81–90 of 127 posts
This is one of the best articles I've seen come across HN lately. You presented a well structured argument, and one I strongly believe in. I had a conversation with someone the other day, trying to convince them how easy it would be to solve a problem they had by creating a quick program with Claude. They were so computer averse, so used to thinking that coding was some impossible task, that they refused to even try…
How so?
I work for a SaaS and we recently had an interesting situation where we lost some smaller customers but are in the process of getting dramatically larger ones at the same time. As in, we lost some customers that were roughly 20-people companies, but gained some customers that are 100+-people companies. The ones we lost seem to have just built our solution in-house, presumably with AI helping. Conventional wisdom woul…
That is, until a given SaaS becomes too greedy and someone identifies the core features people actually use, then spends a few weeks replicating them internally. I think AI familiarity still varies a lot across companies and individuals. Small companies/startups often move much faster than large corporations, so that may also explain what you're seeing. Long before LLMs I worked at places where even monitoring soluti…
Convenience is often more important than the traditional price vs quality tradeoff. Water is free. The convenience of bottled water is worth a lot. Apple's "it just works" was marketing gold that recognised the importance of convenience relative to price and performance (something many, many 'computer enthusiasts' never understood). SaaS will survive. We pay a lot for convenience. You'll never go wrong appealing to l…
I work for a SaaS and we recently had an interesting situation where we lost some smaller customers but are in the process of getting dramatically larger ones at the same time. As in, we lost some customers that were roughly 20-people companies, but gained some customers that are 100+-people companies. The ones we lost seem to have just built our solution in-house, presumably with AI helping. Conventional wisdom woul…
Convenience is often more important than the traditional price vs quality tradeoff. Water is free. The convenience of bottled water is worth a lot. Apple's "it just works" was marketing gold that recognised the importance of convenience relative to price and performance (something many, many 'computer enthusiasts' never understood). SaaS will survive. We pay a lot for convenience. You'll never go wrong appealing to l…
Not to nitpick but I don't think Apple ever literally marketed "it just works". It just does.
-Jeff Goldblum, iconic 1998 Apple iMac G3 commercial
The underlying MBA principle is that companies strongly prefer to focus on their "core competencies." This makes sense because the distraction to a business could be much costlier than the extra money spent in outsourcing non-core functions. This is basically also why the cloud business was thriving even when on-prem is much cheaper in monetary terms, and why the trend will probably extend to cloud AI providers even…
> This is basically also why the cloud business was thriving even when on-prem is much cheaper in monetary terms On-prem is almost always much more expensive "in monetary terms" when you take into account the cost of staffing the operation needed to maintain those on-prem systems, especially if a company has e.g. compliance requirements etc. The idea that cloud is obviously more expensive is not actually supported by…
I work for a SaaS and we recently had an interesting situation where we lost some smaller customers but are in the process of getting dramatically larger ones at the same time. As in, we lost some customers that were roughly 20-people companies, but gained some customers that are 100+-people companies. The ones we lost seem to have just built our solution in-house, presumably with AI helping. Conventional wisdom woul…
Seen similar. They will be back when they realise the vibe coded SaaS run by two people in a trailer park isn’t what it looked like. A lot of the big SaaS stuff isn’t code or product. It’s support and hand holding.
Also the assurance it won't evaporate one day
This is one of the best articles I've seen come across HN lately. You presented a well structured argument, and one I strongly believe in. I had a conversation with someone the other day, trying to convince them how easy it would be to solve a problem they had by creating a quick program with Claude. They were so computer averse, so used to thinking that coding was some impossible task, that they refused to even try…
> we may have just entered the golden age How so?