MicroConf Tactics: Stop Adding Lazy AI to Your SaaS

Rob Walling (0:07)

It's the MicroConf Podcast, I'm Rob Walling, and in this episode, I'm going to be talking about how you should stop adding lazy AI to your SaaS. This of course is audio from one of my most popular YouTube videos. You can check out my channel at youtube.com/atrobwalling.

This talk is my MicroConf Portland talk that I gave here just four or five months ago about how to think through the classifications of AI in a SaaS product and how to stop being lazy about it. And if you want to come to the next MicroConf, which is in Austin, Texas, next April of 2027, tickets are on sale, and the speaker lineup is already stacked. I have Nick Francis, founder of Help Scout, who was on this very show a few months ago, Romley John from Product Lead, Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine, and Anthony Pierri, who has given one of the best talks I've ever heard on positioning, is going to do a follow up to that talk. We're going to be at the Hotel Van Zandt right in downtown Austin, April 18th through the 20th, 2027 I hope you join me and about 275 of your closest founder friends. Tickets have been selling well. This event will for sure sell out. We've sold out the last seven events. microconf.com/us to grab your ticket and use promo code Rob50 for the best price. Ticket prices do go up soon, so don't wait. And with that, let's talk about how to stop adding lazy AI to your SaaS.

AI is everywhere. We're using it to run our companies. We're thinking about implementing it in our SaaS or maybe we are. But the question is, where does it belong? And that's the framework I'm going to talk about today in the latter half of the talk. Topics I'm covering today. I'm breaking my typical three act structure. I think every, perhaps every MicroConf talk I've ever given has three acts. And I just, is this two acts? We're going to talk, I'm going to talk about the five roles of AI in a SaaS company. So in the company itself, not the product. And then basically the last two thirds of the talk is all about adding AI as a feature and how I am thinking about this along with, you know, the other hundreds of TinySeed companies. And my hope is, is like any talk that I do, that gives you a framework for making better decisions. I am going to talk about AI and the roles of it in your SaaS company first. Because the biggest thing that I see with conversations around AI is we get confused. And we say, well, how are you using AI today? And it's like, well, I am using it in support and operations, and also I am implementing a feature. And those are two different things, right? So I am first talk about roles of AI in a SaaS company. And I am only going to spend, I don't even know, five, six minutes about that just to give you a framework for it. Potentially, someone should do a complete talk on that someday. Maybe me, maybe not.

So the five ways that I have seen SaaS founders using AI in the company is where AI is your entire product, right? The product doesn't exist without AI. Where AI is a feature, that's what most of the talk today is going to be talking about. So I am going to add AI retroactively. I already have a product, it already provides value, it already does stuff, but I want to add augmentation. It's where AI, using AI to build your product, which most of you are familiar with, AI for growth, sales and marketing, and internal operations. So those are the buckets I put stuff into. To give you examples of each of these, there's a couple different ways AI could be your product. The one I do not recommend bootstrappers do, and the other one bootstrappers are having good success with. So the idea of AI being your product is that it wasn't possible to build five or six years ago. Before AI, you just couldn't have built this product. In other words, if AI goes away, your product would go away.

One example of this, that bootstrappers, I don't know a single bootstrapper that's doing this, is where you're actually building LLMs, you're building models. We, TinySeed, backed someone building their own model about three or four years ago, it was before ChatGPT hit.

We were like, Anar and I were like, man, this is so cool, he has his own AI model. This is a mode. So we backed them and then all these models just steamrolled everybody doing that. You just can't outrun that. So this is a not recommended approach. The approach that I have seen folks do, and there's maybe a couple in this room, is where AI is such a core feature of your product that you couldn't have built it two years ago. So fiscal.ai is a TinySeed company, and they have a bunch of data about public equities, stocks and such, and the AI, they have a chat interface, they have analysis, they have all kinds of stuff that AI really makes it possible. Lead Truffle, many of you might know Brian from ex Twitter. I thought he might be here, but I don't think he's here this year. But Lead Truffle, you'll see example later, is a texting interface for home services company. So if you're lawn care and you're out literally mowing lawns and chopping stuff, you have an AI agent that is chatting with someone, I guess they don't call, but they text, right? And they're like, hey, can you come and give me a quote for my lawn? And Lead Truffle is the AI underneath that, and that just wouldn't have existed without LLMs. Rosie is Jordan Gahl's company, many of you know Jordan, similar to Lead Truffle, but more on the phone call side, also has texting. And then Pod Squeeze, this is where AI is, we feed it our MP3s for the podcast, and it transcribes the whole thing, does our show notes, and puts in the little, the timestamps and such. And Assemblia does this for city and state government. So having AI, again, building an LLM and doing underlying models is danger, danger. This model is fast, fast growth right now because there's so much opportunity in it. So that's where AI is your product. AI as a feature, which is the bulk of this talk, examples of this, probably obvious, but like Notion, Notion existed, Notion had a mode, we're all using Notion, some of us. And then it added AI writing assistant. Zoom added meeting summaries, just a feature. Loom added AI titles and chapters. If AI stopped existing tomorrow, these products would be fine because we were using them before AI. Podscan, which is Arvid calls, right? It does AI transcripts and filtering, and Figma, text and image generation. So that is a feature, or is your whole product, and as a feature. And then for building, well, there's, Claude Code, I think is the one that's not on this slide, but everything else, you guys know the AI for building. Yeah, I know.