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Posted by namanyayg 19 hours ago

AI is killing B2B SaaS(nmn.gl)
359 points | 564 commentspage 10
nicman23 3 hours ago|
goooood.
zipy124 17 hours ago||
no. High interest rates and a cautionary view of future economic growth are killing B2B SaaS. Money is no longer free, and so there is a bigger push for cost-cutting rather than growing your buisness with free money.
medius 15 hours ago||
A link shortener is such an easy thing to code, it's essentially one database table with a redirect. To add to that, there are many open source libraries to implement link shortening, including analytics and stuff. Even then Bitly and Rebrandly have customers (from their website) like Toyota, Cisco, Oracle, Monday.com, New York Times, etc.

Are these companies unable to build a link shortener? It's also so easy to migrate off shortener service. If they can and still choose to use these shortening services, there must be other reason. And that reason is that they simply don't want to. This has nothing to do with AI.

I run a software company and one of the reasons customers say they want to migrate from their homegrown spreadsheet is because the guy who built it left. A freaking spreadsheet!

Such blog posts and probably many comments here are the perfect answer to "Tell me you don't run a real business without telling me you don't run a real business"

cpursley 12 hours ago|
Regarding your last comment, majority of the people here are costal with FAT paychecks slinging code for VCs. It’s a totally different universe than running a Saas. That said, still a valuable forum.
swiftcoder 15 hours ago||
Until Claude Code comes with indemnity insurance for HIPAA / GDPR / etc… B2B SaaS is here to stay. You want me to convince my auditor that the vibe-coded in house software handles PII correctly?

Making the audit someone else’s problem is 90% of the ‘buy’ value in ‘build vs buy’

niyikiza 11 hours ago|
Spot on. You could argue that most companies buying B2B SaaS could almost always build a clone internally but they need someone to assume SLA and liability.
cyclo 13 hours ago||
Anyone can learn to cook, and the barrier to entry is low. There's no shortage of restaurants though.
pixl97 12 hours ago|
There's no shortage of restaurants that go out of business. Even big name brands have issues with location turnover.
anonnon 6 hours ago||
That's a great point. The restaurant business is one of the worst you could possibly go into, with razor thin margins and astronomical failure rates. If those are the future economics of SaaS (accustomed to 70-80% gross margins), than you ought to cash out now while you still can.
anonnon 6 hours ago||
I'm not one to sell generative AI short at this point, but this seems at odds with the longer-term trend towards more centralized, off-the-shelf solutions, like Shopify, Salesforce, Squarespace, over the "bespoke," in-house alternatives that many companies developed in previous decades. Perhaps AI is making the TCO of "rolling your own" so low that it makes sense to go back to that over SaaS?
pixl97 12 hours ago||
At the end of the day you do not need to replace your B2B SaaS with AI.

You need your B2B SaaS to think you can use AI to replace it though, so said SaaS will keep it's prices reasonable. Otherwise they have you by the balls and will charge you much as humanly possible.

comfortabledoug 15 hours ago||
if you're a software company and all your clients are in tech...you're gonna have a bad time. godspeed.
semiquaver 18 hours ago||
I know this is petty but I stopped reading when I saw the “c-t” ligature in the article headings. Obnoxious and pretentious.
namanyayg 15 hours ago|
I'm the biggest typography nerd and I'll fight to death in the defense of ligatures! Bring them back
semiquaver 13 hours ago||
I love ligatures and typography too but not these.
TheGRS 16 hours ago|
I've worked in SaaS for most of my career, only recently working at a big corp who is largely the buyer and user of SaaS tools to meet their objectives. From the perspective of the corp business buyer, they want something that works for their needs and they want to buy something instead of build it because the support costs are gnarly. They already have engineers dedicated to the tools they've purchased. Much better to put the risk on someone else they can yell at. And the permissions and access to these tools, reports, data, is usually its own special problem to manage. Building a lot of one-off tools is going to just give IT a huge headache and they will push the org to buy before vibe coding a solution.
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