12 things we learned about SaaS and AI in 2025
Software dev is changing insanely fast. Business is changing more slowly.
Product development velocity is through the roof.
AI coding tools progressed fast this year. Almost all of our code is written by Claude Code. (But this newsletter was not!) That means that for us and many others, product dev speed now dramatically outpaces marketing capacity. This creates new dynamics within SaaS teams.
Big companies still have trouble with vibe coding. There’s a huge gap between AI goals and actual AI efficiencies on the ground. QA has become even more necessary—or you’ll write a mess of buggy spaghetti code, often with some pretty huge security flaws.
If you were a good coder pre-AI? You’re 7X faster than before. If you weren’t and haven’t made an effort to understand software architecture, you’re better, but you’re still not competitive with coders who have unconscious competence with how great software is put together.
Vibe coders who didn’t have pre-existing computer science skill are hitting a ‘complexity wall’ at the ~80% complete mark. App dev agencies are telling us that business is booming from eager vibe coders who just can’t get an app/SaaS to the actual finish line.
Marketing is benefiting somewhat less from AI.
You can publish 20 blog posts in an hour with Claude Code, but that doesn’t mean they’re good. Even the most complex SEO AI tools, the ones that claim to factor in tons of data points and do the most competitor research, fail to outperform top human writers at producing content that ranks.
The most difficult parts of social media (audience building, trust, high-quality engagement, relationship building) are still impossible to outsource to AI. Raw post drafting and repurposing, however, have been made easier than ever.
Generating your core claims, points of view, case studies, and other aspects of your “thesis” as a company, are still not something AI can create for you—well, at least. Those you still have to input to the LLM. And they have to be compelling, or your AI content output will suck.
Even with a highly-refined tone of voice, content library, market thesis, and story library, creating content that sounds like a good human writer wrote it, remains devilishly difficult for 99% of AI writing systems. (Of course, if you were never good at generating revenue from social media, you might not notice how ineffective the output really is.)
The hardest part is still the actual business building.
Thankfully, fewer back-office positions are needed than ever to grow a SaaS company. That is a welcome development. But growing tech co’s are still hiring great people. Recruiting has not become easier in 2025. If anything, it has become more confusing.
The actual building a business part remains the most difficult of all. That is to say: getting customers, and onboarding and renewing them, building industry relationships, managing finances, negotiating contracts, staying compliant, and having the strategic vision to create a through-line that ties it all together. Sure, you can prompt an LLM to write something that “sounds like good strategy”—but you’ll only get good business output from an AI if you give it excellent inputs and refine it daily. ChatGPT still can’t grow your business for you.
Founder loneliness and isolation are getting worse, not better. Social media is full of young SaaS bros building apps from Bali, lying about their MRR, and trying to manipulate the internet into trusting them. This was never an effective strategy. But enough people observing the liars and thinking, “why is my product not growing nearly as fast as some others that I see?” and that’s creating FOMO. This is a distraction. It would be a distraction even if every social media claim was true (but again many people outright lie on social media). Don’t give in.
Our needs for authenticity, truth, community, and peer review, are at an all-time high. Free founder communities on Discord, public Slack groups, and Twitter are becoming slop-filled wastelands. Private communities with some form of barrier to entry (like this one) are far better.
Also…
Really enjoy your holiday season.
You don’t need to hack on Christmas Day just because a bunch of “grindset” accounts told you it was a good idea.
You owe yourself periods of true and complete rest.
And, let me add…
Thank you for making 2025 possible.
We are so thankful for your readership this year. To all who joined us via The SaaS Bootstrapper, from Substack, from LinkedIn, from Reddit, from the coffee meetings we’ve had with you individually: you make our dreams reality.
You’ve bought our products, sold your companies to us, engaged with our writing, and much more.
Truly, both Mac and I “tap dance to work” every single day, and we couldn’t be happier to be doing this with you all.
Thank you, and very Happy Holidays to you and yours ❤️
-Alex & Mac
Would love to hear your thoughts.