#Norocketships January edition
Hey you know me. I'm the UCP!!
Happy 2026 people - last time I’ll say that I promise. Loads to talk about already so let’s get into it shall we?
Vile Rumour & Gossip
Keep the lights on when I leave? - And so it has come to pass… sadly a few SaaS vendors have reduced headcount to minimum levels and are really just trading away this year hoping for a PE exit. We’re still chatting to some of the very sad ex-staffers in a fair few of these companies where culture got toxic, sales were sub-par, and the C-Suite just got carried away with their own salaries. Dim the lights and keep walking I’m afraid.
The Shopify strategy vacuum - Everyone’s a Shopify basher nowadays. I’m not one of them, an incredible business, but I do wonder if there’s really an “enterprise” appetite there you know. The platform is so strong doing what it does that there’s no need for a different “GTM”... big companies will use Shopify for specific use cases, and stick with an old platform or Composable for the main stack… that’s not so bad right?
“Trust” me I’m a vendor - SaaS marketing take note. The two vendors with the worst reputation for shoddy tactics are OneTrust and TrustPilot. It is ironic I think that these two both use Trust as a marketing tool, but when engaging with clients the sales teams are insrtructured to behave truly poorly. Every renewal contains a price hike of 300% and is delivered 29 days before the end of the contract. They are giving the rest of you all a bad name.
AI hard metrics - We’ll talk about AI bubbles a little further on, but suffice to say that AI programs within customers are now mostly subject to very hard ROI metrics. Sign off is only coming when a use-case has been thoroughly researched, and a costed timeline established. It’s early days for AI, and right now nobody is getting carried away like they did with MACH back in 2021.
UCP - it’s all about me!
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol was announced during NRF in New York, and boy did it provoke some interesting behaviour. We saw vendors across the ecosystem take to LinkedIn to claim “Launch Partner” status, spam-tagging Google and Shopify (the real architects here) to try and ride shotgun on the announcement.
UCP’s impact will be dramatic. In one fell swoop Google has created a standard for agents to interact with one another, where some attempts have been started to create standards this shuts those down in one easy step, and paves the way for a much faster and more robust customer adoption, something the industry really needs given how leveraged the AI infrastructure players are right now.
AI bubbles
You won’t have failed to notice this prediction. From the Financial Times through Scott Galloway to my mum, we’re all expecting a rebalance sometime in Q1. My own view (what qualifies for me to have one? Nothing) is that there will be many many bubbles… which will burst fairly quietly… over the next 3 years. But AI is a genie that has come out of the bottle, so like the dotcom bubble things will recover and we’ll go again.
The signs to watch out for will be AI players who are truly over-leveraged and manage to go pop. As a customer this could really screw you over, so beware and look at funding runways in terms of cold hard cash…
Like our comment earlier this issue about hard metrics, make sure whatever you buy (and what you sell) has good returns associated with it - and if they’re not there run away.
Empathy rules
Finally for this issue, we’re making a plea for empathy. There are some quiet firings going on across the older SaaS companies, and especially inside SI’s. Paid agencies are struggling against the in-housing trend, and so there are a ton of staffers out on the street job hunting. Within customers, we’re seeing the opposite… new roles and new programs are more plentiful than in the last 24 months, but some kindness won’t’ go amiss.
We’re being kind BTW. This newsletter could be a lot more spicy, but we tone it down for those who fund the whole truth unpalatable.
Jamie
#norocketships Dictionary
Frequently used (but never about you) phrases from #norocketships.
Geldof
/Gel/ /Doff/
adjective
1. Doesn’t do any work on a Monday
“Oh FFS she’s such a Geldof - rarely turns up on a Monday morning and does bugger all early in the week”.
A quick mention of our supporter for this issue. Ocula is a very sharp pointy AI copywriting tool which solves the specific use case of creating SEO/AEO-focused product copy for brands such as AO.com, Boots, Marks & Spencer and more. Great ROI, good “product market fit”, and a nice bunch of people.
