← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Unique Challenges in Building a Martech Company in 2026
00:12:48
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- [00:00]
Benjamin Shapiro
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
- [00:26]
Podcast Host
From advertising to software as a service.
- [00:29]
Scott Brinker
To data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
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Podcast Host
Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. If we're reaching out to the right.
- [00:48]
Scott Brinker
Person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
- [00:54]
Benjamin Shapiro
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
- [01:16]
Podcast Host
So let's move on to our next topic. We talked about what happened last year. Context, engineering, AEO versus SEO. Let's talk a little bit about Martech and tooling. We saw an expansion in the number of Martech companies, but we also saw some churn, right? We saw a little bit over 8% of the companies that are Martech companies just disappear. If you're building a martech company in 2026, what verticals are you thinking about where there's opportunity for expansion in Martech?
- [01:49]
Scott Brinker
Ooh, wow, that's a. You know, I mean, if I could answer that question, you know, definitively on demand, you'd be vibe coding it right now. You know, I think one of the challenges that is happening now in the environment is it used to just be like, okay, if I have a better mousetrap, if I have a way to build a better, you know, solution than the incumbents, you know, I can do that. I find my unique strategy, my niche, you know, I go after it. And it was very much about a battle, a competitive battle with commercial solutions. Oh, is my commercial solution better than yours? Well, where it's getting very tricky right now is because AI has made it so easy for people to build software. I mean, professional software developers, you know, leveraging leaks, coding assistants. I mean, you talk to people who are really good software engineers and the way they're leveraging these AI assistants to like 10x their productivity, it's pretty impressive. And then on top of that, you have, you know, for more of us amateurs, you know, at least we're vibe coding things that okay, we can't use for creating big complex software, but boy, actually using it for small little apps and small, little automations can be very valuable. But between those things, you've got a place now where this ability for businesses to create their own custom software, you know, that really tailors to their particular operations or their particular customer experience that they want to deliver. This is a new player in the market. And so now if you're thinking about bringing a commercial Martech product, you know, out to the world, you've got two sources of competition. You're one like, okay, well, I'm competing against all these, you know, commercial solutions that already exist out there. But wow is what am I able to create and produce better than what, you know, my prospective customer could kind of just build on their own and maybe even build better on their own for their tailored uses. I am sure there are still going to be apps that pass both of those tests, but I think it's a much smaller universe than what it was just a year ago.
- [03:58]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I've heard it described as the era of personal software. I can go and I can develop my own solutions to solve personal point podcast os. Right. How we created. Not to talk about it all the time, but I created and Vibe coded 100% of it, a process that goes end to end to produce podcasts. And sure, there's humans in the loop and that stuff's important, but like, it is me building software for my company and my specific needs and then trying to replicate it so other people can use it. The application of software is totally different now. Where it used to be, these off the shelves, you know, platforms, and then you had point solutions and now we have personalization. I didn't hear you actually answer the question, but I think what you're saying is I would build some sort of a solution that facilitates the development of personal software. Am I putting words in your mouth or is that where you're going?
- [04:56]
Scott Brinker
Yeah, well, actually, so the challenge with that is there's already a lot of companies that do that, including now like, you know, Google, you know, their new anti gravity. They're always lovable. So, yeah, I probably actually wouldn't try and build a new personal software builder. Where I think things could be really interesting is there is actually a big gap in the market right now and it's around this concept of orchestration. So we've always had a lot of moving parts in marketing and anyone in marketing ops will tell you as we've gone more and more, that's just become really hard to Keep track of everything, make sure things aren't breaking. I was disintegrating to this other thing. It's a lot of work now with AI and you start talking about empowering all sorts of people to build all sorts of agents and automations on their own. All of a sudden it's like in this perspective of like 10xing, the amount of complexity and things that are like running around in our business, that's not stable. It's one thing to say, like, hey, for an individual, you can do all these wonderful things and whatever you want, that's great. But when you have a company of like 300 individuals all doing that, okay, now this starts to become a bug, not a feature. And what is really needed and everyone kind of largely agrees on this, is like, okay, we need software that is going to serve as the guardrails, as the orchestration engines. So that yes, we want to empower people to do lots of things on their own, but they have to fit it within a certain set of structures and rules. And right now we don't have great systems that really provide that sort of orchestration and guardrail for the company across all of these different kinds of AI capabilities. I think we're going to see that software emerge. And probably the only challenge with it is I think a lot. I think pretty much every major company in this space all wants to be in the business of being at that center of the orchestration. But you know, one way or another, we're going to get that orchestration capability as users of this.
- [06:57]
Podcast Host
It's funny, we see this actually on the creative side where, you know, there are lots of solutions. AIR is one of them. There's a sort of whole host file stage, I think is another one where when you're doing creative work, it automatically checks your brand guidelines and makes sure that nobody in these large organization publishes an Anheuser Busch ad to a place where kids can see it because it's regulated out for beer ads to be on certain channels or whatever the example is. And so we've got very strict brand guideline tooling. But now we're talking about orchestration tooling that has to sort of fit into the these guidelines of how we're developing software. Because essentially what has happened this year is you've gone from your team of 300 people where 50 to 100 of them were engineers, now 300 of them are engineers, right? Some of them are in the engineering function, but the marketers are building their own software to do their own things. And there's a Lot of risk there and a lot of instability. So you're saying that rules and regulations in orchestration is really where there's an opportunity?
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Scott Brinker
I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
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Podcast Host
Are there any areas in Martech or any verticals that you think are really in danger in 2026?
- [08:12]
Scott Brinker
Hmm, well, I mean, some of these things have just basically been absorbed into the core AI assistants, you know. So, for instance, like, there was a whole category of software for helping you with writing I category. Yeah, I mean, some companies still around, but yeah, no, I mean, it's like this has just been acquired by, you know, Chat GPT. You know, some of the other examples, this idea of, like, oh, I want to research a prospect, you know, like, again, to basically go to ChatGPT or Gemini and say, like, hey, all right, I want to talk to so and so with this company. Find out everything you can about this. You know, the cup. It just, you know, and these used to be categories of, like, competitive intelligence, you know, and again, it's not that there aren't edge cases where people can be like, no, no, no, I can still do more in this category than, you know, the core LLM could do, but for a lot of people who just need the 80% of the value for 20% of the work, so much of that can just be done by these LLMs natively that, yeah, it's a real threat to a lot of those categories.
- [09:21]
Podcast Host
I was having a conversation yesterday about demand generation and building a go to market and it used to be, well, you go into Sales Navigator and you build the list and you go to the company and you take the data out and you go to Zoom Info and you try to extract something and you go to another tool and you get an email and then you have to validate the email and you have to da, da, da, da, da, da to try to get something that is relatively relevant to your core icp. Now you go into Clay and you say, I want a list of every B2B marketer with over $10 million that has a podcast that's, you know, has a marketing team and it's there. And then you can ask for all the details about whatever show that is. I'm spouting off our target market.
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Scott Brinker
I figured this wasn't just a hypothetical.
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Podcast Host
But what's on my mind, hypothetically, you're running a company called I Hear Everything. But the moral of the story is, like, there used to be these really sort of complex processes for us to do the most minute thing about just demand Generation and even just list sourcing. And now it's like it's all one tool. It's all done and it's all immediate. What is the output of that? Right. When we have all the information at our fingertips so quickly, other than a total sense of overwhelm because the world is our oyster, what do you think that does to the market?
- [10:42]
Scott Brinker
Yeah, well, I mean, this is. This is the recurring challenge of technology adoption in go to market. I mean, more broadly, but certainly in go to market, which is a new technology enables a capability, a set of early adopters are like, oh, great, here's how I harness this to get a competitive advantage. And they do get a competitive advantage. And then it crosses the chasm and becomes something that, like, oh, well, everyone, you know, kind of gets that capability. And guess what? It becomes the new table stakes. And. And it's no longer a competitive advantage. This has been the cycle which has played out, I mean, certainly for the decades that I've been, you know, doing this work in Martech. The only challenge now is it feels like the tempo of that is just accelerating, where, like, you know, you can come up with some things that, like, give you an edge today. But the degree to which, like, yeah, most of your competitors might be in a position to have that same capability, you know, 12 months from now, it's. It's hard. This is. This is the new treadmill is the wrong word because treadmill is just too damn slow. This is me, like, you know, trapped to a rocket ship or something, you know, trying to keep up with it.
- [12:04]
Podcast Host
This is the new private jet of treadmills.
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Scott Brinker
Yes.
- [12:08]
Podcast Host
And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks again to Scott Brinker, the godfather of the Martech industry, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Scott, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com you could always visit his website, which is chiefmartech.com it's chief M A R T E C dot com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a regular stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every other week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [13:01]
Scott Brinker
Foreign.
- [13:11]
Benjamin Shapiro
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.