Here’s the question no one wants to ask as we head into planning season: Did you actually gain or lose market share this year?
Not revenue. Not ARR. Not growth rate.
Market share.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: If you grew 30% last year but your #1 competitor grew 60%, you didn’t win. You lost. You’re actually losing market share, and that means you’re falling out of product-market fit — even if your board deck looks green.
The Downturn Excuse is Dead
In 2022, you could blame the markets. In 2023, you could blame “macro” impacts. In 2024, you could still claim we were in a “downturn.”
Now? In the Age of AI? When overall software spend is accelerating at a record pace? You’ve run out of excuses.
The downturn is over in SaaS and B2B. It’s over — if there was one at all in your category. And if you haven’t recovered from it, it’s time to be honest. It’s you.
Here’s what’s actually happening:
- Venture capital is back. It’s flowing into AI and growth as fast and furious as 2021.
- Hypergrowth is back. Yes, it’s often AI-fueled leaders. But so what? Why isn’t that you?
- Software spend is accelerating. Per Gartner, enterprise software spend will grow a stunning 15.2% to $1.43 trillion. It’s the largest and fastest-growing segment of the entire $6 trillion enterprise IT market.
- Public B2B companies are growing faster again. For many, the recent quarters marked a turning point.
- And the next generation like Databricks, Cursor, Anthropic, et al are growing at a pace like we’ve never ever seen before. It’s jaw dropping.
But here’s what you need to understand about that 15.2% growth: roughly 9% is just price increases on existing software (CIOs are budgeting for it). Most of the rest is going to AI. If your software doesn’t have AI features or can’t demonstrate clear ROI, you’re in the “low ROI software getting cut” bucket as buyers reallocate budget.
The pie is getting bigger. The question is: Are you grabbing a bigger slice, or watching everyone else eat your lunch?
Growth Rate is a Vanity Metric Without Context
Here’s what I see all the time: Founders come to me and say “We grew 40% this year!” and expect a high-five.
My first question: What did your competition do?
- If you grew 40% and your main competitor was flat? That’s a win. Celebrate.
- If you grew 40% and your competitor grew 80%? You’re losing. Fast.
The math is brutal but simple. If your competitor is at $50M ARR growing 40%, they’re adding $20M in new bookings a year. If you’re at $10M growing 50%, you’re adding $5M. You’re not growing faster — you’re falling further behind every single quarter.
This is why I keep saying: If you’re not growing at least as fast as your competitors, it’s a “you” problem. Don’t blame the market.
The NRR Zombie Trap
Let’s talk about one of the most dangerous places to be right now: the NRR Zombie.
What’s an NRR Zombie? It’s a SaaS startup that basically fell out of product-market fit after the 2021 boom… but has enough revenue and high enough NRR to keep going. They’re at $2M-$20M ARR, sometimes more, aren’t losing money, and have 90%-100%+ NRR with relatively stable retention.
Sounds fine, right? Except they’re not growing. They’re not winning new customers. They’re just… existing.
These companies hide in their NRR and convince themselves they’re doing okay. After all, customers aren’t leaving! Revenue is stable!
But here’s what they’re missing:
- The competition evolved the past 3 years — and may have blown right past them.
- High NRR can mask massive problems. With 150% NRR, you can “hide” just 20-30% new customer growth and it won’t show up in the revenue numbers.
- The team may be too tired, or broken, to get back in the game for real.
The Honest Questions You Need to Ask
Before you finalize next year’s plan, sit down with your leadership team and answer these questions honestly:
1. Are you gaining or losing market share? Not “how fast are we growing?” but “are we growing faster or slower than our top 3 competitors?” If you don’t know, find out. Search LinkedIn for how many sales reps your competitors have. Multiply by $500K. That’s roughly their ARR growth target.
2. Where is your 10x feature? You need at least one that competitors don’t have in order to win consistently. Too many “good but not great” founders don’t really know what their 10x feature is. What do you do that’s not just better — but 10x better?
3. Did you fall out of product-market fit? This happens more than people admit. Your customers might still be happy. Your NRR might be fine. But if you’re just winning fewer deals… you’ve probably fallen out of PMF. The market moved and you didn’t move with it.
4. Are you tapping into the new AI budgets? Per Morgan Stanley, 50% of budget for AI is new spend — not reallocation. That’s brand new dollars that didn’t exist before. Did you grab some? Or did you sit on the sidelines waiting to see what happens?
5. Is your team still hungry? I’ve seen too many teams that got burned in 2022-2023 and never fully recovered. They cut to survive, they’re efficient now, but the fire is gone. Are your people still pirates and romantics? Or are they just… tired?
What to Do If You’re Losing Share
The good news: If you had product-market fit once, you can probably find it again. You’re likely talented and experienced enough. But you have to want it. And you have to be honest about what’s not working.
Double down on your existing customers. They’re your best defense and offense. If they’re happy, they won’t churn, even if your competitors have a better product. Get on a plane. Visit them. Host dinners. Build loyalty.
Close the feature gaps systematically. If you’re losing deals because of specific gaps, don’t panic. Be analytical. Build what you need. Communicate clearly with prospects about what’s coming. Some will wait for you.
Find your 10x thing. What’s the one area where you can be dramatically, obviously, undeniably better? At EchoSign, we won early deals because we were the only cross-platform e-signature solution. Later, it was ease of use and localization. What’s yours?
Use capital as a weapon. If you have the resources, don’t just play defense. Attack segments where you’re weaker. This is dominant-dominant strategy. Once you’ve achieved efficient scale, you need to be aggressive everywhere, because your opponent will be too.
Rebuild the team if you have to. This is the hardest one. But if your team is broken, tired, or checked out — most of your people may need to go to get back to growth. The existing revenue becomes customer funding for the next generation of products and team.
Track Market Share as Relentlessly As Your Other Core Metrics. You Have To. The Best Do.
Here’s my challenge to you: Before you close the books on 2025, calculate your market share trajectory. Not your growth rate. Your share.
If your market grew 30% and you grew 25%, you lost share. Period. No amount of efficiency metrics or NRR percentages changes that math.
AI has created hundreds — even thousands — of new competitors in many categories. Competition is way, way up. Did you step up? Or did you stand still and watch new entrants eat your future customers?
The winners in 2026 will be the ones who are honest about 2025. The ones who looked at the scoreboard — not just their own numbers, but their share of the overall game — and decided to play harder.
The downturn excuse is dead.
If you’re still not growing, it’s not the market. It’s you.
What are you going to do about it?
This Isn’t Just a SaaStr Take — The Greatest CEOs Agree
If you think this focus on market share over absolute growth is just startup advice, think again. The most successful CEOs in history have obsessed over market position — not just their own growth rates in isolation.
Andrew Bialecki at Klaviyo put it perfectly at SaaStr Annual: “One of the things we believe about software is if you’re the market leader and you’re topping out at 20% share, that’s not really much of a market leadership position. And sometimes there’s dynamics why that happens. But I often think it’s like if you have truly built the best product and maybe there’s some network effects to it, you should be able to top out way higher than that. Could be 50%, could be even much larger than that.”
Think about that. Bialecki isn’t satisfied with being #1 at 20% share. He’s asking: Why can’t you get to 50%? Or higher? Klaviyo has captured over 50% market share in their core ICP — proving that going deep in a vertical can be more valuable than going broad. While many SaaS companies plateau at 15-20% market share, Klaviyo has shown that with strong network effects and a truly superior product, you can dominate your category. Don’t artificially limit your ambitions based on traditional SaaS metrics.
Jack Welch at GE built perhaps the most famous market share mandate in corporate history. When he became CEO in 1981, he issued a directive: Each of GE’s business units had to be number one or two in their markets; if not, they’d have to fix, sell or close it. This brutal honesty about competitive position — not just financial performance — helped grow GE’s market value from $14 billion to $600 billion over his tenure. Welch wanted GE to be world-class in everything it did. If it wasn’t a “Market Leader” at a GE Division, you were told to “Fix it. Close it or sell it.” That’s the kind of honesty we need more of in SaaS.
Jeff Bezos took a different approach at Amazon but with the same underlying philosophy: prioritize market position over short-term profits. In 1997 Bezos penned a famous letter to shareholders, promising that he would always value long-term growth over short-term profitability concerns. Amazon famously reinvested every dollar into gaining market share, even when Wall Street wanted profits. Why? Because Bezos understood that in winner-take-most markets, position matters more than margin.
Marc Benioff at Salesforce has been equally direct about what matters: “We want to grow our revenues. We want to increase our margins. We want to increase our market share. We want to increase our levels of customer success.” Notice market share is explicitly in his priority list. Salesforce ultimately won the market through technological innovations, pioneering the SaaS model, and crafting clever marketing campaigns. This left them with over four times the market share of their nearest competitors.
Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft by shifting from a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” culture — but the underlying goal was regaining competitive position. “Our ability to change our culture is the leading indicator of our future success,” Nadella told shareholders in 2015. When he took over, Microsoft was plagued by internal knife fights, bickering and inertia. The culture change wasn’t about feeling good — it was about competing again.
The common thread? These CEOs didn’t console themselves with “we’re still growing.” They demanded market leadership. They compared themselves to competitors, not just to their own past performance. And they made hard decisions when they weren’t winning.
The Final Word
The greatest business leaders don’t just track their own growth — they track their position relative to the market and competition. Jack Welch didn’t say “grow 10% per year.” He said be #1 or #2, or fix it, sell it, or close it. Bezos didn’t optimize for quarterly profits. He optimized for market share that would compound for decades.
In SaaS, the same principle applies. Your growth rate doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists relative to your TAM growth, your competitors’ growth, and the new entrants flooding your market.
Be honest: Did you gain or lose market share in 2025?
If you lost it — even while “growing” — you know what you need to do.
Losing Market Share is… Losing.
Let me be blunt: Losing market share is losing.
I don’t care if you grew 25%. I don’t care if you hit your board plan. I don’t care if your NRR is “solid” and your customers are “happy.”
If your competitors grew faster — if new entrants grabbed customers that should have been yours — if the market expanded and you didn’t expand with it — you lost.
And here’s the thing about losing in SaaS: It compounds. Every customer a competitor wins today is a customer you won’t upsell tomorrow. Every logo they grab is a reference you won’t have. Every market share point you cede is harder to win back next year.
But here’s the good news: You can turn it around.
The best founders I know don’t make excuses. They don’t blame the market. They don’t hide behind efficiency metrics. They look at the scoreboard, they acknowledge reality, and they get back to winning.
If you had product-market fit once, you can find it again. If you built something customers loved once, you can build the next thing they’ll love even more. If you won before, you can win again.
But it starts with honesty.
So as you close out this year and plan for next, ask yourself the hard question:
Did I gain or lose market share this year?
If you lost — be honest about it. Figure out why. Talk to the customers you lost. Study the competitors who beat you. Rebuild your 10x feature. Reinvigorate your team.
And then go win.
Because in SaaS, market share is the only scoreboard that matters in the long run. Growth rates fluctuate. Multiples change. Macro conditions shift.
But winners win market share. Period.
Be honest. Turn it around. Be a winner again.
Related: It’s 2025. There Is No “Downturn” Anymore. It’s You. | What to Do If You’re An NRR Zombie | A Tale of Two Markets: The Winners and Strugglers in 2025
