Saas companies will survive for the same reason they do today. The operational overhead of any sufficiently complicated piece of software is too much, even more so if it's vibe coded.
AI is killing B2B SaaS
61–70 of 752 posts
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#62I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service. When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them. AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S. Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc. Service provi…
That 2nd S is sometimes engineered into the product design to maximize vendor lock in, and consulting revenue.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#63I've worked in SaaS for most of my career, only recently working at a big corp who is largely the buyer and user of SaaS tools to meet their objectives. From the perspective of the corp business buyer, they want something that works for their needs and they want to buy something instead of build it because the support costs are gnarly. They already have engineers dedicated to the tools they've purchased. Much better to put the risk on someone else they can yell at. And the permissions and access to these tools, reports, data, is usually its own special problem to manage. Building a lot of one-off tools is going to just give IT a huge headache and they will push the org to buy before vibe coding a solution.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#64Anybody who says this doesn't understand build vs buy, and why companies buy in the first place, or they'll selling AI.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#65I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service. When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them. AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S. Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc. Service provi…
Nah it's not that at all. Most of the services are totally fungible and everyone has a short attention span. You need to be in a market which is extremely difficult to disrupt and have a product which people are totally dependent on. And those tend to have a rather large cost to enter unless you were in early.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#66Here is the list of evidence the author gives for why AI is the reason software company stocks are down:
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#67Maybe it's mostly from AI, maybe it's mostly general economic cutbacks. I also feel like these "wrapper" style SaaS products are the first ones companies are dropping when they are looking to cut costs, and I think a lot of companies are looking to cut costs. I do agree with the overall conclusion either way, that System of Record products/companies are the most likely to survive. There are a lot of SaaS companies wi…
I think it's a combination of budgeting, upward price pressure from the SaaS companies themselves, plus bringing things in-house through vibe coding, but there's another factor that I think is harming existing SaaS products. Many of them are becoming legacy solutions with AI bolted on top so they don't really feel that effective or next-level. The underlying tech might even be a generation older too - but the SaaS value-add is providing support, scaling, etc to maintain whatever some old tech that's still a requirement. At some point someone looks at all of these interconnected systems and just says 'start over'.
Vibe coding might not be supplanting all SaaS solutions but it's definitely shaking out "last-gen" solutions.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#68If that would be true, expect in the next decade a frantic search for seclusive grey beards, those who haven't given up their rituals and ancient languages.
If your workforce is vibing all day, they will have no capacity for maintenance, because it isn't their code. So the maintenance that happens will be slop and more spaghetti. I am not saying cases like that never existed before, but such companies will face a moment of truth sooner or later.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#69I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service. When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them. AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S. Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc. Service provi…
> it's quality, availability, price, etc. Are you sure? Companies still use SharePoint Online, Teams etc. The F in SharePoint stands for fast
Yes, many don't like Sharepoint, but still they use it. It's the tool they can use.
Customers don't care if Sharepoint uses LLM, they just want to share ideas, files, reports, pages, etc. If LLM makes it easier, great! If some other product makes it easier, great!
It's not about the product it's about the results.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#70I don't see that happening because companies need to concentrate on their differentiators. Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? Who's taking care of it?
Imagine working at a company who has it own Figma, Docker etc... Thats a recipe for disaster.