8/31/2026

5-Bullet Monday — The Competitor Nobody Names, The Team That Shrank Quietly, and One Question for Your CMO

Edwin Abl, SaaS GTM Expert & B2B SaaS Advisor

CORE ARTICLE:

Your biggest competitor doesn't have a website.

It doesn't have a sales team either.

Kyle Poyar checked how 50 SaaS companies talk about Claude. Only 12 mention it at all. Four publish a build-versus-buy comparison. But 34 have shipped MCP servers, positioning themselves as the thing you use alongside Claude, not instead of it.

That's a positioning bet. It's being made by product teams, not boards.

If a portfolio company's answer to "why not just build this" lives nowhere on their site, someone else is writing that comparison for them.

Meet your biggest competitor (👋 Claude) — Kyle Poyar

Other links and useful reads:

Your Marketing Team Already Got Smaller — Meghna Ratheesh
Nobody announced it. Roles went through attrition, and the efficiency data behind the decision is still in dispute.
AI Abundance Has a Coherence Problem — Scott Brinker
Shipping got cheap. Making it make sense did not. The best case yet for moving product marketing upstream.
Marketing Contracts Under Economic Pressure — The CMO Survey
Marketing is down to 9.0% of revenue. Read it before your next budget defence.
B2B Marketing in the Second Half of 2026 — Zinkevich & Blagojevic
LinkedIn reach fell from 50-100k views to 2-10k. Their read on what still works will annoy people.
Can Superior NRR Offset Weak AI Gross Margins? — Matt Harney
ServiceNow's numbers imply 146% AI NRR. One to bookmark before the next valuation conversation.

about the author

A career scale-up operator, now Operating Partner at Mercia Ventures and advisor on differentiation, marketing, and GTM, I help companies scale from $2M to $50M+ in revenue with the GTM Accelerator Blueprint, sharing insights through the Scaling Better newsletter and supporting growth with GTM Sprints and Due Diligence reviews.

In conclusion

PERSONAL PROGRESS

↳ The Six Levels of Personal Leverage — Anthony Carlton

→ On a personal note, I read this and realised I sit heavy on two levels and quietly ignore the rest. I wrote down the one I've been avoiding and booked an hour this week to start it.

Good luck out there!

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Grab a pen. This will take five minutes and save you weeks.If you're a founder or revenue leader, here's how to test whether your messaging is clear, sharp, and doing its job.Write down these nine things:Three results your clients get from working with you.Three characteristics of your ideal client.Three reasons that the ideal client might not hire you.Your messaging isn't ready if you can't write it clearly and quickly. If you can write it, but it's not addressed across your website, pitch deck, LinkedIn, and sales collateral, you're probably losing deals you should be winning.Here's what this looks like in practice. Say you're a SaaS company that helps HR teams streamline employee onboarding:

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