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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#191

Post by sbarre »

mittensc wrote: post #186
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings? what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?

There are of course exceptions to every rule, and I'm sure some companies have been successful in building their own in-house tooling.

At the end of the day these decisions are all series of trade-offs, and the trick is understanding your requirements and capabilities well enough to make the right trade-offs.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#192

Post by operatingthetan »

827a wrote: post #142
operatingthetan wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that companies would rather pay someone to solve their problems than solve them themselves. Are they not able to just engage AI to solve those problems now? E.g. this morning I saw an app that did something interesting to me for $20 a month. 20 minutes in Gemini and I had a functional app that replicated the behavior. SaaS are more complex but give me a small team and a couple months and we could replicate most any…

No one is replacing Jira or Salesforce with an internally-AI'd analogue.

Give it a year.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#193

Post by brikym »

I can see three forms of competition here:

- A company vibe codes their own app to replace a SaaS. Great when they only wanted a small chunk of the functionality. - Startups benefitting from AI coding are copying mature SaaS companies and competing on price. - Mature SaaS companies are branching out into each others domains. Notion is doing email. Canva is doing an office suite.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#194

Post by direwolf20 »

rvnx wrote: post #150
isk517 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.

The mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is: 1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries) and most of all: 2) "Trust"/"Spam score" It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted. If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my ema…

If everyone ran a mail server at home spam scores wouldn't be so strict

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#195

Post by direwolf20 »

Ucalegon wrote: post #174
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specific concern around uptime & reliability was baked into email systems from almost the start - undeliverable notifications (for the sender) and retries. But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.

Its not a device/MTA issue, SMTP just is not a secure protocol and there is not much you can do in order to 'secure' human communication. Things like spoofing or social engineering are near impossible to address within SMTP without external systems doing some sort of analysis on the messages or in combination with other protocols like DNS.

SMTP isn't at fault, the social ecosystem is at fault. Every system where identities are cheap has a spam problem. If you think a system has cheap identities and no spam, it probably doesn't have cheap identities — examples are HN or Reddit.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#196

Post by brikym »

ahmedhawas123 wrote: post #119

As a founder, there is another angle here that is worth mentioning. Not only does AI B2B SaaS allow insourcing, it also allows there to be 10x (imaginary number) the number of companies building SaaS for the same use case. What we see in healthcare or finance for example is executive fatigue from demos, in many cases mostly vibe coded frontend UIs that entrepreneurs are using to test the market. This creates friction…

Bang on. I mentioned this as well. Mature SaaS companies are also expanding into each others domains. Notion is now doing email for example.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#197

Post by pm90 »

mittensc wrote: post #186
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings? what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?

Clubbing all saas products together just means you can’t really have a productive discussion. Saas products are on a spectrum of quality, from amazing (stripe, datadog) to terrible (fivetran, github). Its upto you as a user to make a call as to which will serve you best, what you should focus your limited resources on etc.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#198

Post by Thorentis »

sbarre wrote: post #187
bandrami wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do tea leaves so I wouldn't commit to that, particularly because I think SAAS was oversold in general even before LLMs came out. But I think the idea that the industry as a whole will shrivel away just isn't feasible, even if there is a correction.

The B2B startup motto of "where someone is using Excel to do something other than accounting, there's a startup waiting to happen" has been shockingly resilient over the decades, and I suspect will continue to be.

We need a new one: "Where someone is using a vibe-coded internal tool made by the creative department that keeps needing bug fixes, there's a start up waiting to happen."

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#199

Post by baxtr »

bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

This vibe-coding-will-replace-SaaS insanity is the new crypto-will-replace-fiat-money insanity.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#200

Post by chasd00 »

bbatha wrote: post #37
zdragnar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having participated in the build of an inventory system / system of record for a large national retail company, I can't see vibe coding helping anything more than the prototyping in the discovery / requirements gathering parts of the process. The sheer volume of data, the need for real time consistency in store locations, yada yada means that bad early decisions bite hard down the road. Lots of drudge work can be ass…

Its funny you mention excel, I see vibe coding in the business sense right now being a gateway to replace all of the ad hoc uses of excel. We've basically leveled up the quality of the software you can build before buying a SaaS product or a hiring an in house engineer.

The moment vibecoded excel has a bug that regular Excel doesn't and a user has to wait on you to re-vibecode it's over. They'll just use Excel while you're trying to get the llm to find and fix the bug.
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