If you read my post at the end of last year, you know that my client work changed toward the end of 2025.
It wasn't dramatic. No single conversation triggered it. But looking back at December, roughly 20% of what I was doing had moved from strategy and advisory into actually building things. Custom data apps, operational tools, activation layers that clients needed but couldn't find off the shelf. By April 2026 that number was closer to 50%.
When half your work has subtly become something different from what your practice was named for, it's time to pay attention.
What the market is telling us
Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma's State of Martech Report puts language to something I've been observing in client engagements for a while now. The micro-SaaS wave is real. Niche, precision-built applications that solve specific operational problems are becoming a serious part of how mature Martech stacks get completed, not replaced, completed.
The logic is straightforward. The big platforms do the heavy lifting. But the gaps between them, the exact requirements that no vendor has an incentive to solve for the median use case, those gaps are where the real operational challenge lives. And for a growing number of organisations, the low-hanging fruit sitting in those gaps is too obvious to keep ignoring.
I've been building in that space for about a year without a clean name for it. A recruitment client needed mid-process postcode validation during candidate screening. Typeform doesn't do that. Building it, production-ready, took three weeks. The alternative was a manual process running indefinitely. That's a precise problem.
Precision apps. That's the term I'm using for this category of work. Tight scope, exact fit, built on existing data and infrastructure, handed over to run without me.
Matthew Niederberger
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What this means for the practice
Martech Therapy isn't going anywhere. If anything, Martech's Law makes the advisory work more relevant, not less. Technology keeps advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, and the gap between stack ambition and operational reality is wider than it's ever been. A lot of companies still need to do the strategic groundwork before they're ready to build anything.
But the companies that have done that work, including some past Martech Therapy clients, are now hitting a different wall. They know what they need. They've looked at what's available. Nothing bends far enough. That's a different conversation and it needed a different practice to have it in.
So I built one.
Martech Foundry is the build and delivery practice. Custom data integration and activation solutions, precision apps, operational tools. Scoped, delivered, and handed over. If I'm still embedded a year after I started, I haven't done my job well enough.
Matthew Niederberger
Martech Therapy remains the strategy and advisory practice. CDP assessments, fractional Head of Martech engagements, RFP support, and the thinking that needs to happen before you're ready to build. In many cases Martech Therapy is still the right starting point, and for clients who move through it and find themselves ready to build, Martech Foundry is the natural next step.
Both practices now sit under Piedmont, the parent entity I've registered to house the full scope of the work. Netherlands-based, working globally, vendor-agnostic by design.
Why Piedmont
A few people I bounced the idea around with have asked about the name.
Piedmont is the French translation of my surname, Niederberger. Nieder means low or foot, berg means mountain. Literally: at the bottom of the mountain.
But the reason it felt right as a name goes beyond the personal etymology.
The foot of the mountain is exactly where most of the organizations I work with find themselves. They can see where they need to get to. They understand the gap between their current Martech reality and what's possible. Some of them have been standing at the base for a while, looking up, not quite sure where the path starts or whether they have what it takes to climb it.
That is the moment I work in. Not at the summit, not halfway up with a map telling someone else what to do. At the foot, with the people who need to make the ascent, helping them move.
Piedmont felt like the honest name for that work.
Why now
Honestly, because the work already looked like this. The restructuring is just the practice catching up with what clients were already asking for.
The 20% to 50% uplift didn't happen because I decided to pivot. It happened because organizations started arriving with a specific type of problem, and the market signal was clear enough that ignoring it would have been the wrong call.
The Piedmont structure gives both practices the space to be what they actually are, distinct but related, each with its own positioning, its own client conversation, and its own way of measuring success. The through-line is the same across both: close the gap between what your Martech can do and what it actually does, as quickly and durably as possible.
What stays the same
The independence. Some of my work still comes from vendor recommendations based on their trust in my work and perspective, and I intend to keep it that way.
The handover model. Every Martech Foundry engagement ends with the client's team running the solution independently. Every Martech Therapy engagement ends with a client that doesn't need me to keep the lights on.
And the writing. The podcast, this blog, the frameworks. That's how I stay sharp and how I stay honest about what's actually happening in the market. That continues under Martech Therapy and the Piedmont name.
If you're curious about the build side of the work, Martech Foundry is at martechfoundry.com.
If you're still working through the strategic layer, Martech Therapy is where that conversation lives.
And if you want to understand how the two fit together, bypiedmont.com is the starting point.
Curious whether anyone else is seeing the same shift. The micro-SaaS signal in the State of Martech Report felt significant to me. Would be interested in how it's landing for others managing complex stacks.
Do you have any questions after reading this article?
Or need support with your Martech projects?
Discussion