[mym1990]

We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffin is that the data is a large part of company moats, and new products need time in the market to get that. Migration is also a long process and risky...so to get customers, a newcomer needs to provide way more value than what the incumbent gives.

I imagine you're going to have people trying to automate the whole GTM lifecycle, but eventually the developer that thinks they can bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.

[mvkel]

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product

Absolutely. But this begs the question that businesses want to also sign up to maintain whatever product they've built, on top of their core business.

"Service" is the word that people seem to be forgetting in SaaS. If you roll you own, all you have is software.

[mym1990]

The "service" part can still come from internal sources. Plenty of companies have internal support for internal tooling. With a good foundation of infrastructure and a lean team that knows how to build, not just vibe code, there is most definitely some ROI there.

But yes, this brings us back to the point that simply building the tool is only a small part of the process...and it has often been one of the most expensive parts of the process.

[risyachka]

In any usable product making a product is like 20% or less. Enter compliance, security, payments and a million other things.

Even if you can build it in a day B2B SaaS will continue to prosper because they sell peace of mind, reliability and compliance. Not features.

Also due to economy of scale it will always be cheaper to buy something from a vendor that sells it to many clients than to DIY it.

[AlienRobot]

Yep. It's a funny thing.

You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database.

But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes?

Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens?

One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore?

Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those.

Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not?

Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.

[icedchai]

Yep. Wait until they realize one of their vibe coded apps validates everything client side and their entire DB is open to the world.

[overfeed]

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product.

What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?

[mym1990]

I think that just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean they will. Lots of people have really great ideas but very few actually commit to execution. Ultimately ROI will go down, deincentivizing the commercialization of that thing someone wanted to bang out in a weekend.

In the very long term, software will become a commodity, as you mentioned. Process and workflow may move into JIT delivery for the need at hand, in theory the data layer will be comprehensive and clean and the days of clicking around a bunch of stuff to fulfill process needs will move into a lower latency activity like...talking to your agent.

I saw a quote today by Brian Eno(1995) that said: "So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they're prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days; the question then is: of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?" and it resonated with me a lot.

[hinkley]

Exactly. Once the market tastes like lemonade, everyone will be afraid of trying new apps in the way that they are afraid to accept phone calls from unknown numbers now.

You will trade initial development budget for advertising budget, trying to position your product in proximity with people who are known quantities.

[dizlexic]

Tbh I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the issue (or I am).

It’s not about some single dude disrupting the saas market. It’s about largish companies who already have internal dev teams, slowly weening their company off these ginormous one size fits all saas products and building local, tailored solutions.

It’s death by a thousand cuts from the erosion of their highest paying customers.

[trhway]

in the 90-ies anyone could easily prototype with tools like Access (and all the other "4GL" tools which were similarly all the rage back then). That still didn't preclude companies from buying their major software from software vendors instead of doing it themselves.

In some sense having customer able to prototype what they want is a good thing. I did it myself as i was at the time on that side, and having a quick-whip-it tool was a good thing to quickly get some feature that was missing in the major software before that major software would add it (if at all). (And if one remembers for example Crystal Reports - while for "reports", it and the likes were in many senses such quick-whip-it tools for a lot of such customization that was doable by the customer.)

So, after initial aftershock - "Ahhhh, we don't need software companies anymore!" - we'll get to the state with software companies still doing their thing just with a lot of AI as specialization is one of the main thing in modern economy and AI becomes most powerful tools of the trade. (and various AI components themselves will be part of software delivery, like say a very fine-tuned model (hosted or on-premise) specific to the customer and software - Clippy on steroids)

(Of course some companies wouldn't survive the transition just like some companies didn't survive the transitions to client/server, cloud, etc. while some new companies will emerge like Anthropic has today or Borland had at the time)

[lumost]

The history of software has been that once it becomes cheap enough for teams to flood the market with “existing product” + x feature for y users. The market consolidates around a leader who does all features for all customers.

I’d bet that we skip SaaS entirely and go to Anthropic directly. This means the ai has to understand that there are different users with conflicting requirements and that we all need the same exact copy of the burn rate report.

[Bewelge]

It's not a market for lemons. We can share info about the lemons and all choose to use the good ones. There's no information asymmetry.

[GorbachevyChase]

If you can gin these things up in a weekend then why would you bother with a monthly subscription model for software? The only valuable part is the specification and possibly the hardware to run it. If I were a CTO trying to save money I might pay for the labor to develop good specs, but I would prioritize getting out from under software companies with a rent seeking models and 80 to 90% margins

[cyanydeez]

It means the same: random lottery of mass, with everuone else failing.

American capitalism hides the depressing fact that rarely does the best succees.

AAI momentum is parallel to just buying lottery tickets and doing so with the belief that you know the real odds, so one can overwhelm with quantity of tickets.

[Nathanba]

I sure hope I never have to hunt down any GTM options myself soon and I can tell the AI to do what it should be doing. However AI adoption may be getting slowed down by profit motives because what Google should have already been doing is letting me git clone the entirety of GTM with all its configs to a local folder so I can treat it like code because it is code. The difficulty with AI adoption will be to make all products be like this so they can interact on a code level instead of me having to press buttons in different UIs to make thing shappen. E.g cloudflare should be letting me git clone its entire config, everything I did in the dashboard, to my folder too.

[Aperocky]

> bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.

But you are not limited to only using LLM for coding.

I agree that marketing and sales is as important as product and technology, but they are not necessarily safe.

[re-thc]

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product.

Prototype maybe. Go to market maybe not so. It's giving false hope. You're just taking more shortcuts with prototyping.