 Founder OS: How AI-powered no-code tools are reshaping how modern founders build and launch software in 2025. by Chris Tottman and Ruben Dominguez Ibar, The Founders Corner Read the entire post here: URL for this Post. From Code to Conversation: A New Development Philosophy A founder opens Claude and types: “Build me a waitlist app with email capture and a dashboard to view signups.” Ten minutes later, it’s live on Vercel. No engineers hired. No tickets opened. Just vibes. That’s what we now call vibe coding. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy earlier this year, and it describes a new way of building software. One where the developer’s role switches from writing syntax to prompting intentions. It’s not programming in the traditional sense. It’s a back-and-forth conversation with an AI tool that already knows how to code. You simply describe what you want and the AI generates the code. You test it. Then refine. The loop is fast, forgiving, and completely redefining how technical work gets done.  What makes vibe coding different from older no-code tools is that you’re not locked into rigid interfaces or workflows. You’re working with real code, but you're not writing it line by line. Instead, you're collaborating with tools like Cursor, Claude, and GPT-4o to generate, revise, and extend software through natural language. The experience feels more like pair-programming with a genius intern than clicking around a drag-and-drop builder. And suddenly, the fundamental ideas of starting a business have changed completely. You no longer need to be an engineer to build products. Domain experts, solo founders, even non-technical operators are spinning up full-stack products simply by describing what they want. That barrier between idea and execution is evaporating. The tools finally caught up. And the mindset “I don’t code, I converse” is spreading fast. Table of Contents 1. The Modern No-Code (Vibe‑Code) Stack 2. What It Means to Be “Technical” Has Changed 3. New Workflows, New Mindsets 4. Where Vibe Coding Shines and Where It Doesn’t 5. New Roles Are Emerging 6. Vibe Coding Is a Gateway to Real Code 7. Build With Vision, Not Just Tools 1. The Modern No-Code (Vibe‑Code) Stack If vibe coding is a conversation, the tools are your interpreters. Today’s founders use a modular stack of AI-native, no-code, and low-code platforms to build surprisingly complete products, fast. These tools aren’t new individually. What’s changed is how seamlessly they interact when driven by AI. Here’s a practical stack most founders use in 2025, along with how each fits into the vibe workflow: 
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Why Quitting Your Job Isn’t Always the Answer Read the entire article on VC Unfiltered (Pegasus Angel Accelerator) URL for this post.  Leap. Quit your job. Leave it all behind. Follow your dream. These are the rallying cries of romanticized entrepreneurship, championed by people who often have little experience in the trenches. But for the vast majority of aspiring entrepreneurs, this approach is reckless. The idea of walking away from a steady career or educational path to pursue a startup dream without a viable plan is a recipe for failure unless your venture has the traction to sustain itself or raise capital to hit an inflection point.
For most aspiring entrepreneurs, hybrid entrepreneurship—building a startup while maintaining your job or studies—is a more practical, calculated path. Not only does it reduce risk, but research also supports its effectiveness. Why Hybrid Entrepreneurship Works Professor Noam Wasserman, author of The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, offers valuable insights into the trade-offs founders face. His analysis, combined with Dr. Joseph Raffiee’s groundbreaking research, reveals a striking statistic: hybrid entrepreneurs are 33.3% less likely to experience a hazardous exit than those who dive headfirst into full-time entrepreneurship. These numbers are hard to ignore, especially in an environment where failure rates for startups are staggeringly high. Hybrid entrepreneurship is not about playing it safe; it’s about playing it smart. By maintaining a steady income and established network while building your venture, you can extend your runway, mitigate risk, and test your ideas in real-world conditions before fully committing. But like any strategy, it comes with its own set of advantages and challenges. The Positives of Hybrid Entrepreneurship 1. Your Runway Doesn’t Start In the startup world, runway refers to how long your business can operate before running out of money. Every entrepreneur faces the ticking clock of financial burn, and once you quit your job, that clock starts immediately. By pursuing hybrid entrepreneurship, you can defer this pressure and give your venture the time it needs to develop traction and stability. This additional runway is especially valuable during the early stages when uncertainty is highest. You can experiment, iterate, and learn without the existential threat of financial collapse looming over your head. 2. You Retain and Leverage Your Network Your network is one of your most valuable assets as an entrepreneur. It provides access to advice, referrals, partnerships, and potential investors. When you leave a job, you often lose daily access to this network, which can severely limit your ability to navigate the challenges of building a startup. Remaining in your current role while starting your venture allows you to maintain credibility and access to these connections. Your colleagues, mentors, and professional relationships can become key allies in your entrepreneurial journey. 3. Failure Becomes More Manageable Startups are inherently risky, and setbacks are inevitable. However, failure hits differently when you’ve burned through your savings and left behind a stable income. Hybrid entrepreneurship provides a safety net, allowing you to recover more easily from missteps. If your venture faces challenges, you still have the financial and emotional stability of your job or studies to fall back on. This safety net also enables calculated risk-taking. You can test bold ideas and strategies without the fear that one misstep will leave you destitute. The Challenges of Hybrid Entrepreneurship 1. Protecting Your Intellectual Property When you’re developing a startup while working for an employer or studying at a university, there’s a risk that your organization could claim ownership of your intellectual property (IP). Many employers include clauses in their contracts that grant them rights to inventions created during your tenure, even if they’re unrelated to your job. Read the rest of this post here.  by Jason Cohen - @asmartbear, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncohen/ Jason built 4 tech startups, both bootstrapped & funded, alone and with co-founders, all to $1M+ annual revenue, sold 2, currently at the 4th, https://WPEngine.com with 200k customers and 1200 global employees. He’s an angel investor, founding member of Capital Factory, an Austin incubator/co-working space, and has been writing about early-stage startups since 2007. This entire post can be found here. URL for this post. Dozens of founders have used this technique to transform the cash-flow of their businesses. Now it’s your turn. Multiple founders have told me the ideas in this article were responsible for the financial success of their startup. They might be exaggerating out of kindness, but if it’s even 10% as useful for you, it will have been worth your time. We’ll explore how growth affects cash-flow, and conclude with several techniques that can transform the cash-flow of your business. The cost of a dollar of MRR What does it cost a SaaS company to add $1 of new monthly recurring revenue? Using the typical acronyms: CAC (Cost to Acquire a Customer) is the total cost to get one new paying customer—Marketing and Sales costs, including fully-loaded salaries.1 The simplest way to compute it is “total spend in a month” divided by “total new customers added during that month.” ARPC (Average Revenue per Customer) is the average monthly-recurring revenue you get from a customer. The simplest way to compute it in aggregate is “total recurring-revenue in a month (MRR)” divided by “total number of paying customers during that month (N)”. 1 --- In smaller companies, typically the founder and others are spending time on marketing and sales activities as well; include the fraction of their time, or the salary that you would have to pay someone else to do those same tasks. Also include commissions. Since it costs CAC dollars to get ARPC new dollars of recurring-revenue: The cost to create one more dollar of MRR = CAC / ARPC If you haven’t done it before, computing this metric will be eye-opening. Let’s posit a hypothetical company with a $10/mo consumer-targeted SaaS product, where they pay $1.60/click for Google Ads; that traffic converts at 5% to a free trial, and those trials convert at 40% to a paid customer. Their CAC is $80,2 and their ARPC is $10, therefore we would say “it costs them $8 to create $1 of MRR.” 2 ---$1.60 / 0.05 / 0.4 = $80 It’s tempting to conclude that “It takes 8 months of customer revenue to ‘pay us back’ for the marketing and sales costs of getting that customer. That customer is unprofitable before then, and becomes more and more profitable after.” (Figure 1)  But, unfortunately, it’s worse than that.
Revenue we can spend All companies have mandatory expenses associated with delivering the entire product to the customer. Not just the product itself, but everything else the customer expects, like being able to pay with a credit card or call tech support:
Read the rest of this post here.  By Charles (Chip) Royce, Flywheel Advisors Chip Royce is a Fractional CRO & GTM Architect, delivering fast growth for B2B, SaaS, and Deep Tech Companies. Read the entire article here. URL for this Post. You have the better product, but they have the lower price. Here’s how to stop fighting on their terms and start winning on yours. I had a client, a CEO at a sharp B2B SaaS company, who was just gutted. His team had lost another deal to a competitor that was, frankly, worse. The product was clunky, the support was slow, but they were cheaper. “They loved the demo,” he told me. “They saw all the features. I don’t get it.” This isn’t an uncommon story. It’s a special kind of frustrating to have a better product and still lose. You know you’re the superior choice, but prospects are signing with the other guys anyway. The reason is simple, but fixing it isn’t. Your product is losing because you’re playing a game of feature-for-feature comparison. That’s a game that always ends with a discussion about price.  The Wrong Reflexes in a Price Fight
When leaders get backed into this corner, I’ve seen them make a few common mistakes. First, they blame the sales team. They tell them to “sell harder” or “improve their closing skills.” This completely misses the point. The sales team is fighting with one hand tied behind their back because the conversation is flawed from the start. Second, they bloat the product roadmap. The logic feels right: more features must equal more value. But it doesn’t. It just adds more noise to the sales pitch and makes your product look even more like a commodity. You are just adding more items to a checklist for them to compare. Third, they offer a discount. This is the most dangerous one. It might save a single deal, but it poisons the well for every negotiation that follows. You’ve just taught your customers that your price isn’t real. These are just symptoms. The actual disease is the feature-selling trap. Diagnosis: Product Commoditization via Feature-Selling The feature-selling trap is what happens when you try to be everything to everyone. Your go-to-market message becomes a generic list of capabilities. This is the very definition of product commoditization. Your unique, innovative solution accidentally becomes an interchangeable good. And when that happens, price is the only thing left to talk about. Think about it like this. If you sell a hammer, and your competitor sells a hammer, the buyer will pick the cheaper one. It makes perfect sense. But what if you sell a “roof-framing system for commercial construction”? You’re no longer selling just a hammer. You are selling a very specific solution to a specific problem for a specific buyer. You’ve changed the conversation from price to value. Here are the signs that you are stuck selling features:
If this checklist feels a little too familiar, it’s time to change your approach. Read the rest of this post here.  by Jonathan Simnett, Managing Director at Hampleton Partners, Co-Host of The Difference Engine Podcast Originally posted on the Categorical Blog. Read the entire post here. URL for this Post.  Building Categories is hard. It requires creativity and in-depth market understanding combined with meticulous planning and faultless execution, particularly in the early days, as you establish both the Category and your leadership of it and as you execute your go-to-market strategy.
Jason Lemkin is a seasoned tech executive, venture capitalist, and author based in California. Known for his candid opinions, I recently witnessed one of his presentations on the Top Ten Go-to-Market (GTM) Mistakes that many companies make. These are the missteps he thinks that can destroy a SaaS business and should be avoided at all costs. I’d also argue that in go-to-market terms these will also ruin your chances of building a SaaS Category. Here’s a look at Jason’s warnings: 1) Don’t Hire a Sales VP Who Can’t Sell Face-to-Face or Demo a Product Lemkin stresses that in the early stages of a SaaS company, hiring a VP of Sales who can’t roll up their sleeves and engage directly with customers is a huge mistake. In the fiercely competitive world of sales, the top people need to be in the trenches. If a sales VP can’t demo the product or communicate directly with prospects, they’re not the right fit. Confidence is key in sales, and if a leader can’t engage directly with customers, it’s a major red flag. 2) Don’t Hire a VP of Marketing Who Can’t Do Demand Generation Hiring someone focused on corporate marketing or strategy at an early-stage SaaS company is a mistake. At the start, the focus should be on generating revenue, and the right marketing leader should be able to drive demand generation. Ask candidates if they’ve “held a commit”—i.e., been responsible for meeting sales targets. If they haven’t, they’re not the right fit for your early-stage company. 3) Don’t Step Out of Sales Founders often want to return to product development, but Lemkin advises against it—at least for a while. A great sales VP will open and close deals, but founders need to be deeply involved in sales to build credibility. Customers love meeting the founder early in the process, and as the business scales, founders need to keep their hands in sales for as long as possible. 4) Never Cut Marketing Too Deeply During tough times when cash is tight, many companies make the mistake of cutting marketing budgets. But Lemkin warns that cutting marketing is cutting future potential. While cutting sales might affect immediate revenue, cutting marketing hinders growth in the long term. If you trust your VP of Marketing, let them spend the budget wisely to drive growth. 5) Not Properly Jumping on the AI Bandwagon AI is no longer optional. While it may not be a perfect fit for every B2B space, it’s where the budget and competition are heading. Lemkin suggests that failing to integrate AI into your product offering could mean losing out on potential business. If your CTO doesn’t understand how to leverage AI, it might be time for a change at the top. 6) Putting Profitability Above Growth In today’s market, growth is often more valuable than profitability—especially for private companies. Lemkin highlights that growth is worth 2x profitability in public companies, but 10x profitability in private ones. If you want to scale and eventually have an IPO, focus on rapid growth, even at the cost of short-term profitability. Read the rest of this post here. Table of Contents
 Here’s the truth they don’t tell you about fundraising:
Pre-Seed: Prove You Can Build It (Technical Risk) At this stage, you're raising belief capital. No revenue, no customers, no proof. Just a trong conviction—and a fragile prototype. The Biggest Risk: Your idea sounds great… but can you build it? You need to show investors (and yourself) that this isn’t just vaporware. That your MVP isn’t just a prototype—it’s the proof point that the product works and that you can build it faster, cheaper, and smarter than anyone else. Your job is to de-risk technical feasibility. Key Actions:
When I backed a devtools startup in this phase, they had zero revenue. But they showed me a CLI tool with 50 developers using it weekly—and they could demo real-time results. That was enough. Seed: Prove It Solves a Pain (Market Risk) Now that the thing works, the question changes: does anyone care? This is the land of product-market fit hunting. You’re not scaling yet. You’re still listening. Tinkering. Validating. The Biggest Risk: You’ve built something technically sound… but is there a real market that needs this now? Your job is to de-risk market risk. Key Actions:
At this stage, I’m not looking for a polished revenue engine. I’m looking for evidence of love—strong pull from a specific user base. One founder I backed had just 20 customers but a 90% activation rate and 100% month-on-month retention. No brainer. Series A: Prove You Can Sell It Repeatedly (GTM Risk) Now you’ve got product-market fit. You’ve figured out what to sell. The next question is how you sell it—and whether that model scales. Welcome to go-to-market hell (and heaven, if you get it right). Read the rest of this post here. Telling a CEO to shrink their target market is a great way to get weird looks. It’s also the secret to finally ditching the price wars and becoming the only choice for your best customers.  You've noticed the feature-selling trap in your business.
Now, you might wonder, “What’s next?” The answer is straightforward, but not easy: stop selling to everyone. For many founders of growing B2B tech companies, this advice seems off. You’ve built a product with broad appeal, and narrowing your focus might feel risky. This concern is valid, but it may be misplaced. Think about it: In the crowded B2B tech space, trying to please everyone makes you forgettable. A niche GTM strategy doesn’t cast a wider net; you become a big fish in a small, profitable pond. A Big Fish in a Small Pond: The Power of a Vertical Market Strategy Selling in horizontal markets, where you target every industry, is challenging. You risk becoming just another option. Your solution blends in, and competing on price becomes the norm. A vertical market strategy changes the game. By focusing on a specific industry, you become a crucial partner instead of a generic vendor. For instance, I worked with a logistics software company that struggled with pricing. They were just one of many. By focusing on cold-chain logistics for pharmaceuticals, they became the top solution for a major issue. True market leadership comes from depth, not breadth. It’s about solving specific issues for a particular group so well that you become their only option. Achieving this changes everything. Three Pillars of Niche Profitability: Increase Pricing Power and More What does this shift mean? Your success relies on three pillars that deliver real results. 1. A Niche GTM Strategy Unlocks Your True Pricing Power The biggest advantage of a niche GTM strategy is increased pricing power. When you’re the go-to solution for an industry’s main issue, you escape the price war. The sales conversation shifts. Instead of “How much does it cost?” prospects ask, “What’s the ROI?” I saw this with a manufacturing client who gained 20% efficiency, translating to $2 million in saved labor costs. They weren’t just selling software; they offered a $2 million solution. This approach isn’t about random price hikes. It’s about earning the right to charge more because your solution is a strategic investment with clear returns. 2. A Niche GTM Strategy Drives Marketing Efficiency and Reduces Customer Acquisition Costs A hidden cost of a horizontal strategy is the waste of marketing funds. Selling to everyone means advertising everywhere. Your message gets diluted, and customer acquisition costs (CAC) soar. You spend a lot reaching people who won’t buy. When you dominate a niche, your focus sharpens. You know your customer inside and out. You understand what they read, where they go, and which online groups they join. Your marketing becomes precise. You create content that speaks to their challenges. You sponsor key industry conferences instead of many generic trade shows. This focus lowers your CAC and quickly attracts better leads. Read the rest of this post here. Raising the right amount of capital is one of the most critical decisions a startup founder will make. Raise too little, and you risk running out of cash before hitting key milestones. Raise too much, and you may give up excessive equity or hold onto capital raised at a lower valuation than your company would command later. The key is striking the right balance between runway and dilution while ensuring your valuation aligns with market realities.  A Framework for Calculating Your Raise
Step 1: Start with Your Milestones The foundation of your fundraising strategy should be the milestones you plan to achieve with the capital raised. These milestones should be tied to: • Valuation Growth: Ensure your next round happens at a higher valuation by achieving meaningful progress (e.g., revenue targets, customer acquisition, product launch). • Risk Reduction: Use the funds to eliminate risks that currently deter investors, such as product readiness, market validation, or revenue predictability. By focusing on milestones, you’ll not only determine how much to raise but also ensure the capital is deployed efficiently. Step 2: Balance Dilution and Runway Two critical factors to consider are dilution and runway, which work together to determine how much to raise. Here’s how to navigate this balancing act effectively: 1. Keep Dilution in Check • Aim for 10-20% dilution per round. Going beyond 20% significantly erodes founder equity and early investor stakes, which can hurt morale and alignment over time. • Example: A founder raising $2 million at a $10 million post-money valuation would dilute their stake by 20%. Keeping this range ensures you preserve long-term control and motivation for your team. 2. Raise 12-18 Months of Cash • This range gives you enough runway to hit critical milestones without raising capital too soon, which can distract from operations. • Why 12-18 Months? • It’s long enough to demonstrate meaningful progress and improve your valuation for the next round. • It avoids sitting on excess cash raised at a lower valuation if your growth trajectory accelerates. Example: The Dilution vs. Runway Balance Imagine your startup needs $1.5 million to sustain operations for 18 months and achieve key milestones like doubling revenue and launching a new product. At a $6 million pre-money valuation, raising $1.5 million would dilute you by 20%—the upper end of the acceptable range. Now consider raising $3 million instead, which would provide 36 months of runway. While this seems like a safer move, you’d dilute by 33% at the same valuation and risk holding excess capital that could have been raised later at a much higher valuation. The better option is to stick to the $1.5 million, hit your milestones, and raise at a higher valuation in 18 months. Step 3: Ensure You’re Worth the Valuation You’re Pitching Valuation is not just about numbers; it’s about perception, progress, and market alignment. Even if your financial model suggests you can raise at a $12 million pre-money valuation, you won’t get funded at that number unless you can convince investors it’s justified. Here’s how to ensure your valuation matches reality: • Benchmark Against Market Norms: Research comparable companies at your stage in similar industries. What valuation ranges did they achieve, and how do their metrics compare to yours? • Get Investor Feedback: Speak to trusted investors and advisors to understand where your valuation realistically lands. Their feedback can help align your expectations with current market conditions. • Be Honest About Traction: Investors are funding your current progress, not just your projections. Ensure your valuation reflects the risk they’re taking and the milestones you’ve achieved. • Focus on Team and Milestones: Investors look at more than financials. A strong team and clear milestones reduce perceived risk and increase confidence in your ability to execute. Your valuation must be a reflection of both your company’s achievements and market realities. When in doubt, align your pitch to where similar companies have succeeded and adjust based on feedback. Read the Rest of the Post Here. by Jason Cohen - @asmartbear, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncohen/ Jason built 4 tech startups, both bootstrapped & funded, alone and with co-founders, all to $1M+ annual revenue, sold 2, currently at the 4th, https://WPEngine.com with 200k customers and 1200 global employees. He’s an angel investor, founding member of Capital Factory, an Austin incubator/co-working space, and has been writing about early-stage startups since 2007. This entire post can be found here. URL for this Post.  A startup can beat a large, successful incumbent, if it does things the incumbent can not or will not do. Here are those things.
It doesn’t seem possible for a startup to beat an incumbent. An incumbent has everything: money, brand, customers, a sales team, marketing that generates thousands of leads every month, product and engineering teams that constantly ship. They mine their big existing customer base for ideas, and then build exactly the right features, and then charge for it. Their 24/7 support team provides faster and better service than someone working in their pajamas at home. They don’t have to build the basics or ask Twitter how to manage international sales tax. They can just focus on innovating. Of course if you’ve ever worked at a big company, you know that while most of those things are true, it doesn’t feel like it. Big companies are rarely well-oiled innovation machines, and it certainly doesn’t feel like you’re constantly outpacing the competition. When we analyze how incumbents are vulnerable, we uncover opportunities that startups can exploit to win, where there’s often nothing the incumbent can do about it, despite their advantages:
The pattern: Every big-company advantage creates exploitable weakness The reason big companies don’t function as well as described above is that things at scale are super-linearly more difficult. It’s an advantage to have 100,000 customers when you’re figuring out what the next feature should be, or when you’re launching a second product, or when you get free growth from word-of-mouth. But it’s a disadvantage to have a lot of customers when you want to innovate with your product, because no customer wakes up in the morning and says: Gee, I hope the software I’m accustomed to dramatically changes today. Customers don’t want to learn new UIs. Customers have workflows that you have to accommodate. Old technology that powers those 100,000 customers doesn’t support the latest technology. You have to update documentation and videos and the people in support and sales who need to be retrained. Even a simple change can be difficult and expensive, and certainly low-ROI. Besides “scale,” a big company must accommodate things startups can ignore. There’s the legal department, for example. A startup does all kinds of illegal things. Most startups do not pay taxes properly, sometimes not at all, especially in other countries. Startups don’t adhere to all the Acceptable Use Policies of all the products they use. Startups don’t have a security team who vets vendors before sending them sensitive data, or vets libraries before they’re integrated into the code base, causing all of their supposed “secret intellectual property” to become open-source. As a result, the startup not only moves more quickly—which is how most people characterize it—but they can completely skip things that a larger company cannot. So Uber decided to just do illegal things in order to grow. An incumbent taxi company obeys the law, so they lose. You could say that that’s not fair. You could say that’s what regulation ought to prevent. But the reality is that startups often ignore the law, and that can be an edge. The way a startup wins, is to do things that incumbents cannot or will not do. So, let’s see how to attack where they cannot defend. Take risks that cannot be quantified The way a larger company decides to take a risk, such as launching a new product line or entering a new market, is by creating a detailed analysis of the opportunity, and a cost estimate. Then the decision is: 1. Is this is a good ROI? (potential-revenue divided by costs) 2. Do we have conviction that the risk of failure is low? How can a startup exploit this decision process? Starting with decision (1), the analysis is typically wrong. There are studies everywhere—and your own experience, if you’ve worked at a large company—showing that most development projects are significantly late and over-budget, and also that the outcome is typically worse than expected. Both sides of the ROI fraction are worse. Read the rest of this post here. by Jonathan Simnett, Managing Director at Hampleton Partners, Co-Host of The Difference Engine Podcast Originally posted on the Categorical Blog. Read the entire post here. URL for this Post.  In recent years, we’ve witnessed a wave of SaaS companies seemingly emerging out of nowhere, carving out entirely new Categories and claiming dominance. But there’s a catch – the current playbook that many of these companies are following seems to come with a built-in expiration date. Is this tech and financial flywheel truly a good thing, or does it ultimately leave customers in the lurch?
Creating Curiosity The story of the SaaS industry has been nothing short of explosive. But as we’ve seen, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that every SaaS venture is destined to succeed by following a well-worn path to market dominance. What happens when that path becomes self-destructive, leaving both customers and companies grappling with its unintended consequences? One name that’s been a significant part of this conversation is Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, whose thoughts on SaaS have had a major impact on the industry. In fact, we even reviewed his SaaStr show in The Difference Engine podcast. Jason and many others have been vocal about the fact that SaaS, as we know it, may be reaching its peak. In our view we are heading towards an AI-driven paradigm shift as the industry moves towards AaaS (Agents as a Service) model. So, let’s ask: is the SaaS playbook, in its current form, truly the route to sustained success – or is it time to rewrite the rules entirely? The Stages of Building a SaaS Business To understand what’s been happening in the SaaS world, let’s break down the stages needed to build a significant SaaS firm:
The Changing Landscape of SaaS We’re now seeing a new reality. Over the past couple of years, mass layoffs in the tech world have flooded the market with seasoned engineers looking to start their own SaaS businesses. Competition is heating up, and as supply exceeds demand, the landscape has shifted. The dream of creating the next big SaaS business is no longer as straightforward as it once seemed. So, what happens next? New CEOs or owners, eager to make their business profitable, often turn to price hikes, cost-cutting measures, and tiered pricing. While this may be a sensible move from a financial perspective, it often leads to customer disappointment. And if customers are not locked in, they’ll start looking for alternatives – causing yet another cycle of innovation to kick off and former dreams of Category leadership to vanish. We recently spoke with an entrepreneur who cashed out, leaving a highly profitable company in the hands of private equity. It’s a sweet deal—an exit, a large paycheck, and the freedom to start fresh. And for investors, this playbook has been incredibly successful. But is it really benefiting the end user? Read the rest of this post here. |