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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#651

Post by kalap_ur »

gspetr wrote: post #616
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 :) ).

This is the prime example of Law 1 of Robert Greene's "The 48 Laws of Power": "Never Outshine the Master." The core principle is to always make those above you - your bosses, mentors, or superiors feel comfortably superior. If you display your talents too aggressively, you risk triggering their deep-seated insecurities, which can lead them to sabotage your career or remove you from your position. Galileo Galilei hand…

great perspective and wisdom nuggets.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#652

Post by Brian_K_White »

Aeolun wrote: post #457
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…

It’s funny you complain about the sales pitch the guy gave you, but the comment itself sounds like a sales pitch :)

I think you need to calibrate your perception of things you read.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#653

Post by sunir »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #634
gspetr wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the prime example of Law 1 of Robert Greene's "The 48 Laws of Power": "Never Outshine the Master." The core principle is to always make those above you - your bosses, mentors, or superiors feel comfortably superior. If you display your talents too aggressively, you risk triggering their deep-seated insecurities, which can lead them to sabotage your career or remove you from your position. Galileo Galilei hand…

Sure it has been codified into a "law" but really this is just basic social skills / emotional intelligence which engineers on the spectrum struggle with. If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do. Casually solv…

It’s hardly basic social skill. This is an executive management skill set. That’s the advanced game.

The basic social skill is to avoid conflict and seek acceptance. Go along to get along.

One wouldn’t rewrite the app on one’s on recognizance without peer approval first if this is your vibe.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#654

Post by kstrauser »

nosianu wrote: post #537
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…

> Honestly, I don’t want to be. I don't get it. On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains. Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally giganti…

What you’re saying is true. Yet, I can only willingly go along with so much terribleness before it hurts my soul. We only have so many days to do things we care about. The thought of throwing away 6 months of them for no defensible reason horrifies me, and I can’t, won’t, participate.

Edit: for a compensating control, I pair with senior leadership I can directly ask about this things. “Hey CTO, is there a reason we’re doing this thing so ass-backward? No? Can I go fix it then? Thanks!” Or, “oh, because we’re stalling to avoid this horrible customer’s demand, and no one’s really going to be working on it as their day job? Sigh, alright, I’ll look the other way.”

I let them be political so that I don’t have to be.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#655

Post by kstrauser »

juleiie wrote: post #534
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.

replace your boss

That’s what I did here, by going to a new place that wasn’t fundamentally broken.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#656

Post by carlosft »

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 the pressure on SaaS margins won't be from customers vibing their way to Figma or DataDog but because gen AI will bring a lot more credible competition in many segments. DD and Figma are probably awful examples because those companies are constantly pushing the envelope, but there are a lot of rent seeking SaaS providers that are going to be in for a rude awaking.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#657

Post by kstrauser »

jesterson wrote: post #583
kstrauser wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good chat. Have a nice day!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#658

Post by chrisjj »

fsloth wrote: post #648
fsloth wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO I think the best any engineer can do in an org is to ask "what is the highest value problem to solve for the business" and "can I solve it". "I made this x times better" is not relevant to _most peoples in any org_. That's the dark secret. Nobody cares how good of an engineer you are _unless there is a fire to put out_. After which you get pat on the back and back to usual business. There are situations where ye…

The sad corollary to "you will be noticed only if you put out fires" is nobody actually realizes the elegant solution you shipped will stop tons of these fires from happening. Rather the reaction will be "that looked simple and easy so probably is not important". And on the other hand, the complexifier (you know the type) ships rude goldberg gizmos just waiting to go off-kilter - and then they come in and save the da…

> The sad corollary to "you will be noticed only if you put out fires" is nobody actually realizes the elegant solution you shipped will stop tons of these fires from happening. Rather the reaction will be "that looked simple and easy so probably is not important".

Or that reaction is really "that looked simple, easy and like the last 10 "elegant solutions" that caused fires".

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#659

Post by laurentiurad »

WarmWash wrote: post #632
laurentiurad wrote: post #594

What 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…

> can accelerate in adding new features to their products If anything AI helps companies escape the "feature wheel" that is used to justify exorbitant costs, while providing debatable (and often even negative) utility to the end user. Keep in mind, Excel '98 would still probably be overkill for 85% of people's needs in 2025. What companies thought was adding more utility, was actually just continually stacking costs…

“Overkill for 85% of people” is a vibes statistic, not an argument.

Also you're generalizing some things to the whole sector like every software provider now is useless and the new features they add are not bringing any values. How can you make such generic statements about a sector that is so diverse?

I start to suspect some of you are just private-equity-sponsored accounts trying to push Anthropic propaganda over the Internet.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#660

Post by theptip »

majormajor wrote: post #418
theptip wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true pre-LLMs, but I think you need to account for the baseline build-vs-buy tradeoff shifting. Companies in most cases don’t want to build SaaS because it is expensive to hire engineers to do it, not because they are allergic to owning teams. If in-housing becomes substantially cheaper than the alternatives then companies will adapt. But even if the new equilibrium is to hire a contract dev shop to build…

The same cost savings could be captured by SaaS. Potentially not by incumbents, but by up and comers. If you can spend $10K/year to keep your in house one alive but $5K/year on the new SaaS option, you stop building your own again.

Possibly, but I don’t think it’s certain. For a SaaS to capture, you’d need a forward deployed engineer model. And then I would have ten different FDEs to liaise with, none of whom know my domain.

Vs if I contract a shop, then I have a dedicated team ramped up on my domain who then can vet infra providers and choose the best tech. So potentially still some SaaS, but probably shifting more to PaaS.

Similar to how you don’t hire your Salesforce or SAP contractors from these companies, I would predict this model spreads to other platforms too, and may make OSS viable in more places.

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