Ask HN: What's the Point of Your Startup? If AI can build anything. Why do you need a human in the loop? For ideation, for market testing, for go to market, for marketing content generation? Why have a startup incubator full of Stanford grads when you can just replace them with a data center and keep all the profit? More importantly, if that is the general temperature of the business space, it seems like acquiring resources is more important than innovating? |
I'm currently building a SaaS with my business partner. I'm the "tech guy" while he has decades of industry experience with the industry that our SaaS is targeting.
What I found building this is there is a giant subset of preferences, problems, and other minor details that aren't written down anywhere, they are just kept in the minds of the people in that industry.
The reason it's not written down is to those people, these things seem obvious. And these things are both extremely important but also very subtle.
We use AI heavily in designing our application but there's always a testing pass where my partner goes over some changes and calls out subtle things of how "things work in practice". These things aren't in any manuals, they are seldom even written down and thus AI systems are completely oblivious to these details.
Now you could build a system that skips some of these subtleties and still gets the job done but what you will find is potential customers will always return to their existing system that takes these into account.
Now one day we might get an AI system that detects these subtleties but in order to do that you would need a load of training data around those things. But how do you even get that training data if all of it is held inside the minds of the people working in that industry?
The competition I see is from two separate directions, 1) AI companies training on the prompts you send them 2) users building their own a la carte solutions.
I don't think it entirely erases Saas, but it does take a huge bite out of it. Building a Saas product seems somewhat trivial at this point.
The larger hurdle now looks like having startup capital (free time to completely fail, or money to pay multiple founders to do that.) That's the risk, and the reward is income generated over time.
There also don't seem to be tons of SaaS paradigms at scale that differentiate companies other than entrenchment. It's somewhat realistic to assume that a handful of companies are going to pop up that connect simple applications to SaaS backends, which lowers even more the amount of income you can generate from a SaaS and would open up the level of competition to folks who can vibe code.
The trap here is the word "seems". When I started building my SaaS years back I thought the problem space was trivial (even joked to my business partner that I could spin the whole thing up in a weekend).
But almost 5 years on it's anything but trivial. The issue isn't with the core features, the core features in our app have been running for years without issue. What is very much non-trivial are all those subtle tiny features around the main feature that enhance the experience.
My customers don't pay me for the primary feature, that they could reproduce in a weekend. They pay me for all the tiny sub-features that came out of all those minor things that I mentioned in my first comment.
Those tiny details are the reason that it's both very easy to say things like "SaaS is trivial" and why the entrenched players are still at the top.
It turns out there's a vast universe out there involving physical products, real estate, agriculture, plumbing, sanitation, health care...