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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#491

Post by aenis »

Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want to wire together.

I dont think going back to having own developers, owning the code is going to be a bad financial propositions for such companies. My company is now one month into trying this out and so far, so good. We kicked our outsystems addiction and are just went live with a react rewrite - and are well into rewriting an expensive to run document management system which we were at the same time under-utilizing and abusing. Our product people are loving it since for the first time in ages we dont need to tell them "well that would be real hard, considering we have salesforce crap underneath and it just doesnt do this or that well".

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#492

Post by kstrauser »

jesterson wrote: post #489
kstrauser wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Conversely, sometimes when you have 23 people designing something, they can lose track of what they’re trying to accomplish and focus on how they’re trying to accomplish it. It can be an XY problem sort of thing. “How can we get the Redis queue to do an exactly-once insertion into Kafka, if we can’t guarantee exact ordering from the Paxos framework?” “Uh, guys, aren’t we trying to send out the weekly email newsletter to our estimated 500 subscribers?” “Oh, well, I guess we could just use Mailchimp…”

Like I said earlier, it’s ok not to believe me. I don’t particularly mind. But just between us, my solution met every one of the project requirements using COTS parts because they’d made it waaayyyy harder than it needed to me.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#494

Post by darkwater »

selcuka wrote: post #473
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…

> No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.

Easier said than done. If a company is in that situation already it's due to a reason. A new middle-manager would have a hard time convincing anyone, let alone a new IC. IMO you just go down with the flow and enjoy your new salary (which should hopefully be higher than the previous one) or start looking for your next gig

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#496

Post by namanyayg »

aenis wrote: post #491

Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want t…

That sounds great. What SaaS are you replacing?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#497

Post by trymas »

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…

It feels like I have worked with you (though obviously not). Had same experiences to the T.

Maybe it's just something that happens to many in web development world, not-invented-here and all...

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#498

Post by bigDinosaur »

mikeocool wrote: post #305
sramam wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These examples are going to be lagging indicators of the underlying sentiment. Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this. Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.

I have heard this from execs at public companies as well. I think a HUGE part of this appetite is that today no one has yet been subjected to doing business on a bunch of apps cobbled together by vibe coders. They are just hearing the promise that AI will allow them to build custom software that perfectly melds to their needs in no time at all, and think it sounds great. I suspect the early adopters who go this route…

In the world of B2B software many of the 'hard problems in custom software development' have not been solved by human coders either - it can be an extremely grim market for anyone who cares about software quality. I'm completely unconvinced that on average a vibe-coded app is worse than the typical B2B slop.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#499

Post by rhubarbtree »

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…

I think there’s also the classic “I can build zoom in a day” - they get video working between two machines. But it’s the last 80% of the app that takes 99% of the time. Nerds don’t see the whole product, just the happy path of a wee technical challenge.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#500

Post by larodi »

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…

I resonate strongly with this story. I’ve seen three people teams get in one month where SAP could not in year, and also let and witnessed incredible number of total fakers in SaaS enterprises.

Big corpo may be too big to fail, not so sure about their whole cohort of partners and fakers.

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