Why the biggest threat to your product isn’t your competitor — it’s Excel.
This is my observation. Not a research paper. Not a case study.
Just someone who has been in enough rooms, worked with enough teams, and watched enough promising products quietly disappear to notice a pattern worth talking about.
When I shared this hypothesis with a friend who manages product for a SaaS company — accounting and management software — he didn’t push back.
He just nodded and said: “We can’t convert free users to paid. The product is good. But they keep going back to Excel.”
That told me everything.
The Product Is Fine. That’s Not The Problem.
Walk into any SaaS demo and you’ll see it.
Clean UI. Systematic workflow. Feature checklist that solves every pain point the founder identified. The product is genuinely good. Sometimes great.
And yet — the free plan is full. The paid conversion is stuck. The churn is quiet but real.
The founder looks at the data and thinks: maybe we need better onboarding. Maybe the pricing is wrong. Maybe we need one more feature.
But the product isn’t the problem.
The problem is behaviour.
You Are Not Competing With Other SaaS
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most SaaS founders don’t want to hear:
Your real competitor isn’t the other tool in your category. Your real competitor is the spreadsheet they built three years ago that everyone already knows how to use.
It’s the WhatsApp group where approvals get done. It’s the shared Google Drive folder with the naming convention only Sarah understands. It’s the manual process that is slow and inefficient and occasionally breaks — but works.
Changing to your product doesn’t just mean learning new software. It means changing how a team thinks, communicates, and operates — daily.
That is a massive ask.
The Behaviour Tax
Every SaaS adoption comes with what I call a Behaviour Tax — the invisible cost of getting humans to change their habits.
It includes: Training time. Stakeholder buy-in. The IT department’s approval process. The HR team’s reluctance. The senior manager who says “just use what we have” because he doesn’t want to justify a new budget line. The junior staff who loves your product but has zero influence over the decision.
For a digitally literate SME with a founder who gets it — the Behaviour Tax is manageable. The boss says go, everyone goes.
For a mid to large organisation? The Behaviour Tax can be larger than your annual contract value.
You Can Only Sell Top-Down
You cannot sell behaviour change bottom-up.
A junior executive who loves your product will tell their manager. Their manager will tell their director. Their director will ask IT. IT will ask for procurement. Procurement will ask legal. Legal will say they need three months.
And somewhere in that chain — someone will say: “Why can’t we just use what we already have?”
And the deal dies.
But if the CEO or the decision maker with budget authority believes in the product first — the conversation flows the other way. From top down.
You’re not selling software. You’re selling a mandate.
You’re not selling software. You’re selling a mandate.
The AI Problem Makes This Worse
With the rise of AI-powered SaaS, this behaviour problem doesn’t get easier. It compounds.
Now you’re not just asking people to change their workflow. You’re asking them to trust a system they don’t fully understand, with data they’re responsible for, in an organisation that hasn’t decided how it feels about AI yet.
What This Means For You
If you’re building B2B SaaS — ask yourself honestly:
What behaviour am I actually asking my user to change?
Not what problem does my product solve? What habit, what workflow, what deeply ingrained way of doing things does my product require the user to abandon?
Build for behaviour change. Sell to the person with the mandate to enforce it. And price your product to include the real cost of adoption — not just the cost of the software.
Your SaaS didn’t fail. Your users just never changed.
That’s a different problem. And it needs a different solution.
P.S. At Majalah BIKIN, I write about human experience, UX, and business psychology — drawn from 30 years across airlines, banking, design, and the field. Read more and follow along.