From Enterprise Juggernauts to Micro-SaaS Tools: The Shift Towards Tailored Software
For more than two decades, enterprise SaaS platforms have ruled the software landscape. Dominant players like Salesforce, Oracle, and Workday built their empires on the promise of one-size-fits-most solutions: expansive, multifunctional systems designed to serve broad operational needs across entire organisations.
But a quiet revolution is underway. Teams on the ground, frustrated by bloated interfaces, low adoption rates, and sluggish deployment cycles are increasingly opting for micro-SaaS and AI-native alternatives.
This shift isn’t just about technology. It’s about control, speed, cost, and context. The Micro-SaaS Moment represents a new era of user-centric, workflow-specific tools, often built by the users themselves using no-code platforms and AI-assisted development.
It is, in short, the democratisation of software creation.
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From Monolith to Mosaic
Enterprise SaaS was built for a different time, when building custom tools required dedicated development teams, significant capital investment, and long implementation timelines. In that world, large, feature-dense platforms made sense.
But they’ve grown unwieldy. According to Zylo, the global SaaS market is expected to hit $300 billion in 2025, and yet a significant proportion (circa 53%) of those licences go unused. As organisations increasingly adopt dozens (sometimes hundreds) of SaaS tools, particularly in large multinational firms, they are unintentionally creating data silos, interface fatigue, and runaway software costs.
Even when these platforms work, the setup and procurement process can stretch over months.
What’s replacing them isn’t another monolith. It is a mosaic of lighter, tailored, rapidly deployable tools.
Some are off-the-shelf. Many are built in-house before being spun off as their own entities.
No-Code, AI, and the Rise of the Citizen Developer
The shift is being driven by three key enablers:
The rise of no-code and low-code platforms that dramatically reduce the technical barrier to building software.
The emergence of AI-native application builders, allowing users to generate tools from natural language prompts.
A growing technological fluency among non-developers, who now understand how software can enhance workflows, even if they can't write a line of code themselves.
Platforms like Lovable and Bolt allow users to go from idea to working prototype in minutes, simply by describing their needs in natural language.
Gartner estimates that by 2026, 75% of new app development will happen on low-code platforms. As published by Straits Research, the no-code AI platform market is expected to jump from $3.68 billion in 2024 to $37.96 billion by 2033, driven by exponential demand for tools that don’t require traditional engineering resources.
This has unlocked a new persona inside businesses: the citizen developer. These are marketers, lawyers, HR professionals, and finance analysts who understand their domain deeply and now have the tools to solve problems themselves, without waiting for overburdened IT teams.
Their tools are often better adopted, more relevant, and far faster to iterate.
The New Software Stack: Smaller, Faster, Smarter
Where traditional SaaS tried to be everything to everyone, micro-SaaS tools are often intentionally narrow. They’re designed for one task, one workflow, or one team.
Revenue Operations (RevOps) teams have been among the earliest adopters. Constantly iterating on sales funnels, customer journeys, and campaign strategies, they need tools that can pivot in hours, not months. The legacy procurement model simply doesn’t work in this context.
Similarly, marketing teams are bypassing long vendor negotiations in favour of building internal tools that automate scoring, segmentation, and reporting.
And across industries, there’s a shift from horizontal software (think general-purpose CRMs or project tools) to vertical SaaS: highly specialised applications that speak directly to a sector’s workflows and pain points.
Speed: The New Prerequisite for Growth and Scale
For these specialist micro-SaaS tools, speed to market, brand identity, a deep understanding of their target sector and a tailored GTM strategy are the baseline requirements for sustainable growth.
AI-native and no-code tools have significantly lowered the barrier to entry, making it possible to prototype and deploy functional applications in days. This acceleration allows specialist firms to respond instantly to market needs and feedback, closing the gap between concept and commercial traction.
Startups leveraging these technologies are reaching product-market fit with fewer resources and at a fraction of the time it took even five years ago.
But velocity alone isn’t enough. Micro-SaaS firms that thrive are those that know their audience deeply, often building for a narrow, underserved niche within sectors like legal, finance, compliance, or RevOps. They succeed not by scaling horizontally, but by going deep vertically, solving problems others overlook and building trust within tight-knit professional communities.
A clear, differentiated brand identity plays a critical role in this. In a saturated ecosystem, tools that stand out are those that articulate not just what they do, but why they matter and who they ae for.
Paired with a focused GTM plan, these tools don’t just launch, they land as well.
Examples from Our Network
Several startups in our orbit are not just embracing this shift, they’re helping define it:
Intelligent Legal Solutions is a legal technology company specialising in investment funds. They’ve created a bespoke tool that allows lawyers to draft and manage side letters more efficiently, while fully automating the MFN (Most Favoured Nation) process—a task that’s historically been manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors.
AlphaLoops is empowering investment firms to rethink distribution. Their AI agents act as extensions of human sales teams, handling outbound lead generation, RFP responses, and pipeline management. All the while feeding insights into a CRM that behaves more like a mission control centre than a static database.
Kore Labs offers a new take on financial product governance. Their Financial Product Management platform helps financial services firms bring rigour, transparency, and speed to product development and oversight, transforming a process traditionally fragmented across spreadsheets, emails, and siloed systems.
Quantum Data Engines have been building these types of tools for the last 14 years. With a deep understanding of the anti-financial crime, fraud, sanctions, and risk management landscape, they are offering modular tools to financial services firms globally to combat these risks and more.
Takeaways from the data: Build Narrow. Move Fast.
The micro-SaaS movement is not just a passing trend. It’s the beginning of a new era—where agility, speed, and user-led development are more valuable than sheer functionality.
The most successful startups are those who understand this shift. They’re not building platforms to scale for millions. They’re building tools that matter to hundreds.
And they’re winning.
Need help scaling your micro-SaaS?
At Lagom Consulting, we specialise in helping high-potential tech firms sharpen their positioning, accelerate go-to-market execution, and scale efficiently—without the bloat. Whether you're bringing a niche product to market or refining your growth engine, we’ll work with you to build a tailored GTM strategy that delivers traction, not just noise.
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