How to stop ‘playbook brain’ derailing your startup in 2025

It’s time to throw away your borrowed templates and handbooks. Copycat SaaS companies could face a reckoning in 2025.

Are you a copycat software company? Now, I don’t mean anything insulting by that. But I am worried that there is a growing subsection of the SaaS market that 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 That might already be a year or two out of date?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 won’t cut the mustard in 2025.

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 I believe this approach poses systemic danger to the broader startup ecosystem. Startups are embarking on a risky journey. They can’t rely on the lessons of other companies to find game-changing success. Founders need to capture the ‘lightning in a bottle’ that characterises the stubbornness and path-breaking ingenuity of true innovators and leaders.

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 employees in successful SaaS companies have made many thousands of people very rich. And no question, 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. 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 senior leaders 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-defining, 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.”

The trends affecting the biggest listed enterprises will inevitably be felt in the ranks of SaaS challengers – especially when it comes to scaling and securing investment in an AI-first era. Make no mistake, AI means the rules of the game have changed.

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 may mean senior leaders doubling down on their playbook addictions – potentially damaging if executives don’t take the time to acknowledge their own unique business context.

Playbooks aren't always your friends

Companies should always 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.’” In the same conversation, he added that his finance team is 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.

This year more than ever, being a copycat and following other companies’ playbooks makes it harder for you to build genuinely new and exciting products, and harder to create innovative, differentiated distribution models to market what you’re building. And in turn, this basically guarantees that you will not stand out to investors.

If you’re hunting for a new year’s resolution in the opening weeks of 2025, let it be this: don’t live and die by templates and playbooks. Don’t be a copycat.