AI

“No code is changing things at a grassroots level. [431] Rob Walling: It's changing things for a lot of people. [432] Rob Walling: AI is going to do that times a hundred.”

“It's completely the wrong approach to think that this is just NFTs and stick your head in the sand. Like that is fundamentally wrong. Like I'll take an argument with anybody who thinks that.”

“It's a model of, if I was running a SaaS app today, I would apply each of those four, generative, categorization, summarization, and predictive, to say where in the app would my users benefit from it doing one of those, or where do I ask them to do it today, t…”

“I feel like not every SaaS app itself needs or can use AI inside of it as a feature. But I do think every SaaS company or every SaaS founder could be using it internally pretty much.”

“I think a lot of people, not a lot of people, but some people are going to get out competed by this low hanging fruit. But the flip side is like you say, The low hanging fruit isn't in itself a moat.”

“Unless you build something novel that is non-obvious and relatively difficult to build, AI is not a differentiator. If all you're doing is engineering a prompt and you can build it in a weekend, even though it can do something totally cool, anyone else can do …”

“Augmenting our systems for discretion capital in terms of using AI to sort of understand the SaaS, specifically the B to B SaaS market worldwide. [266] Einar Volset: And that has allowed us to basically have a step change. [270] Einar Volset: We're basically g…”

“I think the AI generated stuff, it just isn't there yet, and so if you don't have That last 20% to get it, you know, again, it's eighty-twenty, right, where AI can maybe get you 80% of the way there, but if you don't have the last 20% yourself, I think it's a …”

“We have been to conferences this year, which are like similar to ours, where AI wasn't mentioned at all, right? It's just the typical is how we got to two hundred million stuff, right?”

“Globalization, on the one hand, especially now with AI, is actually very easy, and at the same time, not easy at all. Because you ultimately do need other people to support this additional language. Like, it'll just be you in the beginning, but then assuming t…”

“I don't believe AI is going to take a bunch of developer jobs. I think this is the rising tide that raises all the boats. Unless you're a real developer, and you don't, or you resist AI, or you don't want to use it becomes this tool of augmentation that I thin…”

“The obvious AI stuff, we're going to be through that this year. And we're going to start to get into novel and surprising integrations with a lot of the tools we use, or novel and surprising new apps that aren't just a thing that, again, is so obvious to build…”

“This is moving in the direction where AI can do so much more of technical implementation. I think it's only going to get more and more. That doesn't mean there's not going to be demand for software developers to know how to, like, use the AI tools to pull thin…”

“Customer service is more directly in the crosshairs of even current AI capability to some degree. Like obviously you can make the case for like, well, every job is going to be affected or whatever, you know, who knows? But I think this is one where it's like, …”

“I am predicting that the term AI will be used in fewer H-ones one year from now, because it will just be assumed that AI is built into everything.”

“I am running content programs on several sites right now, and I have told all my freelancers, if you use AI, if you copy and paste anything from AI into anything in your post, if I ever find it, We're done. You can use it for brainstorming. You can use it for …”

“AI is really good at giving you kind of like that core, like Middle of the bell curve answer. Right. And if they're giving you something, they're going to give the other thousand people in your space, something pretty similar. Cause that's what AI does. And so…”

“Think of AI as an accelerant. It gets you there faster. If you don't use it, you will be slower than your competition. It doesn't differentiate you because your competition can and will use it.”

“And I think part of that was because you can't put it in front of completely non-technical people yet because the AI is just not good enough.”

“Because I think everything in AI will be very good. And so the things that aren't that good right now are actually the best things to build in because everyone just assumes, oh, who's, is it a voice? Is it really going to replace a person? Yes, actually it is.…”

“Extreme optimism and paranoia. I think that, that is the appropriate stance for the CEO of this company, is we are gonna push so hard, we're gonna crush it, we're gonna get to ten million ARR in 18 months, and at the same time, at any minute, someone could rel…”

“And the reason MVPs in AI and SaaS are like very, very different things is because in AI, you don't build nearly as much as you do in SaaS. So if you want to build a CRM, you kind of can't launch an MVP. You know, if you want an email, for example, Look, you c…”

“Voice and AI is really, really powerful, and when something's really powerful, you're tempted to bring all that power to the user, and that's what creates onboarding friction.”

“Every venture investor is like, take more and go try to get this thing. And you know what? I don't think that's venture investors trying to be evil. They're actually right. They've seen pattern recognition that you're gonna need more capital. This is AI and yo…”

“So I don't think AI makes any of that any easier. AI makes building products easier, and it makes the type, it means the type of products we can build are more varied, and we can build maybe some new product types or categories, but building a product category…”

“But now because of AI, we're seeing even like smaller businesses, like twin employees building like really complex custom integration built in Missive with all the different tool in their stack.”

“Yep, like that a hundred percent exists and I built that and it works about 80% of the time. And so it's that 20% that is still, you know, the human in the loop or the human augmented or amplified experience with AI. That's where we are today. And that applies…”

“Like there was almost no AI at all to the whole production process.”

“No, like we still, I still need team communication software. I need a calendar. I need project management tools. I need an email client. I need a CRM. I need error monitoring. I'm not going to build any of this stuff myself just because I may have some specifi…”

“If your app is a single feature, the beauty of app being a single feature is you kind of development can be done. It can be done. These are great, like indie hacker lifestyle. Step one, step two businesses. You know, you don't have to constantly build an ad an…”

“And it's okay to use AI to code as long as a, like an engineer is supervising slash running that process, because we know That you can have AI build you something, and we know that in six, 1218 months it will become very, very hard to maintain. Feature velocit…”

“My sixth prediction is that at least one major no-code platform will struggle or go under as AI removes its core advantage.”

“People talk about AI like it's part of the problem to solve or that people want AI. False. AI is part of the solution space. How is it that I can deliver more of what they already wanted because of AI? AI has made something possible that was previously impossi…”

“There has to be, I think, and I think there's, I think most people now, if you look, talk to like leading edge research and stuff, sort of agree with this. They're like, look, there has to be another breakthrough to really start that, like, To get to the next …”

“It's probably the biggest technological change I've ever seen since I've been an entrepreneur.”

“I think AI is changing things, but not as much as most people are making it out.”

“And as I reflect on it, I'm like, I feel like these have always been the bootstrapper advantages. So in a sense, it's like, even though so much is changing in our industry, I think ultimately what allows us to succeed and set ourselves apart is kind of staying…”

“The durability of these so-called best practices is so short, like the prompting tools and guidelines and context management, like stuff, stuff that we were writing about six months ago, 12 months ago, 18 months ago is now completely wrong.”

“If you just send it off to do the artifacts for you, if you have it make a product that you don't understand how that product is or what it works, if you don't talk to the customers, but you have the machine talk to customers for you, it will not actually acce…”

“What they call in context learning is not learning. It's just token prediction does next token guessing. So what happens is it just, it inevitably convinces itself To do average work, because that's what's in the training data.”

“Product, like making decisions of what to build next, especially in early stage, I think AI's garbage at that, and I think it will be not good at it for a very long time”

“Every time I have it go through and do it, it's a really good enabler tool on the backend. I could talk about operationally being able to go do the research, compile the stuff to get it to a point where then you can see the nuance, the details of whatever it i…”

“AI is the average of the internet. It's the average of everything, and so if you're not a good copywriter, if you're a two out of 10, And you have AI write copy, it's gonna write a five out of 10, let's just say. And you're gonna be like, man, AI is so great. …”

“And that's the whole thing is like people are going to use the AI for is how can I spin up a hundred ads, each with micro differences between what the avatar is, or the hook, or the phrase, and it can really do effectively like that, and hopefully one of them …”

“Most of the like public SaaS companies are reporting, like, you know, they're coming like, we're not seeing any disruption whatsoever from AI, no additional churn, but in the public markets, the sky is falling.”

“If you're very bearish on SaaS companies, then you're sort of saying that, like, The companies that are the best in the world at deploying software are gonna be bad at deploying this particular kind of software”

“Like, the real SaaS-pocalypse is the big companies, the big incumbents. They're the ones who have raised their prices so much, maybe a little too much, Because they have to grow every quarter for Wall Street, right? So they have bloat, they have legacy, they h…”

“If you don't have clarity on your ICP, the use case that works for you, how your GTM is designed, You're going to be crushed by AI. The AI, like, punishes fuzzy positioning, rewards clarity, rewards like ROI, clear deliverable, and some founders don't have tha…”

“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”

“I've said on the show, I think it's 10 to 20% of SaaS apps are gonna, gonna eat it. Like, they're gonna have real trouble. And it's some specific Categories and things that AI can specifically just replace or people will build themselves or whatever.”

“To Kyle's question, the odds of it being regulated and you not being able to use it in your app, that's a risk tolerance thing, but to me that feels highly unlikely. I think if it's going to be, if it was going to be regulated to not be able to be used in B to…”