In this extended episode, the Metrics Brothers tackle the "elephant in the room" - the SaaSpocalypse. With nearly $1 trillion in market value wiped out recently, Ray and Dave go beyond the stock market headlines to analyze the structural shifts hitting the industry.

The duo breaks down the three primary drivers of the current market "carnage", including the AI Fear of Being Obsolete (FOBO), Regression to the Mean for SaaS stocks and Changing Valuation Methodologies, before diving into the newly released Aviner report, The Future of SaaS: A Fork in the Road. Using Aviner’s "Red Pill vs. Blue Pill" metaphor, they debate whether SaaS companies must fundamentally pivot to "agentic" systems or accept maturity and financialize by focusing on profitability.

Covered in This Episode:

The SaaSpocalypse Explained: Why the stock market is currently a "rugby scrum of information" and why stock price is a measure of future expectations rather than current health

ServiceNow as a Bellwether: An analysis of how a "Rule of 56" company can beat expectations and still see a 30% stock drop in a single month.

FOBO (Fear of Being Obsolete): How the "revenge of build vs. buy" and the collapsing cost of coding are demoting traditional SaaS apps to mere systems of record.

The Aviner Report Breakdown:

• Part 1: The hard data on slowing revenue growth (cut from 40% to 20%) and the "aberration" of 2019–2021 multiples.
• Part 2: The binary choice between embracing AI "Systems of Context" or financializing for net income.

The "Architect Strategy": Ray’s argument for a third path where SaaS companies coexist with AI by providing the governance and orchestration layer

Buyer Sentiment vs. Market Narrative: Why 63% of software buyers believe existing vendors will be the beneficiaries of AI, contradicting the current "SaaS is dead" stock market trend.

Key Metrics & Concepts Mentioned

• Rule of 40 vs. Rule of 60: How the standard for SaaS health is shifting
• Stock-Based Compensation (SBC): Why excluding this from profitability metrics is no longer passing the "financialization" test
• The Three-Layer Taxonomy: Systems of Record, Systems of Engagement, and Systems of Context
• Multiple Compression: The shift from 15x revenue multiples back to the historical 5x mean

Resources Mentioned

• Report: The Future of SaaS: A Fork in the Road by Aviner Growth (Jan 2026).
• Book: The Reckoning by David Halberstam.
• Book: Profit Pools by Orit Gadiesh and James L. Gilbert.

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In this episode of the Metrics Brothers podcast, Ray Rike and Dave Kellogg tackle one of the most critical yet misunderstood metrics in the U.S. economy: Labor Productivity. Amidst the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence, the "Metrics Brothers" break down how productivity is officially measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and why historical technology booms, from SaaS to Cloud, haven't always moved productivity growth as much as expected.

Key Takeaways: A deep dive into the ratio of economic output per hour worked, including what the BLS excludes (farms and government) and the nuances of white-collar labor tracking.

• Historical Trends: A comparison of the post-war boom versus the "SaaS era," exploring why the last 20 years have seen a 66% relative decrease in productivity growth despite trillions in tech investment.
• The AI Impact: Three potential scenarios for the future of work, from "exploding output" to "labor displacement," and why AI might fundamentally remake work in ways the Cloud never did.
• Global Benchmarking: How the U.S. stacks up against leaders like Ireland and Norway in output per hour.

Why Listen? Whether you are a SaaS leader, investor, or white-collar professional, this episode provides a roadmap for staying on the "right side of the divide" in the upcoming AI-driven economic shift.

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Brand is one of the most powerful assets a company can build and one of the hardest to measure. In this episode of The Metrics Brothers, Dave “CAC” Kellogg, and Ray "Growth" Rike take on one of marketing’s most persistent challenges: how to measure brand in a world obsessed with direct attribution and near-term ROI.

The conversation starts with what a brand really is, originating from literal marks of ownership and evolving into a promise of quality, trust, and differentiation. From there, Ray and Dave explore why strong brands create pricing power, customer loyalty, category leadership, and long-term defensibility, even if those benefits do not always show up cleanly in dashboards.

They then break down practical ways to measure brand that align marketing and finance perspectives, including indirect valuation approaches such as brand value and goodwill frameworks, along with comparative metrics like direct and branded web traffic, share of voice, share of search, and inbound pipeline contribution. The episode also covers market research fundamentals including awareness, consideration, trial, and repurchase, and why dedicating a portion of your marketing budget to measurement is essential to sustaining brand investment.

Finally, the Metrics Brothers dig into brand measurement techniques that work in practice, including self-reported attribution, lift experiments, and analyzing sales conversations to see how brand shows up late in the buying process, often at the exact moment a deal is won.

If you have ever struggled to align brand investment with measurable outcomes, justify brand spend alongside demand generation, or connect long-term brand building to real business results, this episode provides a grounded, metrics-driven framework for doing exactly that.

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