Why a focused studio is the right SaaS partner in 2026

Two well-documented findings keep getting relearned the hard way in enterprise software.

The first is from Pendo's Feature Adoption Report: across hundreds of cloud applications, roughly 80% of features in the average product are rarely or never used. Pendo separately estimated that unused functionality represents tens of billions of dollars in wasted R&D every year, paid for by customers, ignored by users, and maintained by vendors who can't afford to remove them.

The second is from the late J. Richard Hackman, the Harvard professor who has spent his career studying team performance. His position, restated in his Harvard Business Review interview Why Teams Don't Work, was blunt: "Big teams usually wind up just wasting everybody's time." His rule of thumb was that the best teams are small, generally no more than about six people, because coordination overhead grows non-linearly with headcount. Amazon's "two-pizza team" rule reflects the same lesson from the other side.

Stack those findings and the implication for buyers is uncomfortable: most of the SaaS you're paying for is shelfware, built by teams too large to keep it focused. That's the dynamic InLight AI is structured to escape. We're a small, deliberate studio. Each product, Agency Suite, RealTravel 2 RealPlaces, BRIX, and LangIQ, gets the attention that turns a useful tool into one a professional reaches for daily. We say no to roadmap noise so we can say yes to the workflows that actually matter to the people paying us.

For our customers, that shows up in concrete ways. Onboarding is measured in minutes, not weeks. Support requests get answered by people who built the product. Targeted improvements ship in days, not quarterly release trains. And pricing is honest, you're not subsidizing modules your team will never open.

If you've been burned by a "platform" that turned into shelfware, or by an enterprise vendor that treats you like ticket #4,719, this is the deliberate alternative. A focused studio, accountable products, and a partner that's small enough to actually care what happens after the contract is signed.