“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 4)

What Martech Created

To understand why AdWaste became a $500 billion plague, we need to look not at Google or Meta but at the failings of Martech itself. The uncomfortable truth is simple: customers weren’t stolen by Adtech—they were abandoned by Martech.

The Mirage of Personalisation

Martech promised one-to-one experiences. The reality? Most platforms still deliver eight or ten crude segments for millions of customers. “Women 25–34” or “loyal high-spenders” isn’t personalisation—it’s stereotyping at scale.

Consider the BRTN framework that reveals the true customer distribution: 20% Best customers generate 60% of revenue, 40% Rest customers contribute 30%, and 40% Test customers (dormant or churned) account for just 10%. Yet Martech treats them all with the same blunt instruments. For the Best customers, these campaigns may still convert—they’d likely buy anyway. But for the silent majority—the Rest and Test customers who make up 80% of databases—this broad-brush approach feels irrelevant. They disengage, drift away, and eventually vanish into “One and Done”.

Focus on the Easy Wins

Platforms and marketers alike doubled down on what was easiest: talking to customers who would likely buy anyway. Best customers get the best campaigns because they make the numbers look good. It’s the marketing equivalent of fishing in a stocked pond—impressive catches, but not sustainable growth.

But ignoring the Rest meant ignoring tomorrow’s revenue. The “missing middle”—those who bought once or twice but never returned—became a lost generation of customers. For every brand, this group is the single largest profit leak. And it’s not just lost revenue; it’s the trigger for the reacquisition spiral. When a Rest customer becomes a Test customer (dormant), the only path back is through expensive ads.

Complexity Masquerading as Capability

Another promise Martech made was simplicity. In practice, platforms became so bloated that 60–70% of features go unused. Dashboards multiply, journeys fragment, integrations break, and marketers need armies of specialists just to run basic campaigns. The average enterprise uses tens of marketing tools, yet customer engagement keeps declining.

Faced with this complexity, many brands default to the easy alternative: handing more budget to Google and Meta for quick traffic fixes. When retention tools become too difficult to use, acquisition platforms win by default. Facebook’s ad manager, for all its flaws, at least delivers predictable results with minimal expertise required.

Input Pricing, Zero Accountability

Perhaps the most damaging flaw is how Martech charges. Vendors bill by inputs—emails sent, monthly active users, API calls made—not by outcomes. This model rewards volume, not value. The incentive is to send more campaigns, not to create more conversions.

This creates a perverse dynamic: Martech profits whether retention works or not. Send a million emails that everyone ignores? That’s revenue for the platform. Meanwhile, brands are flooded with vanity metrics—open rates, click rates, engagement scores—that mask the fundamental failure: customers are leaving.

The AdWaste Equation

Put these failures together and the equation becomes inevitable:

  • Failed personalisation → 80% of customers ignored
  • Focus on Best → Rest and Test abandoned (the 80% who need nurturing)
  • Complexity → 60–70% features unused, adoption stalled
  • Input pricing → volume without value, no accountability

The outcome is systematically lost customers. And every lost customer is worth their weight in gold to Google and Meta, who happily sell them back through search and social ads at 5–7x the cost of retention. This is why 70% of marketing budgets now flow to reacquisition. Not because Adtech outsmarted Martech, but because Martech left the door wide open.

The Double Taxation of Failure

Think about the economics: every retention failure isn’t just lost revenue, it’s double taxation. First, brands lose the customer’s lifetime value—all their future purchases vanish. Then brands pay again—often more than the original customer acquisition cost—to bring the lost customers back through ads. Because if they don’t, their competitors will. Either way, the profit vanishes into what becomes a permanent leak in the brand’s P&L.

A typical D2C brand with 100,000 customers faces this reality: 20,000 Best customers keep buying, 40,000 Rest customers are slowly disengaging, and 40,000 Test customers are already gone. Martech focuses on the 20,000. Adtech profits from the 80,000. It’s a perfect parasitic relationship—Martech’s neglect becomes Adtech’s nourishment. And the brand bleeds money trying to refill a bucket that Martech keeps emptying.

Martech didn’t just fail to keep customers; it created the very conditions that allowed AdWaste to thrive. By ignoring the missing middle, focusing on features and delinking itself from RoI, hiding behind complexity, and rewarding inputs instead of outcomes, Martech effectively became Adtech’s greatest ally. [It is like in politics where a weak Opposition leader becomes the best friend of the ruling party.]

The result? A half-trillion-dollar tax on growth, paid willingly by brands desperate to win back the very customers they already had. And Martech, the supposed solution, was the cause all along.

Thinks 1748

David Brooks: “I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.””

WSJ speaks to David McCullough: ““At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude. History encourages “a sense of proportion about life,” gives us a sense of scale. “What history teaches, it teaches mainly by example.” To live in an era of momentous change and huge transitions is to experience great pressure. Knowing history, reading it, imparts “a sense of navigation,” a new realization of what we’ve been through and are made of. Those who came before us were tough: “There’s no one who hasn’t an ancestor who went through some form of hell.” In the end, knowing history “is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive.””

William Boyd: “The tropes of spy fiction are something that everybody can connect with very easily, whereas the tropes of horror or science fiction or ‘romantasy’ are something alien. We’ve all betrayed people and been betrayed and we all lie and we all pretend to be other people that we’re not.”

NYTimes: ““How was your weekend?” “Good, but I spent way too much time watching people make tiny food on TikTok.” “Whoa, like … dollhouse-size?” “Yes! If you want to learn to make a lasagna in a bottle cap, let me know.” “That’s hilarious! We could organize a tiny food potluck — and fit the entire spread on this coaster!” “Ha! And we’d need tiny furniture, too. Should we ask that guy over there wearing Carhartt to build it?” Our research shows that this sort of riffing pays off…Our aim in conversation, then, shouldn’t be to mine for surface-level commonalities or go on a charm offensive. Instead, we should ask ourselves, “What could we create together in this moment?””

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 3)

The Enemy Is Us

With this background, we can return to the question that started it all: What does Netcore—or any Martech company—truly stand against?

The conventional answer would be predictable: we stand against Adtech’s exploitation, against wasted budgets, against the complexity of modern marketing. But these are symptoms, not enemies. They’re problems, not adversaries. And as Ries makes clear, you can’t rally troops against a problem—you need a villain with a face, a foe worth fighting.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that emerged from that colleague’s question: if we apply Ries’s framework honestly, Martech’s strategic enemy isn’t Google or Meta. It isn’t even AdWaste.

Martech’s strategic enemy is Martech itself.

This isn’t wordplay or contrarianism. It’s a sober recognition of reality. Consider the evidence: Martech promised personalisation, delivered mass segmentation. Promised retention, chased only the easy buyers. Promised simplicity, buried brands in complexity. Promised accountability, hid behind input pricing.

Every one of these failures created the vacuum that Adtech filled. When Martech failed to retain customers, brands had no choice but to reacquire them through Google. When Martech ignored the “Rest” and “Test” customers—that crucial 80% who aren’t yet loyal—it forced brands into expensive remarketing campaigns. When Martech made itself so complex that brands needed armies of specialists, it made the simplicity of Facebook and Instagram ads irresistible.

Take Ria, a customer who bought once from a D2C beauty brand. Martech labelled her “female, 25-34, urban” and sent her the same email as 50,000 others. She ignored it. After ten generic emails, she vanished. Six months later, that same brand paid Google to show her an ad for the product she’d already bought. That’s not Adtech’s victory—it’s Martech’s surrender.

We need to fight against our own industry’s failures—the broken promises, the abandoned customers, the complexity that killed adoption, the input-based pricing that destroyed accountability. We need to stand against the very thing we’ve been.

This is what will make our position unique and powerful. We must not be another Martech company claiming to be 10% better. We must become the anti-Martech, the cure for what marketing technology has become. As Ries writes, “The mind understands opposition faster than superiority.” By positioning ourselves against Martech itself, we can achieve the clarity she advocates.

Think about the implications through three fundamental inversions:

Traditional Martech focuses on the Best customers; we champion the Lost 90%. Traditional Martech charges for software; we guarantee outcomes. Traditional Martech adds complexity; we deliver radical simplicity.

These aren’t incremental improvements—they’re categorical rejections of everything Martech represents.

This isn’t about internal reform or gradual improvement. You can’t fix something that’s fundamentally broken. You can’t iterate your way out of a category failure. You don’t cure a disease by treating symptoms—you replace the failing organ. When an entire industry has become the problem, the only solution is transplant, not treatment.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Netflix didn’t improve Blockbuster; it eliminated it. And as Ries documents, breakthrough brands don’t iterate on existing categories—they replace them by defining clear enemies. Salesforce didn’t build better CRM software; it positioned against software itself with “No Software” as its rallying cry, moving everything to the cloud. Tide didn’t improve soap; it declared war on soap itself with synthetic detergents. Tropicana didn’t make better frozen concentrate; it stood against frozen entirely with “not from concentrate.”

Each identified their category’s fundamental limitation and built the alternative. They didn’t fight for position within an existing market—they created markets that made the old ones obsolete.

That’s what Next Marketing must represent—not better Martech, but Martech’s replacement. We’re not fighting for market share within a broken category. We’re creating the category that makes the current one extinct.

The enemy is us. And recognising that changes everything about how we build, sell, and position our future.

Thinks 1747

Adam Tooze: “The key difference between 2022 and now is more subtle. We need to look to the very definition of crisis to understand it. The term, common to many western languages, derives from ancient Greek medical doctrine. It refers to the moment in the course of a disease when the patient reaches a turning point between life and death. Either the fever breaks, or it proceeds to a terminal conclusion. A crisis, therefore, requires two things: a body, in the broad sense, an integral unit that is still alive but whose existence is threatened; and a threat that has a naturalised logic of progression. One reason that crisis seems less apt a term in the current moment is that the disruptions are so intentional.”

WSJ: “In “The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China,” Ms. Jia and Mr. Li (with their contributing author, Claire Cousineau) explain why the test so dominates China’s education system and society. The authors direct this lively and informative volume at foreign readers who want to learn about gaokao culture, elements of which might appear in local American schools as large numbers of Chinese students go abroad to study. The gaokao-focused education system, we are told, is “a centralized hierarchical tournament” that promotes fewer and fewer students with each round. It is the epitome of a zero-sum game, children competing against their neighbors for one of the quota-allocated spots at the next level. By high school, those students most intent on achieving a high gaokao score will dedicate endless days to practice tests, training their minds for the marathon exam looming at the end of their secondary education. More than 10 million students take the gaokao each year, with only 500,000 entry spots available at the country’s officially ranked 100 most-elite universities. A single point in either direction can seal a student’s fate.”

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton: “AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.” More: “He makes a passionate pitch for how we might overcome some of the risks of modern AI systems, developed by “ambitious and competitive men” who envision AI becoming a personal assistant. That sounds benign enough, but not to Hinton. “When the assistant is much smarter than you, how are you going to retain that power? There is only one example we know of a much more intelligent being controlled by a much less intelligent being, and that is a mother and baby . . . If babies couldn’t control their mothers, they would die.” Hinton believes “the only hope” for humanity is engineering AI to become mothers to us, “because the mother is very concerned about the baby, preserving the life of the baby”, and its development. “That’s the kind of relationship we should be aiming for.””

NYTimes: “In mid-2015, the Chinese government announced a program called “Made in China 2025.” It would provide companies in 10 strategic industries with large, low-interest loans from state-owned investment funds and development banks, assistance in acquiring foreign competitors and generous subsidies for scientific research. At the time, the stated goal was that Chinese companies would control 80 percent of the domestic markets of those industries by 2025. That effort has largely succeeded, Dr. Wong Leung and other analysts said. Chinese clean tech companies have come to dominate both domestic and international markets. While Western countries like the United States and Australia pioneered now-widespread technologies like solar panels, batteries and supercapacitors (which are like batteries, only smaller, and provide quick bursts of energy), China is now building on those designs and creating new, groundbreaking versions.”

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 2)

The Strategic Enemy

Let’s begin with a brief discussion about the book which set off my new thinking. Here is what Laura Ries writes in her book, The Strategic Enemy:

A strategic enemy is an oppositional force that your brand or category stands against. It could be a competitor, convention, or concept. Having a strategic enemy will force you to clearly define what you are not, which will enable consumers to more easily understand what you are.

…When you define what you’re against, it becomes clear what you are for. Instead of making claims your brand is better, it’s better to contrast with a strategic enemy how your brand is different. The mind understands opposition faster than superiority. Positioning your brand against a strategic enemy elevates your brand from “just another choice” into the right choice. It forces your brand to sharpen its focus to become a brand worth fighting for. The enemy could be a competitor, but it could also be another category, convention, or concept.

…Finding an enemy forces your brand to focus on a specific idea. This focus will energize the company and consumers alike to rally around your cause. A strategic enemy must be instantly accepted as a worthy adversary. The contrast should be simple and clear. It is best done using an indisputable difference.

…Go out and pick your fight. Just remember, the concept of the strategic enemy is not about conflict for conflict’s sake. It’s about creating a contrast to bring clarity, focus, and commitment to your own brand. Positioning against a clearly defined enemy…will give your brand the sharpness and emotional charge necessary to cut through the clutter and be accepted into the mind of the prospect to become a brand worth fighting for.

Laura Ries added in an interview with John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing): “Here’s the biggest problem is most companies aren’t focused enough to have an enemy. They do too many things in too many markets and try to appeal to too many people. When you do that, you don’t have a focus and without a focus, you don’t have an enemy. So sometimes the first thing is looking at yourself and saying, what can we say no to? If you say no to something that tends to put you in a direction where you can find an enemy.”

A comment from The Financial Brand: “Her antidote is intentionally counterintuitive: stop trying to be “better,” and instead become unmistakably different by defining, and then defeating, a single, visible foe…Ries argues that when brands rally around an “enemy,” and reinforce the fight with a memorable “visual hammer,” they earn a permanent slot in the customer’s mind.”

Thinks 1746

Economist: “Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear…There will be other losses from a reading decline. Few engines of social mobility are more effective than reading: just ask the Scottish shepherds. Rich children may do it more, but reading is an egalitarian invention. No one—not your nanny, not your tutor, your friends or your posh school—can impel you to devour a book except you. Reading is not merely a tool: it is also one of life’s great pleasures, as Dickens knew well. As Joe, the kind blacksmith in “Great Expectations”, says: “Give me a good book…and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better.” Once people forget that, things really will feel bleak.”

WSJ: “At its most basic level, much like eBay, livestreaming lets anyone sell. Sellers stream videos on their phone, tablet or computer via apps like Tilt or Whatnot. In real time, they talk viewers through items they’re selling from the intimacy of their bedroom or a high-production set. Shoppers get answers to their questions in a live-chat before bidding on an item in an auction or committing to a purchase. In the more corporate version, big brands like Poshmark, Amazon and eBay itself now all offer livestream shopping, often with “known quantity” hosts.”

Arnold Kling on reading with AI: “Reading a non-fiction book from cover-to-cover is not efficient. I used to say that I read books “from the outside in.” I look at the book flap to find out about the author, who wrote the blurbs, and the subject matter of the book. Then I read the introduction and conclusion in order to get the main ideas. If I have read something by a different author that seems relevant, I look for that author in the index, and I head to those pages… I start by asking the AI to summarize the key themes of the book. For each theme that the AI lists, I stop and try to put it into my own words. I test my understanding by feeding my words into the AI, in order get confirmation that my interpretation is correct. Another way that I ensure understanding is to suggest possible examples or ask the AI to provide examples.”

Bloomberg: “India’s four-year-old mission to develop a local semiconductor industry is gaining momentum, suggests government data. To date, there are 10 semiconductor projects; $18 billion in investment commitments; subsidies of over $7 allocated; 23 chip design projects sanctioned; a new semiconductor-led technical education curriculum, and over 60,000 students under various training programs.”

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 1)

A Question

For years, I’ve fought against the $500 billion AdWaste plague—the staggering burn of budgets reacquiring customers brands already knew. In presentation after presentation, I’ve shown how 70% of marketing budgets are wasted on reacquisition—much of it becoming ‘revenue taxes’ paid to Google and Meta for the privilege of finding lost customers. This crusade against AdWaste has become my calling card, the foundation of my thinking about modern marketing’s fundamental dysfunction.

But recently, that foundation was shaken.

I was reading Laura Ries’s provocative new book, The Strategic Enemy, when her central thesis stopped me cold. Ries argues that breakthrough companies don’t succeed by being better—they succeed by defining and defeating a strategic enemy. Uber didn’t just offer better taxis—it declared war on the taxi industry. Tesla didn’t just make electric cars—it declared war on combustion engines. The enemy crystallises the mission, rallies the troops, and clarifies the value proposition.

This made me confront an uncomfortable question: What does Netcore truly stand against?

The obvious answer seemed clear—we fight the Adtechs, those profit-devouring giants who’ve turned customer reacquisition into a trillion-dollar tax on business growth. For years, I’ve positioned them as marketing’s great villain, the strategic enemy that must be defeated.

Then a colleague asked me a question that changed everything.

“What if you’ve got it backwards?”

He continued with surgical precision: “What if Adtechs aren’t the disease but merely the symptom? What if the real story is that Martech platforms—companies like ours—created the very problem we claim to solve? Think about it: brands only pay the Google tax because their marketing technology failed to keep customers engaged. They only need reacquisition because retention didn’t work.”

The implications were staggering. If Martech had delivered on its promise—if it had truly enabled brands to build lasting customer relationships—would the AdWaste problem even exist? When brands ask, “Who lost my customers, moved my profits, and killed my future?” perhaps they shouldn’t point at Mountain View or Menlo Park. Perhaps they should look at their marketing clouds, their customer engagement platforms, their entire Martech stack that promised retention but delivered abandonment.

Every failed retention campaign, every ignored customer, every broken journey creates another profitable transaction for Google and Meta.

Martech hasn’t been fighting Adtech; it’s been feeding it.

This revelation transforms everything. It means the enemy isn’t external—it’s internal. The call isn’t coming from Silicon Valley; it’s coming from inside the house. We haven’t been David fighting Goliath; we’ve been Goliath’s arms dealer.

If this hypothesis is correct—and I believe it is—then NeoMarketing isn’t just the antidote to Adtech. It’s the cure for Martech’s disease. And that single shift changes everything—how we build, how we position, and how we deliver the future of marketing.

Thinks 1745

Mint: “As marketers move beyond impressions, attention emerges as the new metric for effectiveness. Agencies and brands are adapting to a world where visibility is no longer guaranteed—and neither is impact.”

SN Subrahmanyan, chairman & MD, Larsen & Toubro: “Our philosophy is simple: grow to sell or sell to grow. ‘Grow to sell’ means scaling businesses until they’re attractive for monetisation. ‘Sell to grow’ applies when businesses underperform—we exit and reallocate capital. I’ve applied this approach extensively. And when a business isn’t saleable, we wind it down.”

WSJ: “A classic version of the loss leader is high-low pricing: Price a product at a loss and stick it in the back of the store if possible. Costco does this with its other famous loss leader, the $4.99 rotisserie chicken. “Chances are you’re going to pick up other items in the store while you’re going to buy that loss leader, and usually those other items are priced at a higher margin,” said Barbara Kahn, a Wharton School marketing professor…Conventional thinking behind loss leaders centered on high-low pricing. But a 2014 paper from economists Younghwan In and Julian Wright added another wrinkle on how a loss leader might work. Their idea: A company advertises a low-price product to signal that upgraded items in the same category are also a good buy.”

Bloomberg on AI in America’s schools.

Arnold Kling: “My outlook for the future of writing is that it will look more like editing. The AI will do most of the work. A good editor can suggest topics. He can provide general guidance. He can recommend style. When the author submits a draft, the editor can propose revisions. My guess is that in another year or two only a very few students will be able to develop enough skills to write better than an AI. But maybe every student can learn to work with an AI as an editor.”

Martech’s Post-SaaS, AI-First Trillion-Dollar Future (Part 8)

AI Analysis

I asked Claude and ChatGPT to review the alignment with the ideas discussed in the vibe coding essay.

Claude

The core ideas between your two essays align remarkably well and create a coherent narrative arc. Here’s how they connect and what might be worth considering:

Strong Alignment Points

  1. The Commoditization of Features

Both essays nail the central insight: AI/vibe coding makes features trivial to build, so value shifts to what can’t be instantly replicated:

  • Vibe coding essay: “accumulated intelligence, validated data patterns, and institutional trust”
  • Martech essay: “Accumulated behavioural intelligence from billions of interactions”
  1. The Platform/OS Vision

Both position the future as platforms enabling ecosystems rather than monolithic applications:

  • Vibe coding: “Marketing OS… iOS or Android of Martech”
  • Martech: “Agent Marketplace… turning martech from monolithic software into a composable agent economy”
  1. Outcome-Based Economics

Both emphasize the shift from capability to results:

  • Vibe coding discusses outcome-based pricing emerging from the pricing crisis
  • Martech makes this central with Progency and Alpha models
  1. The Democratization Theme

Both recognize that AI enables non-technical users to build solutions:

  • Vibe coding: “citizen developers” and “domain expert developers”
  • Martech: The “hypertail” of billions of micro-apps

Potential Gaps or Tensions

  1. The Speed of Transformation
  • Martech essay: “2-3 year window” for transformation
  • Vibe coding essay: Suggests more gradual adoption with hybrid approaches Consider reconciling these timelines or acknowledging different speeds for different segments.
  1. The “Vibe Coding Hangover” Warning Your vibe coding essay extensively covers the downsides (security vulnerabilities, debugging nightmares, cost explosions), but the martech essay is more optimistic. You might want to acknowledge in the martech essay how companies will navigate these challenges.
  2. The Human Element The vibe coding essay touches on developer role evolution (“architects, reviewers, and quality guardians”), while the martech essay focuses more on marketer empowerment. Consider addressing how marketing teams will need to evolve their skills.

What You Might Add

  • The Competitive Dynamics: While both essays mention AI-native startups vs. incumbents, you could explore more deeply how vibe coding specifically enables new martech entrants to challenge established players.
  • The Data Governance Challenge: With vibe-coded tools proliferating and accessing APIs, how do companies maintain data governance, security, and compliance? This bridges both essays’ concerns.
  • The Integration Reality: Vibe coding makes building easy but integration complex. How does this affect the “8,000 tools to infinite micro-apps” transition?
  • The Pricing Model Transition: You could explore how companies practically transition from seat-based to outcome-based pricing while vibe coding disrupts their cost structure.

The Unified Narrative

Together, these essays tell a powerful story:

  1. Vibe coding democratizes software creation
  2. This forces martech to transform from features to outcomes
  3. The winners will be intelligence and trust platforms that enable infinite creation while guaranteeing results

Your vision of Netcore as the “trust, intelligence, and outcomes” layer that enables vibe-coded innovation while solving real problems (AdWaste, revenue taxes) is compelling and consistent across both pieces.

The main opportunity is to more explicitly connect how vibe coding’s challenges will be solved by the new martech architecture. This would strengthen the argument that established players like Netcore have unique advantages in the vibe coding era—not despite the disruption, but because of it.

ChatGPT

Alignment of Core Ideas

  1. Democratization vs. Reinvention
  • Vibe Coding → Anyone can now create software via natural language, making features and interfaces instantly replicable.
  • Post-SaaS Martech → Because features are commoditised, martech defensibility shifts to intelligence, outcomes, and data moats.
    👉 Alignment: Both highlight that features are no longer the moat—the future lies in outcomes, data, and orchestration.
  1. Agents as the Next Layer
  • Vibe Coding → Agents become orchestrators, stitching together multiple SaaS tools into workflows without human setup.
  • Post-SaaS Martech → Agents become the new operating system (Agents Collective, BrandTwins, TwinLedgers).
    👉 Alignment: Both position agents as the real interface, replacing dashboards and reducing SaaS to infrastructure.
  1. The Build vs. Buy Shift
  • Vibe Coding → Build vs. buy tilts toward “build,” since custom solutions can be spun up cheaply via prompts.
  • Post-SaaS Martech → Enterprises will increasingly build their own tools, collapsing SaaS categories into agentic orchestration.
    👉 Alignment: Both anticipate category collapse as vibe coding and agents empower bespoke, in-house solutions.
  1. New Business Models
  • Vibe Coding → Challenges SaaS seat-based pricing; pushes toward usage and outcomes.
  • Post-SaaS Martech → Introduces Alpha (outcome-based economics), Ads (cooperative networks), and ZeroBase/Progency models.
    👉 Alignment: Both agree SaaS pricing is obsolete; the future is outcome-linked.

What You’ve Missed (Gaps)

  1. Human + Organisational Strain
  • In the Post-SaaS essay, you explore AI intensity (compressed cycles, burnout risk).
  • In Vibe Coding, this organisational/human sustainability angle is underplayed. Adding it would highlight that the bottleneck isn’t just what AI can do, but what humans and orgs can absorb.
  1. Security, Reliability, and Compliance as Differentiators
  • Vibe Coding essay touches on debugging nightmares and security vulnerabilities.
  • Post-SaaS essay doesn’t stress enough that in a world of infinite vibe-coded apps, established martech players like Netcore can win by being the trust, compliance, and reliability layer.
  1. Ecosystem / App Store Vision
  • Vibe Coding hints at an ecosystem where many micro-apps emerge.
  • Post-SaaS frames martech’s future as trillions in value through Agents, Attention, Alpha, Ads.
  • Missing piece: the App Store / Marketplace model—Netcore (or others) as the “iOS of Marketing,” enabling vibe-coded/agent-built apps to plug into a trusted ecosystem.
  1. Atomic Rewards / Mu Layer
  • Post-SaaS covers Mu under Attention, but the Vibe Coding essay doesn’t link democratized software creation with incentive systems. Connecting them (e.g., vibe-coded attention apps monetised via Mu) would strengthen coherence.

Bottom Line

Yes — the essays align beautifully. Vibe Coding explains why SaaS economics collapse (features become disposable), and Post-SaaS Martech explains what replaces them (Agents, Attention, Alpha, Ads).

The biggest gap is not conceptual but architectural: you should explicitly connect “vibe coding builds apps” with “martech provides intelligence, trust, outcomes”. That framing makes the two essays feel like two halves of one manifesto.

Thinks 1744

WSJ: “The main difference between America’s brand of capitalism and elsewhere: a focus on the individual and an incentive to take risks.”

NYTimes reviews “The Story of CO2” [via Business Standard]: “Almost all of the energy that we have access to comes from the sun, and photosynthesis requires CO2.  In the usual processes, that energy trickles up through the food chain until it’s exhausted and released as waste heat. But the great luck of this planet is that rather than being consumed or rotted (same thing), reduced to waste and raw materials, some carbon stores — washes of plankton and heaps of swamp life — were instead entombed for millennia in stone. Thus, fossil fuels are “fossilised sunlight”: solar energy on reserve. This buried carbon also acts, in one of Brannen’s running metaphors, as a giant capacitor. It was charged by geology; it is now being discharged by human workings “on a planetary scale.”” 

New Yorker: “A.I. is coming for culture…We’re used to algorithms guiding our choices. When machines can effortlessly generate the content we consume, though, what’s left for the human imagination?”

SaaStr: “Everyone thinks their AI tool will save labor costs, but you can’t all get credit for the same labor savings. When five different AI vendors are each asking for $60K-100K+ a year to automate parts of your sales process – SDR tools, BDR tools, conversation intelligence, pipeline tools – the math stops working. Again, yes it’s cheap than a human.  So that gets the budget nod — today.  For now.  But ultimately, the pressure will come as we spend millions and millions on different, paid AI agents from different vendors that seem to overlap…Smart companies are already moving toward the Rippling approach: “Give us five agents and an orchestration layer, and we’ll handle it all.” Why manage five point solutions when one vendor can deliver the complete workflow?”

WSJ on how to use AI to learn a difficult concept: “AI offers the ability to dive into fields we never thought we’d learn—as long as you watch out for hallucinations and proceed step by step. First, whether it is French existentialism or principles of building, ask the AI for a big-picture overview: Tell it that it is delivering a first-year university lecture, or explaining the idea to a 10th-grader. Ask it to tell you the major terms in the field, summarize key findings and describe areas of uncertainty and disagreement. Once you’ve grasped that overview, do your own research: Look for peer-reviewed articles that have plenty of citations (100 or more is ideal; 20 or 30 is all right for niche topics). Give the articles to the AI and ask it to synthesize the findings. If you learn better out loud, use Claude or ChatGPT’s audio interface to talk to the AI about each article and ask questions. You can also upload a collection to Google’s NotebookLM, and ask it to generate a podcast on the subject, based on the articles.”