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Well, hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of the eCommercer.
Every time we hit a new problem in the business, the old instinct was to go and find a tool for it. New challenge, new app. Do that for a few years and you look up one day to find a tech stack so bloated you can’t remember what half of it does, or why you’re still paying for it.
That instinct is reversing. And this week’s guest has a front-row seat to why.
Thousands of tools, a small pool of brands
Neal Goyal has spent years inside the ecommerce software world, leading sales teams at some of the names you’d recognise, including Tapcart. He now advises a handful of earlier-stage software companies on how to grow. So when he talks about the state of the ecosystem, he’s not guessing.
Today, there are thousands of software companies all chasing the same small pool of serious brands. An alternative for everything. Very little loyalty. And now something new is happening on top of all that noise.
| | The uninstall rate of software tools in the last 90 days is huge.
Neal Goyal |
Brands are tearing apps out of their stacks. Not because the tools stopped working, but because the question changed. It used to be “which tool solves this?” Now it’s “do I even need a tool for this at all?”
Why the question changed
Neal breaks the last few years into three waves. COVID doubled the number of brands on Shopify almost overnight, and the software companies serving them doubled right alongside. Then AI became something engineers could build with, and four people in a basement could ship a serious product in 90 days. And now the third wave, the one he thinks we’re only at the start of, where the average person, with no engineering background at all, can build their own software.
The thing I found genuinely useful, though, wasn’t the doom. It was where Neal thinks the value goes when the tools all start to look the same. Not the software. The people behind it.
| | There’s a lot of similar software like this being built, but I like those people more. They’re really responsive, they’re really kind.
Neal Goyal |
As everything commoditises, the relationship becomes the moat. Email, he reckons, has all but died as a channel anyone trusts. Of his last ten big deals, he flew out and met all ten in person. Ten out of ten. His whole bet is to do the things that don’t scale, precisely because nobody else is bothering.
Why this one hit home for me
I know the uninstall thing is real because it’s happening in my own business. The number of software subscriptions we run has roughly halved, because the amount we now build ourselves has doubled. After one recent podcast episode, I sat down with Claude Code, no developer in sight, and had it analyse our website and write up exactly what to change. A few weeks later our mobile conversion rate was 400 to 500% higher than it was. A few hours of work. Not a subscription, not an agency.
The next person we hire isn’t a marketing manager. It’s someone whose whole job is AI. That’s not a prediction. That’s a decision we’ve already made.
So the question I’d leave you with is the one Neal’s whole conversation circles. If software is no longer the thing that sets you apart, what is?
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