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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#541

Post by bluemenot »

juleiie wrote: post #533
kavalg wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the beginning of my career, I've been once told by my senior management that I should never again: 1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress). 2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).

Just smear the heck out of them to stakeholders, after implementing something big and climb over these incompetent shmucks and watch their fall

Also make sure to brag using terms that non-technical people can understand and want to hear. Less "we stopped writing an in-house CRUD that was Django but worse" and more "we saved months and increased security by adopting a market leading solution and it works better with AI too".

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#542

Post by kavalg »

juleiie wrote: post #533
kavalg wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the beginning of my career, I've been once told by my senior management that I should never again: 1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress). 2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).

Just smear the heck out of them to stakeholders, after implementing something big and climb over these incompetent shmucks and watch their fall

If I can only go back in time to 2007 :)

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#543

Post by oblio »

Snoddas wrote: post #536
oblio wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Your experience isn’t representative. Mine isn’t either.

I've seen plenty of Gmail accounts over the years and they pretty much look the same.

The only Gmail accounts that are "overrun by spam" are those of people subscribing to lots of spammy newsletters and then not knowing how to unsubscribe from them (or figuring they'd stay subscribed in case the next newsletter is the Magical One™). But that's 100% self inflicted and you can't save those people with any technical solution.

Email spam isn't a day to day problem for Gmail (at least) since Bayesian email filtering was first implemented.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#544

Post by neya »

kstrauser wrote: post #478
neya wrote: post #448

Earlier 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…

Nice work! Sometimes those complex solutions are the right tool for the job. And other times, you just need to glue some stuff together, call it good, and start making money. Experience helps a good engineer know when each approach is appropriate.

Thanks, totally agreed.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#545

Post by scotty79 »

habinero wrote: post #525
scotty79 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like that never happened with non-vibecoded stuff.

There's a difference between someone breaking into your house to steal your valuables, and you getting robbed after leaving your valuables on your lawn with a sign saying "Look At My Valuables"

Startups of the last decade were routinely doing this. Building their fresh ideas on the newfangled databse without bothering to investigste how to secure it in any way against malicious actors.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#546

Post by mrweasel »

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…

My thoughts are sort of similar. AI/LLMs have allowed many of the typical SaaS customers to think that maybe they could do at least some of this work themselves, and get better results.

For most companies this was always true, but LLMs have given them the confidence to actual start writing more software in house. The SAPs of the world have nothing to fear, companies aren't going to vibe code a CRM, but they are going to be able to more easily write integrations. At a previous job we frequently had bills for €10.000 for small integrations into our ERP, but once we figured out the API and gained more confidence in our abilities, all those integrations got pulled in house.

If your SaaS platform provides actual benefits, then you don't need to worry. If your business in writing integrations for other companies into platforms you don't own, yes, AI is going to hurt your business.

This should have happened regardless of AI though. The idea that companies (over a certain size, e.g. ~20 people) doesn't have a least on developer employed, regardless of industry always seemed like a missed business opportunity. We wrote so many tools for sales, warehousing, customer service and accounting and it's hard to imagine the business functioning without those tools. I might have spend two weeks writing a tool, but if it saves sales 20 hours a week punching in orders, we get a positive return in a month.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#547

Post by Bewelge »

justinclift wrote: post #417
Bewelge wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't disagree with that, but the market for lemons still doesn't really fit.

If I remember my econ class correctly it uses used cars as an example. If you're neighbor bought a used Toyota and tells you about it being a great purchase, you can't go out and buy another used Toyota and expect it to also be in great condition. Every car is a gamble.

But if you use something like Hubspot and tell your neighbor it's really good/bad you can expect to receive the same Hubspot service they did.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#548

Post by opencodeinit »

rvnx wrote: post #102
Hamuko wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bus factor is gonna be pretty high if your enterprise relies on an internal tool that some guy at your company vibe coded at some point.

This was true pre-AI, but now, the bus factor is actually way lower in any software than it was before: - Hey Claude, what is the project in XXXXX/ about and how does it work ? What should be improved there ?

Or even better:

$opencode

/init

Wait 20 second, then describe the bug.

AGENTS.md seems to exist not just to save tokens, but also so the Bus has to do overtime Isekaing people before a company goes down.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#549

Post by chanux »

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…

Besides rampant failures in communication and skills allocation, wild U turns of requirements were (sometimes, not even real business requirements) were holding back corporate environments doing a decent job.

With AI, I can only see the rate of such changes sky rocketing due to expectations wildly misaligned with reality. Hence we are unlikely to see any meaningful improvements.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#550

Post by kldg »

bawolff wrote: post #371
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can gin these things up in a weekend then why would you bother with a monthly subscription model for software? The only valuable part is the specification and possibly the hardware to run it. If I were a CTO trying to save money I might pay for the labor to develop good specs, but I would prioritize getting out from under software companies with a rent seeking models and 80 to 90% margins

> If I were a CTO trying to save money A CTOs job isn't to save money but to spend money effectively. Saving money by increasing risk is not neccesarily a prudent move.

it depends a lot on the application, I think, though certainly you can point to cloud services like Cloudflare or whatever Burger King was using to track how many times a clerk said "You Rule" (while capturing all customer audio data, which was then stolen by low-effort attackers) as high-risk; just because you don't feel the safety risks of outsourcing data to a black box on the cloud doesn't mean they don't exist, it just means you get to neglect them. when I headed IT at an SMB, I was given a lot of leeway, and our department had its own budget, so cutting out SaaS was a high priority so we could do more. if I were heading today with LLMs' present competency, I would have replaced much more, up to and including Salesforce which was draining the heck out of our budget despite us not doing anything technically interesting with it.

$40/head/year (including employees no longer with company) for a call metrics suite is low-stakes and relatively easy to replace what we want out of it, and this is an example of something we did replace with a $0 solution with my own abysmal-at-the-time coding skills. ~nobody's about to replace Microsoft suite, though (a couple replacements before me, they earnestly tried; there were still some laptops with OpenOffice on it; I admire them, but I'm not dealing with our sales team trying to figure out what an ODF is).

I love this "petty kingdom" budget model, by the way, as someone whose work personality could be described as "cheap analyst." I'm paying $40/month per head for Software X in your department, and I have an inferior replacement for $0/month/head which meets specs and which you can't quantify productivity loss for (essentially, it just looks ugly and feels bad). I can therefor cut that out of my budget entirely while meeting my obligations, and if *you* really want the decadent solution, *your* department can bear that cost. Either way, I get plenty more money to basically not have to be a dick (like charging careless employees for broken/stolen equipment, or getting an above-expectations solution for ADA employees); and sometimes, maybe some antennas show up on the roof which would be difficult to justify cost for if asked, but I'm way under-budget so nobody would.

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