SaaS

“We've reached a hundred billion in revenue in AI. It took SaaS 15 years to get to the same point. AI did that in four years.”

“So the TAM of AI can be 10 X plus bigger than traditional SaaS or healthcare IT.”

“When we've surveyed entrepreneurs who have businesses with revenue, SaaS businesses, it's only three percent of them that say they found their idea through, like, online research and forums. It is three out of a hundred.”

“You don't even need to be in the top 10,000 SaaS apps in the world to have a completely life-changing outcome. Whether you sell, whether you just take profits,”

“I think I think I picked a, in some ways a challenging business because it's a software as a service where the customer has to like truly make a decision to become somebody in order to be using your product.”

“If you heard the idea that people are talking about, it's not software as a service anymore. It's service as a software because of all these shifts with shifts with AI. You have to think of, okay, not how can we use AI to slightly reduce our costs or do someth…”

“I think in the past, the way that most SaaS Products thought they spent a lot of time on their user interface, and now they really got to think about the agent interface, not just user interface.”

“Contemporary SaaS businesses are more like movie studios now, where you have to hit a blockbuster, and you have to keep hitting blockbusters in order to keep the attention of the world”

“I won't be surprised to see a huge wave of M&A of these businesses, because they're still good businesses fundamentally, or you can make them good businesses, And they just aren't going to be, like, Stripe, or these massive things that capture fundamental piec…”

“Intuitively, it does feel like services are more defensible right now. Ah, ops businesses are more defensible. They might not be as crazily valued, but sure, there is a certain defensibility aspect to it, which is tougher to replicate.”

“I don't know if it'll be three years, maybe five, but This will come back.”

“Everything is moving so fast that if you actually sit idle you will basically be you will lose your PMF within like a quarter, right? So I do feel that that velocity and that sense of urgency is one of the most important traits in AI as compared to, let's say,…”

“Sure, Silicon Valley is still ahead, you could argue, but if in the world of SaaS, Silicon Valley was five years, 10 years ahead, I mean, it's probably three to six months ahead.”

“Even in the age of AI, though, some SaaS will succeed. We know that SaaS is seeing headwinds, but there are a lot of types of SaaS companies that are going to be okay”

“The couple challenges are, you need a high enough annual contract value to justify it, and you need cash up front. Because especially at the start, you're going to send a lot of letters or gift boxes that aren't going to work as you optimize your process. And …”

“So, we declared the Sasacalypse for cybersecurity was over. We did not believe that we were going to get impacted, and you can see now that was six months ago, and we seem to be having a moment.”

“It lands with a team, you expand, and that works when the tool is replacing or when the tool is making an individual better at the job that they already have. It fails and it gets complicated when the value requires real actual change management.”

“My philosophy is that the Ecom playbook Is the right playbook for SAS? Because if you look at e-comm, you have every single cent needs to equal a purchase or an ad to cart. You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of chan…”

“For SaaS, Completely different world because you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch, right? When it comes to analytics, there's a DB, there's a BI layer. So maybe you're using click house and hex last click, you know, first click at…”

“X ads don't work. And, like, that to me just means the platform is still... I have yet to meet a SaaS head of growth or performance marketer that says that X ads print.”

“Now I think it's overblown, right? A lot of companies especially enterprise, have a lot of integrations. They build a lot of operational processes around some of these systems. This isn't a flip the switch and these companies disappear overnight. These compani…”

“I think mediocre software is dead in several years, and the reason that I think it's actually a longer timeline than most people are predicting is because of what I shared about, like, how often people are actually using this stuff.”

“People want to both buy you for what the product's doing today, but they're buying you for the slope too. Like they can see your progress and they want to buy that progress also because like the beautiful thing about SAS is we want them to be a customer for th…”

“No code has to be the most impacted, the most disrupted area of SaaS right now, because, I mean, what is Claude Code really good at? I mean, that's the ultimate no code tool.”

“The more embedded you are, like the more difficult you are to dispense because real time, Thousands, billions of orders are being run in your system, or like mission critical biotech research is being run in your system. The more embedded you are, I think the …”

“I think Bending Spoons is, like, so well positioned with a public currency to pick all this shit up for cents on the dollar.”

“It's the same. It's the same investors. It's exactly the same cap tables.”

“That's why I think the death of SAS is a little bit overstated because why would you use tokens on a bunch of SAS stuff that you're not actually paying that much for per year relative to the outcome of those same tokens being invested against a core product or…”

“Nowadays there are tons of different AI tools, applications, platforms, but everyone is getting tired of certain software as a service model. you know, everyone demands results, you know, like end to end results basically.”

“Is that listen, you could buy this functionality exists in other products, or you could buy it for 50 grand or 80 grand a year today, right? But because it is a well-known body of software, Claude knows it. So Claude can just build it for you. Buy, don't build…”

“And the folks with the highest usage may actually have the most incentive to leave. It's not a clear correlation to success, right?”

“Forward deployed engineers are necessary or newly necessary for early stage AI companies because the workflows are new. Right? If you're building a SaaS company five years ago, most SaaS products are pretty well explored, right? Like you roughly know what the …”

“Basically, at one to three million, the founder is the growth engine. They're the ones who've built the growth, who've been doing it all. The problem is that in order to get to ten million, it needs to change. They need to be able to remove themselves from the…”

“The SAS Armageddon was overblown or that AI was immediately going to replace any engineers. It's me. It's just a tool in the hands of the, of someone who knows how to wield it.”

“Silicon Valley overestimates how fast that future will arrive.”

“I think the business of dashboarding and the business, the AI doesn't the damages doing the SAS is, I think, unreparable. You could ask your AI, build me a tool like Salesforce. 30 seconds later, you have a working tool.”

“Most of them, not all of them, but I would say the vast majority, 80, 90 plus percent of them, have never built a SaaS company.”

“So agents aren't going to kill SAS. They need SAS. They actually increase the demand for good APIs, whether it's CLIs, MCPs, however you want to look at it.”

“The future of SaaS is not fewer companies. It's a higher bar, and SaaS doesn't need to become something else to survive it. It doesn't turn into agents. It doesn't dissolve into everybody's weekend side project. It stays what it is. The future of SaaS, I belie…”

“And I do think that table stakes features are going to be commoditized faster than they ever have been, right? You can't coast on a feature list anymore.”

“During SaaS time, product market fit and the durable business almost are equivalent to each other. The hardest thing is find product market fit, and then once you find it just scales as fast as you can. Because CPU is a commodity. The infrastructure you build …”

“In the past, it requires tens of very strong product engineers and PMs to convert from idea to implementation to production scale. Multiple quarters of years of investment. That's a deep mode. And today, one person, a few weeks, can possibly launch their ideas…”

“The number one question that we're getting as investors is, you know, is software dead? Is SaaS dead?”

“And then there's about a third way you're absolutely threatened, where you are typically what we call plain vanilla SaaS. You automate a workflow, and then you either got to move and survive, or you're going to be dead, right?”

“There's a lot of categories where an AI, an LLM-enabled app is really good, and it's the next generation, and it's obvious what it should be, and customers are going to buy it. But it's not like going to scratch the corporate itch to use, you know, it's not go…”

“So the desire for founders to do free plans, to underprice their product, hey, nine bucks a month for something that should probably be a hundred bucks a month, and to try to do one-time purchases in the early days, I think is a crutch.”

“But I do think of one time, if you think about it, it's kind of like a free model. You just happen to get a payment up front, and then you have free users for the rest of your ever-loving life that you're supporting.”

“My rule of thumb is about 300 a month is the minimum for a one call close, and somewhere around, what is it, about It's about 800 a month. It's about 10 K ACV is my minimum for thinking about cold and warm outreach.”

“Typically, with consulting services built on a SaaS, I'm fine to break even If I'm charging enough on the monthly recurring. You know, if my annual contract value is 5000 dollars a year and up, and I have net negative churn because of the work I did up front, …”

“I think the SaaS-pocalypse is so dumb because Hey, yeah, I'm like vibe coding this inbox app, but 99% of the world is going to want to use something that's maintained by someone else. Yes, you can one shot everything, but the I think the hard rare thing is mov…”

“In this world, you're just a SaaS provider. You're just hosting software. So there's no token costs. And so your margins are back to being like regular, a regular software business instead of being an AI business, which I think is great.”

“This era of high gross margins being the norm is just going to go away. And what's going to make up for it, I think is lower gross margins, much thinner net margins and just much more scale.”

“That I would try to find people that are solution aware. They're gonna be so much easier to sell to, talk to, and convince that this is a thing. That it actually works. That it's viable.”

“SAS is not technology. It's a business model, how you sell stuff, right?”

“I actually think it's a more capital efficient model if you actually build your scale elsewhere and then use the momentum and get into the US.”

“Labor is a multi-trillion dollar market, right? So I think why people say agents is bigger than SaaS is because the total addressable market for agents is just way bigger. You know, it's human capital.”

“SaaS sells software. Agent SaaS sells work. A normal SaaS product says, here is a tool a team could use basically. But an agent SaaS product will say, here is a job your team no longer has to do by hand.”

“If people are already paying for the work, they're paying an employee, they're paying an agency, a receptionist, a coordinator, dispatcher, they, there's an opportunity to sell that service cheaper And then unload some of that work that that person is doing to…”

“I think agents are the new SaaS because software is moving from help me do the work to do the work with me.”

“The secret of SAS, per seat SAS particularly, is that 20% of those seats shouldn't be paying for anything because they're not even using the tool, right?”