Previously on HN:
AI is killing B2B SaaS
461–470 of 752 posts
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#4621. This isn't rooted in data but anecdotes "One Series E CEO told me that they’re re-evaluating the quarterly renewal of their engineering productivity software because they along with an engineer reimplemented something using Github and Notion APIs. They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 and they were not going to renew anymore." 2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your . Nor or they grounded…
It would be amusing if somebody parodied this article titled "AI is killing speculative articles about AI".
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can relate to this so much. When I was a newly joined Google consultant at a partner firm, we went to their office - some 13 different types of cuisines, different types of game rooms, lounges and what not. A luxury star hotel experience. We were waiting for our meeting on behalf of this one particularly large media client who was bleeding money on Wordpress. 3 engineers arrived - fashionably late. We explained the…
It’s funny you complain about the sales pitch the guy gave you, but the comment itself sounds like a sales pitch :)
IMHO it sounds more like someone who is proud of solving a problem for very little effort that Google tried to sell a very expensive solution for.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such. Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.
Omg! Who the hell cares if the "boss" got a heads up. When I'm in engineering or you're in engineering with me, we party the same way: better is better.
The bosses - hell management's job leading into organizational culture - is to stop politics from derailing good engineering and customer satisfaction.
It's not too tough for me. Now that you know where I stand the other side better get it's act together.
Drowning in politics helps nobody including the boss. It's a net loser.
Now I'm practical and empathetic: a surprise can bring heat. But then you breath and get a grip. Cool. But thereafter the right things better get done. Politics for a day - np - politics sapping know how making cynical SE'S think twice? Never.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#465It'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…
Isn't this agreeing with the parent? If Django were the B2B SaaS product, you didn't vibe-code Django, you just used Django. You aren't responsible for maintaining Django itself.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.
When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support? No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers. See the problem? Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this…
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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take this idea and bring your own validation library and forms and UI components to the next job, and you've described what I do. And then you have real lock-in.
Ah, so you’re the one who made that same company’s marketing website!
Hahaha. I'm not above that kind of work. Sometimes having a consistent codebase for both things comes in pretty handy if you need to tie em together or just need to spruce up the CSS every few years.
I don't intentionally make my work hard for anyone else to maintain. I comment and write tests pretty thoroughly in case someone else comes along. Or in case I get woken up at 6am with a bad hangover.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, so you’re the one who made that same company’s marketing website!
Hahaha. I'm not above that kind of work. Sometimes having a consistent codebase for both things comes in pretty handy if you need to tie em together or just need to spruce up the CSS every few years. I don't intentionally make my work hard for anyone else to maintain. I comment and write tests pretty thoroughly in case someone else comes along. Or in case I get woken up at 6am with a bad hangover.
Nah, I gotcha. That makes a lot of sense.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#469[dead]
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#470It'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…
> Sometimes the new guy can make a better version themselves over the weekend, not because they’re a supergenius, but because they’re not hampered by 47 teams all trying to get their stamp on the project.
In 99.9% of cases what seems to be "the better" version is better only for the "new guy" or rather his ego.
Those 47 teams hampering doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, and more often than not actually well justified "stamps".
You only understand those things when you turn from the "supergenius" into an owner who have to take care not only of numbers on screen, but also security, interfacing, management and so on.
Or you don't turn into.