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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#681

Post by ryanackley »

d_watt wrote: post #2

I think one of the interesting things here is that AI doesn't need to be able build B2B SaaS to kill it. So much of the overhead of B2B SaaS companies is thinking about multitenancy, intergrating with many auth providers and mapping those concepts to the program's user system, juggling 100 features when any given customer only needs 10 of them, creating PLG upsell flows to optimize conversions, instrumenting A/B test…

Sure, and Github is filled with these 10 feature competitors. Some even have active communities.

Didn't seem to kill off the big SaaS players or even weaken them.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#682

Post by osigurdson »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #677
osigurdson wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, within months your prompt can simply be "increase NPV" and machines will do the rest? If not, what prompt will work perfectly in your estimation by the end of the year?

“Analyze these business requirements and create a software solution for the problems you identified”. Right now it can get part way there but quickly falls flat. In 12-24 months? It’ll be able to audit itself and determine how to fix issues as they come up, mid-stream. That’s (all of) what a human dev does.

How detailed are the business requirements however? "Increase NPV" is certainly a business requirement, albeit a very abstract one. "Add a checkbox to this form" is another, far more concrete business requirement.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#683

Post by ryanackley »

bdcravens wrote: post #4
d_watt wrote: post #2

I think one of the interesting things here is that AI doesn't need to be able build B2B SaaS to kill it. So much of the overhead of B2B SaaS companies is thinking about multitenancy, intergrating with many auth providers and mapping those concepts to the program's user system, juggling 100 features when any given customer only needs 10 of them, creating PLG upsell flows to optimize conversions, instrumenting A/B test…

And in many cases, it's 12 features, with 2 of the features not even existing in the big SaaS. I'm pretty sure every developer who has dealt with janky workflows in products like Jira has planned out their own version that fits like a glove, "if only I had more time".

Jira has had free competitors that do at least 75% of what it does since it's inception. You could find a dozen on github that actually look good right now.

In spite of this, Jira is bigger than ever.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#684

Post by unsupp0rted »

osigurdson wrote: post #682
unsupp0rted wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Analyze these business requirements and create a software solution for the problems you identified”. Right now it can get part way there but quickly falls flat. In 12-24 months? It’ll be able to audit itself and determine how to fix issues as they come up, mid-stream. That’s (all of) what a human dev does.

How detailed are the business requirements however? "Increase NPV" is certainly a business requirement, albeit a very abstract one. "Add a checkbox to this form" is another, far more concrete business requirement.

Good AI asks clarification questions. Codex plan mode is already getting there-ish.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#685

Post by mbesto »

sramam wrote: post #159
mbesto wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS. This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.

These examples are going to be lagging indicators of the underlying sentiment. Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this. Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.

> I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.

Hunger or actually putting real investment against it? I'll wait.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#686

Post by ryanackley »

yieldcrv wrote: post #477
gbriel wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that code in the future will need to be unvibed. Either the code will be good, or AI will be good enough to unvibe it. That might be awhile in the future but it will happen.

> or AI will be good enough to unvibe it it already is just point Claude Code at a Claude Code codebase you forgot about for a few weeks with no plan.md or agents.md or memory.md implemented configure the session correctly this time and put it in plan mode, it will deal with your whole database schemas, migrate, tie everything to the new models correctly, make a backend deployment script, and fix your UI/UX

Not my experience at all. Claude Code is impressive but it needs to be used iteratively for serious development and requires lots of testing.

Need it to one shot that report against your db using React/Typescript? Or pump out a web form that submits to your backend? works every time.

Need it to do something a little more creative? It frequently fails in subtle ways that aren't apparent until later.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#687

Post by wvenable »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #332
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…

> "just do the parts of it we actually use". 25 years here. You can absolutely do this. Most software is orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be. The junior programmer you are talking about who wanted to rewrite it in a weekend tends to come back with a working program, not empty handed.

I agree. Just because you can buy some piece of software doesn't mean you should -- there is a lot of software that exists just to sell more consulting hours and will never fit the business. It's actually not hard at all to code and maintain much simpler alternatives.

Actually having to support multiple businesses with commercial software is hard. I've written a ton of custom software that far surpasses the capabilities of commercial offerings but if were to turn that into it's own commercial offering it would be large undertaking.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#688

Post by wvenable »

bandrami wrote: post #372
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "just do the parts of it we actually use". 25 years here. You can absolutely do this. Most software is orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be. The junior programmer you are talking about who wanted to rewrite it in a weekend tends to come back with a working program, not empty handed.

Yes, I didn't really doubt the developer could do it, the problems are: 1. That's not a great use of the developer's time, and 2. anything in-house increases our training and support costs

1. The whole point of developer time is to save user time; if a developer can do that then it's worth it.

2. If the in-house software doesn't decrease training time or support costs then there is something wrong there.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#690

Post by majormajor »

theptip wrote: post #660
majormajor wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think with a SaaS you're trading user research and workflow design for a certain lack of customization, and that for 90% of businesses that will remain the right call. (And for the ones where it's not the right call, I think the contractor model also makes more sense than in-house LLM-generated-user-tool teams. That's a lot of code to pile up under a very small team for long-term maintenance. Yeah, "the agents can do it," but you're making ever-more balls that the people overseeing the agents will have to juggle over time.)

If you're selling honey online, say, how bespoke does your inventory management tool really need to be? And are there no lessons you'd learn from a SaaS tool that you'd not have thought of on your own?

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