Ep. 160 - AI Is Rewriting the SaaS Playbook—Are You Ready?

Guests: Ken Lempit, James Ollerenshaw, & Rob Curtis

AI is transforming SaaS—but not in the way most leaders think.

Forget the headlines claiming "SaaS is dead." The real shift isn't just in tools—it's in how fast software is built, marketed, and bought.

In this episode, Rob Curtis (VC-backed founder), Ken Lempit (SaaS GTM strategist), and James Ollerenshaw (AI advisor) break down what AI means for the future of SaaS—and why B2B CROs and CMOs need to rethink their strategy now or risk falling behind.

From the death of mid-market software to the rise of agentic AI, they map out how SaaS leaders can adapt, differentiate, and thrive in this new reality.

Key Takeaways:

• Agentic AI is here: Build for agents, not just users.
• The middle is collapsing: Niche depth and data win.
• Ideas now beat execution: Speed favors bold builders.
• Risk fuels innovation: GTM teams lead AI adoption.
• Data is your moat: Structured models drive defensibility.

Ken, Rob, and James offer B2B SaaS leaders a high-level yet practical view of what’s next—and what it’ll take to win in an AI-native world. If you’re a CRO or CMO thinking about survival and scale in 2025, this episode is your blueprint.

Plus, don’t miss:

👉 Rob Curtis’s AI Venture Studio – StandUp Hiro, where he’s building AI-native tools at lightning speed

👉 Rob’s Substack – Future Work, where he shares front-line insights on building in the agentic age

👉 This Crunchbase article on why VCs are betting on Human x AI teams over foundational models

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Transcript

Ken: Welcome to a special edition of the SaaS backwards podcast, where we explore how SaaS go to market and leadership teams are driving revenue and profitability in their businesses. In this episode, we're kicking off a special series. On the impact of artificial intelligence on the SaaS industry.

What our elite panelists, including yours truly, think it means and will mean for sellers and buyers of enterprise and departmental software solutions.

We'll be looking beyond. Go to market strategies to the very foundation of the SaaS business model and working backwards from some of our observations and prognostications what the products, business models and impacts will be of the agentic AI and the rise of development tools that make almost anyone a systems builder.

If this really is the end of Saas as we know it. Creates an existential issue for many of our clients and ourselves as a firm. And now let's, get the panelists to introduce themselves and I'll start. I've worked with SaaS founders and leadership teams for more than 30 years, helping to craft and support their market strategies.

Prior to that, I myself was a software engineer and a software and data sales executive for Citi and IBM. And, I'd like to also have, James Ollerenshaw introduce himself at this time.

James: at the moment I'm taking a bit of a break from my career in tech marketing, but I've been working in AI businesses for, for more than a decade inside those businesses, and for them, and I've seen how this hype cycle moves, for AI based vendors and. Have gained a pretty good understanding of the biodynamics in this market, and especially amongst the enterprise buyers.

You know, tech's always going through some kind of changes, the real rollercoaster industry. but having had some time to take in what's really happening now, I think the extent of the change which is coming, it's really gonna be far greater than we've experienced before. 

Rob: I'm Rob Curtis. I'm a VC back to founder who's raised over $25 million from leading investors to build FinTech products in the US. Prior to that, I helped many organizations implement SaaS through their digital transformation programs. And today I run a venture studio building AI native apps designed to help companies do more with less, with a particular focus on marketing agencies and SaaS companies.

I also write about AI on my substack, which we'll share in the show notes. And today I'm happy to be the guest host. so Ken James, it's great to have you on the call. What I think is really interesting is, that, we're each gonna bring a very unique perspective to what's a really big shift. And I say a perspective because this is a complex shift and it's really hard to predict.

And I think that's a lot of what today's episode is going to be about, is about how can we develop frameworks, ideas, understand parables, analogies that help us to predict forward, and in particular, to empower SaaS leaders like CEOs and CROs with frameworks that they can use to take decisive action. And for those of us that are entrepreneurs, how can we take advantage of what could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to take the share of the spoils that are gonna come as we see major disruptions in a $1.7 trillion industry?

And I want to kind of start there because a lot of the thought leadership that we see out in the market now is one size fits all. AI is the death of SaaS. Agents are coming to take everything. And in fact, I think that's a good place to start, but Ken, you're a really good person at helping us to see what sits below that and kind of understand who's actually going to be affected.

And so I wanna start, with a quote we heard about, the hollowing out of the SaaS industries. and in particular, I'm curious from you, do you agree that there's going to be a hollowing out? And if so, who do you think the winners and losers are gonna be?

Ken: I definitely think, and, and thanks for the question. I definitely think there's gonna be, a real shaking of the snow globe, as it were. I like to try and understand things in terms of overall trends in the market, and to me there's gonna be, at the high end, not a lot of change in the core business.

So the SAPs, the Oracles, the really large enterprise systems, these guys, they're gonna have a go of it for a while without a lot of change at the core. But there's gonna be this thinning out of the middle where these, departmental or point solutions are kind of weak. You know, they're, they're ripe for challenge and so I think that's going to either move up market or down market, and the challengers are gonna be creating software I.

To do much of what was done before by mid-price software, or they're gonna be taking whole new ways of approaching a problem to solve it more efficiently, effectively, and probably elegantly as well.

Rob: Do you think any of the big players think like the sales forces, the SAPs, the workdays, some people that have a really established. Presence in many corporate estates, do you think they're gonna be as affected as say some of the, I dunno, the tools we might use every day that help us to schedule social media or that help us make decisions?

How do you think some of the bigger plays will be impacted?

Ken: So I think, you know, the big are gonna stay big. I think it's really tough. If you look at like we're, we're a HubSpot partner, as an example, pretty dominant player. They're not quite as big as Salesforce, but they're a pretty big player. But there's four or five also rans underneath HubSpot in the marketplace.

And I think these companies are struggling already with relevance, and I think that's gonna become even more true as either HubSpot or Salesforce create more powerful. AI augmented solutions, the copilot thing, or in fact reinvent themselves as more AI native. so I think the, the hollowing out will be probably the secondary and tertiary players in a lot of these vertical spaces and the growth, if you will, the,

sort of the after rain, kind of new shoots. You know, the new green shoots are gonna be in the beginning, just like a thing like HubSpot was more single purpose. They're gonna have a single idea that they're founded upon and they're gonna grow to become more and more important. So carve a little bit of the problem up with an AI native solution.

Rob: Gain some traction, keep building. So I think that's, that's kind of how I see it. 

I build micro tools. So I'm at the other end of the market, which is create margin pressure, move exceptionally fast. And I often worry about the folks in the middle who perhaps don't have, you know, maybe they move medium and break things, but they're certainly not moving fast and breaking things anymore, and wondering how they're going to retain their business model and their subscribers, if they aren't either moving to the top or the bottom of that market.

Rob: So, I'm really curious, James, what do you see going on in this space?

James: I think you know. To what extent do people who are buying software to what extent do they want those things broken? I mentioned I've worked in, AI businesses and four air businesses for a decade, and this is an industry which is really driven by hype. it's really important is that's what drives the investment that we see, we've seen, that's created all these SaaS businesses that we're now worried are challenged.

and so, you know, that that hype is going on again. I think it's reasons to believe in it. The, the scale of the, of the impact of the technology development which is happening is, is really like nothing I've seen before, but I think some things remain the same, and that is that technology buyers, especially enterprises, are always cautious about replacing established systems that, that aren't thoroughly broken.

So whenever you are selling something, you've gotta overcome the status quo that they already have. So that, that's, that remains a barrier. they're not gonna be willing to throw away something that they've got if there isn't really compelling reasons to do so. And so, I think, you know, obviously the big players, Ken, you mentioned the big players are, you know, obviously well embedded.

I think the people are checking out SAP tomorrow, but even some of those mid-size players probably have some time, to adapt and before guys like you, Rob, come along with all your, much more, you know, your smaller, more effective and better priced, apps and start to eat their lunch.

Rob: Yeah, that's really interesting, isn't it? And I think the corporate buyer, they've always been slow, everyone, you know, raising money with VCs, they're like, how are you gonna last long enough to get through a buying cycle? But I think, you know, there's, there are tools for different parts of, of an enterprise and there are also different.

Kind of companies that don't act it in the way of enterprises. And so James, I'm interested to hear from you where the disruption is going to be. I hear very clearly not going to be as fast for certain types of maybe regulated products, big products, but where do you see the, the real existential threat being?

Is it like the marketing department? Is it small to medium enterprise buyers? What do you think?

James: I have a kinda prediction really, which I, I think is that the companies that, that survive those sort of midsize, you know a lot of SaaS, companies, live in the midsize, there's the big, big players. There's lots of smaller players, you know, that already existed. I think that's gonna happen a lot faster.

So what happens if you're in the middle? What keeps you relevant? And I think it's, the ones that can really continue to be investible there and grow and become significant players are those that have deep industry knowledge they know the industry that they're serving inside out.

They're probably from it. And they understand all of its nuances and complexities and can use AI to solve existing problems for that industry and do things cheaper, better, faster. You know, there's a lot of automation, that's where AI tends to begin is like, let's automate a familiar process. Then once you've got that kind of tool up and running and you are gathering data and it's honed for that industry, your whole database is set up to serve the kind of questions and problems that industry has, then you've probably got a ways of being kinda quite embedded that give you some protection.

So I think there is a middle ground that can exist,and it's that specialization is gonna become absolutely critical.

Rob: Ken, what do you think?

Ken: I think James. Flew at a hundred miles an hour over one of the key things here, which is having a really great data model. I think if your, if your software solution is comprehensive enough, you've got a data model to support a real business and that itself can be a really powerful well to draw from, to make a transition from a traditional SaaS, like a cloud-based SaaS to an AI native set of applications.

And we've actually seen James in our own client work we've seen together where it's possible the data's more important than the application, right? The ability to communicate cross industry through a centralized data repository and agreed data model could actually be the thing that gives you longevity and some defense against, you know, the death of your software business.

So, I, I think that's where. Where there's a big opportunity and, and I think even a mid-size firm with a sophisticated data model can kind of build that, dare I say, moat around itself. I think, you know, it's the moats are being filled in

 But the data is, you know, the data is special, right? The data is irreplaceable.

The business function maybe not as much. So that's, that's what I took away from what James said.

James: You know, I've got something to say on that, the reason why that is special is the question of reliability and so, we're all been having a lot of fun over the last past couple of years with all these generative AI tools and we're all blown away by their capabilities.

And every week there's, you know, that that just keeps in increasing and it's gonna keep happening. But those aren't enterprise ready products a lot of the time that's individual users, using those tools for themselves doing some amazing things. But if you are, you know, wanting tools that are, you know, for running your business, that reliability, is absolutely critical and that's where that specialization, I think really has, has an impact because you can be

more confident that the, the database and how those applications are being built is aligned to the business need, and so the outcomes, you know, generative outcomes are not gonna be filled with plausible hallucinations that end up helping you make bad decisions when it's all there to help you make good ones.

Rob: I'd like to offer a bit of a counterpoint to that, which is that I agree there are some systems that need to be highly deterministic. I wouldn't make decisions off of something that had potential for hallucination. But there are a lot of parts of running a company that do not require deterministic solutions.

And what we're seeing from the interviews I've done on my podcast and some of the thought leadership that's going on at the moment is actually the Pareto principle will apply a lot for some of the work we've been doing, which is 80% is good enough, in exchange for significantly reduced cost or significantly increased scale.

So if I give you an example, let's say we're talking about marketing personalization. I wanna send an email to every one of my customers and I want to use an LLM to generate content that is specific to them. I can take a risk that one in 10 of those is going to be a bit janky because in exchange one, that's gonna probably feel better for my clients.

But in theory, that should lead to much higher conversion rates and, and I suspect that we will see across society. a softening of what good enough looks like, in exchange for, significant increases in scale or a decreasing cost. Because actually, you know what, most of the things that I do at work, I don't need it to be 100% perfect.

I need it to be good enough to move forward. And I think in a world that's changing so fast, I think that we'll start to make some real trade offs in terms of accuracy versus speed.

James: I think we're both right, right and wrong. And I think that's the interesting thing about this is so I, I agree with what you just said, and that depends on the buyer and the application. You and I, all of us have worked,for clients in highly regulated industries. In those situations, we can't afford for

10% of something not to work, or even 1%. So it, I think this is like how this plays out for, you know, SaaS is a very broad area. It's serving all the industries under the sun. So what their needs are are not the same. And so I think this is, this is gonna be the, if you are, if you're a SaaS business. Who's your customer? You know, what are the things that matter to them? I think these are the questions. As I said, I said that, what remains the same is always as interesting to me as what changes. So, looking at those things in the round, is really important as you evaluate your business through this change.

Ken: Yeah, I mean, I think the people on the factory floor at Boeing are probably not gonna even be happy with 1% wrong. Right? So that means these large scale incumbent systems relatively impervious to to change, right? I mean, it's really hard to push them off regardless of what the alternative is, but where

organizations see a competitive advantage accruing from being first mover, they're gonna take more risk, right? So the risk absorption, right? The appetite for risk is greater. Like for example, in places like sales, right? People are pretty willing to take risks in sales because, hey, it's only a phone call, right?

It's only an email. it's only calling the wrong person. Whoops. Sorry Mary. You know, I didn't realize, you know, this wouldn't be of interest. Whereas, you know, Boeing definitely wants the doors to say on its aircraft. So I'd say our risk profiles are gonna have some bearing on how innovative we can be and how much risk we can take and the partners we can bring into our organizations.

 The idea that you're bringing to market, Rob these, kind of purpose, single purpose or small applications to start, you know, is a great way to get the beachhead. And I, and I think that's the way it's always been. That's not an AI thing. You know, people have brought minimum viable products out before there was AI at all.

So we're doing the same thing, but we're using different capabilities and maybe they're more impactful, more money saving, more capable, even as small green shoots, you know, young, software apps. so I think, James, to your point, a lot of things remain the same. You know, the willingness to take risk has always been more in the

sales, marketing and maybe customer service space less in the manufacturing, transportation, spaces where failure is not an option, right? We're not gonna go to unknown players if imprecise is acceptable for the game. If the waste is acceptable in the context of great gains to be made, people are gonna go with new solutions if they see a promise.

And, and I think that's kind of exciting. I mean, that's what kind of makes us an exciting time to be a software entrepreneur instead of needing 30 people to build my MVP. You know, I can do it with maybe one or two other people.

Rob: Might be worthwhile kind of elaborating a little bit on what, what we're seeing as, as new builders, which is, you know, we are seeing that while we are not there yet, development costs and software engineering costs are dramatically decreasing. Are we at the place of not needing software engineers?

No, we're not. Do I think that time will come? Yes, I in some form, in some areas. And I think the time is it's good to start now because while I'm pulling my finger out, probably something will innovate within the next week or two that might abolish an uncertainty that I had last week. So I think actually first movers in this space are going to

suddenly enter the market and offer a load of competition with existing SaaS providers. And I think that's going to, you know, for those of them that cannot have a really strong moat or have clients that are more open to curiosity, innovation, they're gonna suddenly have a whole bunch of new competitors nipping at their heels. And build really fast. And so we've taken this as a kind of macro theme and we've built it into the thesis of the business, which is, let's take these as a series of features, not bugs. Let's assume that software becomes really commoditized. It's available to just about everybody. Not everybody should be a software engineer, but many can.

And why don't we take more of a VC type approach to building software? Because you know, the old days of validate manually and get it right before you build, were designed to make us minimize the cost of wasted engineering effort. But when the cost of engineering is negligible, actually the speed of validation, needs to be just as fast.

And I think, James, your point about having deeper expertise actually is one of our core hypotheses, which is one of the superpowers of the builders of the future will be kind of product and market instinct of knowing where to build. Because we see a world in which. There are plenty of SaaS companies out there.

Their clients are paying too much money or they're no longer seeing the value, and that all of those are validated market problems for which we could produce software at 10% of the cost. And so we are just leaning into this model, assuming that maybe one in 10 or one in 20 will take off, but at the rate of producing one application every two weeks.

Maybe the slow side. That means that within six months time, I could have produced 13 to 27 new apps, and surely one of them will take off and have a business model associated with it. And so like if I'm a SaaS partner out there right now, or a SaaS leader, I'd be worried about companies like mine coming along and eating your lunch.

Ken: I think there is a real risk to the incumbents and I think there's also an opportunity to co-create and, so I, I think there's gonna be not just entrepreneurs like yourself, but I think the clients are building their own stuff. And, I wonder if collaborative development and partnering with firms like your own, or with clients who are building add-ons to these softwares.

'cause they all have APIs. We haven't seen that yet as a big thing. There are partner ecosystems, but they tend not to be revenue share nor planning together orientations, right? They don't, they don't talk together. You know, I've got a thing that plugs into your thing and you're okay with me selling it.

That's just sorta makes my platform more widely applicable. But maybe there's a kind of a shared development, shared benefit, that would appeal, especially on the enterprise side because we want these softwares to be predictable. Auditable, you know, if they're AI that you know, they can be governed, right?

Because when we get big, when companies get big, they start caring about governance. so I, I just think it's a really interesting time and certainly there's a threat, but there's also an opportunity and, and I think we should always try and highlight those. 'cause I think there are new business models.

Like, imagine the broker of those relationships. You know, somebody who's, who's a matchmaker between people like you and, you know, companies like yours and, you know, enterprise and mid-scale software companies could also be an interesting area of endeavor.

Rob: I think it gets to like what would make a startup successful in the new world? So perhaps before it was validate an idea really thoroughly. Make sure you hyper define an MVP that somebody wants. Maybe your first mover advantage is really great. And then technical execution is, the way to win today and the thesis we're operating on is that having a good marketing and product instinct, IE you know what people need and you have a sense of what they would buy, means that the ability to generate ideas, valuable ideas faster, becomes an accelerator.

And the speed of execution, how great your go-to-market cadence becomes. And indeed how you could build go to market tools that take these apps that may have, you know, if one in 10, one in 20 works and maybe it has a life cycle of one to two years before this particular space is flooded with copycats, then you go to market and your innovation become almost your core competitive advantages.

And I often think about the old corporate buyer who you wanted their, you wanted their thought leadership. You wanted their knowledge of process, they'd work with the startup, the startup was always a little bit too innovative and always a little bit too fast. So now we're almost at this third stage where everything is happening so quickly.

And like James, you're right, there are gonna be corporate buyers that are very slow. And yet at the same time, at the top of the corporate buyer group are CEOs and CFOs who want real savings, headcount reductions, improved accuracy, higher scale, more revenue. And there are operational staff who are running compliance organizations.

And you then you've got the builders who are just building incredibly fast. And so we're starting to see this real disconnect between all of the stakeholders in this ecosystem where we're all looking at this a little differently. And so for those out there that are one of the players in this ecosystem, none of us is entirely, has the whole jigsaw.

So I'm curious like. How do you keep up with the rate of change and all of the news that comes out there so that you can take on stuff that is digestible and actionable rather than get caught up in the, maybe the latest model news or what's going on geopolitically with deep seek, that kind of thing.

Ken, we'll start with you.

Ken: Well, it pays to be curious today, that's for sure. I think you need to be willing to read. You need to be willing to get on the webinars that you've maybe grown tired of since the pandemic put us all on Zoom. Here we are. there's a lot of great insight being developed by analyst firms. Some of them are the newer breed of analyst firms, like CB Insights as an example.

consulting companies are putting out some great insight at the enterprise level. It's time for us in the software business, whether we're building or selling or marketing, to be able to reinvent ourselves. And that's an education and a try and be good at it process.

You know, you, you can only read so much, right? Like you can't read about riding a bicycle, can't read about learning how to ski, you gotta get on the skis. And I think the same is true for this new era in software building and usage, you have to kind of get on the bike and try and ride it. So gotta build some things Rob.

And I think we as marketers have to learn how to market differently and sellers are gonna have to learn how to sell differently there. There's gonna be a lot of roadkill for the people that don't, build their skill sets. That's one of my thoughts here. I've seen AI automation in sales that's very good and some that's very bad.

Let's leave the bad aside. The really good are ferreting out, let's say, of a ideal customer profile or total addressable market of let's say, 3000 companies, more than you can prospect in depth as an individual. And the, the software is doing such great work at uncovering which companies among your ICP are really in market and the sales teams that are aided by that kind of technology game changing insight, real insight building, real intent building.

They're gonna outsell their competition. So as a sales leader, I've gotta really educate myself, take all those vendor calls, get on those webinars that I really don't want to attend. I've gotta learn, I've gotta become an expert, in this dramatically changing space and I think that's true for the people that have been building software for 10, 20 or 30 years.

If you want to be relevant, you're gonna have to sharpen the saw just a little, if not a lot.

Rob: And James. You were one of the catalysts for doing this podcast series as a way of kind of learning in public and, and learning through, through discussion. Like, how do you stay up to date and , what made you bring this as an idea to the table?

James: It's such a huge topic. It's such the scale of change. It, it is so expansive. I mean, we are talking about it in terms of SaaS, of course, you know, but you read the news each day and it's like, what's this gonna mean for like, you know. Society, you know, the future of humanity. It's, it's that big.

So it's, it's, I think it's kind of impossible to keep up with, you know? And I think that's why Ken, your point is right, like, like you've gotta, you've gotta ride the bike, to, and you've gotta experience it. And so this is like, you know, what we are doing today, having these conversations is us starting to test that out.

You starting to have a go at building some of these,AI based apps. Using ai, tools to do that is part of, of gaining that experience. I think that's the, that's really the only way to approach that. Rob, there was something you mentioned before around, kinda software developers, CEOs, people in operations having different ideas about, about the future.

and I think that's true. and so. How all that kind of comes together that's gonna be interesting. Ken you shared a piece of news this morning from Crunchbase, which I thought provided an interesting validation for what you were saying Rob, which was, there's funding now going into more of this factory approach, to building software and I think whilst there's, you can build, you know, a hundred little apps and some of them will, will float, most will sink.

Those that that float are still gonna need some financial backing for them to then really start to become, really scalable products with, you know, the things that enterprise or any business buyer needs, customer support and, continual, software development. We should share that Crunchbase article in our show notes.

It was a really interesting thing. I think the basic idea there was the VCs are looking for folks that are kind of ahead of the pack. They're not looking for a technology moat. They're sort of looking for like, how much ground have you staked out? have you accelerated ahead of what's gonna be some fast followers.

Ken: and they're, they're looking for teams and executive leadership that are aligned with that new definition of what's investible. And, and I think that's, that's a really fundamental change. if you go back just a couple of years, it was what's your mode? You know, what's your technological advantage, you know what makes you special.

And now they're saying, you know, just how much of a head start do you have? It's a very different kind of question, and I think leads back to the kind of iterative development route that you're building the business to be able to do.

Rob: Yeah. You know, actually I think being a former consumer founder is really valuable right now. Because the pace of releasing features for consumers to keep your mind share top knowing that churn is so easy is actually a really, really fast pace. And, you know, I, I think about how I stay up to date. I could spend a day reading about vibe coding, or I could spend 15 minutes in, in rep lit and have a front page for an idea that I had

 done for me. And it's almost like magic, you know, this idea of, you know, science and magic becoming indistinguishable depending on how advanced it is. I think until I was hands-on, I could not understand the power of some of the tools that are coming. And are they perfect? Absolutely not. But I'm a person with a natural orientation towards action.

And I think when I look at how you can build successfully in this space, you need a little bit of crystal ball gazing. You know, there's a bit of a faster horse kind of idea here, and that people don't entirely know what they don't need yet because it is happening so fast. And so I think to some extent, just rolling your sleeves up, helps you to try and figure things out and having a really, really high appetite, for bad bets. And then refining your judgment about making the right bets. And so if I give you an example, like one of my bug bets for many years has been status report meetings are really boring.

Nobody pays any attention, and they take 15 to 30 minutes of your day every single day. Now, Agile did not increase the rate at which projects succeed they just put more ceremonies in. And so taking that as a problem. With my team, by the time this podcast is out, we will have fully created an AI agent that runs your standups. 

It invites you to a meeting if there is a problem and only if there is a problem. And if there is not, it does your status update for you. And all of that is based on a two minute phone call using voice. Now that would've been a three month validation exercise before a long technical build. Lots of user testing and off we go.

Rob: But with the tools that are available to now, I could take that from concept to reality within two weeks, including a go to market. So technical risk and technical ability is no, you know, this idea of ideas are cheap and execution is everything I think is inverting, in that ideas are everything and execution is cheap.

 But it does mean that anybody out there that's an ideas person like myself with perhaps few, an engineering mindset is helpful, but not necessarily the ability to code. Every one of us is empowered to go and bring these things to life now, and so I think this is such a massive and significant shift to all types of software developers.

and I think it's really one of the reasons Detras of, of pulling this podcast series together is so that we can kind of pick up what's going on each week, understand, what this means for us, and then try and actually get hands on with some of these tools. So it goes beyond reading articles and maybe hearing firsthand from people that are either adjusting their business models or are building on the ground. 

And so Ken, I might hand this over to you as we kind of wrap up today's podcast. 

Ken: I appreciate it and I think we had a great first episode in the series. and here what I think we want to do is, have each of us, make a prediction and give us one unanswered question that you'd like us together to delve deeper on. James, why don't you start us off.

James: I kind of gave my prediction earlier is that, that those SaaS kind of companies in the middle ground that'll survive are the ones that are, you know, have that this deep, deep industry knowledge. So I'm interested about the, the kind of, the, the questions we have. We've kind of done the lay of the land today.

We've, we've raised, a lot of topics, a lot of questions, and so I'd be interested to know what do we want to kind of like deep dive into in some, some future episodes, and explore a bit further. I'd be really interested to know what our, our listeners, think about that. what, what, what do they care about. 

So if you've got something you'd like us to, to talk about next, please let us know. And then, you know, Rob, as you were suggesting. I think we all want to experience doing this somewhat in public, and we wanna share that with you.

Ken: Awesome. Hey Rob, why don't you, offer a prognostication and your unanswered question?

Rob: So I'm gonna go back to the kind of core business of running a SaaS company and, agents are coming. I believe that the ability for a company to be discovered by LLMs, to be usable by an agent permissioning user tokens, all of these kinds of things, and it for your product to be able to be well used by an agent such that, users can deliver the outcomes that you want delivered, but through a different user interface. I think these are going to be some really stellar shifts for the industry. I saw an article yesterday just about how different types of YouTube content

can be more or less successfully recognized by LLMs and draw attention to your product. And so I think, you know, how companies interact with, AI agents, how they find themselves discoverable on LLMs is going to be a big shift around, in particular product discoverability and retention. And I think that leads me to my question, which is, how on earth do you do that? What is it in a world in which people are shifting their behaviors from Google to ChatGPT, I never go to Google anymore. It's all ChatGPT, or it's all an LLM. How do I make sure that it's discovering the right products? Because it does have a tendency to only find certain blogs.

Those aren't necessarily the high authority or high quality ones that I want, but some folks out there are gaming this, and so I think that's going to be a massive shift in terms of how we think about SaaS marketing.

Ken: Just yesterday I asked ChatGPT, how can I build content that will surface in ChatGPT. So, yeah, and it had a whole, whole recipe for how to do that. And maybe for our agency listeners, there's an opportunity to continue selling SEO like services. So my prediction, 'cause that's where we are in the episode.

So I'd say the Gold Rush is on. I think VCs will open their wallets much more than many observers expect. You know, there's, you can't paint with too broad a brush here. But I just think there is plenty of money still on the sidelines. in many areas there are useful new approaches to getting work done that just weren't possible before.

You know, we talked about sales, and that's where like sales agents, these intelligent agents are scouting an entire ICP on a continuous basis to find signals that there's a buying opportunity. I, I just think that's the kind of. Capability that just never existed before and is very high value. So I think those are gonna be investible, even if they're not, technology moats.

It's gonna be all about the land grab.

Maybe we should go and build that kind of agent optimization tooling now so that we can give it to everybody so that they can actually do what they need to do. There's no clear winner in that space for sure. and, and I do have a question and, and my question is, sort of goes back to, how the business changed. The software business changed when cloud kind of became, undeniable as the way software was gonna be delivered.

And the question is, are SaaS execs willing to completely remake their software for the agentic age, or are they gonna try and get by with bolt-on co-pilots for a couple of years and you know, will that co-pilot strategy be enough? You know, my gut feel says, no, it won't. I think most of us have had enough experience with co-pilots to know they're fairly limited.

They sort of augment, they don't really change the experience. So that's my bet. But I'd love to hear some feedback. But I think we gotta land. We could keep going, but we gotta land the episode. So I want to say thank you. Rob, Rob Curtis and James Ollerenshaw. Thank you so much for. You know, kicking off this special series on SaaS backwards.

I appreciate all the effort that went into making this a very deep dive, even as it's just trying to set the table. We'll be continuing to learn alongside you guy's. We'd love to hear unanswered questions, topics, and predictions from the audience. If you have any, please send me a note. my email is kl@austinlawrence.com. 

If you'd like our episode, the next episode or two to include some of your thoughts. And if you haven't yet subscribed to the podcast, please do subscribe to SaaS backwards wherever podcasts are distributed. Or you can search SaaS backwards on Google or YouTube. Rob James, thanks so much for making this a really amazing first scratch at a really big topic area.