“It’s a very crowded market, and it’s really hard to distinguish ourselves from other players.”

“I need more demos and more clients in the first place, and I can’t get them without a clear message via email.”

“‘Why should I care?’ people reply to my cold emails.”

Three SaaS startup founders told me this last month. They all use AI for their copy and messaging. 

My response?

AI is a tool for execution. Your message should come from customers, especially if they drive revenue. That’s increasingly the case in this “SaaS storm.”

The “SaaS storm” and shift to customer-driven revenue

Alina Vandenberghe, co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper, said on LinkedIn in early 2025 that we’re in a “SaaS storm.”

Why are we in a “SaaS storm”? A couple of reasons…

“Aside from AI, venture dealmaking is in a drought”

CB Insights reports that “venture dealmaking is in a drought. Globally, deal activity fell 19% YoY to 27K in 2024 — its lowest annual level since 2016.” 

AI now captures 37% of venture deals.

Now we know why SaaS companies slap “AI” on everything. And why there’s been a shift to customer-driven revenue.

All SaaS companies struggle to grow

New business for bootstrapped and VC-funded SaaS companies declined over the past four years, reports Senior Manager of Insights at ChartMogul Sofia Faustino.

Median growth for bootstrapped SaaS companies fell 27% throughout most of 2021 before stabilizing later that year.

Growth pulled back 5% through Q1 2025, reaching an all-time low that quarter.

The slowdown was more gradual for VC-backed SaaS companies, with median growth dropping 21% through the end of 2022.

It’s been flat ever since.

Top-performing VC-backed companies remained stable through mid-2022 thanks to cash reserves. When those ran out and VC funding dried up, they saw growth drop to record lows: 15% from Q3 2023 to Q1 2024.

Getting new customers is harder for all SaaS companies, so priorities have shifted from growth to retention and expansion.  

“With new business declining, both bootstrapped and VC-backed companies rely more on expansion growth. Acquiring new customers is costly, so all SaaS companies pivoted their strategies to leverage expansion as a growth driver during the recession,” says Faustino.

This may be one reason that SaaS bootstrappers are proclaiming…

“Customer-funded SaaS is taking over the world”

Alex Turnbull, the founder of Groove HQ and Helpy, declared on LinkedIn that “customer-funded SaaS is taking over the world” in early 2025.

It’s not just bootstrappers. VC-backed SaaS companies are prioritizing customer retention, too. 

If customers drive revenue, shouldn’t their feedback shape what SaaS brands say in their marketing (aka their messaging)? 

But that’s often not the case. 

AI-generated content explodes in 2025

“We’re living in cost-conscious times where sustainability and efficiency are trending,” explains Faustino.

Generative AI tools are one way SaaS companies have become more efficient. 

A CoSchedule survey reports that 85% of marketers use AI tools for content creation.

Judging from my inbox, many of these marketers work at SaaS companies: I wake up most mornings to see a wall of “unlock,” “revolutionize,” and “transform” — empty messages that don’t tell me why I should care about the webinar or lead magnet they promote.

GenAI mirrors and magnifies lazy B2B marketing.

What about AI hallucinations?

More than half of the marketers said they’re “likely” or “very likely” to trust the accuracy of AI-generated insights or content.

Members of the B2B marketing community, Exit Five, are more divided on AI content and copy.

Their perspectives range from “ChatGPT writes better than any human” to “it’s really easy to fall into the trap of outsourcing your creativity” and noticing “AI pumping out endless ‘thought leadership.’”

How do customers feel about all this AI-driven messaging and content? 

“AI’s trust problem” 

“Online disinformation isn’t new, but AI tools have supercharged it.”
— Bhaskar Chakravorti, Harvard Business Review author and Dean of Global Business at Tufts University’s The Fletcher School of Business

Consumer trust in AI is low.

They’ve complained about “AI bias, inaccuracies, hallucinations, and bad performance” to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). 

It’s easy to see why when you read Microsoft MSN news headlines about fishermen catching mermaids, bigfoot sightings, and travel guides promoting Ottawa, Canada’s food bank.

That’s not to mention AI-scrambled copies of copies masquerading as online ads because generative models went MAD training on their own data.

SaaS companies have gotten in hot water for disseminating misinformation.

X’s AI chatbot, Grok, “incorrectly informed users that Vice President Kamala Harris’s name was missing from ballots in nine states due to missed deadlines, which was untrue,” reports The Guardian. 

Misinformation like this is alarming because studies suggest that 57.1% of online content is AI-generated now. And the fact that, “regardless of the quality of the model architecture or dataset, hallucination incidents can be expected to go down but can never be eliminated.”

The takeaway for SaaS companies? Consumers are skeptical of AI-generated messaging and content.

Even if customers believe your marketing, they may not like it.

Customers could spot AI-generated calls-to-action, email copy, and social posts 55% of the time in a recent Nexcess.net study.

How do they feel about AI-generated ads? Half said they’re a turnoff. 

B2B marketing’s trust problem

Customers’ wariness of AI content could compound B2B marketing’s trust problem.

On a scale of 1 to 100, B2B technology buying decision makers’ trust in marketing is only 61, reports the Informa Tech Trust in Marketing Index.

Informa Tech’s survey reports that buyer distrust stems more from a lack of value and relevance in B2B marketing than the half-baked or inaccurate messages typical of the worst AI-generated content.  

• 71% were disappointed in the value of gated content.
• 42% said the content was too general.

Respondents of Demand Gen Report’s 2024 content preferences survey echoed this sentiment: 51% of B2B buyers said content was too generic and irrelevant to their needs. That’s up from 38% in 2023. 

The quality of B2B marketing is declining. 

“Crap at speed and scale”

“Overall, I am optimistic about generative AI in creativity — I think it will allow creators to produce better work and spend more time exploring new ideas and less time manipulating pixels. But I also know some companies will use AI to produce an avalanche of generic, soulless content.”
— Scott Belsky, Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer

What’s clear is that many companies are hurtling “crap and speed” at their customers. 

This isn’t a new problem — just one that AI copywriting made worse.

Because outsourcing thinking to a robot and skipping what R2B2 Founder Adam Robinson calls the “horribly manual customer discovery process” is essentially scaling lazy B2B marketing. 

Even in 2018, only 35% of marketers said they did audience research.

So it’s no surprise that 63% of customers thought brands were trying to sell them things they didn’t need.

Now marketers flood customers’ inboxes, social feeds, and search results with even more irrelevant content.

This approach may be low effort for marketers, but it’s more work for customers, says Chief Marketing Technologist author Scott Brinker:

44.2% of B2B buyers think AI enabling marketers to send more personalized emails will make their experiences worse.

That’s a problem for SaaS companies relying on customers for revenue because poor experiences kill conversions. 

How customer-driven messaging builds trust and drives revenue

How can SaaS companies regain customers’ trust?

Switch from AI- to customer-driven messaging. 

AI is a tool to execute copy. It can’t tell you what customers need to hear to like and trust your brand or be persuaded by your marketing messages.

Sure, it can scrape the internet and provide insights from reviews or social media comments. But that data could be old or inaccurate. People tend to present curated versions of themselves online and AI hallucinates. 

As Masterful Founder Joanna Wiebe has taught marketing students for years, the best messaging comes from customers. Only they can tell you what they were thinking and feeling throughout the buyer’s journey.

Mirroring builds trust

What customers say about their pain points and desires should shape your message.

How they say it should inform your copy.

Their sticky and emotional language is what Joanna calls “voice-of-customer data.” VoC is a key element of conversion copywriting.

Using customer-driven messaging and VoC in your copy has a mirroring effect.

Mirroring means attentively listening to and rephrasing what someone says and mimicking their facial expressions and body language. While we can’t smile at readers — we can mirror their words and feelings back to them on the page. 

Studies show that mirroring builds trust and likeability. That’s why it’s coaches’ and salespeople’s go-to tool.

Customer feedback and VoC can also increase conversions. Informa Tech’s survey reveals that messages that solve B2B buyers’ specific problems build trust.

The best source of this feedback? Customer interviews. 

Groove’s website conversions jump 100% with VoC

“We knew that if we really wanted to get the insight we needed — not data, but words — the best way to do that would be through having actual conversations with our customers.”
— Alex Turnbull, Founder of Groove HQ and Helpy

Customer support software Groove HQ had a strong product and happy customers, but its website wasn’t converting. 

“On the marketing side, this blog was bringing us thousands of new visitors, but at 2.3%, our conversion rate was terrible,” said Turnbull. 

One culprit? Weak messaging. Turnbull interviewed his power users to uncover what they truly care about and how they talk about it. That customer feedback was the foundation for Groove HQ’s website messaging, lifting its conversion rate by 100%. 

Wistia’s free-to-paid conversions take off 350% with VoC

Video marketing platform Wistia had a great product, strong brand, and solid price. Most of its trial users were good-fit customers.

But its onboarding emails weren’t converting.

The company hired Joanna Wiebe to fix them. She eliminated vague messaging and used sticky VoC in the email copy to rocket free-to-paid conversions by 350%.

Where to find customer-driven messaging 

There are plenty of quick-and-dirty ways to find VoC data:

• customer reviews
• testimonials
• forums
• surveys

But the best insights come from interviews. 

Here’s why: 

Accuracy

Online information can be inaccurate, especially now that over half of it is AI-generated. For example, one study found that nearly 14% of the 73 million reviews it analyzed were fake. Interviews offer insights straight from the most trusted source: your customers. 

Nuance 

You can’t watch your customers’ body language, hear the anger in their voice, or dig deeper with follow-up questions when reading survey results or online reviews. Only customer interviews offer this level of nuance.  

Sticky VoC

With so much AI-generated content online — including reviews — it’s harder to find sticky VoC these days. AI polishes out the character and emotion of how people talk.

Customer interview transcripts are packed with odd turns of phrase and charged language. 

How many interviews do you need? I typically aim for at least 5. Other industry experts recommend between 5 and 12. Ask open-ended questions. Record the meeting, so you can mine the transcript for messaging insights and VoC. AI notetaker tools like Fathom or Otter.ai are great for this.

How to save 2 hours mining customer interview transcripts with ChatGPT

Customer interviews can be a goldmine of messaging insights and VoC. But how do you find them?

Mine your interview transcripts.

Look for the pain points and desires that triggered customers to search for a new solution, objections to choosing your product, and alternatives they tried before converting — just to name a few. 

You can do this manually, but it’s time-consuming. It used to take me up to 6 hours. Now I get it done in 4 with ChatGPT, though I still read the transcript to fill in the gaps (AI seldom finds everything).

Here’s the prompt I use and an example of my insights from an interview with the founder of an email service provider (ESP). He’s not a customer but agreed to let me interview him about his messaging strategy. 

Step #1: Prompt ChatGPT to mine your interview transcript

Upload your interview transcript to ChatGPT. Use this prompt to have the chatbot analyze and sort your VoC data. 

ChatGPT prompt

​​Please analyze the following interview transcript. The interview is between [your name and role], and the [role] at [company]. Create a table to categorize the [interviewee’s] buying triggers, pains, jobs, desires, objections, and alternatives.

Instructions:

1. ONLY extract direct verbatim quotes from the [interviewee]. Do NOT use insights, paraphrases, or suggestions from any other speaker.
2. Present the findings in a table with these columns:
   • Summarized Data Point
   • Direct Verbatim Quote from [interviewee’s name]
   • Frequency (e.g., 1st most mentioned, 2nd most mentioned)
3. Do NOT reference, use, or compare data from previously uploaded transcripts.
4. Double-check the output to ensure full compliance before delivering the results.

Customize the prompt to fit your message-finding goals.

In my prompt below, I asked ChatGPT to find buyer triggers, pains, etc concerning messaging.

Step #2: Review your table of messaging insights and VoC

Now you have a table of insights and sticky VoC to craft customer-driven messaging and copy.

Rinse and repeat the process to pull more insights from the transcript. Look for patterns in customer feedback. Lean into pain points, desires, and objections that come up often.

Message for customer-driven revenue

With the number of SaaS and AI-powered companies predicted to balloon to 175,000 by 2026, competition for customers’ hearts, minds, and wallets will only get steeper.

Companies can’t afford to blend in and break trust with vague, irrelevant, or flat-out inaccurate messaging — especially if this “SaaS storm” persists. 

If you rely on customers for revenue, your message should be for them. 

Just ask them what they need to hear.