The StackScape™

Helping You Build Your Tech Stack.

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WHY

With the increasing amount of available marketing technology solutions (almost 7,000 according to the latest MarTech landscape by Scott Brinker) creating the perfect tech stack also becomes increasingly challenging.

To help marketers getting from overwhelmed to focused, I believe we should zoom in on the landscapes, add refined and task-specific categories with a shortlist of the best technology available, halfway between the landscape and the stack: the StackScape™.

With the right StackScape™ in hand, selecting the solutions that best fit your needs and budget should be a breeze.

HOW

It all starts with categorization. A tool or solution should help you perform a specific task or reach a certain goal. These tasks or goals are leading in the categorization of StackScapes™. For example: “Search” is not a task or goal, but “Keyword Research” is.

Once categories are defined, the research starts: each category ideally offers no more than 10 possible solutions and no more than 2 to 5 solutions in the same price range.

Selection is based on thorough research and personal experience. Third-party sources that influence the selection are Forrester, Gartner, Digital Marketing Depot, G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, Siftery, BuiltWith, SimilarTech and Zapier.

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WHAT

The StackScape™ is a legible visualisation and selection of technology that follows these criteria:

  • Useful categorization: solutions within the same category should perform very similar tasks from the practitioner’s perspective.
  • No more than 10 categories on one slide.
  • No more than 100 solutions on one slide.
  • Solutions are showed in ascending order in terms of starting price category per month (excluding discounts, such as with annual prepayments).
  • Ideally, there are 2 to 5 options to choose from within each starting price range.
  • Uses the following starting price ranges:
    • Free(mium)
    • Affordable (paid but less than $200 / mo)
    • Mid-market ($200 – $1,000 / mo)
    • Enterprise ($1,000+ / mo)

Examples of StackScapes™ ‘avant la lettre’ (but without the price ranges and usually broader categorization) are:

I encourage marketers and technology enthusiasts to create and publish their own StackScapes™, but I kindly ask you to link to StackScapes.com whenever you call it a StackScape™.

I’ll publish each of my own StackScapes™ on the blog, where you can also read the introduction to the StackScape™.

WHO

The StackScape™ concept was coined by Wijnand Meijer at SMX West in San Jose on March 23, 2017.

info [at] stackscapes.com

© 2019 Antifragile B.V.