The dissolution of integrations and data moats in SaaS

When we first started to build a CRM company, I got a lot of advice that the thousands of integrations and CRM migration challenges would eat away at R&D time and slowly bleed the company dry. It hasn’t panned out that way so far at all.

First, on data migrations - typically speaking, CRM migrations are done by exporting a file, manually adjusting the schema of the new CRM, manually lining up the old fields to the new fields, and then manually dealing with every duplicate and exception as you import each row. It’s one of the most tedious processes in the history of software. Sadly, this is still the experience today in Lightfield and we’ve all spent hundreds of hours helping our customers through a garbage CSV importing process. There’s actually a small industry of system integrators and CRM migrators who do nothing but this work. Last year, Accenture attributed 52% of their revenue to technology consulting services that have a heavy weighting on ERP and CRM migration.

Last week, a customer didn’t use our legacy data migration tool and instead asked our agent to do it. It was pretty good except for some mild hallucination. So we built code execution functionality for our CRM agent who could build a Python program and run a deterministic migration without hallucination. Then, we started to build a cleaner API that would allow the agent to make schema changes live during migration to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. It’s pretty good at handling merging and exceptions too. This will be ready to launch in the next few weeks. The cost of data migration is rapidly approaching zero.

Second, on integrations. I’ll caveat all of this by saying we’re focused on startups who run modern web apps. I make no claim about the long-tail of on-premise legacy enterprise apps. Every startup we work with has a fairly modern cloud-based stack. Nearly every one of these companies has an MCP server because their customers expect it. It turns out you can MCP what you need into the CRM, use our agent to parse it, then choose how to store/act on it. We got this up and running internally for Linear, Datadog, and a famous call recorder who is planning to publicly release their MCP server very soon. This all happened in days. We’re actively working on our MCP offering for all of customers and will release it soon.

This example is very specific to my company, but this is for a horizontal system of record. The seemingly most impenetrable category in software for decades because of data and integrations.

The upshot is simple: when the cost of migrations and integrations approach zero, mediocre products lose their ability to lock customers into extractive long-term contracts. SaaS can no longer hide behind “good enough” software and 80% sales-driven growth. We may be entering an era where the best product actually wins — and has to keep winning to stay ahead. That’s very good news if you’re competing with a big, slow incumbent.