Our illustrious founder has bitten the bullet and plunged, tank top first, into the world of LinkedIn video content. You have to respect the grind.

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Below is a transcript from his video blog series, the Tank Top Diaries.

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“Morning from Tank Top Diaries! It's just a quick one from me about February. 

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It feels like there's a state of the market conversation to be had about where (in digital and eCommerce, at least) SaaS vendors are compared to customers. With the European economy in some trouble – both the UK and Germany are forecast to grow less than 1% this year – there are many negative stories around…for all sorts of good reasons, to be perfectly honest. 

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(Why is it I find myself becoming slightly left-wing as I get older? I thought you were supposed to go the other way. Anyway…). 

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SaaS vendors are thinking very hard about which territories to invest their money in, and frankly, if I were a lot of SaaS vendors right now, I’d be thinking about the US: because the economy is in great shape. Coming out of NRF (New York) I think all of us felt the the buzz. The people were wearing smarter clothes, better fitting clothes than they were last year, and everybody felt like they were really on it. 

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In Europe it's not quite the same. However, the the MACH doldrums or composable doldrums which we thought we were in the end of last year, with some projects going a little bit awry, seems to have rectified itself partially. Meanwhile the 'Shopify against everybody else' war in the mid market continues. I have a real respect for a couple of eCommerce players who are entering European players, both of who have won good solid deals. One of whom I think is on their fourth customer announcement yesterday – their first non-apparel business. And they've done it really without making a huge amount noise, but just by being very very clever and very careful about who they talk to – and a great offering, so well done to them. 

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I'm in the process now of starting to find speakers for MACH 3, so I find myself talking to some very very exciting very big organisations who've done some really remarkable things given how hard it is to achieve anything in a really huge organisation. So I think the stories at MACH 3 will be fantastic [spoiler from the editor: they were. And if you were there and you saw, why didn’t you say “hi?”] and they'll be enormous businesses who've really transferred at least part of their processes. 

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So that's the last of it for me, I'll do the other one of these in a few weeks. Cheers."

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