Saying "SaaS is dead", is dead.
AI can make you 5X faster at coding. But you can't vibe-grow a business.
I’m constantly amazed at people’s willingness to believe nice-sounding things they want to hear.
Take SaaS, for example. A common grandiose claim I hear is:
“SaaS is dead. By 2030, it’ll be all AI agents. Business software won’t exist.”
Often followed by ‘and now buy my LLM/vibe coding tool’.
But here are two things to remember:
Every major technological revolution (industrial, telecom, internet, web 2.0, and now LLMs) has presented a net increase in work opportunities for humans
Almost invariably, the full impact of those technologies took MUCH LONGER to arrive than the first eager enthusiasts initially predicted
No doubt AI has already made things like coding and drafting emails dramatically faster than before. At Wildfront, our software engineering velocity is up by at least 5X. If not more!
But that isn’t really the point, because…
AI Cannot Vibe-Grow Your Business
The point is:
Simply building a functional workflow software was never the hardest part of building a SaaS business.
(In the same way that creating a website, menu of services, and pitch deck was never the hardest part of building an agency.)
Then Why Do People Say This Stuff?
There are roughly two types of people who are the most excited about the prospect of AI somehow making them a billionaire in a few years with the right prompts and agents:
Founders who have large audiences and a track record of building SaaS the old way, and therefore enjoy a massive distribution advantage over founders without that → They take for granted the highly-valuable skills they’ve already built
Aspiring founders who have never built a meaningfully-sized business, and dramatically underestimate how hard it is → They have no idea what they’re up against and are blissfully frolicking around in dreamland 🙃
This makes sense:
If building a business doesn’t seem hard to you — either because it’s second-nature to you, or because you are unaware of what it takes — then you are likely to assume that LLMs will have an easy time of helping you build one.
Our experience is that building a business (with real customers, revenue, and equity value) will continue to be a demanding task.
It has just become much less tedious to write both code and basic informational content.
What We’re Doing About It
Our product portfolio is about 2/3 “traditional SaaS products with AI features” and 1/3 “AI-forward/GenAI tools”.
Some founders are thinking, “Let’s build an AI tool and then figure out who to sell it to”.
But we’re thinking, “This is an interesting problem. Let’s build a solution. And we’ll build AI into it if that’s the best way to solve the problem.”
What This Means For You
Getting a SaaS or AI product off the ground is hard — especially if you’re building distribution. Marketing, community, social media, personal brand, content, referrals. (AKA, the real ‘hard game’ of growing a tech product.)
To meet this challenge:
We’ve opened up space in our private founder chat group for a few more founders, at any stage, who need help making key decisions and want support from a group of peers. (For the rest of 2025, it’s $45/mo or $345/yr.)
We’d love to hear what you’re building and grow MRR together alongside you.
Replies to this email go straight to Mac and Alex, so write us back if you have any thoughts or questions.