zlacker

>>jnord+(OP)
I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience.

For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it. One gave up. The other's users tell us it's crap. We've lost zero paying subscribers to free internal alternatives.

I believe that agents are a multiplier on existing velocity, not an equalizer. We use agents heavily and ship faster than ever. We get a lot of feedback from users as to what the internal tech teams are shipping and based on this there's little evidence of any increase in velocity from them.

The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building. A lot of the value in our product is in decisions users don't even know we made for them. Domain expertise + tight feedback loop with users can't be replicated by an internal developer in an afternoon.

>>benzib+xN
> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools.

That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this happening.

>>jeswin+3Y
The Excel holy grail. Dashboard are an abstraction, SaaS is an abstraction of an abstraction from the pov of customers suffering from a one size fits all. Shell scripts generated by LLMs that send automated a customized reports via email will make a lot of corporate heros. No need to login, learn and use the SaaS in many instances for decisions makers.

>>testbj+yE1
I feel that large corps have guard rails that will limit this from happening. For SMB's, this is not a new problem. Gritty IT guys have been doing this for decades. I inherit these bootstrapped reporting systems all the time. The issue is when that person leaves, it is no longer maintainable. I've yet to come across a customer who has had any sort of usable documentation. The process then repeats itself when I take over, and presumably when I'm finished. With a SaaS product, you are at least paying for some support and visibility of the processes. I'm not really trying to make a point other than this is not a new, but still intriguing problem, and not sure that LLMs will be some god answer, as the organizations have trouble determining what they even need.