Today, I read a TechCrunch article about what investors are no longer looking for in SaaS, or rather, what to avoid if you don't want to lose their interest.

The red flags were:

• Too easy to replicate light AI wrappers, generic horizontal tools, basic CRM clones, generic productivity or project management tools.

• No real depth products where differentiation is mostly UI and automation, anything without proprietary data, surface-level analytics.

• Becoming obsolete workflow automation tools that coordinate human work (agents are taking over), integrations as a moat (MCP is making connectors a commodity), and "workflow stickiness" products trying to keep humans inside their software.

We ve been speaking with a lot of TikTok Shop operators recently and noticed that understanding true profitability is still surprisingly difficult.

Data often lives across multiple dashboards ads, affiliates, creator performance, and order reporting making it hard to get a clear picture of margins and growth efficiency.

Curious to hear from founders or ecommerce operators here:

What has been the biggest challenge when trying to measure real performance on TikTok Shop?