When you list a business for sale, the marketplace makes you tick which growth levers are still untapped. It is the closest thing to a structured confession of what you never got around to. We parsed 630+ of them.
A founder on r/SaaS asked the question this article answers with numbers: “How do you force yourself to stop building and actually start marketing?”
Everyone has an opinion about that. Almost nobody has data, because the honest answer only exists at the moment someone gives up and sells, and that moment is usually private.
Except it is not. When a founder lists a business on an acquisition marketplace, the listing form makes them tick, from a fixed menu, which growth levers remain untapped. It is a structured, comparable, self-reported account of what they never got around to, and it exists for hundreds of real businesses with disclosed revenue.
We parsed 638 of them. 74.8% say increasing digital marketing is still on the table. 46.4% say the same about new product features. The gap between those two numbers is the whole article.
Acquisition listings are usually mined for price, revenue and multiple. The untapped-lever field is ignored, and it is the only structured field in the dataset that describes the founder’s own judgement rather than their accounts.
We checked: across all 241 published articles on this site, this field had never been used once. Neither had several others. It is a large, clean, unexamined surface.
Post-mortems are written by people who failed loudly, which selects for drama. Surveys ask people to recall intentions. This field is different: it is filled in at a moment when the founder is still solvent, still holds the asset, and is describing the business to someone who will scrutinise it.
It is not neutral either, and we deal with that in the seller’s incentive. But it beats recollection. For the other datasets built from these listings see the state of SaaS acquisitions, profit multiples by category, and the SaaS valuation guide.
Source is our sell-side dataset, 656 live listings from acquire.com, which reports $500M+ in closed deal volume and 2,000+ startups sold. 638 listings have a populated untapped-lever array, averaging 5.1 entries each.
Percentages below are the share of those 638 listings that include a given option. Queries re-run September 11, 2026.
| Source | Evidence type | Volume | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Untapped growth levers | Structured picklist chosen by the seller | 638 listings, 5.1 avg | Picklist is weighted ~4 marketing options to ~2 product options; category ratios are inflated by the menu |
| TTM revenue | Seller-disclosed trailing twelve months | 656 | Pre-diligence, unaudited |
| Team size | Seller-selected band | 628 in the two main bands | Bands are coarse; “2-20” spans very different companies |
| Reddit ICP corpus | Question sentences from founder subreddits | 4,593 ICP-filtered | Illustrative, not representative; self-selected communities |
| Paying customers field | Listed customer count | Excluded | Not a count: holds the leading integer of a churn band string |
Nine options account for 3,175 of roughly 3,254 total lever selections. This is a menu, not free text, and the menu is not balanced.
By our reading it offers four marketing-flavoured choices (digital marketing, social media, content marketing, SEO) against two product-flavoured ones (new product features, add new product features). So if you compute “share of listings naming any marketing lever” against “share naming any product lever”, you get a dramatic ratio that is substantially an artifact of how many boxes there were to tick.
We computed that ratio, found it was 11 to 1, and decided not to lead with it. The defensible comparison is one option against one option, which is 74.8% against 46.4%. Still a clear gap. Not a fabricated one.
| Lever | Listings | Share | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Increase digital marketing | 477 | 74.8% | Marketing |
| Social media marketing | 435 | 68.2% | Marketing |
| Increase content marketing | 411 | 64.4% | Marketing |
| Expand to new markets | 402 | 63.0% | Market |
| Focus on SEO | 338 | 53.0% | Marketing |
| Improve conversion rates | 330 | 51.7% | Funnel |
| New product features | 296 | 46.4% | Product |
| Hire a sales team | 244 | 38.2% | Sales |
| Increase pricing | 242 | 37.9% | Pricing |
Digital marketing 74.8%, product features 46.4%. A 28-point gap between the single most popular marketing option and the single product option.
Put differently: for every three sellers who think the product still needs work, roughly five think the marketing does. Both groups overlap heavily, because the average listing ticks five boxes.
Digital marketing, social media, content marketing and SEO are arguably one regret split four ways: nobody found out this existed. Taken individually they occupy four of the top five positions.
This matches the demand-side evidence in industries still running on spreadsheets, where the hardest part of the opportunity was never the build.
Just over half say search was never seriously attempted. SEO is the slowest-compounding channel on the list, which makes it the one most likely to be skipped by someone who is about to sell. Cross-read Product Hunt alternatives and startup directories.
Half say they never optimised the funnel they already had. This is the cheapest form of growth after pricing, because the traffic already exists. See why SaaS customers churn and customer review analysis for where the leaks are.
37.9% flagged increasing pricing. It ranks eighth of nine, below hiring a sales team.
That is strange, because it is the only lever requiring no new work at all. Our analysis of 39,000+ real price points found the micro SaaS median sits at $25 a month, roughly half the overall market median of $49, so for many of these businesses there was genuine room. See also SaaS pricing strategies and how to price a micro SaaS.
Notable mainly for who flags it. Teams of 2-20 flag it at 42.3%, higher than solo sellers at 39.3%. The businesses that already hired are likelier to believe more hiring is the answer.
Third overall, and the most ambiguous option on the menu. It covers new geographies and new customer segments without distinguishing them, so we treat it as directional. Related: niche opportunities by industry and B2B SaaS ideas.
| Team | Listings | Flag a marketing lever | Flag “hire a sales team” | Median TTM revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo (“Just me”) | 191 | 94.8% | 39.3% | $55,000 |
| Team of 2-20 | 437 | 91.8% | 42.3% | $166,000 |
This is the most useful comparison in the article. If the distribution gap were a capacity problem, teams should flag marketing far less than solo operators. They flag it 91.8% of the time against 94.8%.
Three percentage points. Adding up to nineteen people barely changes whether marketing got done. That suggests the constraint is attention and inclination rather than hours.
The obvious objection is that marketing-flagging listings are just smaller, earlier businesses. They are not. Median trailing revenue is roughly $120,000 for listings flagging marketing levers and $116,500 for those flagging product levers.
Teams do earn more than solo sellers ($166,000 against $55,000), but they neglect marketing at nearly the same rate.
The sell-side data and the founder forums describe the same thing in different registers. In our ICP corpus of 4,593 question sentences, distribution is the single largest theme.
From r/SaaS, the top-scoring version: “How do you force yourself to stop building and actually start marketing?” And in the same thread, “How do you force yourself to switch from builder mode to marketing mode?”
The word “force” recurs. Nobody asks how to force themselves to write code.
From r/SaaS: “why is selling so hard for devs?” and “How do you force yourself to do the marketing side?” The thread title is “20 years coding, 0 money made.”
Twenty years of capability, zero distribution. That is the 74.8% figure with a face on it. The builder-side view is in side hustles for developers, simple SaaS ideas for solo developers, and solo developer revenue examples.
From r/microsaas: “At what point do you stop building and say, ‘This is good enough, I need feedback now’?” And another: “If you were starting your first SaaS today, when would you stop building and start marketing?”
There is no threshold, which is exactly why the default is to keep building. See how to build a SaaS in 2026 and launching a micro SaaS in a weekend.
From r/indiehackers: “Figure out distribution before you write a line of code, this is the most important part of building?” And from r/Entrepreneur: “What I wish I’d known: pick the problem and the distribution before you pick what to build.”
Both are hindsight. Both match what the sellers ticked. See also how to find a profitable niche, how to decide what business to start, and business ideas that solve real problems.
Building has a tight feedback loop and an unambiguous definition of done. Marketing has a slow, noisy loop and no definition of done at all. Under uncertainty people do the task that returns a signal.
That is a sufficient explanation for the entire dataset, and it does not require anyone to be lazy or foolish. Related: why SaaS customers churn, SaaS metrics benchmarks, and how fast SaaS startups actually grow.
If marketing were genuinely optional, nobody would be buying it. The clearest independent check on the 74.8% figure is our Upwork corpus, where the task is not an opinion but a job someone is funding right now.
“Businesses often face difficulties in scaling their lead generation efforts due to the manual nature of data collection and the lack of automated systems, which limits their growth potential.” “Cold calling is often a tedious and inefficient method for reaching potential clients. Automating outreach and follow-up processes can save time and reduce costs associated with manual calling efforts.”
“The process of creating high-quality content that resonates with target audiences is often labor-intensive and requires specialized skills.” “Managing and scheduling content across multiple social media platforms can be overwhelming and inefficient without proper tools. This often leads to inconsistent posting and missed engagement opportunities.”
“Social media managers often spend excessive time analyzing engagement metrics and generating reports manually.” “Capturing leads from various sources and managing them effectively is a common challenge for businesses.” “Many businesses struggle to find and recruit high-quality affiliates efficiently. This process often involves extensive manual research, outreach, and onboarding.”
Two more name the measurement problem underneath all of it. “Many businesses struggle with ensuring that their conversion tracking is set up correctly, leading to inaccurate data reporting. This can result in poor decision-making and ineffective marketing strategies.” And: “Ensuring the accuracy and validity of collected data is a significant challenge for businesses, often leading to ineffective marketing efforts and wasted budgets due to incorrect contact information.”
Even the platform-specific version repeats it: “Many Etsy sellers struggle with optimizing their product listings for visibility and conversion. This process is often manual, time-consuming, and requires ongoing adjustments based on SEO and market trends.”
These are people paying money, monthly, for the exact levers 74.8% of sellers left untouched. More on reading this source correctly in validating demand with Upwork jobs, the state of freelance demand, and finding problems to solve.
There is a second, less flattering explanation for why marketing gets skipped: the software for doing it is genuinely unpleasant. Our G2 and Capterra corpora are full of it.
“Users report overwhelming choice leading to confusion, longer lead times for campaigns, insufficient analytics capabilities, and a steep learning curve, which can impact campaign effectiveness.” “Key pain points identified include login-related issues, complexity in managing multi-channel marketing, and performance limitations affecting user experience.”
“Users frequently report difficulties in understanding the platform, inadequate analytics capabilities, and challenges in targeting the right audience demographics effectively.” “Core issue revolves around inadequate cost control features and limited campaign functionality.” “Users report difficulties with campaign creation and integration of reports, indicating a lack of user-friendly features.”
One names the paywall-before-proof problem specifically: “Users experience frustration with the campaign setup process, requiring payment before testing and lacking an initial trial phase for smaller lists, leading to limited exploration of the platform’s capabilities.”
The Capterra side is blunter. A director of marketing: “30% of the email you send does not reach the recipient. I’ve contacted them 6 times about the same issue and got zero response.” A head of investor relations: “The basic functionality for email sending is now completely gone, and the platform is useless for our needs.” A CEO: “From the beginning, there were so many bugs in the software. It is NOT user-friendly and we never were able to get it working properly to even run 1 campaign.”
And the support experience around it: “Customer experience was terrible; three different representatives in six months only led to confusion. The lack of consistency cost us dearly in time and opportunities.” “Their customer support is horrendous. It’s like getting blood from a stone trying to resolve issues.” “No response from tech support despite multiple outreach attempts; it seems they only assist selective users.”
A VP of performance on the control problem: “Sometimes it has some glitches, and that is not able to pause or activate campaigns for hours, only by days or months.” And a team lead on the setup cost: “Integration took a lot of time, the process was not easy to understand which may discourage some users.”
None of this excuses skipping distribution, but it does explain some of it. Compare with email marketing software limitations, sales software limitations, customer support software limitations, and the most hated software of 2026.
Put the three corpora together and a single picture emerges. Sellers say marketing was the unfinished half. Buyers on Upwork are paying humans to do that exact work by hand. And the software meant to automate it draws thousands of complaints about analytics, deliverability and setup cost.
That is a market failure with a product-shaped hole in it, which is the pattern described in market gap analysis, business pain points, and the most underserved software markets.
It also suggests the 74.8% is not pure avoidance. Some of it is people who tried, found the tooling hostile, and went back to building where the feedback loop was clean. See uncovering real-world problems and turning problems into products.
Sellers tick most of the menu. That is partly incentive and partly honest: by the time you list, everything looks untapped, because you stopped. The same “everything at once” problem shows up when choosing what to build: micro SaaS examples, single-feature micro SaaS ideas, and SaaS ideas backed by pain points.
A listing is a sales document. Untapped levers are an argument that the buyer has headroom, so sellers are motivated to tick generously. Every percentage in this article is inflated by that, uniformly.
What survives the inflation is the relative ordering, because the incentive applies equally to every option. Digital marketing outranking product features by 28 points is not explained by an incentive that pushes both up.
It does not prove marketing matters more than product. It proves sellers believe marketing was the unfinished half. Those are different claims, and the second is still useful.
It also cannot tell you whether pulling those levers would have worked. Nobody ran the counterfactual.
Every listing has revenue. Businesses that never reached sellable revenue are absent, and their lever mix is unknown and probably different. For the base rate see startup failure statistics and why startups fail.
Distribution is the half sellers say they left undone. Scope is the half that decides whether you ever get far enough to find out. Our buildability analysis found micro SaaS concentrates in a narrow 6-to-8 band and collapses at both ends: how small your MVP should actually be.
Pricing requires no new channel, no new headcount and no new code, and 37.9% of sellers left it untouched. If you do one thing after reading this, re-check your price against what comparable products actually charge.
The top four levers are four channels. Sellers left all of them untapped, which suggests they were treated as one undifferentiated chore. Pick one. Practical routes: how to get customers for a startup, your first 100 SaaS users, where to launch, and finding your first customers.
Builders ship because a build has a scope and an end. Give a channel six weeks and a definition of done and it stops competing with the thing that feels productive.
The reason marketing loses is that its feedback is slow and ambiguous. Shorten the loop artificially: count conversations, not revenue, for the first month. See customer discovery questions.
46.4% of sellers still wanted more features when they gave up. If you are reaching for a feature because distribution feels uncomfortable, you are reproducing the dataset. Cross-read how to build a SaaS and micro SaaS ideas.
For an acquirer, an untapped marketing lever is the thesis: a working product with no distribution is a cheap asset with obvious upside. See buying vs building, finding acquisition targets, and reading the AI buyer thesis.
Untapped levers are one half of the listing. The other is the asset list, and it is narrower than most founders assume: inside real SaaS listings the codebase carries no valuation premium at all, while registered IP climbs 27 points across price bands. See what actually transfers when you sell a SaaS.
Treat a long untapped-lever list with suspicion rather than excitement. It is an argument, not an audit, and the seller has every reason to make the headroom look large. Check it against the due diligence checklist.
The businesses in this dataset did not fail at building. They built something with real revenue and then sold it while still believing nobody had properly heard of it. The unfinished half was almost never the product.
If you are choosing what to build next, start from documented demand rather than from a feature idea: SaaS ideas from real pain points, problem-solving app ideas, and how to find SaaS ideas.
Our finding is one dataset. It is worth checking against the others that exist. MicroConf’s State of Independent SaaS is the long-running survey of bootstrapped founders and covers marketing approach directly. The Y Combinator library is the reference for the funded path, which runs on a different clock and a different distribution model. On the supply side, our Stripe Index covers 29,000+ companies listed on Stripe’s public directory, and the US Census Business Dynamics Statistics programme gives the economy-wide survival baseline.
None of them measures untapped levers at exit, which is why this field is worth parsing at all. Cross-read with the micro SaaS competition map, SaaS market saturation, the state of small SaaS valuations, and SaaS market trends.
A few last voices, because the aggregate can make this feel abstract. From r/microsaas on the onboarding-versus-cost tension: “For those running tools with non-trivial per-request costs, what balance did you settle on between keeping onboarding frictionless and keeping your margins?”
From r/SaaS, on the audience problem stated plainly: “When you have no followers and no community, how do you get the first 100 people to even look at your offer?” And: “What I’m struggling with now is the part nobody really teaches: how do you actually find customers?”
From r/indiehackers, the version where the work was done and still did not land: “Could be the channels, could be the landing page I’ve already rewritten 3 or 4 times without moving conversion.” And from r/SideProject, the question that should come first: “How did you check your audience actually PAYS before you built?”
That last one is the whole article in a sentence, asked before the build instead of after the sale. It is the same instinct behind validating a startup idea, multi-signal validation, common validation pitfalls, customer pain point analysis, and tools to find customer pain points.
638 of 656 listings have a populated lever array, so coverage is 97%. Nine options cover 3,175 of roughly 3,254 selections; the remainder is sparse free text, some of it junk (one listing entered “351 active paying subscriptions” as a growth lever).
Picklist weighting. Four marketing options against two product options. Compare option to option only.
Seller incentive. Untapped levers are a selling point, so all figures are inflated.
Self-report, not audit. Nobody verified that marketing was genuinely untapped.
Survivorship. All listings have revenue.
One marketplace, one snapshot. September 2026, single platform.
Coarse team bands. “2-20” spans a two-person side project and a twenty-person company.
The listed paying-customers field looks like a customer count and is not: it holds the leading integer of a churn band string, so “5-10% Stable” becomes 5. We excluded it. The monthly churn column is entirely empty, though the churn bands themselves survive in the raw record.
The general rule: run min, max and percentiles before citing any scraped column, and open the raw record before concluding data is missing.
Start at discover, or read getting started with the sell-side database, using sell-side data as validation, and the revenue intelligence guide. The MCP server exposes the same data in an AI assistant. Cross-reference with the Stripe Index and the state of SaaS acquisitions.
Acquisition listings with disclosed financials, revenue benchmarks across 8,699 startups, and 1M+ documented complaints, in one place.
Start searching →Digital marketing, flagged by 74.8% of 638 listings, against 46.4% for new product features.
Partly, and it matters. The picklist holds roughly four marketing options against two product ones, so category-level ratios are inflated. Compare option to option: 74.8% vs 46.4%.
Slightly. 94.8% of solo sellers versus 91.8% of teams of 2-20. The small gap is the point.
About 5.1 out of roughly nine options.
No. It means sellers believe marketing was the unfinished half. That is a self-report at exit, not a controlled comparison.
No. Median TTM revenue is $120,000 for marketing-flagging listings vs $116,500 for product-flagging ones.
37.9%, ranking eighth of nine despite being the cheapest lever available.
38.2% overall, and teams of 2-20 flag it more than solo sellers (42.3% vs 39.3%).
Flagged by 63.0%, covering both new geographies and new segments without distinguishing them.
The data cannot establish that, but it is consistent with it. Those who stopped overwhelmingly felt distribution was the unfinished half.
It is biased toward businesses worth selling. Every listing had revenue.
Because it is a sales argument, not a confession. Untapped levers signal headroom to a buyer, which inflates every figure here.
No. It suggests being found is the half that gets skipped, because only one of the two halves feels like progress to a technical founder.
Raising prices, at 37.9%. No headcount, no channel, no code. See what micro SaaS actually charges.
Moderately. Structured and consistently populated, but a picklist chosen by a motivated seller.
Pick one distribution channel before your next feature and give it the same number of weeks you would give a build.
BigIdeasDB indexes acquisition listings alongside revenue and complaint data. Start at discover. Further reading: how long it takes to grow a SaaS, the state of indie SaaS revenue, how to sell your SaaS, SaaS valuation multiples, the first $1K MRR, the solopreneur toolkit, the best micro SaaS ideas, low competition SaaS ideas, how to find startup ideas, and how to find problems worth solving.
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). The Growth Levers Founders Never Pulled (630+ Exits). BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/growth-levers-founders-never-pulled