Thoughts and rants from a veteran CDP contractor and interviews with my peers.

Vibe Coding Martech

Breaking the Martech Mould

Most Martech platforms solve about 80% of what companies need. The remaining 20% becomes scripts, spreadsheets, and quiet workarounds. AI now makes that gap easier to build. But breaking the Martech mould raises a bigger question: are we building freedom, or just moving responsibility?

Last week I attended a conference with my wife that had absolutely nothing to do with marketing technology.

She is finishing her degree to become a teacher in the fine arts, and her research focuses on a topic that has been quietly worrying educators for years: school dropout rates and the role creativity can play in preventing them.

The numbers in the Netherlands are confronting. Roughly 20% of school-age children are considered neurodiverse in some form. Around 70,000 children are currently not attending school, and another 280,000 are at risk of dropping out.

Not because they lack intelligence

Vibe Coding Martech

The dirty truth about vibe coding in Martech

After ~1000 hours vibe coding, I’ve learned something surprising. AI makes building software easier. But the moment your tool actually works… the real work begins. Hosting. Security. Monitoring. Maintenance. Are we replacing SaaS, or just redistributing responsibility? Curious how others see this.

Every few weeks, another post appears in my feed declaring that SaaS is finished.

Someone cancelled a subscription, vibe-coded a replacement in an afternoon, and now the economics of software are apparently solved. Why pay €30, €300, or €3,000 a month for a tool when an AI can generate the same thing with a prompt?

The sarcasm around vibe coding does reveal its limitations.

The story has become loud enough that it has started leaking into financial markets. Investors are suddenly trying to understand what AI-assisted software creation might do to companies like HubSpot, Adobe, and Salesforce. If every

Martech Stack Builder

Martech Stack Builder, another step closer.

Two months ago, I started building the Martech Stack Builder to help companies and agencies visualize their marketing technology, but also improve cross-departmental collaboration. Here are some notes from the v0.10 update.

Here is a quick update on my Martech Stack Builder project. Over the last week, I have made some big improvements. Let me break them down for you.

What is the Martech Stack Builder?

Maybe I am getting too far ahead of myself, so here is a TL;DR.

Two months ago, I started building a Martech Stack Builder that helps you visualize and present your company's, or your client's, marketing technology stack. A "Miro for Marketing", I guess. The Martech Stack Builder lets you drag 'nodes' onto your canvas and build relationships between them. Additional consideration specific to marketing

gartner magic quadrant

Diverted by design? What the CDP split means for the mid-market

The CDP market didn’t just split into platforms and agents. It quietly diverted the mid-market along the way. This piece looks at what changed, why many teams now hesitate, and how CEPs became the safer path for getting things done.

In last week's part 1, I described how Gartner finally named the split inside the CDP category in their Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms 2026. Platformization on one side. Agentification on the other.

Two futures, both serious, both demanding.

That still leaves a simple question hanging:

Who is this actually built for?

Because when you read this year’s Magic Quadrant carefully, the most telling signal isn’t who moved up or down, which opens another can of worms. It’s the kind of organization the category quietly assumes as the norm.

Large teams. Strong data foundations. Time to

customer data platform

The CDP split is official (and it’s not the one vendors were selling)

For years, CDPs have been stretched like the industry’s Spandex. Data foundation one moment, orchestration layer the next, now even the “context brain” for AI. In this year’s Magic Quadrant, Gartner finally names the split. And it changes how everything should be read.

Reading this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms gave me a familiar feeling.

Not, not that of reading a short novel, with its 46 pages. Not excitement. Not disbelief. More the quiet recognition you get when something you’ve been circling for a while finally lands on paper. The conclusions didn’t come out of nowhere. They arrived right on time for the category.

For years now, CDPs have been asked to stretch in every possible direction. Think of them as the industry’s Spandex. One moment they’re a data foundation. Then an orchestration layer. Then

martech

Extending Martech’s Law: why growth leads to decay

Martech stacks rarely fail. They decay. Over time, more human effort is required just to keep the same outcomes. This article explores why ROI erodes quietly, how entropy shows up in real stacks, and why I built the Second Law of Martech scan.

When I wrote The real Martech ROI equation, I was trying to articulate a frustration I kept hearing, and feeling myself. On paper, the business case made sense. The tools were implemented. The dashboards existed. The licenses were paid. And yet, the return felt harder to realise year after year.

Not because the technology stopped working, but because everything around it seemed to require more effort.

That article stayed with me longer than I expected. Especially one unanswered question: if the investment is already sunk, why does value still feel like it’s slowly leaking away?

The answer I kept

Latest Posts

What is the Martech Stack Builder?