Why SaaS Marketplaces are the New Battleground for Go-to-Market Success

In the rush and churn of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) world, the battle for customer attention has never been more fierce. For every household name, think Slack or Salesforce, there are hundreds of SaaS hopefuls vying for a sliver of mindshare and recurring revenue, only to find themselves lost in a sea of similar offerings. The root cause? All too often, it’s a lack of differentiation and an underdeveloped, or outdated, go-to-market (GTM) strategy. As the field grows ever more saturated, the question facing every founder and product team is the same: how do you break through?

A robust GTM strategy is no mere luxury; it’s the difference between irrelevance and market traction. Statistically, companies with a clear GTM plan are 2.4 times more likely to hit their revenue targets. Traditionally, that’s meant a combination of inbound content (à la HubSpot), organic app store play, outbound sales, and perhaps a dash of viral sharing, like the elegantly effortless approach Loom brings to video communication. But as 2025 comes into focus, these tried-and-true tactics are facing a sea change. The locus of SaaS growth is shifting, away from walled-garden app stores and toward the open, deeply interconnected ecosystems of SaaS marketplaces.

What sets this new breed of marketplace-powered GTM apart is not just distribution. It's the way these platforms reshape the very architecture of SaaS offerings, how they dissolve barriers to adoption, and how they let ambitious newcomers borrow trust and demand from established giants.

Integration is the New Discovery

Consider the classic playbook: Launch your SaaS in a major app store, cross your fingers, maybe spend a good chunk of your projected LTV on ads, and hope for a spike. But millions of products now compete for the same sliver of screen real estate. The app store model leans heavily on organic discovery, which is increasingly a losing bet for new entrants.

Enter the integration-first mindset. Take Canva, the visual design platform that’s not-so-quietly revolutionized workplace creativity. Rather than focusing solely on being found in the chaos of an app storefront, Canva invested in deep integrations with business mainstays like HubSpot and Salesforce. These weren’t mere afterthoughts or check-the-box partnerships; they were frictionless bridges, embedding Canva directly into the workflows of users who already lived inside those systems. The result? Canva didn’t just gain visibility, it became indispensable inside these established habitats.

It’s a defining example of how SaaS marketplaces, whether Salesforce AppExchange, Microsoft AppSource, or similar, are enabling products to meet their ideal customer profile (ICP) precisely where work happens. Such platforms do more than distribute apps; they actively pull best-of-breed solutions into the gravitational field of their massive user bases, side-stepping the biggest challenge for new SaaS: earning trust and trial.

Virality Meets Ecosystem Leverage

Loom’s growth hacks, particularly its emphasis on effortless video sharing, illustrate another marketplace-like effect: users themselves become the vector for distribution. While Loom’s strategy blossomed through built-in product virality, SaaS marketplaces institutionalize this phenomenon. They set up mechanisms, such as “app recommendations,” “most installed,” or “people also use” sections, that elevates the best products through customer-driven adoption signals, powered by the aggregated credibility of the marketplace audience.

Moreover, for SaaS companies steeped in B2B workflows, these marketplaces create new possibilities for cross-selling and bundling. Imagine a project management tool designed to seamlessly extend Salesforce’s CRM capabilities, discoverable by thousands of decision-makers actively looking for ecosystem-ready add-ons. Or consider usage-based SaaS billing, popularized in marketplaces like AWS Marketplace, which allows for more nuanced monetization: customers pay for what they use, while products can scale up and down effortlessly.

Lowering Barriers and Raising Opportunity

Why are SaaS companies flocking to these marketplaces? The numbers tell a compelling story. Marketplaces now drive over 40% of enterprise SaaS deployments, a surge fueled by lowered integration costs, faster customer onboarding, and a massive trust-well built by years of careful platform curation. For emerging SaaS brands, this represents both distribution superhighway and credibility shortcut, fundamentally reducing customer acquisition costs in the process.

Contrast this with the typical direct-sale or standalone app approach, where the challenges are steep: Outbound sales teams often find steep resistance, with CAC (cost of acquiring a customer) ballooning to 15-20% of ARR. Meanwhile, the average conversion rate for cold website visits or app store flybys continues to drop year over year.

Marketplaces solve for this by collapsing the sales cycle. Their pre-vetted, review-rich environments mean a new product isn’t trading on its own reputation alone, it inherits the gravity and goodwill of the ecosystem it plugs into. This effect is increasingly vital as buyers demand seamless workflows and “single pane of glass” experiences, not disjointed silos.

Marketplace Strategy IS Product Strategy

One overlooked insight: Succeeding in marketplaces increasingly means architecting your product for ecosystem-native integration from day one. It starts with research, mapping the platforms where your ICP already spends time, prioritizing integrations that close actual workflow gaps, and thinking beyond functional connectivity to genuine value.

The purest forms of virality, like Loom’s core sharing loop, need to be designed into both your product and its marketplace presence. Carefully planned, value-driven sharing (such as collaborative document links, real-time notifications, or co-edit features) can echo through entire ecosystems, multiplying your reach. Adopting pricing aligned with marketplace billing, such as feature tiers or pay-per-use models, brings both simplicity and scale, letting you harness the channel's built-in mechanisms for expansion.

A Lesson for SaaS Leaders

What does all this mean for founders and product strategists? In this era, competitive advantage is no longer just about what you build, but where and how you launch, integrate, and expand.

The app store, in many niches, is yesterday’s field of dreams. The future belongs to those who can see SaaS marketplaces not simply as another channel, but as the infrastructure for growth, a place where distribution is inseparable from product architecture, and customer trust is shared rather than hoarded. The result? For the best, most thoughtfully integrated SaaS offerings, distribution becomes less a battle, and more a natural consequence of working where your customers already live.