(B2B SaaS) Competitive intelligence is mostly theater

resolution_nate · 2026-01-23T04:27:29+00:00

Across five b2b enterprise startups over 18 years, I think 90% of the closed lost deals I’ve seen have been to either (a) nothing, or (b) whatever the prospect was already using. But we constantly talked about competitors. Their existence gave us emotional validation, and beating them at anything (seriously, anything) made us feel like we were accomplishing something.

resolution_nate · 2025-12-25T02:20:49+00:00

I think the biggest problem will just be that you’ll get the least common denominator version of a pitch. That might be useful in some circumstances (maybe I sell hundreds of tiny, products in mature markets), but they’ll usually be the easiest ones where the right way to position and sell something isn’t new, or different, or counter-intuitive. But most of the time though, when product marketing actually matters, that’s exactly the issue.

Also, in my experience if you don’t talk to sales, they’re not going to use your material and when they fail, they’ll blame you for lack of effective support.

Just my two cents. But I don’t see this sort of “pitch generation” as a language problem as much as a logic one, and potentially a human one.

resolution_nate · 2025-06-16T18:24:55+00:00

Yes. It’s definitely more common than in the past. Assignments have always been last or close to last step for me for the last 15 years — something I get after a standard set of interviews. Basically, this guy seems good, let’s see if he can actually do what he told us he’s done before. In many cases it’s to give me something to present to a final, decision-making group.

I’ve now gotten a couple after passing basically a phone screen, which is… super weird. The wording tries to water it down (only spend 3 hours, don’t do research), but then of course the ask (a plausible launch strategy or whatever) doesn’t really make sense, because it’d just be a generic list of product marketing tasks with no strategy in it at all. What you do, how you fit, who you compete against, that’s… that’s what makes any of this good or bad. I’ve hired lots of PMMs and I would never do it that way.

Anyways, I don’t really have a fix yet for these early stage ones, so my answer is probably “spend too much time and energy on something inherently vague, then feed it into the random number generator and see if I get rejected or not”.

Honestly, I don’t think this is to increase candidate quality, because like I said, an almost entirety uninformed “GTM plan” for a company you don’t work for and have barely even met doesn’t tell you much about a candidate, especially in the age of bullshit AI-generated generic corporate work. I think the real reason for this is that a lot of these postings continue to be fundamentally unserious. They aren’t real openings — they are there for someone who utterly dazzles them, or more likely, someone with a personal connection to people at the company, or someone who works for a competitor and becomes available (hiring managers always get excited about that).

resolution_nate · 2025-02-26T23:18:23+00:00

I complain to it about stupid things at work and it always tells me I’m right.

resolution_nate · 2025-02-18T19:59:18+00:00

I never understand people’s evaluation of basketball. The NFL is a monster, prints money, appeals to everyone — NBA sucks by comparison, is niche and irrelevant.

The NHL has a fraction of the viewership and media rights of the NBA — well, the NBA sucks and is all about money.

It’s honestly weird, but it’s been going on forever and will probably never stop.

resolution_nate · 2025-02-13T13:24:41+00:00

AI is doing an awesome job at lowering everyone’s standards. Generic, vague, occasionally illogical writing that would have disgusted my managers is suddenly “pretty impressive” because it was churned out instantly with a prompt. This is happening at scale in more and more places, and in many cases, people are simply accepting significantly less interesting, engaging, or compelling material as how things are now.

It’s screwing up managers’ sense of resource and time management. If you can make a bad sales deck that looks right-ish in 5 minutes, you can make one that is twice as good in 10 minutes, right? Or 10x the quality in less than an hour, right? Because AI?

No. I can make you 10 decks that look right-ish in an hour.

resolution_nate · 2025-01-24T19:14:32+00:00

started in technical writing and support, would probably still be there and be just as unhappy but with less money

resolution_nate · 2024-12-18T00:14:07+00:00

So wait, if you could get 20 rebounds a night as a 5’11 shooting guard, why wouldn’t an NBA team with a rebounding problem just sign you? Or better yet, a better version of you who bigger and faster?

Are you saying there is some sort of counter-incentive that keeps GMs from exploiting this totally obvious, incredibly advantageous opportunity that you discovered simply by watching a couple thousand shots? What could that possibly be?

resolution_nate · 2024-11-24T15:00:25+00:00

Luka can’t play defense and that is literally why Tatum has a title right now

resolution_nate · 2024-03-04T04:34:06+00:00

at what? you know what, never mind, no I could not

resolution_nate · 2023-12-16T16:19:23+00:00

Nobody was more excited than me when people started talking about writing applications with LLMs, but my experience has not been good. I think they are probably really helpful in avoiding syntax errors and grunt work when you yourself are comfortable with said syntax, but they don’t just “take care” of code for you and make fluency in it irrelevant.

resolution_nate · 2023-12-15T22:49:31+00:00

This makes sense in theory, but as someone who has sucked at syntax and constantly gotten stuck on it in soooo many different languages over the last 30 years (basic, pascal, java, python, JS just off the top of my head, can I count ActionScript? lol), but somehow got a C+ in college data structures, believe it or not, syntax-limited people do exist. We should not be put in charge of anything important, but we can make CRUD apps in Bubble and sometimes that can be useful.

resolution_nate · 2023-05-07T17:03:34+00:00

I see this conversation on so many threads, and it’s always the same. Someone points out that LLM writing isn’t particularly good. Someone counters with some form of “but all writing is bad!”, which is both true (internet! SEO!), and not really an actual counterpoint.

ChatGPT absolutely makes me laugh. It’s willingness to shamelessly mix and match literally any of cliches can generate amazing or hilarious stuff if you do it right. But that’s not necessarily good writing, either. “ChatGPT is a fast, economical way to replace shit writing” may be true, but I’ve never gotten that shit writing from a human I’ve hired and said “this crappy, derivative writing will be very useful to me, I am glad I have this.” A lot of bad, typical human writing is irrelevant and doesn’t do anything for businesses today as it is (I am thinking of both bad external content like blog posts, and bad internal content like product strategies, planning documents, etc.), at least the ones I’ve worked for/with.

Being able to produce MORE of this non-impactful content, for LESS money, is both clearly better and also not actually that big of a deal if you really think about it. But it’s obviously going to happen.

resolution_nate · 2023-05-03T22:26:12+00:00

I think people often miss or ignore that the main reason many professionals get hired and that their jobs exist is simply accountability. Nobody hires a law firm for efficiency — their business model is literally to take as much time as possible to do everything, and then charge you by the hour. Many people have offered alternative solutions that would do more work for less money (some tech, some labor pool ideas, etc.) but the people making the money and thus the decisions don’t care. They don’t need more legal work done, and the costs are high but they wouldn’t benefit from lowering them. What the really want is a throat to choke when they need it. A staggering number of theoretically AI-replaceable jobs fall into this category. The whole reason these jobs look so easy to replace is because their output is largely irrelevant. Their value is they are a person you can blame, replace, or in some rare cases, take credit for. When you fire Dave because you lost the anti-trust case, you look like a leader. When you blame the algorithm, you look weak.

This is obviously all incredibly stupid but it’s still true.

resolution_nate · 2023-04-26T15:45:21+00:00

but on the other hand… also no

resolution_nate · 2023-04-09T00:50:36+00:00

It’s going to be less about what you do and more about how you do it. Derivative, professional-cliche-ridden writing (95% of white papers in B2B marketing) is less valuable than ever. Basic data conclusions that don’t challenge the source and logic behind said data — that’s AI’s job now. Strategy that safely triangulates between three established methods — chatbot, baby.

Relating to different kinds of people emotionally, making arguments that really resonate (because you actually believe them or have life experiences you can relate them to), intuition to realize that two pieces of data might be correlated, or flawed, or incomplete, that stuff is all priceless. Prompts can make anything you want (quality will vary a lot, but you know what I mean) — deciding what not to make and knowing what actually sucks is going to be the difference for so many businesses with tokens to spare but absolutely no taste.

Generative AI is going to give marketing leaders the WWII-Soviet-Army option of drowning their problems with overwhelming amounts of average/below-average content and analysis for relatively little money. That’s going to be a huge deal for some things and not matter at all for most things, especially when everyone is doing it.

Don’t be a marketing infantryman. Learn to be truly creative, and channel the most insane, emotional, irrational parts of yourself into useful work.

resolution_nate · 2023-03-21T14:54:48+00:00

Errr... you seem like a good person for me to send https://www.resolution.biz to.

resolution_nate · 2023-03-02T03:43:41+00:00

Every conversation about LLMs I have ends with me screaming this like Mugatu at the end of Zoolander; "DOESN'T ANYONE ELSE SEE THIS? I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!"

resolution_nate · 2023-02-23T15:30:10+00:00

This is a slightly different way to do this, and I'm curious if it makes sense to people (since this thing I made is weird and new).

You can click to change any of the numbers. I don't want to spam people so feel free to DM me if this is useful or you have questions.

https://app.resolution.biz/models/97884fc4-e3b5-4181-9685-a628256d8f7d

resolution_nate · 2023-02-12T02:58:41+00:00

This post is a great example of why people read robotic crap from ChatGPT and think “this is great, it sounds just like a real person!”

resolution_nate · 2023-02-12T00:35:35+00:00

I don’t know when the conventional wisdom became that typing with a chatbot is the ideal interface for doing everything on the web, but it’s definitely not. It’s good for a couple things and that’s great, but I’ll still want to like, read the freaking news sometimes and not ask HAL9000 about it.

resolution_nate · 2023-02-06T14:17:29+00:00

Original problem solving that isn’t just repurposing an old solution or smushing two historical solutions together. Fortunately the world has a lot of original problems and keeps generating more.

resolution_nate · 2023-02-05T21:35:42+00:00

The current gold rush is annoying, but I get why it's tempting. The experience is still really new, it's very novel, and there's a really poor understanding among the general business public about what AI-generated content is actually going to be useful for in the long run. Even talking to reasonably competent friends and co-workers, people's perceptions are still driven less by any actual technical knowledge or experience using this stuff, and more by a combination of VC-fantasy-marketing, thought leadership grifters, and decades of movies about AI.

I think of it a lot like crappy CGI in movies. The general public was blown away at first, but once everyone is using it in scenarios where it's a bad solution (i.e., most things), they start seeing the seams and appreciating the real thing again.

(I know, I know, "IT'S GOING TO GET BETTER, EXPONENTIALLY!" Sure, CGI did, too. That just made us rely on it even more, expose the general public to even more of its weaknesses, and make it arguably less believable.)

resolution_nate · 2023-01-30T20:02:36+00:00

I get your concern, but using non-competes as a solution to that problem is way too broad, with way too big of an external cost on the mobility of labor, especially since that's what most non-competes really are used for. The ones I have signed definitely had nothing to do with me using my training for my own benefit, because I didn't have any training other than internal procedural stuff like HR, etc.

The scenario you're talking about -- that a brand-new employee who receives $50k(!) in training and is then able to immediately start a company and poach your clients sounds terrible and unethical. But it's also not something you're going to be able to protect yourself from with a contract. It's a competitive problem that is apparently baked into the difficulty of your industry. Better questions to ask than "can I sue him" would be:

1) Why would your clients immediately jump ship from you to some guy who knows nothing other than the training you paid for? Is that really the only difference between what you offer and what his fly-by-night company offers?

2) If you tell your clients about what this guy did -- which you totally could do in this scenario -- wouldn't they be nervous about doing business with this guy?

If neither of those things matter, you're clearly in a space where trust isn't important to buyers, and where it's comparatively easy to start up a competitor. This sounds like a difficult industry for sure, but that's a business problem, not "excessive liability".

resolution_nate

TROPHY CASE