Products for devs are quite dead. SaaS for devs is dead. There are exceptions, though I think you have to extrapolate on variables that are not raw software. I have ideas and am implementing them. Mostly in private because building in public also can no longer be capitalized upon. Seemingly.
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I think you have the real economic effects of AI companies sucking up entire industries now (a lot where indie hackers operate) I do think the SaaSpocalypse is at least partly real
A regular boring but non-superficial SaaS app would do well 5 years ago but now it might not get anyone to sign up because it's so easy to vibe code by tens of thousands of other people
So if someone tells you, I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparatus. Show me the commitments you've made to make sure that happens every time. No exceptions. And if you don't have one, then they are lying to you no matter how good their intentions are.
software as a service businesses, for example the whole reason why they can charge a subscription is because they are able to essentially hold a gun to the customer's head and say, "Pay us at your subscription, otherwise we will delete all your data."
exceptions are an inherently poor way of handling errors because they make it easier to write bugs which won't be immediately obvious on casual code inspection
While the core borrow-checking rules are simple, there are so many exceptions (admittedly for solid ergonomic reasons) that it's easy to internalize the wrong rules.
Extrapolators have a remarkable track record in the AI field, being repeatedly early to trends and capabilities that empiricists believed were still decades away.
They have a general sense which is also by the way extremely robust in people like whatever it is the human value function whatever the human value function is with a few exceptions around addiction it's actually very very robust
And in contrast to software as a service or software you'd buy off a shelf at, you know, Fry Electronics, you know, decades ago, which might help you be marginally more productive, help you get a job done. Agents, in contrast, are actually getting the job done for you. And so you're in essence hiring software to accomplish a task and get it done well.
But what happens when every company can just invent their own business logic really cheaply and quickly? You stop using platform SaaS, you start building custom tailored solutions, you change them really quickly.
This book is a great overview of the keys to building a repeatable sales model for your SaaS business. It's a great mix of the best lessons from Jason Lemkin and his SaaStr blog and Aaron Ross's top tier consulting work. You can skip the last 50 pages which transitions to being a bad self-help book.
Want to know the story behind how Salesforce was built? This is that story in founder Marc Benioff's own words. At times I found him overly prescriptive without an appreciation for his unfair advantages he had (getting to start it while having a big salary at Oracle, having $6Mn in "bootstrapped funding", etc). However, he also helped pioneer the cloud and SaaS as a business model, so there are many great lessons to glean if you're building a high-growth SaaS business.
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