When business people everywhere start worrying about the state of the economy, they quickly "put on hold" every costly initiative that is not critical to profitability, "until there's less uncertainty."

Naturally, the first thing executives and managers do is review headcount and real estate to figure out which employees can be terminated and which locations can be closed without impacting revenues in the short to medium term. But then, they also:

* put on hold all software development projects, software license upgrades, hardware purchases, and other tech expenditures that are not critical to the business; and

* review all existing recurring expenses, including every SaaS subscription, with a fine-toothed comb, to see which of those expenses can be reduced or eliminated without impacting revenues in the short to medium term.

As a consequence, many startups selling software, hardware, and all kinds of subscriptions see their sales pipeline and a big chunk of their revenues evaporate overnight, seemingly out of the blue. Startups whose customers are mostly other startups suffer the most. It can be very painful.