Will AI Replace SaaS? The Future of Software

The line between being a writer and being a builder is starting to, like, blur.

I almost feel like software could be the sort of next SEO, right?

Yeah.

Performance based stats would be incredible.

It has completely reset the table for, like, what tools are possible. And so that means that there's a lot of low hanging fruit because we're all just like figuring out our workflows, right?

Hey, welcome back to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf. I'm here with Nathan Lands. And today we're going to talk about the crossover of software and AI and we're bringing on a guest expert, Dan Schipper, to talk all about it. Dan is the CEO of Every. He has all sorts of companies underneath him that he's incubated. He's an investor, he works with Sequoia, he has all sorts of knowledge in the software space and he's going to break down his exact process for deciding what products to build and what tools he used to build them and exactly how he brings them to market. It's a great discussion. So let's just go ahead and dive right in with Dan Schipper. We're talking with Dan Schipper, the CEO of Every. Thanks so much for joining us today, Dan. How you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, so I'm excited to really dig in with you and what you're doing over at your, you know, various companies that you're working on. Let's go ahead and like lay the groundwork. Like, tell us a little bit about your company and what you're building and what is Every.

Yeah, that's a good question. That has evolved significantly. We've been around for five years. That's evolved significantly over time. The way that I talk about what we do right now is I call us a multimodal media company. So we publish writing, we publish podcasts, we publish video, and we publish software. We do all that using AI and we've sort of gone in that direction because I think that there's this really interesting thing happening where the line between being a writer and being a builder is starting to blur. And they're sort of moving into this overlapping venn diagram now that you can write in English and turn it into code. Writing is building. And also because software is so cheap to make, I think that software is becoming content. And so as a media company, like what we focus on at Every is we have a daily newser every. Every day we write a long form essay about what comes next in tech. We've got like about 10 regular writers who do that. I write every Friday a column called Chain of Thought on the sort of intersection between AI, creativity, psychology, philosophy, all that kind of stuff. And our job is to sort of explore the future. And the best way to do that in, in my opinion, always to be using new tools and experimenting with things and building things and all that kind of stuff. And what we found is that when we experiment with something, if we release it to the audience people love, makes the writing better. And sometimes those experiments become real products and should be real products. And so what we've done is then made them into real, actual products that we often start by using them internally and then we'll publish them, publish them to the audience, and then we bundle them into the subscription. So you pay one price and you get access to all of our content and all of the software that we make. And we've done four incubations so far. The most recent one, which we just launched like about three or four weeks ago right before Christmas, is called Quora. And it manages your inbox with AI. So basically what happens is as emails come in, it decides if you need to respond to them, if you do need to respond to them, if they're from a human, it makes it to your inbox and you see it immediately. And if not, it automatically archives it. And then twice a day you get a beautiful brief that summarizes all the things you need to know about what's going on in your inbox, but you don't need to actually do anything with. And it just saves like a ton of time because like 80 to 90% of your emails are like that. We have a bunch of other products that are. That are sort of in that. In that vein for different parts of. Parts of your work life. And yeah, that's the basics of every.

And that was cora, Like, C O R A.

C O R A. Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, and that's been. It's been going really well. We've got like 10,000 people on the wait list. We're taking off like 20 people a day and just sort of starting to ramp it up.

I'm on the wait list, so, you know, I can't really talk about it. I haven't. I haven't tried it.

I'll get you off the waitlist. You should have told me. I know a guy.

Cool. That's fascinating thing about, like, writing. Do you say writing is like. Is becoming software? Is that what you said? Something like that.

Writing is building and software's content?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I've been noticing it too, because as part of this, doing this podcast, I've been trying to get more hands on with AI, like actually started building some stuff. So recently I started using all the different AI tools to kind of develop a game prototype just for fun. Maybe it becomes a real thing, I don't know. But I have been noticing it is fascinating that I am now talking with AI and kind of writing my game design document with AI, using my voice, using stuff like whisper flow, chatting with it, having it update the document, and then I feed that document back into Zero1Pro when I'm coding on it. And it's just amazing that that conversation I'm having with AI then informs the actual code and software that is created that's never existed before.

Isn't that so cool? And like, so you can code while you're walking around and just like, you know, recording your voice. Like Kieran, who is our GM of Quora and he built cora. That's how he started the first Quora mvp. He built that in a single night. And he did it by going to take a walk and he just like recorded himself being like, this is how I want the app to work. And he threw it into a one and just like, it's awesome. I think, like, so cool. There's like, there is a big difference between that. Like the you can build a prototype and then actual like production grade software. But even the production grade software is like, is super, super. It's just changed what you can do and how fast you can do it. And it's really, really fun. Yeah.

So the, I really like the like what you said there. So writing is building. That makes sense to me. Right. Like everything is kind of becoming prompting to get what you want. Right. If you want to write software, you prompt it. The software can come into existence. I mean, even now, like we're talking about, you can even speak it into existence and then it actually becomes software. Can you speak more to the software is content. What do you mean by that?

Software is much cheaper to make now. And so, and one of the things we found is that if we release a little experiment as a piece of software.

All of the experiments we run are much better at attracting audience and emails than any given essay or YouTube video or whatever because it's this totally new format of thing, right? And so in the same way that on Instagram you can take pictures and TikTok you can take videos, on YouTube you can take videos and those are different from like Hollywood films, but they're still videos, I think that we're, we're sort of, we've been living in the world of like, software is sort of like a Hollywood movie. Like you need a lot of money and time to make it. And it's, and now like, with all these tools, it's, it's expanding beyond people who are professional developers. And anyone can make a little prototype and that, that switch is, is sort of like, anyone can kind of like make it, write a blog post. Anyone can like, you know, do a tweet. It's, it's, it's going to be the same thing. I don't think that there are, there aren't really platforms yet for this, but I think there's going to be like a YouTube of software development maybe like replit. Is that to some degree. And it's not for professional coders, it's for like people who just grew up prompting. And that's happening right now.

This is something we've actually talked about on the show in the past too, is like, I almost feel like software could be the sort of next SEO, right? Because I feel like just writing blog posts and writing content is, it's so easy now. Like, anybody can do it because of tools like Claude and chatgpt and Gemini and everything that's available out there. I think the value of sort of written content is starting to go down. And when it comes to SEO, right, one of the goals of SEO is to bring somebody to your site and keep them on your site as long as possible. It almost feels to me like really good software that people find value in will be the new thing that keeps them around longer on your platform and help your site rank better and help, you know, you actually grow your business a little more. I'm curious if, if you have the same thoughts or if you would disagree with that.

I think, like, well, for, for one, like, I love words and, and I think the written word is always going to be super, super valuable. I, I, I do think there's something to what you're saying, which is that to some degree, a lot of the content that is probably better served by a chatgpt, it's like, okay, like, how do I ask for a raise? You know, it's like there's zillions of those SEO articles and like, that's much better from ChatGPT, especially, like, the more generic stuff. I, I still think that, like, for us, like, for, for every, for example, like the audience that we have wants to hear from me and wants to hear from other writers that they know and are not looking for like a generic fact or a generic process. And that's a sort of different thing. That's a smaller, definitely smaller audience but is still like I think incred incredibly like important and valuable. I think on the tools front you may actually see some of the same commoditization because like you don't need to go use a SaaS tool when like artifacts just like spins up a little UI for you and you can just like whatever. So, so it may, that may also happen with software to some degree. And then I think you also have to like wonder, okay, if software tools are the new SEO, like what is the thing that is like pushing people to those tools? Like is Google still? Is it ChatGPT? And if it's ChatGPT, like how and why is ChatGPT like letting those things surface and rank. But I do think that providing people with like rich, let's say multimodal experiences that are, that's not just text, it's not just video, it's maybe it's, it's, it's tools or whatever like that is I think going to be a really legitimate way to like build an audience and build a following and, and all that kind of stuff.

Look, I am always getting questions from people on how I create my thumbnails, graphics and all this content at such a f pace. It's AI, but I know that's easier said than done. Starting is the hardest part. Well, HubSpot has your back. They just dropped a step by step Guide on which AI tools you can use today to 10x your content creation process. If you've been looking to create content with AI, this guide is a total game changer. You can get it right now at the link in the description. Now back to the show. Yeah, yeah, and I totally agree too that when it comes to like the world of content, right, I think as AI becomes, you know, more and more prolific and everybody's using AI to, you know, try to game the system through SEO and things like that. I think it becomes more and more important to have your own voice and to, you know, actually be a voice that people can trust and you know, actually put your face out there, right? There's a lot of stuff you're seeing on YouTube now of like faceless video channels and people are claiming it's all the rage right now to make faceless video channels. But in my mind, if that's the direction everybody's going, the people that actually put their face on YouTube are the ones that are going to be the sort of rising, they're the ones that are going to rise and, you know, stand out.

The sacrifices we make for fame, you know, it's just us.

Yeah. I do wonder, like, why would chatbots send you to other tools in the future if it gets so easy that they could just like create it for you on the fly, like with like, what we're seeing right now. Like, I've been using O1 Pro a lot and like seeing how good it is at software, I can't imagine in another two or three years that any idea you have AI is not just like, cool. Here it is, here it is right now in the window.

Just.

Just use it.

Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, when it comes to the whole like HubSpot conversation, you know, podcasts like this and what they're doing in like other media spaces, I think is like, right. Like you've got podcasts like the Next Wave and My First Million and marketing. It's the grain and the Hustle. And they're starting to do all their newsletters now with the Hustle Daily and, and all that kind of stuff. So it's like HubSpot's becoming like this larger media brand.

The whole SEO game is like changing rapidly. And yeah, it seems like shows like this are a really good bulwark against those kinds of changes which, which have been happening for a long time. It's not just AI. There's. There is that interesting dynamic that, you know, you can see open AI starting trying to react to or trying to head off, which is like, you know, they do deals with publishers and they cite their sources and all that kind of stuff. And I do think that.

They would like to keep a vibrant ecosystem and have partners and all that kind of stuff. And I also think you can see with Google's example that over time the pressure is to keep people on the platform longer and add more ads or do the instant answers or whatever. And I think AI, broad use case, general purpose AI, consumer apps are going to have that same pressure. Like maybe it's not now, but in like 20 years, like when Sam Altman is like, you know, on his island somewhere and like there's another CEO, that's what they're going to have to do. Yeah. And I mean, maybe we'll just be living it, be living in a post capitalist utopia because we'll have AGI or whatever. But like assuming that that's not the case.

That that is a thing and that is a pressure and I think that's a, that's a really interesting thing, but also like all of these new tools open up new opportunities. So like it seems likely to me that yeah, it may, maybe it spins up a whole UI for you for like a specific thing, but like the kind of UI that it makes and the, the way that it does the ui, like we've talked, been talking about is a content format, is a, is a perspective. And it would be surprising to me if they didn't allow brands or businesses or whatever to like make available those tools or those powers within their app to some, just in some way, sort of like an app store type thing. And they've done that like repeatedly. They've tried to do app store type things for a long time. It hasn't quite worked yet, but it'll probably work eventually. So it's, it's like, it's. I, it's not like the death knell of like all independent tools or media or whatever. It's just like it, it's changing and, and, and there will be new opportunities in the old ones. You have to like move on to the new ones.

Yeah, totally. Would you be open to like sharing a little bit of like your workflow for actually building new software? Like how do you validate an idea and then what sort of tools do you use to actually build the idea? And yeah, you know, can you, can you walk us through some of that?

Totally. I think the really cool thing about the current AI landscape is it has like completely reset the table for like what tools are possible. And so that means that there's a lot, a lot, a lot of low hanging fruit because we're all just like figuring out our workflows, right? It's all new. And that wasn't the case two years ago because it was like the apex of the B2B SaaS. Boom. And like every, like every low hanging fruit have been picked, right?

Yeah. There's a clear way you do things. It was all like, it's all been figured out. Yeah, yeah.

And now it's, now it's totally different. So what I do and what like sort of the philosophy at every is.

First I use these tools every day. And by these tools I mean like the more general purpose tools like Claude and ChatGPT and, and cursor and Windsurf and like all that kind of stuff and what ends up happening is you, you end up finding workflows that, that start to work pretty well for you. But once you find a workflow and a chatgpt type tool, it's kind of a pain to just do it over and over and over again. It's not built for that. It's built for this like general purpose thing. And that is always an opportunity to me. So, like, a really good example of that is we have this app called Spiral. And Spiral helps you automate a lot of repetitive creative work. So like, you know, like, for me it's like doing my, my podcast, my podcast descriptions or my podcast Tweets or my YouTube titles or like that, that kind of stuff where it's like, I have a format, I know basically what it should be, but it's. And it's like really important that I get it right. But it's also like fairly repetitive. And what I realized is like, at some point, I guess in like May, that Claude was like really good at that, like if I gave it a few shot prompt with some examples and I was like, okay, here's my. I want you to do, I want you to take a podcast transcript and turn it into a tweet. And like, here's examples of me doing that in the past. Here's a new transcript. Can you like do a tweet? It would like get me 80% there. And then I would just have to like do some modifications. But like, that prompt was like really hard to do all the time. Like, I didn't want to have to redo that all the time. And if I didn't want to have to do it, like, I just knew that my team wasn't going to do it. And so I just spent like two days basically making a, an app called Spiral where you can like, you can you make a spiral. You say like, I want to turn podcast transcripts into tweets. You feed it some examples and then you have like a shareable widget that you can like any time thereafter, like generate more and more and more tweets without having to like reprompt anything. Um, and that's going really well. We have a full time GM for that on that product. His name's Danny. He's really talented. We have almost 10,000 users for it and it's growing really well. And, and that's an example of like you, you find this, like this use case in the general purpose tool and then you can like unbundle it into like its own app. And, and, and the way that I do that is, I mean, it's sort of, it's sort of. I think the, the way Nathan, you, you sort of, you mentioned earlier is like I use Cursor or Windsurf. I kind of go back and forth between the two. They have These like really, really good agentic building environments now where you just type in a chat and it's like it just goes off and does stuff and then it's like it's made like five files and it's like. I have no idea how it all works, but it's fine.

Sometimes it's fine.

Quick, quick, quick question. Do you actually know how to code yourself or is. Are you letting AI write all the code? Okay, you do know how to code.

I do know how to code, but I am letting AI write all the code because I'm very lazy.

Yeah, yeah, but at least you're able to do a little bit of extra troubleshooting if the AI doesn't figure it all out for you.

Yeah, and so, and, and like, you know what's really nice is like O1 and 01 Pro, sometimes these tools still like, because they are still on COD Sonic because like the O. The O series models don't have tool use and they all the agent stuff uses tools. Honestly, when O1 or maybe O3 has tool use, which I think is coming very, very soon, it's going to completely change everything again. But I'll often, like, I'll start in 01 or 01 Pro. I'll say make the plan. I'd paste the plan into cursor, Cursor will do stuff. Then it will get stuck and have a bug. And then I'll just paste it back into 01 and then paste it back. And then every once in a while I'm like, I'm bored of copy pasting, like a lot of when I figure out how this actually works.

But also for me, like to be really clear, like my job right now is I'm mostly prototyping things, prototyping new things and writing about them. And then sometimes they become products, but once they're actual products, we have actual engineers who like actually are like in the code a lot. And so like I could be, you know, reading the code or whatever, but I'm, I'm not doing that right now because it's not really my job.

So. So I want to ask this to you because there's been a lot of discussion around like SaaS projects, SaaS companies having no moat. Right? You've, I'm sure you've heard that a million times over the last couple years. Like, what are your thoughts on that? So let me preface this with saying, like, I personally, like, if I have a problem I need to solve, that's like a fairly simple problem. I've stopped going out and Looking to find if there's a software product for it. I will literally open up Cursor and tell Cursor what I want it to make and it'll write a little Python script for me and it solves that recurring problem for me. I know right now I'm probably like, abnormal in doing that. I don't think most people sort of have that kind of workflow, but I'm wondering if it's going to get to a point where when somebody has a problem they need to solve, instead of turning to SaaS products and paying, you know, some sort of recurring subscription, they're just going to go to one of the AI chat bots that are out there, maybe it's ChatGPT or Claude or one of these tools, and just say, this is a problem I'm trying to solve. It says, okay, here's a little script I wrote that solves the problem.

Yeah.

So I wonder what the future of SaaS looks like.

I mean, I think you're def. You're definitely right in the sense that there are certain little things. There are maybe like a thousand little things that, that come up every day that like, maybe I would have, like, looked for a tool for before, or probably I would have just like suffered through, like doing them manually or whatever that. Now ChatGPT just does it for me, and it's amazing. But I think there's also a big difference between that and like a fully featured, like, SaaS app, which, like, for a power workflow, which I just don't. I just think that things that are more specialized for those kinds of users are going to win. Even when you have AI, even if you theoretically have AGI, and that there are, there are room for those kinds of tools, whether they look like traditional B2B SaaS or whether they look a little bit more like an AI native version of that, whatever that looks like, I think it's going to be more like that. And I think there's also a really interesting question about, like, how much SaaS is actually the right business model. What, what, what I've been seeing a lot more of, and I think is probably a little bit more of a AI native business model is paying per completed task or paying for the value that you get, basically. Because when you have, when you have AI, you're like, you can pay for the job to be done right versus just like the time or the, the, by the month. And I think that's really interesting because SaaS is such a much better business model that, like, if you are currently a SaaS company, you'd probably rather stay a SaaS company. And, and, and that means that there's a lot of opportunities for startups that like, don't necessarily need to keep that, keep that model.

Yeah, performance based SaaS would be incredible. Like, yeah, that's an amazing idea.

I think that's going to happen. I mean you see it already in certain places, like just the LLM APIs are all, are all pay per use or whatever. But I think that'll, that'll filter up through the stack. I mean, we've got other tools that I think are cool. We have a, we have a tool called Sparkle, which is a file organizer. So basically it just sits on your desktop and, and just aut automatically organizes your desktop, your downloads and your documents with AI, which is like really cool and very useful.

Everything is fucking messed for me. So like, but now it's not. And I didn't have to do anything.

That's amazing. I'm always like trying to think about like how to organize my files. I'm like, oh, one day I'm going to organize them all. They're going to be. And I was like, wait a minute, AI is going to eventually do that for me?

Yeah, it's just a matter of time. Another thing that we've been working on that it's actually one of our, one of our writers Michael Taylor has been working on and we're kind of doing it with him.

Is AI is quite good at like acting like a particular kind of person, like simulating a particular kind of person.

And Michael built this tool called Rally that we've been using internally. I think we're going to make a, like every column out of it and then maybe launch it as a SaaS product or as a, as a product that's still TBD. And it really depends on if Michael wants to do it with us, but I think it'd be really cool. And basically what it does is like, for example, if we're coming up with headlines for a podcast.

What we can do is we spin up an audience of like a thousand every people or a thousand hacker news people. And then we can be like, okay, here's my three titles. Like which ones do you like? And it will just like survey the crowd and then tell us what the crowd of LLMs thinks. And it's really cool, it works.

And I thought you were going the opposite side. So actually I thought it was gonna be like the, the person who's helping you create the, the, you know, the taglines or whatever you Fed it a bunch of books from some famous person who's an expert at that. But you do the opposite. Like the audience side. That's. That's.

Yeah, exactly. So it's sort of like wisdom of the crowds. Like ask the audience type stuff, which. Yeah, like right now, like now you have to, like, you just have to try stuff or you have to do AB testing and it takes a long time. You need a big audience or whatever. And we. If you use this, it doesn't. You don't have to. And I think the. It's still, it's very early and it remains to be seen. But like, I feel quite confident that the results will align to some degree with like, what you would actually find out in the world. And it's. That's really fucking cool.

Wow, interesting.

So I actually do have one other sort of little rabbit hole I do want to go down with you. So I believe you do some investing outside of every as. As well. Right. So you have some investments. I believe you work with Sequoia Capital as well. Is that correct? How do you. What are you looking for in investments? I'm assuming you're probably focused more on AI. I could be totally wrong. I'm just sort of guessing. But what are you looking for in investments? Like what, What's. How do you find something that stands out to you?

The investments that I've done usually are.

Places where I've had particular thesis, a particular thesis I've been writing about and thinking about, or I just know the founder and I know they're really awesome and I just like, want to get into whatever they do. And yeah, I do invest in AI. I have found, honestly that a lot of AI companies are just raising at such gigantic valuations that like it. I haven't actually pulled the trigger on that many deals, even if I really like the person or really like the. The thing they're building, because it's just like a 40, $50 million seed round is just like crazy to me.

But like, generally it's like, is it. Is it a thesis that in a space that I, that I care about or like an idea that I care about? And I have a bunch of articles that sort of lay out all that stuff and I can give you a little preview about the things I care about right now. Like, for example, one is the future of science, like how AI might change how we do science is a big one for me. Another one is, yeah, just do I. Do I really like the founder? And then the last one is just, do I use the product. Do I like it? I think the proof's in the pudding a lot in those, in those situations. And.

You can tell immediately when someone's built something awesome because you just.

Yeah, yeah. So, so when you say like, you know, you have a thesis on it, it's kind of, you're kind of saying like, this is something I wish was in the world, but then you actually find something that does that, that, that looks, that's something that you'd want to invest in.

Yeah, exactly.

Or I assume some way the world's changing and how a product would fit into that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I, I love that stuff and I, I, I especially, like, get really excited about a lot of the science stuff. Like I was really nerding out about like that matter gen that just came out from Microsoft the other day. I think that's something that's really exciting and I think there's a lot more stuff that's going to pop up sort of in, in that world over the next, you know, this year. I think we're going to see a lot of sort of materials science sort of things come out of AI this year. And so that, that to me is super, super exciting. But on that note, I really, really appreciate you hanging out with us today. Where should people go after listening to this episode? Is there a specific social media account you want to shout out your website? Let us know where to check you out.

Pick one or two of the products, not like five of them.

You know. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. You can find me on X at Dan Shipper S, H, I, P, P, E, R. Or at every also on X. And then the website is every to. You can find our newsletter, you can find all of our products, the courses we offer, all that kind of stuff. And it's been, it's been awesome chatting with you guys. Yeah, it's been great.

Yeah, thanks so much, Dan. Really, really appreciate you. And thanks everybody to listening to this episode. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We're also available on YouTube if you want to see our faces, actually talk to each other. And thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you in the next.

Sam.