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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#481

Post by kstrauser »

selcuka wrote: post #475
keyle wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in a similar situation, with a laravel product quoted for over a million and I quoted 40K and did it all. That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.

> That did not go down well Enterprise customers are more likely to use a product that they paid $1M over the same product that they "only" paid $40K.

If it was a one-time contract and you get paid for it, what they do next is their problem, not yours.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#482

Post by kstrauser »

jackblemming wrote: post #454
kstrauser wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything. Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app . It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No o…

You’re doing God’s work. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep building.

I couldn’t help it if I tried. It’s who I am.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#483

Post by oblio »

phil21 wrote: post #293
cj wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you’re having a correlated outage like that, then it’s likely you fix the prod issue before the cloud engineers at some giant cloud company even respond to an internal escalation much less fixes an issue. More than likely your prod issue is causing the logging problem. If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much…

> Half of $30k/mo trivially pays for an engineer you hire to only manage such a cluster for you and just works an hour a week unless a pager goes off if you truly need that level of peace of mind. If you’re hiring for such a position I have a few rock star level folks who would love such a job.

1 person? Is that person always on call?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#485

Post by keyle »

yieldcrv wrote: post #471
keyle wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in a similar situation, with a laravel product quoted for over a million and I quoted 40K and did it all. That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.

you got paid the $40k though?

Nope.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#486

Post by kstrauser »

scrubs wrote: post #464
November_Echo wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I learned a lot from that job, mostly how not to lead people. Subsequent jobs that I’ve been at for longer stints have placed much more emphasis on delivering good work than on building complicated plans to someday hopefully maybe consider delivering good work.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#487

Post by keyle »

selcuka wrote: post #475
keyle wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in a similar situation, with a laravel product quoted for over a million and I quoted 40K and did it all. That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.

> That did not go down well Enterprise customers are more likely to use a product that they paid $1M over the same product that they "only" paid $40K.

It was a case of pay $1M and take no responsibility vs. set a budget of 40K and own it internally.

When salesforce leaks your customer's information, whoopsie! not our fault! it's salesforce!

And yet they're far more likely to have the leak. BASICALLY.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#488

Post by oblio »

Aeolun wrote: post #459
cj wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are we acting like it's hard to set up? Because the current generation of “full stack” engineers are great at spinning up react apps, but struggle with infrastructure and systems management. It’s really not any more complicated than that. On a typical 8 person engineering team, maybe 1 or 2 people will know how to deploy anything to the cloud if you’re lucky. The expertise just isn’t there at most companies.

Surely all the engineers that existed 20 years ago haven’t simply retired? At the time if you told someone you couldn’t set up your own server they’d ask you what kind of engineer you are then?

> Surely all the engineers that existed 20 years ago haven’t simply retired?

20 years ago we had 5 times fewer engineers. And most of those have moved into management, other fields, retired, work calm jobs for the government or boring companies, etc.

How many 40+ year old engineers do you see, especially when compared to 20-30 year old engineers?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#489

Post by jesterson »

kstrauser wrote: post #474
jesterson wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 justif…

That is often the case, but far from all the time. Other times something is made so needlessly complicated by office politics that it may never get shipped.

Not saying it never happened in history, but most of those "complications" are justified. Being narrowsighted and overfocused does not help to assess it.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#490

Post by oblio »

badc0ffee wrote: post #177
rvnx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Trust"/"Spam score" See jwz's struggles with hosting his own email. (Not linking to his blog here with HN as the referrer...) With email, the 800 lb gorillas won, and in the end it didn't even solve the spam problem.

> With email, the 800 lb gorillas won, and in the end it didn't even solve the spam problem.

I have a 15+ year old Gmail account that I've used everywhere. Spam has been a non issue since 15+ years ago.

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