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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. rianto+nf3[view] [source] 2025-12-15 21:27:22
>>benzib+xN
While most here are aligned with your perspective, and for good reasons, let me offer an alternate perspective. Today AI can take the goal and create a workflow for it. Something that orgs pay for in SaaS solutions.

AI does it imperfectly today, but if you have had to bet, would you bet that it gets better or worse? I would bet that it will improve, and as it is often with tech, at exponential rate. Then we would seen any workflow described in plain language and minutes see great software churned out. It might be a questions of when (not if) that happens. And are you prepared for that state of affairs?

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