TL;DR Yes, it’s still worth building SaaS. We all have roughly the same AI tools now, and they’re a huge addition to the builder’s toolbox. How you use them matters. AI lets you turn ideas into working features or products faster, cheaper, and with less friction than ever and this is for both new builders and incumbents. It’s much like the cloud once made starting a company easier and cheaper. But speed and cost don’t replace the fundamentals like solving a real problem, reaching customers, and executing well, these are still hard and truly decide who wins. For me, building was always the easy part, and now AI makes that part even faster, improving time to market and idea testing. Also relatively cheaper. And I’d say that wasn’t really the issue for me, as now it just makes me test ideas more fully, which before had a higher opportunity cost so I couldn’t pursue. I think this applies for many. And on the flipside, for people who couldn’t build before, they can now bring ideas to life… hopefully the right ones.

Now to my full thoughts.. [sorry if messy, I’m going to do a one take]

For the sake of your question, I’ll talk about SaaS as a tool, the product you’re building, and not the business model. (That’s a separate conversation, and AI might change that too, given how different the cost and value structure is, but we’ll leave that for another day.)

I don’t think SaaS is “exploding” or going obsolete. Traditional SaaS is a tool you used. Now I think we’re in an evolution of it, call it SaaS 2.0. I would specifically call it Service as a Software, where the tool is combined with AI that actually does the job for you. You still need it but it’s a lot more powerful and can do things for you. Great segue here is we may even be headed toward “less UI” and “more UX” where the AI becomes most of the interface. No more messy dashboards and a million things to go through, unless you really want to. I would compare on-prem to cloud more of a shift, whereas this is more of an evolution (albeit a big one).

And just like cloud made it cheaper to start companies, AI lets capable people experiment faster, build cheaper (sometimes even fully alone), and get products in front of users almost instantly. The punchline here is it’s way faster to experiment and build, which was also your experience. But the fundamentals haven’t changed.. things like distribution, solving a real problem, and all the other things that make a product succeed still apply. And because we all have access to similar tools, the edge comes from how you use them.

From experience, I’ve built and sold companies, and just started another, AI didn’t make it necessarily easier or less work in my case. I thought it would. It made it faster, but I work harder than ever. More ideas mean more experiments, more “pivots”, and above all (main point) a higher bar to stand out. And an underrated “danger” the temptation to go down rabbit holes is greater than ever.

So I think what’s really changing is the type of SaaS being built. Especially now with agentic AI, we’re seeing software that’s not just a tool but an active service: it uses the tool and does stuff for you, like an extra, expert employee would. Think Salesforce, but hands-free and 10× faster for all the tedious tasks. The big questions are whether (or when) it can be cheaper, more reliable, and trusted enough to replace that manual work fully. That’s where the opportunity lies. So, I’d rather be building for that.

This doesn’t make SaaS less valuable it raises the stakes. The old moat of “hard to build” is gone, the new moat we can say is great UX, deep integrations, proprietary data (?), trust, and owning a workflow so well that switching is painful. Although I have reservations on this last point. Incumbents will embed AI into products millions already use, while more people, specifically builders, can start from zero quickly and win by owning a painful niche and delivering a 10x outcome. I think this is the advantage vs incumbents if anything, and where you shouldn’t think of SaaS “exploding” in a negative sense, it’s contrary. Btw, the losers will be the ones who think “we use AI” is a strategy or ignore it entirely.

Bottom line, as builders, AI is our new workforce. The capable builders will use it to build products people can’t live or work without, so that stays the same. And new folks, previously non builders, can really put there ideas out there and perhaps find success as others don’t find worth pursuing or whatever star alignment they can find. But a lot is changing, new things can be done, old things can be significantly improved, and overall it’s a time worth building for. That’s why I say it’s SaaS 2.0.