Exploring the Decline of SaaS Stocks: The Real Reason Behind the Fall

Why are SaaS stocks in freefall? Everyone is missing one simple root cause: They Just Aren’t Very Good Software Anymore.

Not in the Age of AI.

Let me give you an example from this week. We are still using Marketo for email marketing. It’s a very dated platform but does have scale.

For the last 2+ weeks, the Unsubscribe link has been broken on the emails Marketo sends from us.

That’s a CAN-SPAM violation and one that is really core to what Marketo does.

First, support told us it could not be fixed and blamed Salesforce. This makes no sense. We've literally not integrated them, changed nothing, and send no emails from Salesforce (yet).

Then, we were told the only way we could get it resolved was if we talked to engineering. We finally did.

They first blamed Salesforce. Then they said we were using another email client, not Marketo. Then they blamed Beehiv. Beehiv is cool, and we may use it soon, but we've never used it! Then they said it “must be something you are doing.”

Seriously? For $60k+ a year?

They never committed to any fix.

So we spun up a new unsubscribe link in Replit that manually deletes the record in Marketo via their creaky old API.

This is a fail on many levels, yet so many pre-AI companies are still trying to sell $20k-$500k products this way. It worked from 2015-2022 or so.

But no one is going to buy this cr*p anymore when Claude and other AI leaders are just so, so great.

#SaaS stocks #software decline #AI impact #marketo issues #software failure