Episode 842 | What is the Future of SaaS in an AI World? (Rob Solo)

**Rob Walling** (0:00)
It's another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host Rob Walling, and in this episode, I talk about the future of SaaS in an AI world. And this topic has been floating around the Internet as people are talking about SaaS being dead, or asking if SaaS is going to exist in five years. And I've actually received multiple listener questions, and I'll read one of those in a second that's asking this exact question. Before we dive in, I have a couple quick MicroConf announcements. First, Early Bird Tickets for our next MicroConf are officially on sale. We're heading to Austin, Texas, April 18th through the 20th of 2027, for three days of world-class talks, meaningful conversations with other founders, and some great excursions around the city. If you're thinking about joining us, now's the time to grab your ticket. Early Bird is the lowest price ticket tier we'll offer, and the prices will only go up as we get closer to the event. Plus, producer Sonja gave me the promo code ROB50, that's Rob Five Zero, which gives listeners of this podcast an additional discount at checkout. MicroConf events consistently sell out, and I expect Austin to be no different. Head to microconf.com/us and reserve your spot. Also, I want to let you know that if you're a MicroConf Connect member, we're going live next week with Harris Kenny, who you may remember from Tiny Seed Tales Season 5
Tracy Osborne is sitting down with Harris for a fireside chat, and they're going to talk about mindset and bias toward action, what that actually looks like day to day, how to know when to push through versus change course, and the small habits that can pull you out of a funk. It's the kind of conversation that you will not find anywhere else. And if you're not a member, we'd love to have you. It's at microconfconnect.com.
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Let's dive in to the future of SaaS in an AI world. This question was a simple reply to my Rob Walling email. So if you go to robwalling.com/emails, you can sign up to receive a weekly email from me. And a reader responded and said, what's the future of SaaS companies now that AI makes it easier than ever to build and copy a product? And this, as I said at the top, is a variation of questions I'm seeing all over the internet. And I have received other versions of this on this show. And so I really wanted to sit down today and try to give as much of a definitive answer as I can to this question. So what is the future of SaaS now that AI makes it easy to build and copy SaaS products? I'm going to start by giving a short answer in four words. The future of SaaS is SaaS. And now I want to show you why.
But before I do that, one rule for how to listen to anyone on this topic, including me, is to be very careful with anyone who tells you something is dead because we have heard this song before.
In 2000, after the.com crash, the media told us the Internet was done. Over. Nothing left to build. They said this on the Internet. I don't know if you weren't alive then or weren't paying attention. It was so pervasive and just a given that the Internet was never going to be worth anything. And then mobile and iOS were going to kill the web in, I don't remember, 08, 9 The web, it was going away. That didn't happen. Then blockchain and Web3 were going to kill everything. I lost track of exactly what it was going to kill, but it didn't happen. Maybe the web. I don't even remember. No code was going to kill software development. Everyone's going to build their own apps. Nobody needs engineers. It didn't happen. There are other examples. And now AI, the new technology is going to kill SaaS. So it's the same song. It's a new verse. Here's the thing I see about people saying it. 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. And actually, I wouldn't be surprised if 95% of them have never built any company. Saying X is dead is a way to get free clicks. It's a way to get eyeballs for declaring something outlandish. And nobody comes back to check if you were right or wrong. So, just be very careful. If you hear this message every day from some new chuckle f**k on the internet, there's still a chuckle f**k. Just because a lot of people are saying it doesn't mean that they're right. Calibrate accordingly. It's social media. Pick who you're going to listen to. Usually, things are not dying or dead. But to be fair, there's a real version of this argument. And I break it down into four separate claims that I'm going to talk through individually. The first one is that everyone is going to self-host their own custom app that they either vibe code or build with AI. The idea here is that in addition to, let's say you're a SaaS company and you pay for SaaS subscriptions, that you're going to vibe code or code all of those apps, custom host them. And maybe that the dentist down the street is also going to build their own practice management software and self-host it. So that's kind of argument number one. Point number two is that any app can be replicated in a day, I've heard people say, in a week, in a month, in some short time frame, so that there's no moat and that copying an app is free. The third claim is that agents are going to replace everything, that they're going to do all the work and so we won't need SaaS apps anymore. And the fourth claim is that AI is going to mean infinite competition, that everyone can build an app now, so there's going to be 10,000 different email service providers and 5,000 different CRMs because everyone can vibe code one and that you're actually going to have infinity competition so that you can't possibly complete. And I'm going to take all four of those in order and talk through them and talk through why I don't believe any of them is the death of SaaS and even why all combined they are not going to kill SaaS.