The Tech Obsession
Why the B2B Software industry has a technology problem.
B2B software is not customer-centric — and it never really was.
This isn’t a critique of intention. Most founders I’ve worked with care genuinely about the people using their product. But caring about customers and building a business around their success are two different things, and the industry has largely chosen the first while calling it the second.
The reason isn’t hard to find. The SaaS model was supposed to solve the alignment problem: because customers pay monthly, they can leave monthly, which means the company only survives if it keeps delivering value. The argument was elegant. What it missed is that the metrics used to measure success — MRR, ARR, pipeline growth — all track acquisition better than they track outcomes. A company can grow ARR for years while its customer base slowly becomes more dissatisfied, more churned, more dependent on discounts to renew. The number goes up. The foundation quietly erodes.
So companies optimise for what they can measure. And what they can measure most clearly is the product: how many features shipped, how many releases this quarter, how much of the roadmap is done. Roadmaps are legible. Customer success is not. It requires judgment, qualitative data, difficult conversations with clients who won’t tell you the truth unless you’ve built real trust with them. Shipping version 2.4 is cleaner. It feels like progress.
This is why, when I sit with a company at €10, €15 or €20M ARR trying to understand why growth has stalled, the answer is almost never the product. The product is usually fine. What’s missing is evidence that the people who bought it are actually winning. There’s no CSM, or there’s one who is functionally a support rep. There’s no repeatable definition of what client success looks like. Nobody can tell me, without pulling up a spreadsheet, which clients are healthy and which are at risk. The entire revenue motion has been pointed outward — towards new acquisition — while the existing base received just enough attention to not churn immediately.
The tragedy of this is that customer success isn’t charity. It is, in economic terms, the highest-leverage activity a B2B software company can do. A client who genuinely succeeds renews without negotiation, expands naturally, refers others unprompted, and becomes the kind of proof point that shortens every subsequent sales cycle. The compounding effect of a customer base that actually wins is enormous — and almost no one is building for it deliberately, because it doesn’t show up fast enough on a monthly dashboard.
The AI moment is making this more urgent, not less. Everyone is rushing to add AI features, to ship AI-native versions of their products, to make sure they’re not left behind. Some of that is reasonable. But what AI actually does, structurally, is accelerate the commoditisation of mediocre solutions. A product that exists purely as a technical delivery mechanism — with no deep customer context, no track record of outcomes, no relationship that a client would articulate as trust — is exactly what an AI-native alternative will replace first. The companies that will survive are the ones whose clients would describe what they achieve with the software, not the software itself. Nobody pays for SaaS; they pay for a result. The subscription is just the current best delivery mechanism for that result. If a better mechanism appears — and it will — the only moat is the depth of the relationship and the proven record of outcomes.
What’s strange is that none of this is controversial in theory. Ask any SaaS CEO whether customers succeeding matters and they’ll say yes, obviously. But then watch what actually gets funded, celebrated, and prioritised: the product launch, the growth hack, the new segment. Customer success, when it exists, is usually the last team to be built and the first to be cut.
I don’t have a clean conclusion to offer here. I’m not sure the incentive structure changes without a generational shift in how the industry thinks about what it’s actually selling. But I do think it’s worth asking, specifically and honestly: in your company, when growth stalls — what do you look at first?
Focus on what matters,
Gaspard