Allstacks’s Real Competition: Why Tableau Dashboards, Not VSM Platforms, Block Their Deals

Your sales team runs a competitive analysis workshop. They map out every value stream management platform, document feature gaps, build comparison charts. They’re ready for battle cards.

Then you close your first hundred deals and realize: you’re rarely competing with anyone at all.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hersh Tapadia, CEO and Co-Founder of Allstacks, a value stream intelligence platform that’s raised nearly $16 million, shared a counterintuitive insight about competition that changes how you should think about positioning, pricing, and sales strategy.

The Competitive Landscape That Doesn’t Matter

When you look at Gartner’s value stream management platforms category, you’ll find roughly 16 companies. Conventional wisdom says you need to differentiate against these players.

Hersh looked at this landscape and came to a different conclusion. “Most of the deals that we go through we’re actually not competing at all. We’re going after them solo,” Hersh explains.

This isn’t humble bragging. It’s a fundamental insight about where real buying friction exists in emerging categories.

The Real Enemy: Yesterday’s Solutions

So what are they competing with? “What we’re actually competing with is maybe somebody, some enterprising person said this data is really important, I’m going to build something in tableau for Power bi to really get a handle on it. But now the organization is scaled to the point where that’s no longer tenable and they’re looking for a solution.”

This is the actual competitive dynamic. Not a feature comparison against another vendor, but a replacement decision for an internal solution someone cobbled together when the problem first emerged.

Years ago, an engineering leader recognized that understanding engineering productivity mattered. They had no budget for a dedicated tool—or the category didn’t exist yet—so they built something. They pulled data from Jira and GitHub, wrangled it into Tableau or Power BI, and created dashboards. It worked well enough.

But “well enough” has a shelf life. Organizations grow. Data sources multiply. The person who built it leaves. Maintaining the homegrown system becomes a burden. Dashboards break when APIs change. Nobody understands how the calculations work.

That’s when companies start looking for a real solution. Not because a competitor ran a compelling ad. Because the internal solution finally became more expensive to maintain than it’s worth.

Why This Changes Your Go-to-Market

Understanding your real competition reshapes your entire sales and marketing strategy.

1. Your messaging targets pain, not features

If you’re competing against vendors, you talk about features and benchmarks. But if you’re competing against homegrown solutions, the conversation is completely different. You’re selling relief from maintenance burden. You’re selling scalability. You’re selling the ability to redirect engineering resources from maintaining internal tools to building product.

The pain isn’t “we don’t have enough dashboards.” The pain is “maintaining this thing is killing us, and we’re terrified it’s going to break.”

2. Your pricing anchors differently

When prospects compare you to vendors, they think about price delta between solutions. When they’re replacing homegrown solutions, they think about internal cost. How much engineering time goes into maintaining this? What’s the opportunity cost?

Your pricing isn’t competing with another vendor’s number—it’s competing with the fully loaded cost of internal maintenance. That’s usually much higher, which means you can often price more aggressively.

3. Your sales process focuses on replacement, not comparison

Traditional sales involves proving you’re better than alternatives. But replacing homegrown solutions requires a different approach. Prospects already know their internal system isn’t good enough—that’s why they’re talking to you.

The question isn’t whether you’re better. The question is whether the migration pain is worth it, and whether you can actually replace what they’ve built.

The Broader Pattern for B2B Founders

Hersh’s insight points to a broader pattern in emerging categories. Early on, most companies aren’t buying dedicated software. They’re solving the problem with internal solutions—spreadsheets, homegrown tools, duct-taped integrations. These work well enough to validate the problem matters, but don’t scale.

As the category matures, companies start looking for real solutions. But they’re not comparing vendors to each other—they’re comparing vendors to the internal status quo. The buying criteria aren’t about relative features. They’re about whether the pain of continuing with the homegrown solution exceeds the pain of migrating.

This changes how you should think about your market:

Your actual TAM isn’t companies using competitive products—it’s companies that have built something internally but haven’t bought dedicated software.

Your primary marketing job isn’t differentiation from competitors—it’s surfacing the hidden costs of homegrown solutions: maintenance burden, technical debt, key person risk, scalability limits.

Your sales objections won’t be “Competitor X has this feature.” They’ll be “We’ve already invested so much in our internal solution” and “Migration seems risky.”

Your product priorities should focus on making migration painless and maintaining feature parity with common homegrown patterns, not just matching competitive features.

Finding Your Real Competition

Here’s the tactical question: How do you identify your actual competition when it’s not another vendor?

Talk to your last ten closed-won deals. Don’t ask who else they evaluated. Ask what they were doing before they bought your product. Who built it? How long did it take to maintain? What broke most often? What finally pushed them to look for an alternative?

You’ll find patterns. Maybe everyone was using the same combination of tools. Maybe the breaking point always came at a specific scale. Maybe there’s a particular type of person who always ended up owning the homegrown solution.

These patterns tell you where your real competition lives. And more importantly, they tell you how to position against it.

Allstacks figured this out by paying attention to deal patterns. Most B2B companies never do this analysis—they stay focused on the competitive landscape that’s easy to see (other vendors) instead of the competitive reality that actually drives buying decisions (internal solutions).

The companies that figure out their real competition don’t just win more deals. They build entirely different—and more effective—go-to-market motions.