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The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#31

Post by readthenotes1 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #26

All these arguments ignore that the bread you buy today is not always the bread you’ll get years from now. Don’t we all know the cycle by now? 1. Company pours money and resources to create good product 2. Good product gets customers and those customers use word of mouth to get product viral and even more customers 3. Eventually the company has to make a profit and in that pursuit, they make the product worse by addi…

Platform decay is real.

I have relatives who share sourdough starter yeast and make their own bread.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#32

Post by olibhel »

skybrian wrote: post #27

My guess is that SaaS will be around, but it's going to look really different. Say there's a company that sells you a subscription to an issue tracker. At first, it looks just like any other web-based issue tracker. But, although you won't realize it at first, it's hosted on a Linux VM with a development environment on it. Each customer's app gets built from source. Then, when you want something changed, you send a m…

Now where's my customized toaster?

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#33

Post by skybrian »

sausagefeet wrote: post #29
skybrian wrote: post #27

My guess is that SaaS will be around, but it's going to look really different. Say there's a company that sells you a subscription to an issue tracker. At first, it looks just like any other web-based issue tracker. But, although you won't realize it at first, it's hosted on a Linux VM with a development environment on it. Each customer's app gets built from source. Then, when you want something changed, you send a m…

Maybe I'm a luddite, but this seems far fetched, to me. I just don't see a path for LLMs to make all kinds of changes to a codebase from non-technical people, correctly. Yes, LLMs can do amazing things, but they still don't have a mental model of what a thing is doing and make all sorts of weird decisions that are not what you want. I believe LLMs are going to make the bar for a SaaS you would pay for, as a company,…

That's why I assume it goes through support. A support person checks if the prompt is reasonable (and maybe rewrites it).

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#34

Post by jorisw »

lordofmoria wrote: post #6

I completely agree that people are vastly undervaluing convenience, reliability and SaaS being essentially a great way to make something “someone else’s problem”. The count argument would be that building with AI will potentially give you infinite customizability, which is especially attractive if you’ve ever hit a brick wall using a line-of-business SaaS product. It works great until you hit that wall. But again, I…

I believe customization isn't as highly valued by regular people. Just look at your friends' phones and how they haven't usually done anything to customize their experience.

If enough people were hitting that wall in that SaaS you mention, the SaaS would've fixed it. The barrier of starting over with a custom solution, leaving behind a SaaS they've become accustomed to, is an unlikely choice. They'd rather just come up with a convenient workaround, and briefly look at competing products.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#35

Post by jillesvangurp »

SaaS partially took the place of bespoke projects that people were doing before. They never stopped doing those of course and there were also off the shelf packages that people bought before SaaS.

AI lowers the cost of creating bespoke software that competes with both. Instead of buying a one size fits all thing that half does what you need, you can now have a thing that is a bit better suited to your needs. There will be a lot more demand for those things. A lot of these things are going to require deep domain knowledge and some system thinking skills.

This is still hard enough to do well that a lot of the creation work will be outsourced to professionals. Even if that involves the use of AI prompting. Maybe after naive attempts to do it in house fail. My hunch is that there will be a lot of growth for those that can do these types of projects efficiently and that it might more than offset the job losses in the SaaS sector.

There are a lot of of companies that are still under using software. There never was any good SaaS that fit their needs and they lacked the skills to do it themselves. When you lower the cost of something (creating software) the market usually grows. A lot of things that were previously not feasible are now doable.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#36

Post by noufalibrahim »

I was building an in-house infra management platform (including a self hosted AI agent) for companies in a segment that's very careful about its internal IP.

I spoke to the CTO of a well funded company who was spending a few millions on AWS infrastructure per year with budget overshoots etc. I pitched the product to him with all the details and he understood it but at the end of the day, his response was that he'd rather pay AWS for the convenience rather than manage this by himself.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#37

Post by theturtletalks »

wwweston wrote: post #30
theturtletalks wrote: post #26

All these arguments ignore that the bread you buy today is not always the bread you’ll get years from now. Don’t we all know the cycle by now? 1. Company pours money and resources to create good product 2. Good product gets customers and those customers use word of mouth to get product viral and even more customers 3. Eventually the company has to make a profit and in that pursuit, they make the product worse by addi…

I might imagine that even this cycle could change, if the resources necessary to support step 1 and step 2 are much lower. Which might mean step 3 isn’t as necessity driven. Of course, it’s possible other things can drive step 3. And frontier models are already a study in unusual levels of resources dedicated to step 1.

Very true, but if the company has raised VC funds, step 3 is inevitable. Even if the original founder resists making the product worse, the future execs won't blink an eye.

Open-source on the other hand, isn't profit-driven as much. The builder is making it for himself and for the love of it. Give me that bread maker 10/10 times. And yes, that bread maker might also start to chase profits and make the bread worse, but I can fork his product and be on my merry way if he does.

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#38

Post by theturtletalks »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #31
theturtletalks wrote: post #26

All these arguments ignore that the bread you buy today is not always the bread you’ll get years from now. Don’t we all know the cycle by now? 1. Company pours money and resources to create good product 2. Good product gets customers and those customers use word of mouth to get product viral and even more customers 3. Eventually the company has to make a profit and in that pursuit, they make the product worse by addi…

Platform decay is real. I have relatives who share sourdough starter yeast and make their own bread.

Yes this collective shared knowledge, akin to what open-source provides for software, will always win in the long run

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#39

Post by actionfromafar »

ahmed_1000 wrote: post #10

The threat to SaaS is moreso consolidation than AI. Since people value convenience more than anything, having more functionality in one service rather than multiple services will win. For example GitHub integrating more and more code scanning/security functionality rather than having a separate service like Snyk for that.

"Gentlemen, there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling."

Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed

#40

Post by a_c »

Many such examples with variations

- browser extensions where a bookmarklet will do (media speed control)

- tolerate-able UX where alternatives available (e.g LLM chat interface without a table of contents is a pain to me, vibe coding an extension took me less than 1 session worth of credit)

- buying bulk vs buying individually

- doomscrolling vs reading a book

- standing vs tip toeing (one I discovered only very recently that I can tip toe any time to train my toes for climbing, no need dedicated training sessions)

- getting angry/depressed online vs realising most thing on internet is about provoking emotion

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