The Death of SaaS: Why I'm Building Agentic Products Instead
I’ve built and sold a marketing agency for £10 million. Now I’m building products designed to make most marketing software, and indeed most marketing agencies, obsolete. That’s not arrogance; it’s an observation of an inevitable technological shift.
The SaaS model is broken. It’s a relic of a pre-AI era, a digital landlord renting out tools that create more work than they save. We’ve been sold a lie: that access to a dashboard is the same as achieving an outcome. It isn’t. And the bloat, the cost, and the sheer user friction are creating a market ripe for disruption.
This isn’t just a new category. It’s a full-scale replacement. We are moving from Software-as-a-Service to Outcome-as-a-Service, driven by agentic artificial intelligence. And my company, Creative Marketing Group, is planting its flag firmly in this new world.
The SaaS Façade: A Model Built on Friction
Think about your current martech stack. How many logins do you have? Ten? Twenty? How many of those platforms do you use to their full capacity? The honest answer is probably none. You’re paying a monthly subscription for shelf-ware.
SaaS companies don’t sell outcomes; they sell access to a tool. Their business model relies on you logging in, clicking around, and feeling productive. The actual business result is your problem, not theirs. To support this façade, they build enormous, inefficient structures. For every £100k in annual recurring revenue, a typical SaaS firm might burn £20k on a sales team to persuade you to sign up, another £15k on onboarding specialists to teach you how to use the labyrinthine interface, and a further £10k on a customer success team whose real job is churn prevention.
It’s a model built on managing the customer’s frustration, not on delivering value. The burden is placed squarely on you, the user. You have to learn the specific language and workflow of each tool. You become an expert in HubSpot, or Marketo, or Salesforce, not an expert in marketing. Your day is consumed by feeding the machine.
I saw this first-hand with a well-known UK high-street retailer. They spent a fortune on a world-leading CRM platform. The goal was simple: personalise communication and increase loyalty. But the reality was a team of five marketers spending their week pulling lists, creating segments, and manually building campaigns. The tool didn’t do the work; it just provided a clunky workbench for humans to do the work in. The result? Generic, delayed campaigns and zero impact on customer lifetime value. They owned a Ferrari but only knew how to drive it in first gear.
The Contrarian Truth: Your Dashboard is a Bug, Not a Feature
My core belief is this: the perfect software requires as little of your time as possible. An interface, and especially a dashboard, is a confession of failure. It’s an admission that the software can’t complete the task on its own and needs your constant input and supervision.
We’ve been conditioned to see these complex dashboards as a sign of power and sophistication. They are the opposite. They are a monument to friction. They represent the gap between your intent (“I need to win back lapsed customers”) and the outcome.