A founder argues the SaaS model is broken and proposes selling the entire customer journey as a service instead. His firm runs two-day AI workshops for industrial clients that deliver what McKinsey takes four months to do, tapping into a 1:7 gap between software and service spending.
Chapters
I constantly challenge Silicon Valley that they're stuck in the SaaS era, which means you build a great product and then you just sell it like cookies. I think those times are over. I think good go-to-market, excellence in execution, delivery is just as important as the product and the technology, especially at that level where we operate. So the thesis that we have and the way we go to market is that, We give our customer the entire experience from first conversation to education to delivery. We have multiple revenue streams. We don't have only ARR. We have consulting services. We have forward-deployed engineering. We charge for every single engagement that we have with a customer, and our customers buy the work. They buy the outcome. And funny enough, while I was sitting back there, I read a brand new thesis from Sequoia Capital around services is the new software. On every dollar spent on software in the average enterprise, there's about 7 times more spent on the service. Means you're spending, let's say, $10,000 on QuickBooks. Most likely you have an accountant for $100,000 that closes the books. These $100,000 are up for grabs for software companies right now. But for AI-native software. Absolutely. Yes. So, so the way to go in there for us is We're not selling only the software, we're selling the entire package. But we are running fully AI native, just like you said it. We're doing consulting workshops, 2-day workshops with some of the largest industrial companies in the, in the country. And our AI is preparing the workshop. Our AI is recording the workshop and our AI is vibe coding in real time during the workshop, the prototype for the customer. We do in 2 days what McKinsey did in 4 months before, right?