Toni: an, like an actual person in their thirties that still has hair on his head.
[00:01:48] But yeah, no, I think this is going to come off in the next couple of days because we're going to go somewhere in the far East, somewhere exotic, somewhere hot. And I'll be sweating anyway all the time. So kind of, that's why, you know, hair needs to come
[00:01:59] off. Um,
[00:02:00] Mikkel: You know what? I really, I didn't enjoy the act of having to wash the hair put like hair products in, go to the hairdresser, all those things. Like, you know what? Actually, initially I was like, oh man, I'm going to miss my hair. But I think after a month you were like, I get out of bed every morning and it's just, my lack of hair is now an asset.
[00:02:21] It's like amazing
[00:02:23] Toni: No, you're
[00:02:23] Mikkel: to do anything about
[00:02:24] Toni: pitching it. Everyone is like, you know what, actually, now that you said it, I'm going to
[00:02:29] shave my
[00:02:29] Mikkel: And also, Toni, in Asia, it's a mark that you're a wise man. It's a mark that you're, so if you're fat as well, then it's even better because then you're rich. It's,
[00:02:37] Toni: So I'm guessing I'm a rich, wise man.
[00:02:45] Mikkel: That's exactly it! That's exactly it. I didn't call you fat, you did. But but I mean, it's funny. Today we're going to talk a bit about some of the other things we hate specifically about SaaS. Specifically about SaaS. And I think the trigger was you saw a post from Adam Robinson. And to be frank, it was not, I don't think it was like a whine post, him whining about anything, it was more him reflecting about 2025 and the challenges ahead.
[00:03:09] And, and he just outlined some things that weren't really wonderful for him in terms of building a business,
[00:03:17] Toni: Yeah, I mean, so he's, he's like an experienced entrepreneur. He's kind of been doing this retention. com, like a B2C Clavio kind of product. I think, I don't, I don't 100 percent know. And now he's doing the retention, but the B2B version, you've heard about it, RB2B or RB2B or whatever. And he was, you know, he's, he's getting some headwinds obviously in kind of, he's working through that.
[00:03:37] He's great at this LinkedIn stuff, like hands down, like he's a master at this. And even that we are picking this up again, kudos to him. He again, he again did it. And he was whining a little bit about, you know, the, the, the tough, the tough thing that's going to happen in 2025. And we wanted to you know, not recite his list because we were kind of disagreeing with too many things there, but like jam a little bit on it have, have our, our approach to.
[00:04:02] What is it, what we hate about SaaS these days, or why does SaaS actually suck these days? And and I think that might be either something for people to whine about or maybe to take a little bit with with a grain of salt and, and try and see the positive in it. But, let's, let's explore, kind of, what, what do we have on the list here that we, that we hate about SaaS,
[00:04:22] Mikkel: I think the first one, and that's what he noted down was being being copied is a whole lot easier. Folks are going to copy something they build ultra fast. I mean, he made it sound like it was going to take a couple of days and then copy complete. And I was like, you know what? It's, it's a little bit bullshit also.
[00:04:40] Like, yes, there's some truth to it, but it's also a little bit bullshit because in this market, any developer by now must be using something like cursor
[00:04:48] Toni: Well, that's not true, but
[00:04:49] many, many,
[00:04:50] Mikkel: But mainly, but it's just to say, at least then you have it at your disposal, right? So you can, you can, you can build at the same pace as anyone else, right?
[00:04:59] It's not like the dynamics is shifting that someone is now faster than you on that level. And I think the other thing is, you could be copied before. If there was a, like a top team coming out of Facebook, like their top developer starting out and they wanted to copy your product. Yeah. Probably they could.
[00:05:17] Probably they could already do that.
[00:05:19] Toni: Now that, that has been, that has been kind of a test a while already now, like basically saying like, okay, let's just say five 10x developers backed by Andreessen or
[00:05:29] Sequoia.
[00:05:29] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:05:30] Toni: Could they, could they copy your product in a month? And the answer is in many cases, probably yes. And if it was a no, then, you know, also this cursor enabled, you have way more 10X developers basically now.
[00:05:43] It's probably still also not gonna, gonna, gonna you know, copy you. However, and, and maybe this is me being kind of a you know, second time found, I think, you know, one, one thing here though, that I, that I agree with is Sure, you can build stuff faster, but really the bottleneck is to build something that works, right?
[00:06:03] You, you will only have so many work working kind of solutions out there. And once that is found, then that gets exploited much faster, right? It's not really about the rate of development. It's more about who strikes gold and once gold is found, how quickly can people rush it and kind of replicate the thing?
[00:06:20] And this is, you know, I mean, I gotta say, you know, the whole story on RB2B is pretty fantastic, right? They, I think they grew to a million in two weeks or something like this. And then to 4 million in 10, 10 weeks. The the thing though, is they did that with a super small team, four, five people or something like this.
[00:06:37] And, you know, that also tells me it's probably not super deep and high tech stuff
[00:06:41] that they've
[00:06:42] Mikkel: yeah.
[00:06:42] Yeah.
[00:06:44] Toni: easy to easy to copy, easy to exploit, right? Which, which obviously is happening now, right? There's a, not only has it been able to get a lot of people excited about the software, which then helped him attract customers and revenues.
[00:06:58] But also attracted a lot of people like, you know, I can build this. And, and that's kind of what's happening kind of, at least in this bubble of the, of the industry there. And I think at large, I think, yeah, I think this is, you know, I don't think it's going to be super, super easy peasy to copy everything, but it's gonna, it's going to be a little bit easier.
[00:07:17] But here, I think in a, in a, in a bigger SaaS company, I think here the, the opposite is also true. Well, your developers also should be now faster in copying other people. And let's just say you're not the market leader. Let's just say you're following, which is probably true for 90 percent of our listeners.
[00:07:34] You now have the opportunity to catch up with a market leader much faster than you had before. Right. So kind of, there's, there's some good and some bad in this thing, but ultimately you know, that being copied as much easier now, I think that it's true, but it has been, it has been true and it's, you know, for a
[00:07:52] while
[00:07:52] Mikkel: it's not new. Copies have been around for a while. Not just in software. This predates software. And probably software to a degree is a little bit easier to copy than, I don't know, some pharma recipe for a drug or whatever else, right? I mean, so there's going to be things that are easier to copy.
[00:08:10] Yeah, sure.
[00:08:11] But also just the production of it. Like it's not easy to, to build that whole machinery. And that's why personally, I think some of the companies that have a hardware component, like think about toast as an example, they do a point of sale for restaurants and you know, but also the booking component, which is then just software, all of a sudden, then it's a little bit more difficult to copy because you, Requires different skills, right?
[00:08:36] And and so I think that's just, it's always been a thing. You could always copy someone. So it's not really new. Does it suck? Do I hate it? Yeah. I kind of hate when someone copies what you do. I think everyone does. And I think we just have to live with it.
[00:08:48] Toni: But it kind of leads us to the second point.
[00:08:51] Basically, moats are no more. Like, in the age of AI, in the age of everything can be copied, in the age of, like, even websites and blog posts and everything can be copied extremely easily now. Basically, folks are coming to the conclusion that it's impossible to actually generate a moat, or much rather ask the question well, what kind of moat is there going to be left, right?
[00:09:18] What's your, what's your, what's your take on that?
[00:09:21] Mikkel: Well, personally, I think what I said to you is, well, if you're being disrupted by, if your moat is being disrupted by AI now. Was it really then a moat to begin with? Like truly was it? So I'm not so sure. It's, it's, I think we, we tell ourselves a convenient lie that we have a moat. But when push comes to shove, it's like, no we don't.
[00:09:43] Right. So I think Jonathan Moss, we had on mentioned this company called Check out of the States. They do online tutoring. Probably they had somewhat of a moat because they had all the tutors, all the great ones, and they had reviews of those tutors. So even if you wanted to start, it was difficult to, to basically succeed.
[00:10:02] Right. Because they had a bunch of proof points in there for folks to get a tutor that was truly great at a transparent price. Now folks can just get their tasks, specifically their school tasks done by AI, so they don't even need a tutor anymore, right? It was just all, all gone. Right. I think maybe in that case, it's, it's fair to say that moat disappeared rather quickly, but for a lot of other companies, it's like, yeah, I, I just don't think they had a moat to begin with, honestly.
[00:10:30] Toni: I think, I think, I mean, this, and this is kind of what's interesting now, kind of with, with this new AI thing approaching, right? Kind of to a degree. I think Preview, yeah, they had a great moat. It was a wonderful moat. But then this new technology came around and just like, oh, moat gone. Bye bye. Same thing with all, something like Stack Overflow, right?
[00:10:47] That used to be the look up database for people to find code, so for developers, right? Well, not so many people are using this anymore. They're just using Cursor or ChatterBT and kind of it's gone. To a degree, you know, why, why is it made obsolete? Why is it why is it kind of the, the moat gone? Well, probably all the moatls training on data that was supplied by StackOverflow.
[00:11:09] So there's kind of a copying slash, you know, moat is gone kind of situation happening, which is pretty unfortunate, right? But the, the other thing around the moat piece, which, which you know, people are whining about and to a degree it's kind of right. Number one, I think, kind of, to your point previously, Mikkel, kind of, did you have a moat to begin with, and, you know, whatever but really what it just means is you need to now find just a new moat.
[00:11:32] You just need to kind of sit down and, first of all, challenge, was my previous moat an actual moat? Kind of, was it defensible? Was it deep? Was it broad? Was there water in the moat? Or was it, you know, was it easy to kind of climb over? And now that the tectonic plates have shifted, that stuff is different now, you know.
[00:11:49] Do you still have a moat, right? And I think moat can be many things can also be your ability to distribute your stuff. Your moat can be just the amount of customers you have and the amount of market share you have. These things won't be easy, easily to kind of steal away or copy or anything like that, right?
[00:12:06] So there are a couple of moat pieces that in this new world of how we're seeing things right now. You just need to rethink and kind of check like, well, how does that stack up to to what's going on out there right now and kind of, you know, as you, as you need to evolve your product market fit, as you need to evolve your competitiveness, you also need to evolve your moat.
[00:12:26] And I think if there's anything that's, that's absolutely fair, I think is, Reassess whether or not you have it with this whole gen AI thing happening around you. And for many of you, it might just be like, yep, no, this, you know, no issue. Maybe it's a competitive thing, you know, some competitor adds that stuff and we need to kind of draw or kind of pull equal.
[00:12:46] But otherwise kind of the other moat that he had might just not be affected and then just keep trucking.
[00:12:50] Mikkel: But it's also like, if you, if I don't think a lot of folks, they actively build a moat, actually. They build the software and then they make up excuses for how they have a moat. Look at Google as an example right now. You and I have talked about, Hey, are they totally screwed? Are they going to get disrupted?
[00:13:06] And we both kind of agree. Yes, they're going to get disrupted on search. But it's gonna take a long time and it's because they have a really strong moat. What is the moat? Well, they own Android, you know that Second biggest iPhone OS or not iPhone phone operating system out
[00:13:23] Toni: No, I think it's the biggest,
[00:13:25] Mikkel: It's the biggest.
[00:13:25] Okay. Okay, you might be right because of Samsung. Yeah, true They have a licensing agreement with Apple as well on search. So basically the interface is Anyone uses to access the internet, they own the real estate there for you to start the search, which is just plus the habit along with it, you know, they own the browser, they own YouTube, you know, yeah, they will get it disrupted eventually.
[00:13:49] They also have an opportunity to maybe just build
[00:13:52] Toni: yeah, we, we talked about this actually with you know, this example of system of record, system of engagement, kind of, I think people have, have heard about this before. So the system of record in, in your go to market is your CRM, Salesforce is your system of record, sorry. That's just what it is. Replacing that, it's going to be pretty awkward, pretty difficult to do.
[00:14:10] You know, basically all the auxiliary tools you have, they're plugging into it. It might even be that your AEs are. Not logging in anymore because they're doing everything in Gong or everything in, you know, Outreach or wherever they're doing it But you still can't rip it up It's still impossible for you to do right and then you have the system of engagement Basically, which is kind of sales loft outreach kind of these the SDR tooling basically and that has been starting to get basically kind of Disrupted by the AI SDRs right kind of they're kind of doing this and hey, why do I even need SDRs in the first place?
[00:14:45] You What is kind of now happening, which is actually pretty cool, I think it's cool Outreach has I think now also released an AISDR functionality. And what's different here now is that their AI actually is on top of the system of engagement, meaning they're seeing which emails are going out, which are working, which sequences are working, which are not working.
[00:15:08] They have a different training pattern and access to a different training data. Because they are the system of engagement already. And now kind of they're leapfrogging what the other guys can do. It's like, oh, you know, we need to see some emails, otherwise we can't train. Like, they don't, Outreach doesn't have that problem, right?
[00:15:25] So, I think this is a great way of kind of thinking also about moat. In like, you know, what kind of system off are you? And I think there are only three, system of engagement, system of records, system of intelligence or something like, I don't know. But this kind of approach I think is, Is a great way to maintain your moat and, and build on top of
[00:15:44] it.
[00:15:44] Mikkel: Yeah, but it, but I think in general, I think that's one of the, the, let's just say the annoying things. It's actually difficult and it should be difficult, but it's difficult to build a moat in software, especially in software. Right? And that means a lot of us also at risk, honestly, of getting commoditized a bit here and disrupted.
[00:16:00] The other thing that I hate by the way, is the focus on efficiency. I, I, I, I
[00:16:07] Toni: Because, oh, because you're in
[00:16:08] marketing, you
[00:16:09] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:16:09] Toni: measured. That's right. I
[00:16:10] forgot.
[00:16:11] Mikkel: ah, that accountability level. It's just, it sucks. No, I think it's we've, we've talked a bit about it, but So when it was growth at all costs, no one seemed to care about efficiency, but it actually mattered a great deal.
[00:16:21] You and I talked about, Hey, maybe focusing on improving a bunch of things throughout your funnel, that efficiency is going to be radical gains for you as a business, right? No one listened, no one listened. Now, the problem with efficiency is everyone wants to do it. And the way they do it is they do indiscriminate cutting across the board or have done so already.
[00:16:40] And because they can't really argue why someone needs to cut harder than someone else. They just do it evenly across the go to market. And what, what that leads to is just, well, your same amount of, you have the same efficiency, you just produce less.
[00:16:56] Toni: And I think this is where, you know, where I hate SaaS because it's kind of getting double f'ed from both ends.
[00:17:02] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah, it is.
[00:17:03] Toni: On the one hand side, right, if you really think about efficiency, efficiency, you know, people will tell you it's a CAC Payback or something similar. And it's usually a ratio between You know, good things, revenue, or ARR, or whatever you want in profitability.
[00:17:16] And on the, on the negative side, you have cost or something like this, right? Kind of, you basically kind of put those two things into a combination or into ratio. And, and when I'm saying kind of they're getting F from both ends is, they're, you know, seeing slowing demand. Like, you know, no one is really interested in SaaS anymore or an only SaaS.
[00:17:33] We're not talking about the delivery moatl, but we're talking about the, Difference between SaaS, right? Kind of, no one is really interested in only bare bones SaaS anymore. So demand is going down, sorry. And it's not going to get back up to the 21, 22 kind of area. It's just not. So on that side, they're getting effed, and then on the other side, I think many people are going extremely, or have gone extremely poorly about cutting costs.
[00:17:57] You know, doing it indiscriminately across the board because, you know, maybe it was easier to. Make that difficult decision with all of those CA, C level and VPs in the room to say like, you know what? Everyone will get cut the same way. You know, let's make a compromise. Instead of you needing to give 50 and you only give 10, which would be so unfair we'll just do 25 across the board, okay?
[00:18:18] Is that, is that fine? Can we kind of agree on that? And I think this is this is the reason why many working in good initiatives also got cut, like, and, and many, many, you know, poor initiatives that should have been cut more, you know, still only got away with the 25 percent cut, right? And basically, you know, what we're seeing at the end of the day is like, less money in, you know, less money out, but less efficient, actually, and probably the same or worse efficiency metric than you had before, right?
[00:18:46] Kind of, and, and trying to escape that, really, really difficult, really difficult.
[00:18:53] Mikkel: No, I agree. So, that's one.
[00:18:55] The other thing that's happened as of late is I saw a benchmark report for 2024 showing that pipeline creation has been increasing, right? Pipeline creation has been increasing. But the closed one deals or revenue just hasn't followed. I think that's, that's the other thing, like, the whole Difficulty of sales.
[00:19:17] It's it's, it's, it's not as fun as it used to be.
[00:19:21] Toni: No, I think, I think what's happening is I think people are still looking for stuff to buy. But I don't think this has stopped, right? Kind of, people are buying things but I think what has happened is, and that's again why I, you know, hate SaaS right now, is You are, you're not even losing. Against your competition.
[00:19:45] That, that's, I think that's the most heartbreaking piece in this process that people need to kind of realize. It's, it's a little bit like your girlfriend breaks up with you because she's not interested in guys anymore. She, she now likes girls, right? It's kind of to a degree, it's like, Oh, it's not my fault.
[00:20:02] But it's like, you know, it's, it's even one step removed. And, and the thing is here, it's really. Yeah. The reason why those deals are not going through is not that you're better or worse than your competitors in the same set. No, what you're losing to is company priority on a completely different disconnected problem that a different vendor is trying to solve.
[00:20:23] That is solving that in a much more convincing ROI positive way. Like, that's basically what is happening. And then, you know, as those, as those purchase decisions travel up the ladder, as we all know, it's not the individual departments making decisions, it's the CFO making that decision, right? We, we know that by now.
[00:20:41] As they travel up the ladder, kind of the CFO sits there and kind of has these different proposals on the table, And all of those are great proposals. I actually only, you know, see a reasonable path for those one and two, and we're not going to do more this quarter and boom. And you know what? Your SaaS solution that just.
[00:21:00] Augmenting and helping someone to do their job instead of doing the job for them, right? That's really kind of the difference here that didn't make that list. That wasn't con, you know, it wasn't convincing enough for the CFO to award you the, not the money. It's not about the money because all of these are positive, but to award you with the attention of the organization at that point, right?
[00:21:21] So, and that I think is extremely heart crushing, soul crushing, crippling for everyone on the sales side. Yeah. And equally, so by the way, also for your buyer, because your buyer wants your tool they, they still want to have that thing, but they get said no, because the, the focus of the organization actually has to be somewhere else.
[00:21:40] And this needs to take second row.
[00:21:41] Mikkel: Then we have the last thing we basically hate about
[00:21:47] SaaS. Thanks. Yeah, I think the last thing kind of I'm gonna package two things into that actually because I didn't like a secret one on my list here Mikkel and So the the first thing I had, you know, the last the last thing that I hate about SaaS is SaaS is still, when you look at this, predominantly selling to SaaS, like, and that's a problem, right?
[00:22:08] Toni: Kind of, if you look at some of the IPOs and successful companies in the SaaS space recently, you know what they all have in common? They do not sell to SaaS. So they have been extremely successful for the last couple of years. Obviously, they're growing crazy, like 60%, whatever. Even at those billion dollar run rates and their, their performance is extremely stellar, right?
[00:22:28] And if you are still selling to SaaS like you did the last, you know, four or five years, you need to find a way to break out of that stuff, right? And it's, you know, I still remember when we were like social media, you and I were selling social media management software. We had this, we had this cohort of you know, agencies.
[00:22:45] Yeah. Agencies was like a love hate relationship because, oh, you know, inbound came two days before quarter and then boom, deal closed, you know, one day before quarter. And so it can go extremely fast. But what also happened with them is they churn pretty quickly, right? And, and the thing is, you know, SaaS is probably around there.
[00:23:04] You can probably around, create opportunities. They're probably not going to close. If you do close them, they're probably going to churn. And it's just going to give you headaches. And you just need to kind of see that part of your funnel. With a little bit of a different, you know, eye, maybe more skepticism that you have seen previously, right?
[00:23:19] and, and, you know, SaaS selling to SaaS, I hate that. You know, it's, I think it's a, it's an, it's an, it's a good excuse if you're starting out and you're kind of still in product market fit, you know, and trying, you know, those companies will be happier to engage than, than established ones, but you need to find your way out of this.
[00:23:37] What, what do you think, what do you think about this here?
[00:23:39] Mikkel: I just wonder how many SaaS companies are predominantly, focused on selling to SaaS. Like, that's the only thing I'm kind of reflecting over. Definitely, I think it's It's a risky one to put your hat on alone, and I definitely think that's why we also had this, let's say this tiny bubble uh, happening a little bit.
[00:23:56] This space got so much funding, so it got attractive. You could start a SaaS selling to SaaS, you know, more and more focus like that. Uh, I, I think it might have screwed a few people over. So yeah, I, I think any vertical, by the way, can be bad. Any vertical can be really terrible, annoying, frustrating for us.
[00:24:12] It uh, agencies to a degree love hate relationship. So, so I'm a bit ambivalent if you can be successful selling to SaaS, you know what, great, but I just think there can only be so
[00:24:21] many,
[00:24:22] Toni: no, but I mean, we're seeing in the public markets, right? Overall, S& P 500 is up like crazy over the year, 27%. It's just insane. I'm sorry. It's insane for an index like that, that basically can never go down. It's basically, you know, it's very hard to lose money with the S& P. Like, I'm not a fan, but I'm just saying it.
[00:24:38] So if this goes up 27%, that's just unheard of. I'm sorry. That's, that's a kind of out there. And and I don't think everyone, you know, there are companies only selling to SaaS. I don't, I don't believe that necessarily, but you know, part of your funnel will be that. And you know, part of the reason why you could sell a lot in 21 was because part of your funnel was SaaS.
[00:24:57] That now simply has changed, right? And kind of the flip side of that coin why has it changed? Well, because funding for SaaS is terrible. we've, we had Peter Walker on the show and you know, we were basically leading with like only AI companies are getting funding and, and he was like, well, you know, it's, I think he said something like 30 percent of, of the funding is going towards AI.
[00:25:18] So there is some other money that goes somewhere else. But yes, it's you know, it's it's not the same amount anymore and and the scrutiny is way higher The bars way higher and you know, what what used to be a great SaaS investment is now like Oh, this is gonna be a tough sell like, you know, and and I think those two things combined that kind of reinforce each other I think but I think that's the last thing I really hate about SaaS is like, really difficult to sell to other SaaS companies because SaaS companies don't get funding and they're usually not profitable, at least not in our space.
[00:25:51] And it kind of, that rounds out, that rounds out the list here for me.
[00:25:55] Mikkel: That's it. I also just find it hilarious, by the way. So we've been recording a lot, especially today. We've been recording a lot of episodes. We, we discussed, hey, we've done so much AI. We've done so many episodes on AI now. Let's cool it a little bit and do something. Let's get back to SaaS. And what do we do?
[00:26:13] Five things we hate about SaaS. This is like funny how that works sometimes. It's funny how that works. Next we're going to do five things we hate about selling or salespeople. Let's see. Or AI, Oh yeah, yeah, that's true. Let's do AI
[00:26:24] next. That's actually, you know, maybe we should do that. That's fair. So even the score a bit.
[00:26:27] Uh, If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to hit like, subscribe, follow. Maybe we had a CTA in the beginning. I don't know, but you're getting another one here. Toni, thanks so much for joining me on, I guess the last episode we're recording in, uh, 2024.
[00:26:40] Toni: That's it. Mikkel, thank you so much. Thank you for the year. And thanks everyone for listening and sticking with us. uh, have a good day and have a good new year. Bye bye.
[00:26:47] Mikkel: Bye.