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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#411

Post by lumost »

overfeed wrote: post #255
mym1990 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?

The history of software has been that once it becomes cheap enough for teams to flood the market with “existing product” + x feature for y users. The market consolidates around a leader who does all features for all customers.

I’d bet that we skip SaaS entirely and go to Anthropic directly. This means the ai has to understand that there are different users with conflicting requirements and that we all need the same exact copy of the burn rate report.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#412

Post by keeptrying »

SaaS dying is mostly nonsense.

Which is easier to vibecode - AI agent or Salesforce?

The fragmentation in the AI agent space will be markedly larger than at the base CRM layer.

Abd the AI agent is replaceable in under a minute but your data in Salesforce isn’t.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#413

Post by dizlexic »

overfeed wrote: post #255
mym1990 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?

Tbh I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the issue (or I am).

It’s not about some single dude disrupting the saas market. It’s about largish companies who already have internal dev teams, slowly weening their company off these ginormous one size fits all saas products and building local, tailored solutions.

It’s death by a thousand cuts from the erosion of their highest paying customers.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#414

Post by CyanLite2 »

The real story isn't that some enterprise mega corp is going to vibe-code their own Workday.

The real story is that SOME startups made up of one person (or small number of engineers) will do it, and create pricing pressures against Workday, or DocuSign, or other B2B SaaS.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#415

Post by theptip »

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 may be true pre-LLMs, but I think you need to account for the baseline build-vs-buy tradeoff shifting.

Companies in most cases don’t want to build SaaS because it is expensive to hire engineers to do it, not because they are allergic to owning teams.

If in-housing becomes substantially cheaper than the alternatives then companies will adapt.

But even if the new equilibrium is to hire a contract dev shop to build something custom to keep avoiding responsibility, this would have the same impact on SaaS.

So I’m pretty skeptical of this first-principles prediction expressing right level of uncertainty.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#416

Post by majormajor »

kstrauser wrote: post #397
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…

OTOH, I was hired by an enterprise that was many months into a giant backend rewrite. After wrapping my head around the many plans, I realized they were rewriting Django, badly. One weekend I prototyped the whole thing… in Django. It worked. It met the specs. It was a CRUD app with a REST API. I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do tha…

Yeah, that definitely happens.

But I don't think Claude Code is going to prevent an org that thinks they can prompt their way to a replacement for all their SaaS from having internal political bickering that makes them end up with a extra-shitty mega-compromise to try to make all the internal stakeholders happy.

If you've got no vision and no taste, you need to find a vendor who will protect you from screwing up your internal processes and tools.

Internal tools teams have rarely cared much about UX or the day-to-day experience of their poor users. The quick-and-dirty internal-prompt-based one is likely to similarly be unimaginative and unintuitive.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#417

Post by justinclift »

Bewelge wrote: post #341
overfeed wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?

It's not a market for lemons. We can share info about the lemons and all choose to use the good ones. There's no information asymmetry.

> We can share info about the lemons

That might turn out to be less than reliable over time, as bots are already screwing up systems with fake information and it's probably going to get worse.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#418

Post by majormajor »

theptip wrote: post #415
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 may be true pre-LLMs, but I think you need to account for the baseline build-vs-buy tradeoff shifting. Companies in most cases don’t want to build SaaS because it is expensive to hire engineers to do it, not because they are allergic to owning teams. If in-housing becomes substantially cheaper than the alternatives then companies will adapt. But even if the new equilibrium is to hire a contract dev shop to build…

The same cost savings could be captured by SaaS. Potentially not by incumbents, but by up and comers.

If you can spend $10K/year to keep your in house one alive but $5K/year on the new SaaS option, you stop building your own again.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#419

Post by dizlexic »

theptip wrote: post #415
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 may be true pre-LLMs, but I think you need to account for the baseline build-vs-buy tradeoff shifting. Companies in most cases don’t want to build SaaS because it is expensive to hire engineers to do it, not because they are allergic to owning teams. If in-housing becomes substantially cheaper than the alternatives then companies will adapt. But even if the new equilibrium is to hire a contract dev shop to build…

You’re forgetting the companies that already had developers.

Whose job had been maintaining a single internal system but had never had the bandwidth to expand their focus.

Companies like that are the ones spending millions a year for large one size fits all SaaS products.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#420

Post by dizlexic »

eli wrote: post #93
mschuster91 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries "in English" and get back answers. And yet, precisely that h…

Software got easier to develop, but we just came up with more problems to solve with software. The new tools didn't shrink demand for COTS enterprise software - it grew massively since the 90s!

This is what I want to be true, but as someone’s at the middle of their career I’m terrified.
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