Shadow AI: Turning Unapproved Tools Into Pipeline
Employees already use unapproved AI tools at work. For SaaS vendors, shadow AI is bottom-up distribution in disguise: how to detect it, harness it, and convert it.
Sarah Lindqvist
Sarah covers hidden markets and market entry strategies. She focuses on niche segments, expansion playbooks, and go-to-market timing.
Partner-Led Entry: Borrowing Someone Else’s Distribution
Building distribution from zero takes years. Partner-led entry borrows it: integrations, marketplaces, agencies, and co-selling that put you in front of buyers tomorrow.
Category Creation: Inventing a Market You Can Win
Competing in someone else's category means fighting on their terms. Category creation lets you define the criteria, crown yourself king, and make rivals irrelevant.
Community-Led Entry: Conquering Markets Through Existing Tribes
Don't buy attention. Borrow it. Community-led market entry means conquering new segments through tribes that already trust each other.
Blind Spot Markets: Niches Ignored by the Giants
1. TL;DR & Definition Blind Spot Markets are highly profitable, hyper-specific industry verticals that incumbent enterprise software companies ignore because the Total Addressable Market (TAM) appears too small on a spreadsheet to justify their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and engineering…
Stealth Segments: Invisible Billion-Dollar Demographics
1. TL;DR & Definition Stealth Segments are cohorts of high-intent, high-budget buyers who do not share a traditional demographic identifier (job title, industry, company size) but share a precise, urgent behavioral trigger or operational pain point. Because they cannot be…
Underground Economies: B2B Grey Market Opportunities
1. TL;DR & Definition In the context of B2B SaaS, Underground Economies refer to massive volumes of commercial transactions, operational data, and logistical routing that occur entirely outside of formal, digitized systems of record. These are the "grey markets" of…
Shadow Workflows: Secret Tools White-Collar Workers Use
1. TL;DR & Definition Shadow Workflows are the unauthorized, un-sanctioned SaaS applications, scripts, and manual workarounds that employees use to actually get their jobs done, bypassing the clunky, IT-mandated enterprise software. For a B2B SaaS founder, identifying a shadow workflow…
Parallel Infrastructures: Building Alternative Corporate Networks
Editor’s note: this article discusses regulatory gray zones for educational purposes and is not legal or tax advice. Rules on data, competition, and taxation vary widely by jurisdiction and change frequently; consult qualified counsel before acting on anything here. 1.…
Backdoor Channels: Entering the Market via Developers
1. TL;DR & Definition Backdoor Channels are go-to-market (GTM) motions that bypass traditional enterprise procurement, IT approvals, and executive buy-in by targeting the end-user (usually developers or individual contributors) directly. Instead of selling top-down to the VP of Engineering, you…