As software gets cheaper, value shifts from best-of-breed tools to vertical stacks that do everything. Eric Siu calls these "revenue brains": integrated systems handling sales, marketing, SEO, and outbound. Agencies will build similar brains for finance, operations, and other functions.
Software was expensive, thin, horizontal, best-of-breed software stacks extracted rents across every business. Now that software is cheap, value moves to vertically integrated businesses that deliver opinionated end-to-end experiences. What does that mean exactly? That means instead of trying to be everything to everyone, you actually now are— let's say Neil and I are both in marketing. Marketing would be one vertical. But now that software is more democratized, this is where the value is occurring now. And that's why I think everyone needs to build a revenue brain. A revenue brain is more vertical, meaning that It covers sales, it covers marketing. That revenue brain can be something that integrates with your cold outbound system. So it's handling cold outbound for you. But maybe it's also integrated with your AEO SEO software suite too. So it's creating content. It's also looking at the customer calls that you're having. We've talked about having your website be like its own revenue agent. That is an example of a vertically integrated experience that you can deliver. I don't think agencies are going anywhere. I think agencies are going to evolve. I think whether you need a finance brain, or a revenue brain, or a company brain, whatever brain you need, you need these vertically integrated brains.
