The first instinct is to throw money at the problem. You hire an external agency or a boutique consultancy. You write a Statement of Work for a "Martech Architecture Review."

It sounds very strategic. It costs about $40,000.

I know this well because, I’ve been that consultant.

For eight weeks, three very smart analysts interview your team. They ask questions about data flows. They draw diagrams on whiteboards. They build a 40-slide deck with a beautiful, colour-coded capability matrix.

And then they present it to you.

Here is the problem: by the time that deck lands on your desk, the marketing automation platform has shipped a major update, the sales enablement team has bought a new conversational AI tool on a corporate credit card, and your core CRM has deprecated a non-core feature you were relying on.

You haven't bought a solution. You've bought a very expensive, high-resolution photograph of a problem that moved the moment the shutter clicked.

And worse, the consultants built their matrix by reading the vendor documentation — the exact same proprietary jargon that created the confusion in the first place.

When the consultant play fails, you do what I did. You decide to do it yourself.

Welcome to Spreadsheet Hell.

You decide you're going to map every capability of all 40 tools in your stack. You spend your nights and weekends cross-referencing feature lists on vendor websites.

You try to figure out if Salesforce's "Einstein Activity Capture" is the same thing as HubSpot's "Activity Timeline." You try to determine if "audience orchestration" is just a fancy way of saying "customer segmentation." (Spoiler: it usually is).

The spreadsheet doesn't lie. But it becomes a lie the moment you stop updating it.

SaaS vendors ship features every two weeks. To keep a manual audit accurate, you would need a full-time employee doing nothing but reading release notes and updating cells in Excel.

The human brain is simply not equipped to hold the architectural reality of 40 different SaaS platforms in its working memory at once.

Both of these solutions fail for the exact same reason.

The overlap problem isn't a consulting problem. It isn't a spreadsheet problem. It is an information architecture problem.

The data exists. Every vendor publishes their feature set. But it is stored in incompatible formats, described in proprietary language, and updated constantly.

No human process — whether it's a $40,000 consultant or a burnt-out marketing director working in Excel at 11:00 PM on a Sunday — can keep pace with it.

We are bringing a knife to a gunfight. We are trying to manually map a dynamic, constantly shifting ecosystem of thousands of tools, all of which are actively trying to obscure what they actually do behind marketing fluff.

This isn't a problem that needs more hours. It needs a different kind of tool entirely.

Like I said last week, that spreadsheet almost broke me. But it also planted a seed.

I kept thinking that there had to be a better way. A way to cut through the vendor jargon, map the capabilities automatically, and actually see where the Overlap Tax was hiding — without spending $40,000 or losing three months of your life to Excel.

Many years later, I returned to this problem.

For the last little while, a small team and I have been quietly building exactly that.

It started as a personal frustration. It became a side project. And now, it's something real.

Next Tuesday, I'm going to show you what we built. I think some of you are going to find it very useful.

Thanks for climbing this week,

Troy Muir | The Ladder

PS. Martech House is a hand-picked, private peer group for senior marketing, digital and martech leaders to get sharper thinking, better signals, and more honest conversations than they’ll find at industry events. Applications are now open for the next intake if you want to be part of it (APAC only) - click here to learn more.