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Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

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Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#71

Post by khasan222 »

pydry wrote: post #30
khasan222 wrote: post #25

Idk if I disagree completely but it feels like I do. To elaborate, I don’t think we will see less applications, I think we will see more with better features. My reasoning is people aren’t happy with many of the titans we have for certain apps, uber is my favorite example. Everyone hates the price it charges thinks it’s unfair, but to go back to a time before uber is unfathomable. That to me is a ripe market to be ov…

From what ive seen we see no more features and quality is getting worse. OP is ascribing magical powers to AI which it does not have. sure, it can replace a shitty poorly coded todo app. but nobody wanted that anyway.

I think people will get way better at wrangling code with ai as time passes

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#72

Post by Adrig »

sltr wrote: post #67

Three days ago, Rob Walling (SaaS investor) refuted pretty convincingly the claim that genai kills SaaS. His life mission and wealth are bound up in SaaS. If he's not scared, nobody should be. https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...

Oh I love Rob, didn't catch this episode, thanks for sharing

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#73

Post by sltr »

em-bee wrote: post #69
sltr wrote: post #67

Three days ago, Rob Walling (SaaS investor) refuted pretty convincingly the claim that genai kills SaaS. His life mission and wealth are bound up in SaaS. If he's not scared, nobody should be. https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...

or his success depends on his perceived confidence. meaning that maybe he is scared, but doesn't want to show it because it would make it worse. care to share some key takeaways? not really keen on listening to a half hour audio.

Fair that motivated reasoning could be at play. Rob's audience is SaaS founders, but whether his listeners remain engaged and his sales funnel full does not influence how genai affects their businesses, and being duplicitous doesn't fit with his character.

The episode was worth my time.

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#74

Post by owebmaster »

JackSlateur wrote: post #60
khasan222 wrote: post #25

Idk if I disagree completely but it feels like I do. To elaborate, I don’t think we will see less applications, I think we will see more with better features. My reasoning is people aren’t happy with many of the titans we have for certain apps, uber is my favorite example. Everyone hates the price it charges thinks it’s unfair, but to go back to a time before uber is unfathomable. That to me is a ripe market to be ov…

Bad example: uber is not a saas at all It's a network.

Uber is literally a software as a transport service

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#75

Post by gls2ro »

sandcat_ wrote: post #50
mattm wrote: post #35

> I built a SaaS in a few hours. It does its job better than tools people pay real money for. It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them. > Whatever niche tool you’re sketching this week, a thousand people can prompt a working versi…

This is just the old argument in favour of SaaS, though. The article is pointing out that those long-standing rules may no longer make sense, in a world where 1. it no longer takes even a weekend to build the niche, perfectly custom tool and 2. the maintenance / feature requests side is also just a prompt away. At my job (we're somewhere in the transition between startup -> enterprise), we still use a lot of SaaS and…

Even if maintainance is just a Claude/ChatGPT session away we know that the cost of that session could be 1-2 hours of attention going to a supporting tool. And what if suddently is down? now your software team is having an incident about an in house tool instead if an incident about your paying customers.

Moreso while a custom build software just for you is a great fit for your own processes you are loosing innovation and what you could benefit from using a software where someone is trying to innovate and bring out better things that you might not know even to ask for in a prompt as that is not your own domain of expertise or better said you are too expert in your own process that you cannot see what else is out there. And to overcome this you have to try to put in resources for this tool.

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#76

Post by sashagim »

Some contrudictions in the article. Yes, Todo apps were always cheap to build, but some became large companies. Yes, the ai made the easy part easier. So why should the landscape change? Yes, technical people can build tools for themselves. Do they all really want to? What about non-technical people? Also, note - it's tools, not products. Tools help me achieve a specific goal. Products help me work better in a way I've not necessarily thought about myself.

I do think one claim is spot on - as production costs go down customization becomes cheap. This makes it economically viable to build products, especially more complex ones, for niche markets. Hubspot for medical? No problem. MailChimp for music clubs? You got it.

Ultimately, the value remained in the same place - create something people are willing to pay for. The economics might have changed, certainly for software development job market - but honestly, as a developer myself, I've always felt coding is not hard enough or valuable enough for the society to justify the insanely high salaries.

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#77

Post by Adrig »

sashagim wrote: post #76

Some contrudictions in the article. Yes, Todo apps were always cheap to build, but some became large companies. Yes, the ai made the easy part easier. So why should the landscape change? Yes, technical people can build tools for themselves. Do they all really want to? What about non-technical people? Also, note - it's tools, not products. Tools help me achieve a specific goal. Products help me work better in a way I'…

> Todo apps were always cheap to build, but some became large companies

The point is that simple apps like these have just become insanely competitive to distribute, and it's best not to think of it as mini businesses

> Tools help me achieve a specific goal. Products help me work better in a way I've not necessarily thought about myself.

For me a product = a packaged set of tools.

What was interesting with the micro-saas wave is that a lot of people started to build products around one simple tool. It worked because sometimes a well-crafted one is better unbundled. Here's one example that thrived on this premise: https://www.bannerbear.com/

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#78

Post by killix »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #63
willio58 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them. Fully agreed. It's also just a time saver. People are lazy, and I don't mean that in a bad way, just that people don't really want to sit there and explain to an agent exactly what they…

To be fair to Claude on the Clerk thing, I had my agent build session management and auth from scratch, then beefed it up with all the best practice advice, and and and. It took me an extra day of agent-prodding and code review. And I still will have to add SSO and Google/whoever sign-in and passkeys and 2FA at some point. Using Clerk would've avoided that, but at a permanent cost of one more dependency.

[flagged]

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#79

Post by JackSlateur »

JackSlateur wrote: post #60
khasan222 wrote: post #25

Idk if I disagree completely but it feels like I do. To elaborate, I don’t think we will see less applications, I think we will see more with better features. My reasoning is people aren’t happy with many of the titans we have for certain apps, uber is my favorite example. Everyone hates the price it charges thinks it’s unfair, but to go back to a time before uber is unfathomable. That to me is a ripe market to be ov…

Bad example: uber is not a saas at all It's a network.

To give more details

Uber is not a saas, it sell the ability to match drivers with people. You can code an uber-like software easily and you will find that it leads to nowhere: no network => no driver + no consumer = you have nothing

Another kind of business is online bank: are they just software ? Yes, obviously. Are they software-as-a-service ? Obviously not: they sell regulation, integration with financial stuff, government approbation and what-not

Just because a company is used via software-only does not mean that it has a saas

On the other hand, you have companies like tesla, which are far more "software-as-a-service" than online banks

What a funny world

Re: Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It

#80

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Adrig wrote: post #23
skiing_crawling wrote: post #3

This has that weird "AI written" sentence structure.

Fable helped me edit since I'm not a native English speaker, so I might not catch these subtleties. Thought and structure are my own

That explains a lot, as there were a bunch of Claudeisms but the overall writing didn't feel like the standard.

It's a shame that the models can't better preserve people's voices for this use case.

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