Quick SaaS-y notes.

Putting this out there very well knowing that everyone is talking about it offline but there is a range from denial to counter action to debate and many variations of this!!

I saw this note below from one of the cofounders of Hubspot and it prompted that very ‘to the brim’ filled mouth having these very intense discussions with founders building this everywhere, to be spilt out.

This debate on the death of SaaS that is raging just about everywhere is something most of the foundational AI folks saw coming from a few 100 miles away. The counter has always been ‘the deep connected workflows’ angle. The constant counter to the app layer commoditization debate keeps going down to deep connected workflows of 1 product extensively into an org across use cases/jobs. What is rarely discussed is the fact that the guys who capture the most value in this space are the incumbents or the very rare disruptor with a small but fast growing tribe-ish personas that generally always work like a cult who have massive network influence power — canva, figma, hubspot being those rare examples. Definitely #goals if you’re a founder but this just got 300x harder than even 3 years ago!

I wager what will become mainstream instead is many many small 5–10 people SaaS companies. 0–5M revenue range. Exactly like what happened with the phone app marketplace creation. Smaller ACV. Commoditized but catering to specific niche groups with a rare winner here and there. Need a ton more Acquire.com like companies, if anyone is listening/looking. The real disruptors in the next chapter will be the guys controlling the foundational layers, hardware folks or new categories for new audiences/behaviors. Until the old app layer comes back around a decade or more later. With a likelihood those cycles get shorter than the ones before.

I think at some level the ease of building a SaaS company means abundant SaaS companies with much smaller but meaningful outcomes for many many more founders than ever before. Perhaps SaaS just became the next industry to become like the services one.