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Comment by pavelai | Hacker News Reader

Well, the history of software development shows that everything is changing and don't lasts forever. Golden age of SaaSes now is going to fade (at least for current version and for some time, maybe a decade). Today junior developers can create a fully working SaaS with dozens of features without even knowing how it works. And they would spend a few weeks or evenings to develop it. We are about to see a flood of services and it will make all the business model obsolete. This is what is happening now at Github. You can see a lot of excellent projects which were written by AI, and no one wants to contribute to these projects, because they can do the same project on themselves

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Just because they can write it - which is doubtful - doesn’t mean any company of note is going to trust software written by a random junior developer with any of their proprietary information.

Creating software has always been easier for SaaS type software than understanding the business and sales.

Thank you. There's a lot of insights y'all are honing. Appreciate that.

Do you think small businesses, e.g. the bodega on the corner, the local barber or nail shop have those concerns?

And what do you think happens when a company that is already in that market or an adjacent one gets a whiff of some junior developers product? They just throw a few devs at it and use their existing sales organization and add it as a feature.

Don’t mistake a feature and a product - stolen and paraphrased from what Steve Jobs said about Dropbox. He was right, just premature.

I think of pricing and packaging as a separate lever than product. Yes, if a big brand copies a solution and the one-time pricing and packaging -- they will take some of that group away.

The issue is that many times the company would LOSE existing revenue and that's often a non-starter during planning.

If your one-time price is $49.99, and their existing monthly fee is $19.99 per month, they're not going to offer a $49.99 option. It would harm their core business too much.

Of course they will. They will make a lower tier product that doesn’t have things that larger companies need - most of the time they keep something like SSO federation into a premium tier.

We're having a discussion on belief at this point. I appreciate your perspective and think, in many cases, your prediction would be right. In others, it won't. There's no determinism to these things.

The point of the discussion for me (can't speak for you) was to ask if there's an opportunity, and I am not deterred to think there is.

Is it easy, no. But it's straight forward to approach from a product perspective.

There's strategies one may deploy to make it harder or more painful for a big company to copy because they'd have to swallow a large number of downsells into the new offering.

Maybe the insight from this thread, is that one must consider high-value low-product-effort features that, often, force upsells in the cloud solution that one could offer in an installable one.

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