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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#501

Post by bonesss »

dizlexic wrote: post #413
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?

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.

I feel the market forces kinda point the other way, though, since the customization of the SaaS is also cheapening, but faster and more targeted than these internal teams. Over time I believe that’ll lead to more, not less, SaaS consolidation.

Let’s put the cost of code production at 0: regulatory compliance with payment processing laws or industry oversight is a recurring job that’s common for the whole industry when it changes. SaaS companies have hundreds of customers to attend, these become first class business functions. New demands won’t be in training data for LLMs, so someone needs to be doing this. SaaS has the funds and customer base to have dedicated experts at these functions, but it’s dead capital and nigh-impossible hiring in a tiny talent pool for the rest of the market… the delta to get Salesforce or SharePoint not to be total ass and fully customized is orders of magnitude smaller than detailing those foundations, and as people who sharecrop on platforms like those know, the devil is always in the details. Those internal teams just aren’t positioned to juggle both sides of that coin, they can’t be experts, mistakes can be existential, and the liability picture is so very ugly… coding is the least of it.

Into this, MBAs are not static. It’s not gonna take more than a few “vibe coding ate our CRM data” high profile snafus, or industry think pieces to map out why customization is faster/better/smarter, to get clear business dogma around this. A witty turn of phrase about focusing on your actual business.

I think ‘no one ever got fired for hiring IBM’ x 5 is on the horizon, and the evil marketers at Salesforce, MS, and the rest are gonna work hard to grow their piece of the pie. They have LLMs too, only with better models and unlimited tokens. And our executives will be checking directly with their LLMs about how to invest (the consultants, journalists, fanboys, and social media bots too…).

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#502

Post by ManuelKiessling »

Just a single data point, and I‘m not pretending it’s a conclusive one (yet), but I think there is a middle ground between buying a SaaS and vibe coding a replacement: replacing a SaaS with your own solution, using AI coding agents — while actually knowing what you do because creating robust software in-house is already a core competency. No vibe coding needed.

At my company, we build software every day because our business is running a job board.

We always had kind of an impedance mismatch when it comes to creating content pages (think landing pages for marketing).

Yes, we can do this ourselves, but then software engineering resources are in conflict between shipping the next feature and creating landing pages.

So we introduced Webflow. Now marketing could create their content themselves. Did it match our corporate identity? Hopefully. Was it technically sound? Sometimes. Was it fun for software engineers to fix things in Webflow. No.

It kind of worked, but wasn’t exactly ideal.

Meanwhile, software engineering became more and more productive with the advent of AI coding agents, Cursor in our case.

So we tried another approach: giving our content creators Cursor.

But that was brittle, too: Cursor presents an overwhelming complex UI for someone who never used an IDE before, it could do a thousand things while only three are actually needed in this use case, you have to explain git on top of Cursor. It kind of worked, but only kind of.

So we sat down and built https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/

It’s like a hyper-focused „Cursor light“ in the browser, so our content creators can just „chat away“ and create their content pages, with all the guardrails baked into the product. Getting tracking pixel integration etc. right just works. Matching our style guide perfectly just works.

And as a bonus, there is a whole git based storage and versioning workflow underneath, so software engineering can support and test and deploy the results with their preferred tools and methods, but none of this complexity leaks through to the content creators.

We built this ourselves in days, not months, thanks to Cursor, but it’s not vibe-coded — it’s a rock solid application that we will support and improve long-term without headaches: https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#503

Post by malthaus »

hunterpayne wrote: post #389
sdf2erf wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a place on the internet where folks like yourself, who seemingly have a way to think economically congregate? I personally dont know of one, for which if I did, I wouldnt visit here anymore. So many takes on here are so lazy and simpleton that when you go a few levels deeper all the flaws get exposed.

Its called PolyMarket

... where they come with their own idiosyncratic mental/moral flaws

you gotta treat communities like newspapers - acknowledge their bias and diversify

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#504

Post by csomar »

shimman wrote: post #359
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.

I guess we really are living through the leetcode generation! D:

My experience matches that of cj. In fact, if you do mention anything outside the walled garden, you'll get weird looks and someone will ask "Why?" like you are going down a dangerous path.

Come to think of it, they are right. Why take all this ownership when it's the company that is going to pay for all of this and you can push these responsibilities to some third-party overseas.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#506

Post by gizzlon »

cj wrote: post #339
phil21 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely. In my experience the systems/tools needed to debug production issues are often only used when they’re needed. Which now means you need health and uptime monitoring on your log server since without that, it might break randomly and no one notices until you need it. > The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-pre…

> It really comes down to the people and whether you have the expertise on the team

Aren't these people suppose to debug and fix complex problems in prod? And if they can do that, why can't they run and debug a log server?

Of course there are trade offs with any outsourcing decision. But I think we should have higher expectations of engineers

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#507

Post by evolve-maz »

cj wrote: post #330
shimman wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but the amount of companies that need something like DataDog is quite small compared to their 30,000+ customer count. Maybe 5,000 companies on Earth truly need something like DataDog, 80% of their customers would be perfectly fine with a self hosted instance of grafana. Using an open source self hosted solution should be the industry standard, encouraged position, by default. Our industry does not gain over…

> 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.

Expertise isn't there because people are outsourcing that sort of work to companies. I didn't know how to do much of anything, until I had to do it for work. Then learning everything became way easier.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#508

Post by lampe3 »

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…

Oh I have seen this story and was the one who caused this story when I was younger.

In a lot of cases the "new guy" thinks its an easy software and does it on his free time and thinks he did a great job.

In reality the specs are never 100% done correctly. The "new guy" misses some edge cases everybody but him knew because its just company knowledge. A lot of info in the specs was missing since they are not complete and so on.

This over the weekend never works in the long run. The ORM worked for all the happy path and written down cases but then you have cases were the ORM just is not good enough or fast. So you start to add strange code to work around the ORM. The same for the web framework or the validation lib.

To me the author of this comment sounds like the typical "Freelancer" coming in into a company knowing everything better then all the people and then leaving after a few months and now everybody else has to deal with his code.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#509

Post by yieldcrv »

kstrauser wrote: post #432
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.

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…

I'm not good at office politics, but I got better at not caring. Understanding what is erroneous stimuli, as an employee you don't have to respond especially if you aren't noticed. This is fairly easy for engineers, even lead engineers. Anywhere there is a buffer between you and other stakeholders.

Occasionally though, I do get thrust into it, mostly during a company pivot about something I wasn't hired to do. All the personalities to manage, I 100% fumble, but still deliver.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#510

Post by port11 »

AI is killing this. Millennials are killing that. Gen Z certainly must be killing another thing. And Yarn? It was killing NPM. This nonsense type of title really was made for a world where nuance doesn’t exist.

B2B SaaS is projected to grow over the next decade, not shrink. Just use the LLMs and you’ll be reminded of the value provided by the company selling non-core but important tools for your business.

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