Think the martech landscape is big? Here’s the size of the software industry overall

Around the 11 yrs that I have been publishing the martech landscape, as it mushroomed from ~150 solutions to ~10,000, I have seen a lot of folks react to it as an anomaly. “What is it about marketing and advertising that spawns so a lot of software program applications? Certainly no other career has to deal with these sprawl!”

To which application assessment website G2 responds in this write-up, “Hold my beer.”

Though there are absolutely dynamics precise to marketing that feed the frenzy of new martech startups, the fact is that martech is just a part of a a lot bigger software program revolution. Marc Andreessen known as it “software taking in the planet.” I call it The Fantastic App Explosion. Software is in all places (and, increasingly, every little thing is software package).

But exactly how lots of commercially packaged program applications are there in The Good Application Explosion?

Let’s choose game titles and purchaser-oriented apps off the table. We know there are hundreds of thousands of these kinds of apps for mobile equipment on the Apple App Shop and Google Enjoy Retail store. It’s truthful to say that’s a distinctive kettle of fish than B2B computer software, these kinds of as martech.

Properly, at minimum these days. Frankly, buyer and company software program applications are driven by much of the identical underlying engineering. And you see raising cross-pollination concerning those people domains. The consumerization of IT continues to be a major motion underway. I individually see similarities concerning creators on purchaser platforms and “makers” within organizations leveraging no-code instruments. And if you believe that the hoopla of the metaverse — which will a single day increase from the trough of disillusionment — the convergence of organization and buyer ordeals will blur even further more.

But for now, let’s adhere to a slender interpretation of how a lot of business enterprise application apps are there in the earth?

The solution: at the very least 103,528.

That is the number of computer software items profiled on G2’s web-site as of very last 7 days. It is not a theoretical guesstimate. It is an empirical rely — like the martech landscape, but spanning all small business program types.

I emphasized the phrase “at least” in entrance of that variety for two causes:

Initially, G2 acknowledges that they have not uncovered all of the business enterprise application applications out there however. My impression is that in particular in markets exterior of North The united states, there’s a ton even now to find out. Feel of China and Japan, for instance.

Next, new computer software startups continue to keep currently being released. (You may possibly be mumbling under your breath, “Let’s see what the existing financial state does to that merry-go-round.” Set a pin in that caveat for a moment – I’ll arrive back to it.)

In other phrases, that 103,528 selection is a reduce bound of the B2B software package item universe. The genuine quantity is undoubtedly bigger, and perhaps considerably bigger. 150,000? 200,000? Additional?

G2’s databases is absolutely continue to escalating, adding on normal 945 program products for every thirty day period.

What about consolidation, you say? These figures from G2 are inclusive of the point that they’ve dealt with above 760 merger and acquisition cases because January of this year. So, indeed, consolidation is happening. But the paradox of simultaneous consolidation and expansion in computer software marketplaces holds accurate. It is not just martech.

Speaking of martech, the folks at G2 also shared with me the counts of 9,365 martech goods and 1,488 adtech products and solutions in their databases. Blended — which is how I’ve always imagined of them — which is 10,853 madtech apps in complete. Additional than what Frans and I arrived up with in our 2022 martech landscape release in Could.

Our system is to share knowledge amongst us and G2 to get a superset of all of them. But it is great to also have an impartial corroboration that, yes, today’s martech landscape really is on the magnitude of ~10,000 items.

Is 2023 the 12 months of the Martech Cataclysm?

But let’s get back to that question about the overall economy I dodged earlier.

No sugarcoating it. This up coming year or two is going to exert a ton of tension on the recent martech landscape. Funding will be harder to arrive by, and at noticeably extra modest valuations. Internet marketing departments are going to have tighter budgets and come to be much harder buyers when it will come to contemplating and negotiating martech buys. This is the first time in about a decade of exponential martech expansion that the marketplace is going through a genuinely formidable financial atmosphere.

Definitely, this will end result in lots of additional acquisitions of scaled-down martech fish by even larger martech fish, as properly as the non-public equity crowd betting on the other aspect of this cycle. But additional painfully, there will be an escalating selection of early-phase martech ventures that basically contact it quits soon after failing to possibly safe their up coming funding round, locate a keen acquisitor, or rebalance their functions to profitability.

My most effective guess? Up to 20% of the existing martech landscape could churn before 2024.

But it’s only the churn level of existing martech distributors that I have a dark prediction about. As far as collective market profits goes, I think martech is likely to go on to improve for the foreseeable potential. It’s possible not as quickly as it has been for the up coming few of many years. But in the massive photograph, nonetheless very fast. For just one basic reason: the electronic transformation of marketing is significantly from in excess of, and it stays one particular of the greatest levers every single company on the earth has for successful and retaining customers.

Primarily in the difficult times ahead, excellent martech will be essential to survival success.

Forget about valuations for now, which have been the semi-delusional yardstick of measuring martech ventures these previous couple many years. Earnings is the ground truth of sizing an market. And I’m 99.9% sure martech revenue will expand yr-about-12 months for the rest of this decade.

And to repeat the mantra of this post: it is not just martech. The entire application business has enormous progress in advance of it. The inspiring chart over from Battery Ventures (with my two annotations in orange) is both an exact glimpse-back at software profits advancement around the earlier 5 a long time, but also a relatively conservative extrapolation of common compound once-a-year expansion of software package revenue for the following two many years.

Two matters pop out quickly from that chart:

First, holy cats, the sizing of what the software market is probably to mature to by 2050 dwarfs where we are now. “Software taking in the world” is software using above far more and additional of each individual facet of the financial state. Around the globe GDP in 2020 was ~$85 trillion. By 2050, it’s anticipated to be ~$165 trillion. It’s really not that ridiculous to think of computer software generating up a mere $6 trillion of that, or ~3.6% of full GDP.

2nd, the Dot-Com Bubble Burst in 2000 and The Fantastic Economic downturn in 2008 hardly sign-up as very small dents in the upward slope of this mountain. Which is not to trivialize the difficulties so quite a few faced in those yrs. But putting those people hurdles in standpoint of the lengthy match, the over-all trajectory of the software marketplace hasn’t been derailed by the ups-and-downs of macroeconomic enterprise cycles. I imagine that is likely to keep on being real for this generation and most likely the next.

All of which leads me to conclude that The Excellent Application Explosion will carry on via these subsequent few of yrs. And on the future wave of recovery and enlargement, the progress in new application applications may possibly very nicely hit mild speed ludicrous velocity.