One point is now you dont have to pay money to 3rd world countries like mine :(, you can manage with fewer resources inhouse. AI will take care of slop work.
AI is killing B2B SaaS
601–610 of 752 posts
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to bring up JIRA example. You could replace it in-house yeah it is just tickets with statuses. /s But then keep in mind one who built the replacement will become the owner of an application that business doesn’t want to pay for and that person will be cost center for the company. That person better get marketing and negotiating skills that Atlassian has on board because that person will be responsible for the…
You guys keep using services like Jira, Salesforce, Stripe, Datadog, etc. While those are definitely the biggest names, I don't think people are referring to those SaaS platforms as the ones they will replace or try to build an inhouse version of. It will be things like ETL pipeline services, data scraping services, maybe some internal analytics SaaS. The niche things that cost a lot because they’re in a sweet spot w…
They are though, atlasians stock is in the toilet. The world seems to think Jira will be replaced by AI built in house replacements, for some reason
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#603What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive. It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One…
The software industry moat is disappearing. What will happen is 1000 (10,000?) competitors putting price pressure on every saas app.
Software will cease to be a winner take all and be a very long tail distribution!
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#604People have been debating what "real" development is for as long as there have been computers. "That's not real software development, you're not even controlling which registers you use!" "How can you say that's real code when you aren't even managing your own memory!" "That doesn't look like C, must not be code!" and on and on.
At the level of the old adage about whether the horse-drawn buggy-makers are in the buggy business or the transportation business, it's all telling the computer what to do in the context of providing a customized tool that you or others might use. So in this context, a customized Excel spreadsheet counts. And so does a vibe-coded app.
And of course, wringing our hands about what it looks like now totally ignores the fact that it's not going to be like this for more than a year or two at most.
How long until a user can reasonably say to Claude or similar, "I need Bob here to track production at my factory. Lay out a set of tools to do that, and make sure they're layered with help and tutorials so Bob can learn on the job because he doesn't know anything. Don't let him make any mistakes."
That's probably not coming next year, but certainly it's not ten years away.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#605It'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…
So you think this downturn will be short lived? When management realise that the vibe coded projects are not maintainable, SAAS will be as popular as ever
I've seen some bad some SaaS that management insists is an integration they need and no one else provides. I can easily see some vibe coded projects replace them.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#606Earlier 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…
Have you ever tried to contact their support? The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot. They do go down and don't work and often times there's simply nothing you can do. The worst offenders will seize upon the moment and force you to upgrade a support plan before they will even talk to you, even if the iss…
> The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot.
Tremendous opportunity announcement!
If you are building a dev-focused SaaS, treat your support team exactly as they are: a key part of the product. Just like docs or developer experience, the support experience is critical.
Trouble is, it's hard to quantify the negative experience, though tracking word of mouth referrals or NPS scores can try.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
This vibe-coding-will-replace-SaaS insanity is the new crypto-will-replace-fiat-money insanity.
It's shocking to me how prevalent this "who needs Salesforce when everyone can just vibe code their own CRM from scratch in a day" narrative has become in the business press. Like, what???
That's what happens when business press is all written by LLMs. Maybe the models think too highly of themselves...
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#608What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive. It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One…
The software industry moat is disappearing. What will happen is 1000 (10,000?) competitors putting price pressure on every saas app. Software will cease to be a winner take all and be a very long tail distribution!
Where are all these 1000 competitors coming from?
You need to have tremendous agency/will to start competing with a public company. Plus, you need to have a lot of distribution channels, competing with sales people that do this for a living since ages, and marketing budgets that are higher than your annual Claude spending.
Regular people do not press 10 clicks daily to track their calories, and you're saying that they will start competing with Salesforce and the like?
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#609It'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…
& the counter-argument is those SAAS apps being killed by A.I are growing revenue 20%+ YOY people who write this BS - one never don't understand SAAS fundamentals, they only see what's on the screen and forget the complexity that lives on the backend - forget the costs of running such a SAAS before it was low-code will kill SAAS, then Visual UI builders, now its A.I just like it was before that crypto will kill Trad-…
Here are the most recent 10-Ks for Salesforce and Workday.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001108524/0...
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001327811/0...
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#610I 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…
> “…deciding what to do and what not to do is something else that takes forever…”
If that’s the case, then I should think business owners and office workers should be able to sort that out, lestwise on the “how to automate the boring stuff” front. That repetitive, boring, time consuming, error prone work. Incremental, least work for greatest impact.
The danger is they pull a 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter —level mistake. Or their solution suite grows to big to manage with mounting tech debt.
Also, if you’re software also required some custom domain hardware, then there’s your bottleneck for protectionist business practices.