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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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581–590 of 752 posts

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#581

Post by yunohn »

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

While probably facetious, those with power (who you aim to smear and replace) will save themselves and work together to fire you ASAP. This is not a winnable battle nor strategy for success, unfortunately.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#582

Post by bombolo »

oblio wrote: post #543
Snoddas wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

[dead]

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#583

Post by jesterson »

kstrauser wrote: post #492
jesterson wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nothing personal, but our conversation reminds me many similar convos I had with developers who thought their product was superiour - but they could see it only from their angle. And it was superiour - but again, only under narrow view.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#584

Post by jpfromlondon »

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…

In my career I've deployed close to 100 different saas products at enterprise level and can tell you that most of the current crop are slapped-together half-finished dross with a huge sales and marketing team.

In the time it takes to deploy semi-bespoke saas, or while waiting for the current licence term to expire it would be very easy to develop a more suitable and much cheaper product in-house, this was true before AI tools and doubly so now.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#585

Post by ambicapter »

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

See also, test the flammability of every bridge you cross.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#586

Post by ambicapter »

sublinear wrote: post #577
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 :) ).

Unless you were working at a startup full of very naive people, I gotta say this sounds made up.

If people at startups weren't slightly naive, they wouldn't attempt an endeavour that has such a low success rate :)

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#587

Post by ruszki »

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…

And it’s possible that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

I got a green light to do an integration in a week alone, which was planned for a team of 5 for half a year. We knew that it cannot be that much. So I delivered…

It was never used. It was purely political. The integration didn’t happen because it was “half a year”, but because middle management didn’t like the idea of integration for political reasons.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#588

Post by tedggh »

Are there real documented cases of a company replacing their SaS with a vibe-coded version?

Like I can see how a very small company could replace a portion of an overkill and underutilized SaS platform.

I don’t see how a larger more complex business could replace their SAP or ADP with a vibecoded version.

These stories are all very similar in where the author knows some CEO of an obscure company who told them they had an engineer reverse engineer and vibecode some obscure SaS solution and saved them $50K.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#589

Post by resonious »

thinkindie wrote: post #565

I have few sticks in the sand in my thinking framework: * writing code has always been the easiest part of building software, deciding what to do and what not to do is something else that takes forever sometimes * there are several open source projects that can replace commercial SaaS and still people prefer to purchase commercial SaaS. These are available immediately, deployed immediately etc etc. * along the same l…

> writing code has always been the easiest part

Let me provide some possible evidence against this: so many teams are desperate to rewrite their codebase but struggle to actually do so. And when they finally make the leap, it takes them 5x as long as they had hoped. Then sometimes the new code isn't even any easier than the old code.

I personally find writing code to be a huge time suck and I'm very happy that AI helps me save that time.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#590

Post by Ekaros »

Or maybe there is look at true value proposition of the B2B SaaS products. It is not big spend per user, but it does add up eventually. And then savings start to look like big numbers. Big enough for some manager to justify action. This might lead cutting some seats just on cost basis.
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