What We're Seeing

The Market Is Rewarding Discipline Again

The market is not short on technology, ideas, or advice. It is short on companies that can consistently turn them into growth.

By Bill Ryan | Big Wheel Performance · 2026-07-28

As Big Wheel Performance continues to grow, we are getting a clearer view of the market.Every day, seven experienced operators are talking with founders, investors, prospects, and clients. Our operators also serve on advisory boards, giving us a view across different companies, industries, and stages of growth.We are going to begin publishing the patterns we see each month. Here is what stands out right now.<h2>AI Expectations Are Becoming More Realistic</h2>Businesses initially approached AI with a combination of inevitability and overconfidence. That has started to change.After a wave of half-baked pilots and disappointing projects, companies have paused to lick their wounds. They still believe AI will change their businesses, but expectations are more tempered, and there is greater respect for the work required underneath the technology.Companies are increasingly starting with the problem they need to solve, examining the underlying process, and then determining how AI can help.That is a much healthier approach.McKinsey’s AI research reinforces what we are seeing: redesigning workflows and putting experienced leaders in charge are among the practices most closely associated with producing real value from AI.AI is a powerful tool, but an AI project is still governed by the basic physics of project management, process design, adoption, and change management.<h2>We Are Paying Too Much Attention to the AI Seller</h2>Most of the AI conversation in sales and marketing is about helping humans sell more efficiently.How can AI write more emails? Produce more content? Research accounts? Score leads? Automate follow-up?Those are useful applications, but they may not be the most important change taking place.In our own lives, AI is already a primary buying tool and a secondary selling tool. Buyers are using it to define problems, research options, compare vendors, prepare questions, and validate decisions.Forrester reports that 94% of business buyers now use AI during the buying process. At the same time, 6sense found that 81% of buyers had selected a preferred vendor before speaking with sales.The balance of the conversation should probably be 70% about serving the AI-assisted buyer and 30% about helping the AI-assisted seller—not the other way around.The opportunity is not just producing more content with AI. It is making sure your company can be discovered, understood, evaluated, and trusted by buyers using AI.That requires clear positioning, useful content, credible evidence, strong customer references, and a self-service buying experience. AI has not eliminated those fundamentals. It has made them more important.<h2>SaaS Is in a Stickiness Phase</h2>New-logo acquisition continues to be difficult and expensive. At the same time, existing customers are becoming a larger source of growth.Benchmarkit’s 2025 SaaS research found that the median cost of acquiring new ARR increased by 14%. It also found that existing customers now generate approximately 40% of total new ARR, up from 25% two years earlier.Companies often react to these results separately. They celebrate retention and expansion while panicking about new-logo growth.We believe the two are connected.Buyers who have already committed to a vendor are more likely to stay and expand. Buyers who have not committed are harder to move off the fence.The same caution that makes acquisition difficult can make existing revenue more durable. It is a headwind for new logos and a tailwind for expansion.SaaS companies need to stop treating acquisition, retention, and expansion as separate motions. They are different parts of the same customer journey.<h2>Domain Experts Are Becoming Software Founders</h2>We are also meeting more early-stage SaaS founders who come directly from the industries they are targeting.These are not traditional technology founders searching for a problem. They are lawyers, contractors, healthcare professionals, logistics operators, and other industry experts using AI to build solutions around workflows they understand firsthand.They know the customer because they were the customer.AI is lowering the technical barriers to building software, but that does not automatically create a business. These founders may begin with better problem knowledge, but they still need to validate the market, define the ideal customer, establish positioning, build a repeatable sales motion, and create the operating discipline required to scale.The product may now be easier to build. The company is not.<h2>The Bigger Shift</h2>These may appear to be four separate observations, but they are all part of the same market shift.Technology is becoming easier to access. Building is becoming faster. Buyers have more information and more tools. Existing vendors are harder to displace. New products are entering the market every day.As a result, the advantage is moving away from simply having technology and toward the ability to turn that technology into a disciplined, functioning business.That is the market BWP was built to serve.We combine the operating discipline of SaaS and private equity to help companies build capital-efficient sales, marketing, customer management, and AI systems. We work between strategy and execution—the place where good ideas most often break down.The market is not short on technology, ideas, or advice. It is short on companies that can consistently turn them into growth.That is what we will continue watching, working on, and writing about.Bill Ryan is a Co-Founder & Managing Partner at<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://bigwheelperformance.com/"> Big Wheel Performance</a>. He helps enterprise sales and SaaS companies build capital-efficient growth by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success into flywheels that scale beyond founder dependence.