Jason M. Lemkin says SaaS competitive edges have shrunk from years to months. EchoSign had years before DocuSign copied it. Now startups get cloned in weeks, big companies in months, making moats nearly impossible to build.
Maybe next year I'll have a different answer. I'm still, I mean, I know a lot, but I'm still in learning mode. Just realize that, like, your competitive edge is shrinking in time. Shrinking in time. When I started in SaaS, you basically had you build something really slick and then you'd have about 1812 to 18 months until you were copied by a startup. Then you'd have like five years until a big company copied you. Okay, I know I'm really dating myself, but for fun, when we launched Echo Sign DocuSign, which is like $18 billion company today, it only worked in Windows and only was partially web based. We had like 18 months before they decided, hey, we're going to copy what Lemkin and his team did. Like, we needed to get users, they needed to see traction. They had traction. And printer drivers for real estate didn't seem worth their trouble. Then it took like five years to six years for Adobe to decide to copy it. Then the copy didn't work and they bought us. Then like Google just launched a clone like last year, like a decade later. Like, that's the way it used to happen. Not too recently, I invested in a startup that I love. Incredible, incredibly powerful startup. Within two weeks, they had like four clones. Two weeks. And then I talked with a massive company that's building a clone themselves. It'll be out this year. So the rate at which, this is where I think it's not that we're going to rebuild Workday and Salesforce and Oracle, but our competitive edges are going to be measured in months and when they used to be years. And that compounds, that compounds. And if you can't run at that pace, I don't see how you're going to, you're going to, you're going to fall to 0% growth. So that's what I worry about is this rate of iteration. And so it's not exactly the narrative of you can prompt everything in ChatGPT, but, but our, our moats are all weakening. Our moats are all shallower. And the pace of copying and improving, I mean, literally this, it's funny, this. So Google just launched a replit, lovable clone.
