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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#241

Post by bandrami »

aspenmartin wrote: post #237
sbarre wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Enthusiastic employee (vibe-)codes a replacement for a turnkey SaaS product that the company uses. 2. Company uses it, maybe even starts to rely on it for important business operations, and for a time the employee supports that app. 3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up. 4. Employee either leaves the company or moves on to another project. 5. Pain

This feels like it goes along the lines of "people's vibe code is cluttering up our PR's, people still need to review" -- it misses the boat: models are already capable of getting you up to speed on how the code is organized and works, in as much as you want to or need to be up to speed. They are already helping me cut down review time because I don't need to aimlessly hop around, I have a good starting point that I…

I think it has to actually work at least once before we can start predicting it will be the norm.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#242

Post by tsunamifury »

Vibe coding seems to be the iPhone camera to DSLR moment for programming.

- No professional used an iPhone for years. Most don’t today.

- Professional scoffed at it as a toy

- The toy shifted the balance of volume through everyday enablement of amateurs to a degree that professional were right, but now in a severely lopsided terrain.

The value ends up in the most engaged paradigm, rather than the most perfect one.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#243

Post by re-thc »

mym1990 wrote: post #216
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…

We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffi…

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product.

Prototype maybe. Go to market maybe not so. It's giving false hope. You're just taking more shortcuts with prototyping.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#244

Post by llmslave »

AstroBen wrote: post #179
llmslave wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no the difference is 90% cost savings, which was previously impossible

How does a company charging 10% their competitor afford to compete on marketing, sales, design, user testing or customer service? (this is even granting that AI is a 10x speedup for developers, which I don't agree with and no-one has shown)

they dont, which is why these companies are going to get smoked. a small team of people will compete with atlassian head on. the whole saas business model is under threat

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#245

Post by coffeebeqn »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #234
baxtr wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's shocking to me how prevalent this "who needs Salesforce when everyone can just vibe code their own CRM from scratch in a day" narrative has become in the business press. Like, what???

I vibe coded Stripe and Okta in a weekend. Time to deploy to prod and save some money!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#246

Post by bandrami »

runako wrote: post #233
mittensc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings A typical SaaS customer will use many pieces of software (we mostly call them SaaS now) across its various functions: HR, accounting, CRM, etc. Each one of those will have access to the same pool of senior devs and AI tools, but they will pour more resources into each area and theoreticall…

As my manager said to a young me when I offered to replace our CMS, and promised I could do a good job at it, "you could probably assemble our office furniture too, but I don't want to pay you to do that either"

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#247

Post by runako »

pverheggen wrote: post #225
sbarre wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Enthusiastic employee (vibe-)codes a replacement for a turnkey SaaS product that the company uses. 2. Company uses it, maybe even starts to rely on it for important business operations, and for a time the employee supports that app. 3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up. 4. Employee either leaves the company or moves on to another project. 5. Pain

I think you can avoid the pain by thoughtfully designing it to avoid lock-in. You want it so that if needed, a dev can vibe-code a migration tool to the equivalent SaaS offering. AI lowers the barrier for creating these in-house replacements, but it also lowers the barrier for scrapping them too.

The thing about lower barriers is that it makes it easier for e.g. Salesforce to raise the level of expectations. And that's the moving target. New employees will come from elsewhere and wonder how a company is operating using tools from 2020 when X, Y, Z are becoming industry standard.

The key here is that the moving target will _never_ be "what can 1-2 people vibe code without any expectation of being the best at what it does?"

(Also: training people on bespoke tools takes much longer than training on configurations of standard tools. Imagine if you had to learn a new source control system at every job, like in the '80s.)

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#248

Post by echelon »

falloutx wrote: post #99
echelon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating? These are real risks to these companies. Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source…

> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employe…

I mean, for that example there's even less to do: you just put your employees directly on Nano Banana or one of the simple Nano Banana wrappers.

If you need rich outputs, there are tools for that now too.

Let me put it another way - would you want to be Adobe or Figma right now?

And applied to the original point, would you feel comfortable being a SaaS company right now?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#249

Post by zdragnar »

chasd00 wrote: post #208
epolanski wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example I made about inventory wasn't random. One of my clients spends 500k+ on XXX licensing per year (for a 200M revenue company that's not peanuts), and on top of that has to employ 12 full time XXX developers (that command high figures just for their expertise on that software while providing very little productivity) and every single feature takes months to develop anyway. Talking about stuff like adding few…

That situation makes sense but then i have to ask why hasn't it been done already? Software developers are not rare and if the use case is so isolated and discreet then surely it would have been tried by now. Even without genAI, CRUD, RDBMS record management, SSO, row level security... none of those things are new or out of reach until now. I think what you'll find is when you sit down with the users and start asking…

Nobody gets fired for choosing SAP, Salesforce etc.

Spending tons of money to get a janky, unreliable system of record, or finding out too late it is missing crucial auditing capabilities, or that it has Big Money bugs, on the other hand, is far worse, especially if you have investors asking what the hell you were thinking.

Your point about users not knowing what they wanted until after the fact is also painfully true. The hardest part about these systems is the people most likely to buy are the ones who have been doing it with a lot of human processes for years. Buying a SaaS or other third party product means having leverage to force them to change to more standard practices. Building in-house means that everyone will fight to high hell to make sure that their special snowflake way of doing things is accounted for and you end up in a worse spot as a result.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#250

Post by strange_quark »

strangattractor wrote: post #220
jonwinstanley wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think this downturn will be short lived? When management realise that the vibe coded projects are not maintainable, SAAS will be as popular as ever

All of the hype surrounding AI will subside when a SaaS company eventually deploys a moltbot version of their software and the company is driven out of existence due to the chaos that ensues.

So… next week then?
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