My. Phone. Has. Been. Blowing. Up. All. Damn. Week.

Earlier this week the HubSpot stock fell by 11% in one day. The stock is down about 70% overall since it’s 2025 high. People are panicking and rightfully so. I’ve been getting texts, slacks, emails, and DMs from friends, colleagues, current HubSpotters, former HubSpotters, and random people on the internet. Yes, I spent 8 years there, but I’ve been out of there for 3 years now so I don’t know any more than what the news tells me. That said I still have some thoughts…

The first is that this isn’t a HubSpot issue but an industry-wide one.

Is SaaS dead? Not all the way but it’s gonna be a rough ride for some companies

Is SaaS dead?

No, I don’t think it is. We’re still seeing a ton of amazing, new companies show up almost daily. Companies like Fathom or Beehiiv are thriving. I think the point solutions that do one or two things really well? They're the future. But the bloated all-in-ones are sweating right now. And they should be.

I recorded this video with Melissa Rosenthal (mullets and all) a year ago—it was posted on February 13, 2025.

All-in-one software is garbage (from Feb. 2025)

The take: all-in-one platforms that specialize in mediocrity are in trouble.

A year later, the stock market is proving the point because it wasn’t just HubSpot. It was Salesforce and Microsoft and Adobe and Intuit and Workday and a bunch of other stocks that “crashed.” I’m not a financial expert (by any means) but when I think of these companies, I don’t exactly think world class.

Here's what the big guys keep forgetting: disruption doesn't care about your market cap, it doesn't care about your install base, and it doesn't care that you've been around for 20 years.

Blockbuster thought they were untouchable—they turned down Netflix.

Kodak thought they were untouchable—I watched them fall apart real time as my dad’s photo lab shut down.

Every category leader ever thought they were different until they weren't.

Do I think these companies are going to go out of business? No. I think they’ll rebound because they still have customers and market share and brand awareness but the game has changed. And something needs to change.

Let me guess… AI?

You know it! People can now vibe code their own mediocre solution for a fraction of what these bloated platforms charge. Why pay $50k/year for features you don't use when you can stitch together exactly what you need?

Now kidding aside, I don’t actually believe vibe coded apps are the real future. Some people will create amazing things with them, for the majority of us we’ll want someone else to do the work. We’ll want support. We’ll want help docs and knowledge bases and academies. That’s why I don’t think SaaS is dead. But man will it look different…

The winners in this next chapter:

• Point solutions that are genuinely best-in-class at one thing - these are your Fathoms, Beehiivs, Capsules, Airs, and so on
• Platforms that play nice with others - examples here are tools like Canva, Clay and Notion
• Tools that let you build YOUR workflow, instead of forcing one on you - I don’t hate all-in-ones, I just prefer my own opinions about how the work should be done over theirs and I’d rather build Dmitry’s all-in-one. Shout out to Zapier for making this easy.

The losers:

• The "jack of all trades" platforms that do nothing well - there’s a whole list of them earlier in this newsletter. I do want to be clear—and this isn’t me talking out of both sides of my mouth—I’m not saying they’re bad products. In aggregate, they do the job, but there are 100% better options out there that do that one thing you need better
• Companies building ChatGPT wrappers calling it AI first - you can just tell the difference between tools where AI was built natively versus being bolted on
• Platforms still charging per seat like it's 2015 - the fact that I still have to give people full access to a tool that they only need one view or feature of is madness.

SaaS isn't dead. But the assumption that the big guys are untouchable? That's what's dying.

Did you know that on average a mid-market tech company has anywhere from 200-250 pieces of software that they’re paying for (it’s > 500 for large enterprise). Most of them don’t communicate with each other out of the box—this is actually one of the primary reasons all-in-ones blew up.

I’m not here to sell you on software sprawl but brand sprawl is also real. How many of those tools are being used to communicate with customers? How many of those tools live outside of marketing? How many of those tools have an owner that doesn’t work at the company anymore? I bet there are quite a few.

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