It could be time to throw away your borrowed templates and handbooks. Information has never been easier to access, but basing your go-to-market strategy on second-hand insights risks undermining your efforts to build a trusted, distinctive brand.

Are you a copycat software company? Now, I don’t mean anything insulting by that. But today, a growing subsection of the SaaS market draws the bulk of its ideas and inspiration from templates and playbooks pre-defined by other companies. 

Should startups try and learn from the best? Absolutely, yes. But relying on templates and handbooks for crucial parts of your go-to-market engine? That might already be a year or two out of date? That’s no longer enough to build a trusted, beloved brand.

I’ve spent more than a decade working in commercial teams in European software startups and scaleups. In 2024, I left a European SaaS company after a three-year stint, serving part of that time on the company’s leadership team. Over those three years, our annual recurring revenue increased by roughly 10x. We also raised strong Series A and Series B funding rounds during my tenure from some of the world’s leading investors.

And by the standards of modern SaaS companies, we did get a lot right. We played by the rules, dutifully tracking our performance against industry benchmarks, reading the books on leadership and scaling, and saying the right things to our customers, investors and employees. When things were going well, we ramped up; when things were going badly, we pivoted.

In short, we sought to scale up as many SaaS businesses did before us, trying to learn from the best and subscribing to the written and unwritten laws of the ‘SaaS playbook’. But I’m left wondering: can teams really build game-changing organisations by following in other companies’ footsteps? 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with learning from the experiences of successful peers. But borrowing go-to-market tactics from other companies can only result in one end-state: being derivative, and – dare I say – boring. 

All tech founders understand they are embarking on a risky journey. And founders understand that they need to capture the ‘lightning in a bottle’ that characterises the stubbornness and path-breaking ingenuity of true category creators. So why should they expect other companies’ playbooks to help them innovate, capture attention, and build trust? 

How did we get here?

For most of this century, software has been a huge creator of value and wealth. The salaries and equity granted to founders and  employees in successful SaaS companies have made many thousands of people very rich. And our lives are better for it. Platforms like Shopify have transformed the way we buy things online. Your grandmother can make a transcontinental video call thanks to applications like Zoom. No question: the winners of the SaaS boom deserve their success.

The especially interesting thing about the growth of the software market is that successful companies seem to want to share what they’ve learned. Founders and C-suite executives write down the tactics and techniques that helped them scale up and transform industries, sharing them personally on LinkedIn or turning them into resources for ambitious startups to download and learn from.

So in one sense, actual playbooks providing a ‘roadmap to success’ are easier to find than ever before. Every year there are more white papers, reports and how-to guides published, across every conceivable vertical. And there is more benchmarking data than ever before available for operators and executives to measure their success compared to peers and competitors.

But there is something fundamental missing from the idea of a playbook for growth. No exceptional team is a perfect replica of another organisation. No iconic brand is a duplicate. And no category-leading, industry-disrupting company follows another company’s playbook. 

This is especially true when there are unprecedented challenges for much of the SaaS industry. In a stellar analysis of listed SaaS companies published last year, Jacco van der Kooij and Dave Boyce argue that SaaS is losing its go-to-market fit. The numbers make their case plainly: “Since late 2021, growth rates have halved, the cost of acquiring new customers has surged by 1.5 times, and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) has seen a substantial decrease.” 

These trends will inevitably be felt in the ranks of SaaS startups and scaleups – especially when it comes to winning new business and securing investment in an AI-first era. Make no mistake, the rules of the game are changing, and fast. 

While customer demand and investor appetite is higher than ever for the hottest companies, more and more funding is being concentrated in a small number of likely champions. For everyone else, each dollar of new revenue is harder to win and investors are harder to excite. Paradoxically, the rapid pace at which LLMs are being embedded in organisations – and the eagerness of winners to shout about their unique recipe for hypergrowth – may mean companies doubling down on their playbook addictions. Shortcuts like these are seductive, but possibly damaging if executives don’t take the time to acknowledge their own unique business context.

Playbooks aren't always your friends

Of course, founders and senior leaders should try and learn lessons from what’s worked for similar companies. But seeking to mimic the strategies of successful peers is unlikely to help founders create unique, distinctive organisations. ‘Playbook brain’ is potentially very dangerous for companies that rely too much on cribbing from other people’s work.

Luca Maestri, who was Apple’s CFO until the end of 2024, holds a healthy disregard for templates and benchmarks. As he said in an interview last year, “I tell my guys in finance, ‘I don’t want you to ever benchmark anybody else, because you can only get bad ideas.’” He added that his finance team was around half the size of equivalent departments in companies he’d worked at previously that were a tenth as large as Apple is today. Worse than mere stagnation, unthinkingly adhering to benchmarks could actually hold you back from achieving exceptional outcomes.

Being a copycat and following other companies’ playbooks could make it harder, not easier, for you to build genuinely new products and services. But it also makes it harder for you to say things that are genuinely interesting. And in turn, this makes it harder for you to stand out to investors, potential new hires, and customers.

Learn from your predecessors, yes. But don’t live and die by templates and playbooks. Don’t be a copycat.