291–300 of 398 posts
The only SaaS that AI has eaten for us is Retool. It wasn't the cost (we were paying < $200 per month). Retool has become more clunky to use vs. writing code with AI to solve the problems we used Retool for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ai is much more developed at its entrance to the economy than most anything during the dot com boom. Dot com is not super comparable to AI. Dot com had very few users on the internet compared to today. Dot com did not have ubiquitous e-commerce. The small group of users didn’t spend online. Search engines didn’t have the amount of information online that there is today. Dot com did not have usable high speed mobile d…
None of that matters to this point, though I'd dispute some of it if I thought it did. "Can they keep charging money for it?", that's the question that matters here.
There were not as many consumers buying online during dot com boom.
To the extent currently more is being spent on AI than anything in the dot com boom.
Nor did companies run their businesses in the cloud, because there was no real broadband.
There’s no doubt there’s a hype train, there is also an adoption and disruption train, which is also happening.
I could go on, but I’m comfortable with seeing how well this comment ages.
I'm not a consultant anymore but my friend who owns a dental clinic asked me if I could build them a personalized system that checks in with the staff every week; a thing that helps analyze how they feel week to week and helps my friend update her management strategy and coaches her on how to talk with her staff / helps her figure out her staff's communication strategies and what work they prefer to do; and she'd like me to run and host it so she can't see the raw data from her staff so they'll trust it more as it's run by a third party.
She could probably figure out how to do this but she'd still rather pay me like $5k to do this than spend 100+ hours figuring this out herself. Even with AI it'd probably take me at least a couple of weeks to get it working 100% as intended, and I don't have a dentist business to run.
I think we'll see more back office SaaS, becuase the problems to solve are near infinite, and no one has time to build all these themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I'm seeing Ad infinitum on HN in every thread on agentic development: yeah but it really doesn't work perfectly today. None of these people can apparently see beyond the tip of their nose. It doesn't matter if it takes a year, or three years, or five years, or ten years. Nothing can stop what's about to happen. If it takes ten years, so what, it's all going to get smashed and turned upside down. These agents wil…
You aren't wrong, but you’re underestimating the inertia of $10M+/year B2B distributors. There are thousands of these in traditional sectors (pipe manufacturing, HVAC, etc.) that rely on hyper-localized logistics and century-old workflows. Buyer pressure will eventually force process updates, but it is a slow burn. The bottleneck is rarely the tech or the partner, it's the internal culture. The software moves fast, b…
> people deeply integrated into physical infrastructure move 10x slower than you'd expect.
My experience is yes, to move everyone. To do a pilot and prove the value? That's doable quickly, and if the pilot succeeds, the rest is fast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our sales teams heres the "we'll just build it internally" or "we can just throw it into an LLM" all of the time. Yes, certain parts of our product are indeed just lightweight wrappers around an LLM. What you're paying for is the 99% of the other stuff that's (1) either extremely hard to do (and probably non-obvious) (2) an endless supply of "routine" work that still takes time (3) an SLA/support that's more than "ra…
> "we'll just build it internally" or "we can just throw it into an LLM" all of the time. Is that a bluff used to negotiate the price?
I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…
The beauty of HN: frequently comments are way more valuable than the article being shared
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this hap…
The president of a company I work with is a youngish guy who has no technical skills, but is resourceful. He wanted updated analytic dashboards, but there’s no dev capacity for that right now. So he decided he was going to try his hand at building his own dashboard using Lovable, which is one of these AI app making outfits. I sent him a copy of the dev database and a few markdown files with explanations regarding cer…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, for many larger companies, access to internal data and systems is only granted to authorized human users and approved applications/agents. Each approval is a separate request. This means for any "manual" or existing workflow requiring a access to several systems, that requires multiple IT permissions with defined scopes. Even something as simple as a sales rep sending a DocuSign might need: - CRM access - DocuS…
It is much easier to use an AI API in my bank than to use any other tool. Since the AI is from MS, it's ready to go, whereas other tools require a few months of budgeting, licenses, certs, and so on. Since AI/Azure/AWS is already there and 'certified to use,' it is easier for me to patch something together using this stack than to even ask for open-source software
I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…
Our sales teams heres the "we'll just build it internally" or "we can just throw it into an LLM" all of the time. Yes, certain parts of our product are indeed just lightweight wrappers around an LLM. What you're paying for is the 99% of the other stuff that's (1) either extremely hard to do (and probably non-obvious) (2) an endless supply of "routine" work that still takes time (3) an SLA/support that's more than "ra…
Why do they have an internal engineering org at all if they can't manage the most basic maintenance of a software product?