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[return to "AI agents are starting to eat SaaS"]
1. benzib+xN[view] [source] 2025-12-15 07:45:57
>>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.

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2. bob102+Z51[view] [source] 2025-12-15 10:32:13
>>benzib+xN
> Domain expertise + tight feedback loop

This is the answer to a happy B2B SaaS implementation. It doesn't matter what tools you use as long as this can be achieved.

In the domain of banking front/back office LOB apps, if you aren't iterating with your customer at least once per business day, you are definitely falling behind your competition. I've got semi-retired bankers insisting that live edits in production need to be a fundamental product feature. They used to be terrified of this. Once they get a taste of proper speed it's like blood in the water. I'm getting pushback on live reloads taking more than a few seconds now.

Achieving this kind of outcome is usually more of a meat space problem than it is a technology problem. Most customers can't go as fast as you. But the customer should always be the bottleneck. We've done things like install our people as temporary employees to get jobs done faster.

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3. hvb2+fT2[view] [source] 2025-12-15 19:53:26
>>bob102+Z51
I might be missing something but live edits in production and banking? Doesn't that violate all kinds of compliance controls?
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