5 Insights that shifted my Mindset
Most SaaS tools are overbuilt for what people use, and under built for what they need.
You walk into a call and someone says,
“We’ve got the stack: Jira, CI/CD, observability, all that works.”
Then two minutes later they admit they’re still copy-pasting release updates into a Google Doc every Friday.
They’re not lacking tools. They’re lacking translation between them.
Too many SaaS products are built for demos, not for reality.
They add features instead of intelligence. They integrate, but don’t align.
👉 If your product doesn’t adapt to how the customer actually works, it becomes overhead, fast.
Strategy decks are just theatre. People pay for in-the-room judgment.
I’ve stopped showing slides.
Stopped walking in with a shiny Notion link.
Now, I open the call, share screen, and start mapping.
Live. Create flow of their systems. Their chaos. Their blind spots.
No pitch. Just signal under pressure.
That’s when the posture changes. That’s when trust starts.
👉 If you can’t make the room smarter in real time, no framework’s going to save you.
Off-the-shelf AI agents suck.. until they’re custom-built for the real work.
Tried five agents off the shelf this month. They all promised:
“Just connect your stack, describe the task, and we’ll take it from there.”
Sure. Until you ask it to:
“Monitor release logs, correlate with Jira tickets, flag regressions, and escalate if SLA risk hits 10%.”
Then it chokes. Or worse, makes something up.
Because it doesn’t know your systems. Your patterns. Your language.
👉 Agents aren’t value out of the box. They’re scaffolding.
The intelligence? You still have to build that.
Selling in the US isn’t harder.. it just demands sharper calibration.
This week, I ran the same pitch three times. The reactions were…educational.
A PE partner stops me mid-slide and says:
“Don’t show me features. Show me how this moves EBITDA across the portfolio.”
A DevOps lead interrupts:
“You’re losing me. Just tell me where it plugs in and what it automates.”
And a GCC head says,
“We can’t afford innovation that breaks things. Make it invisible or make it optional.”
Same product. Three totally different buying logics.
👉 If you miss the lens, you miss the deal.
Translate your value with precision.. or you’re pitching into a void.
We’re not scaling by sprinting. We’re scaling by cutting.
No frantic energy this month. No dashboards full of pretend momentum.
We trimmed.
Said no to distractions that looked “promising.”
Said yes to one offer that’s actually landing.
Rebuilt the narrative. Cleaned up the path.
It feels slower but everything’s moving faster.
👉 Focus isn’t a vibe. It’s a weapon.
Growth doesn’t come from more motion. It comes from clearer intent.
Final Thought
You don’t scale by doing more.
You scale by doing fewer things that make everything else irrelevant.