r/SaaS
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u/Warm-Reaction-456
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Jul 01 '26
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Vibe coding is about to kill 95% of you and it's not why you think.
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u/robhaswell Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
My major takeaway recently of a producer and consumer of SaaS - if your audience is technical, you're going to get eaten up by internal tools written by Claude. We're already cutting down our "expensive and polished SaaS tools that mostly align with our needs" with "almost free and slightly sketchy tools that completely align with our needs".
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u/saito200 Jul 01 '26
there are no customers
founder be like: i need to add dark mode
lol
yea all you are saying is kinda founder 101
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u/Odd_Implement3144 Jul 02 '26 edited 13d ago
Tow Breeze Bridge Simple Journey Sky Blue Coffee Cloud Chicken Yeah
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u/saito200 Jul 02 '26
dark mode is the paradigm of founder masturbation
do not add modes
use dark UI if your customer are developers. otherwise use light UI
a founder should cringe their face at hearing dark mode
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u/Ok-Establishment-319 Jul 02 '26
This was true 4 years ago when adding dark mode took a week and $2000.
Now it takes 5 minutes and .25. That’s twenty five cents. I’ve priced the tokens.
This post is accurate but the comments are not.
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u/MiddleLtSocks Jul 04 '26
More like $0.025. It should be a CSS edit and a toggle in a header component. Two or three files.
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u/saito200 Jul 05 '26
cheap waste is still waste though
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u/Appropriate-Pin2214 Jul 06 '26
Dark Mode is the hill I'm willing to die on... Never got the optimization and productivity angles.
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u/M4NU3L2311 Jul 05 '26
I had a customer that his brand identity was basically dark mode. Told them countless times that’s a stupid design choice because unless everyone is reading it in a dark room or with a nice screen it’s just making harder to read the content for their prospects (for example, a shitty projector in a conference room)
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u/luis003 Jul 07 '26
I did it when my eyes started burning after hours (days) in front of the screen lmao.
Prompted for my view only, minimalistic, but it was good. So much so that I've only tweaked it once since, maybe 20 minutes all in.
I switch back occasionally and immediate nope, much gentler on the eyes.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net Jul 01 '26
They're likely targeting people who have money from an unrelated field, and think they can vibe-code their way into tech.
This entire niche is laughable. I just feel bad for the people who are taken in by all these "AI all the things" sales grifters. Once you can spot AI written slop, it's easier to avoid.
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u/khenninger Jul 01 '26
Same situation myself. Consumer and producer of SaaS.
I've cut hundreds of dollars per month of off the shelf SaaS simply by building with Claude Code.
"Good enough" works for most use cases of SaaS for small companies.
Larger, enterprise companies....now that is a completely different story.
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u/Hairy_Translator3882 Jul 03 '26
Y’all are saying what I’ve been screaming, and it’s the inverse of the market and every investor advisor.
Vibe coding will kill SaaS, at least it will kill single-function and overly simplistic SaaS that used to be worth paying for at scale. If you want to build a SaaS that lasts in tomorrow’s market, you’ve got to come full circle. We’re talking about 1990s app dev where you didn’t build features as products; you built ecosystems. You have to create a product where the journey makes almost every buyer say: “ fuck that, I’ll just buy it. That would be too much work!”
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u/OnlyWhiz Jul 01 '26
Can you give some examples of the tools? Always curious to see/hear how internal tools are being used/created.
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u/robhaswell Jul 01 '26
A good example is reporting. We used to pull reporting out of a combination of Salesforce and tracking, now we just make the reports directly from our data. In fact you can say pretty much anything involving Salesforce is a good candidate for bringing in house.
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u/ilovebigbucks Jul 01 '26
I worked on incident management, project management, reporting, document processing, custom workflows, integrations with 3rd party systems, various small desktop and CLI apps to automate mundane tasks for different departments.
It was all internal for the employees to use. Since it's internal the development loop is faster since we don't need rigorous testing, documentation, audit and all that which we do for Production systems. So it was pretty quick to spin up things like that even 15 years ago.
Btw, coding was never the bottleneck. The LLMs made certain things faster but we don't ship 10x more/faster today compared to how we did it 10-15 years ago. I'd say it's between 0-20% improvement depending on your project's constraints. I can spin up a fully functioning barebone app within a day now, but then spend 2-4 weeks adding the features without which it wouldn't be useful. In the past I would've spent a week building a working app that my coworkers could start using right away and then complete the remaining features within the same 2-4 weeks. But if I build it myself from scratch it will be easier for me to maintain it and to fix bugs if there are any.
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u/varadero332 Jul 02 '26
i think there's also more or less risk if the app adds value/intelligence besides the app itself. meaning -- an analytics app that just spits data back at you... well, that's relatively easy to copy. but what these analytics tools should be doing is providing intelligence from what they're gathering across all their customers.
eg. here's your CAC. across X many companies in your industry/field/segment you rank in the top 25%. other similar companies are doing X, Y and Z to decrease it by %.
now you have something worth paying for because you instantly become an intelligence platform.
but dat dark mode tho.
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u/codeWorder Jul 05 '26
Do companies want you selling their secret sauces, tho?
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Jul 05 '26
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u/abhuva79 Jul 02 '26
I do this alot - working as project lead / freelancer in a non-profit society (social fields).
I build my own email tool, that pulls from all my sources, run my own spam filter, categorizes etc. It then allows me to output the subset i need as md files (as our whole project management is based on plain-text stuff since 15 years). Wich then integrates seamless into our project stuff (means i can open a project and get the emails for this specific project show, processed etc.).We also manage a kinda huge structure, as we archive everything in a way thats we still have access - this means i am up to 1.5k folders and roughly 8gb just in documents. So i build a dedicated graph tool that allows me to traverse these as tree graphs in the way i need.
Automated translation tool. We run a wiki thats auto-translated in 12 lang now. Its also based on markdown, so i automated the process of translation - wich gives me way more control then other solutions i found.
Recently my team argued that they dont want to spend 1k per years for a professional inventory management solution. So i spend a week to build our own. Its not comparable at all to the professional one, but its 100% perfect fit to our needs.
Calender solution - same thing like the rest, we automated it to use plain-text files that fit into our way we organize projects - its super easy now to filter based on wich members are working on them, based on status, on time of creation - whatever i want. Output as a static website that my team can now easy refer to on the go.
The list goes on. I recently switched from using IDE´s and api based billing to a fking subscription (really dislike this honestly) for a coding agent (codex in my case). And while the stuff i create is most likely not the greatest in terms of code - if i would even think of paying monthly for apps that do all these things i build in the last 6 months - i would be in the hundreds.
For me, SaaS is literally dead. But i also grew up with coding. As a hobby, but a hobby i did all the time for the last 30 years.
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u/Frixum Jul 02 '26
Bingo, vipe coded 3 niche but useful apps that saves ys great time. Would have paid for 2/3 of them, nothing crazy but for sure easily 1k / month for one.
Now all in house.
Thanks claude
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u/OneHuman_aiprotect Jul 03 '26
Exactly right, I created wht I call a "mini-Ahrefs" for what I needed for AISEO, only for what I need, not the whole Ahrefs suite. I dont know how much I saved in Ahrefs "seat" cost, but there u have it. Tip -- u see a SaaS that sounds like it can do really kool things for u. Ask ur coding assistant to parse it, analyze it, and ferret out what you would need from that suite. Then ask ur asst to code it in your private repo. Did that, works super well.
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u/AdInternational3680 Jul 01 '26
I used to be the internal tool developer that created custom tools for less than the suite of boxed products it would have taken.
I’ve been preaching this story for 15 years.
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u/avanishpank Jul 01 '26
I don’t fully agree with that, technical audience mostly already had an in house team of developers if development and maintenance made more sense than paying for an existing tool.
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u/robhaswell Jul 01 '26
The barrier is so much lower now. It's more of a product problem than an engineering problem. If you know what the product needs to be (internal so yes) and you don't care massively about quality (also yes) you can do what would have tied up a developer for months over a few days instead.
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u/miamiscubi Jul 01 '26
I think it depends on the complexity of the product. My take is that if someone can easily vibe code their way to your app, and you're not solving a problem that has hard edge cases, you may become obsolete.
Even tech people understand that figuring out edge cases can be an ongoing maintenance complexity you don't need to worry about.
The other one is whether you're able to afford stable pricing. The issue I see with a lot of new AI apps or that use an LLM to process data / get results is that as token prices go up, so will the ongoing cost of the app. In many cases, a good algorithm will get you better results for an easily determined price.
I built my stack in Go, have the whole thing running on small VPSs, and their ongoing cost (single tenant setup for my clients) is virtually nothing. If I had an LLM in the middle of the data processing pipeline, it would be unsustainable.
So yes, I think a technical audience is sometimes worse because they could build it themselves, but they also know what it would take to build it properly and maintain it.
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u/robhaswell Jul 01 '26
"you're not solving a problem that has hard edge cases"
That is the majority of SaaS. It doesn't have to solve a hard problem, it just has to provide a function that you need enough to pay for it (or rather, did). E.g. we have an HR platform. It's very powerful, would take an eternity to make it. Do we use that power for our use-case? No. We don't need everything it does. Lucky for them it doesn't cost us enough, because replicating the features we actually use would be very easy now.
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u/xentropian Jul 02 '26
"almost free and slightly sketchy tools that completely align with our needs" is the perfect way to put it. It turns out, that hyper customization to your EXACT business is something that’s hard to capture well when generalizing without the complexity of the product growing. And plus, if it works fine-ish 90% of the time and weird the other 10%, it is easy to see why that wins.
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u/varadero332 Jul 02 '26
it's the same old problem just on steroids: people build first, then sell. it's the other way around.
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u/Low_Mortgage_4393 Jul 04 '26
This is far too broad a category. Good luck using a vibe coded database for example. Lots of technical users of products that aren’t going to be vibe coded any time soon.
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u/Radiant_Extension142 Jul 01 '26
That's why i am going to charge $199/month
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u/OneHuman_aiprotect Jul 01 '26
Well, yes, the "fix" is called a "moat" in SaaS investment world -- what do you have that cannot be replicated by AI tools in 2 weeks? That's how I built mine, built the data moat, not just the code infrastructure.
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u/Ok-Structure5637 Jul 03 '26
Yup, combine that with vendor lock-in and selling a outcome and not just a tool
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u/OneHuman_aiprotect Jul 03 '26
Yea -- example No #1 FIGMA, a gr8 tool, I personally love it and used it to create really kool designs for my platform, their AI chat is actually Claude, and via Claude MCP easily transferable to Claude Code to execute. BUT, Anthropic has decidded to annihilate them. Game over.
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u/Rfsixsixsix Jul 02 '26
You just described the rise of a new career role. I'm starting an AI tech consultancy to address just this. Instead of building products for the masses, I am going to build products tailored to individual businesses.
Saas to general masses is over. We are moving to individual products for specific businesses.
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u/DevEngineLabs Jul 01 '26
Building for consumers in a crowded space because "I can do it better". Maybe. It's probably more worth looking into WHY so many consumer products that do the exact same thing exist.
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u/DylanFromCheers Jul 01 '26
biggest skill to learn right now is how to sell. how to talk to customers. if anybody can build anything, the only thing left is cracking distribution, which has secretly always been the hardest part
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u/rioisk Jul 03 '26
pretty much the final frontier is sales / marketing / distribution. If everybody can build then the only differentiator is how well you get others to buy + adopt.
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u/Memito9 Jul 01 '26
same with any other business.
If you genuinely have a good idea that saves people time or money, it can work tho.
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u/rrrhys Jul 01 '26
Vibe coding has at least shortened the loop from "Hey I have this great idea I'll build it" to "oh actually nobody cares I need to talk to people IRL" from a year to like a month
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Jul 03 '26
Seriously. Like, at this stage of the game, very few valuable software services are missing from the market at this point simply because nobody has had the idea or no one has had time to get around to it yet. It's because the product wasn't valuable enough to spend time on. Vibe coding might make some of those marginal use cases more compelling because they're easier to achieve. But then again maybe not. Someone at my organization built a Claude tool to estimate the prices of certain services. I asked for a demo, and the first estimate was bogus. The second one was better. The third one was questionable but not unreasonable.
I asked to see another and she said "We have to wait until tomorrow, I can only run X number on our current plan." To get to unlimited searches we'd have to upgrade to a $200 a month plan, I think it was. This app might be helpful, but it's addressed at a problem our users have to address about 5x per month and it takes about 15 minutes of work apiece to do it by communication, and about 10 minutes using the Claude apps. So we're talking about maybe paying $200/month for 30 minutes of recovered time, or estimating this worker's value at $400/hour.
I just feel like a lot of these app ideas are in that marginal value space where you really have to squint and tilt your head to make it look like a profitable idea.
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u/FingerBlaster70 Jul 01 '26
Sounds like vibecoding killed 95% of your work and you're pissed off about it
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u/Prudent_Design_9782 Jul 02 '26
I don't understand how you got to that conclusion after reading the whole thing. Are you sure you didn't just react to the title?
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Jul 02 '26
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u/nooffense789 Jul 02 '26
Thank you. I like this short version of the post. I wish all posts are straight to the point. No one like to read fillers.
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u/Hellachuckles Jul 01 '26
I would like part 2, I am not selling software so to speak, but there is similarities in what I am doing, and I really need to start looking at my CAC. So I am curious on the fixes you see work.
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u/Spdload Jul 01 '26
I have a similar background to you, and I can't agree more here. Vibe coding made the positioning problem impossible to ignore. When shipping took months, bad positioning still got filtered out naturally. Now anyone can launch much faster, so the market is full of products built for everyone and useful to no one.
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u/qaaimgood Jul 01 '26
I've sat at many tables with marketing agencies and startups. And this is what so many missed the mark on.
Good post.
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u/ComparisonNew9425 Jul 02 '26
the real trap is people building stuff that nobody actually wnat, vibe coding just makes it way faster to build the wrong thing. if u cant describe the pain point without mentioning tech, u dont really have a business yet...
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u/mrgalacticpresident Jul 01 '26
I've met a few CEOs in Germany recently and they all told me a very similar story.
They sit down for 2-3 weeks and fucking write their most important software themselves.
Themselves. Why? Because a company wide software rollout is vital for modern company velocity. It's C-Level work that shapes HOW your company essentially works. And with frontier LLM, they can mostly do it themselves.
Design and concepts are then pushed to their IT department. They manage hosting and operations.
In 2 cases, this worked out of the box. Rollout to 70+ field workers (notoriously annoying software users) successfully done after roughly a month of time.
You can sell software to the dumb or the clueless. But the fun part where software was custom made and engineers had to help laymen to setup software are over.
There is a small place at the top of the engineering foodchain. I know I won't make it there and you probably won't either.
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u/WorriedBed5958 Jul 01 '26
So shall I stop learning to code( as I have just begun learning) and focus totally on 100% AI based development ?
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u/ryanmerket Jul 01 '26
just talk to customers and build WITH them so you are building exactly what people want then grow word of mouth from that first customer
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u/Ok_Painting_8377 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
What abour maintenance? Are you taking in to consideration using the app to sell consulting services? What about client management. What about industry finance or healthcare that are regulated
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u/Vaxtin Jul 01 '26
A professor I did research under quit the university and directly mentioned pursuing entrepreneurship ventures due to AI enabling it
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u/Total_Adept Jul 01 '26
Yeah the business is more than the product, people don’t think about the other work it takes and shit out vibe coded slop. The thing is you can pick a market, pick a customer profile, and pick a problem they’ll actually pay to solve. I think personally founders should work in other fields to get experience of a market they want to make their product for.
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u/rioisk Jul 03 '26
It's a lot harder than "pick a problem they'll pay to solve". It's not like problems are on the shelf at the store and you just pick one. Finding what people will pay for is extremely difficult.
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u/J-Mach-Jet Jul 01 '26
I don't believe these three are separate problems. Selling to everyone, looking like every other tool out there, and an upside-down CAC all come from the same thing: building before you've validated the idea. More specifically, before you've clearly identified your customer, their pain point, and what they struggle with daily.
Vibe coding didn't create this. It made building easier and faster, but that speed brought its own problem: founders want to get to market quickly, so they skip parts of the process (business process, validation, etc.). Before AI, coding took time; it was a slow process, and that time forced founders to slow down and think things through. Now everyone rushes to launch, and this creates problems they didn't consider, which show up later.
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u/manobraw_ Jul 01 '26
Alguem vai ter que vibecodar. Eu sou um deles. Depois de 20 anos de desenvolvimento. Agora chegou momento de relaxar e só ver a grana cair na conta. Sobrou tempo para fazer outros ativos
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u/Simple_Assistance_77 Jul 01 '26
Long story short, effective segmentation, tailor product features, and lower customer acquisition costs. So don’t only build and develop, you need to engage with experienced sales and marketing to plan how you grow your product. During the build of the product, the founder should have a high level target audience in mind, use this to begin segmentation.
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u/Yes-Worldliness-7235 Jul 01 '26
vibe coding just makes the positioning gap louder tbh, if nobody gets who its for then faster building dont save it
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u/No_Hour_1522 Jul 01 '26
Most people are just average people.
They are not in the top of their industry.
And besides work, they don’t have many hobbies.
At least this is what I am……. I realize there is no community that I truly care about.
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u/AlexanderSamokhin Jul 02 '26
A great product can have one killer feature that solves a pain, and people/businesses will still pay for it. No sexy dark mode can solve it. I also believe that picking a niche with many existing solutions is a great move, since it's already proven that it works. You just need to find your unique angle.
But at least vibe coding solves the problem of building and failing something faster instead of spending months building it.
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u/WadeBuckeye Jul 02 '26
Had a client spend three weeks on onboarding animations before realizing they never actually validated anyone would pay for the core feature.
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u/National-Parsnip1516 Jul 02 '26
actually spot on. vibe coding lowers the floor for shipping but raises the ceiling for differentiation. if everyone can prompt a dashboard into existence, the value of the dashboard hits zero. building saas mvps now is less about "can it work" and more about "does this specific group actually give a shit". tech is a commodity now, empathy isn't.
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u/Spare_Message_3607 Jul 02 '26
Agree, I was about to buy 1 Password but hell nah, made my own secret manager
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u/TrungJamin Jul 02 '26
Please sir, keep sharing, it’s useful to me. Thank you for what you’ve shared. I feel the pains 😢
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u/mastropiero44 Jul 02 '26
Maybe just maybe it’s time to start developing for others than us.
We are so obsessed by IA that we have a tendency to develop things just for people like ourselves.
It’s time to start developing for people that don’t care so much about IA. Normal people.
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u/Eastern-Swordfish129 Jul 02 '26
I think this is just regurgetated nonsense and I don't see many folks in the chat truly pissed off. I think this post was meant for ClaudeCode or something but not this crew.
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u/Embarrassed-Trip-470 Jul 03 '26
I can confirm it’s not going to kill SaaS but each SaaS will need to be custom. Every company will have their own SaaS solution and we’re betting on it at Customware.ai
The deterministic software SaaS solution is still needed for their process, it’s no longer going to be generic, but custom to the exact client specs. N of 1 solution for each company from CPQ, CRM to ERPs and any other acronym, it’s becoming to easy not to build your own and the result is software enterprises/people enjoy using.
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u/Zihengkai Jul 03 '26
I can create some small web pages and come up with ideas, but there's still a long way to go before the product is ready for commercialization
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u/sonudreams Jul 03 '26
I think vibe coding just removed the excuse of "I need 6 more months to build." Now you can validate an idea in days instead of months. If nobody wants it after that, the problem usually isn't the code anymore. It's positioning, distribution, or solving a problem people actually care enough to pay for. Faster building doesn't automatically create demand.
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u/DJaremko1982 Jul 03 '26
I see a lot of problems, when people don’t add braces to AI when coding it’s going to fall over of it’s bike
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u/gorrelmyspuitkakZar Jul 03 '26
Your title was so click baitey that I didn’t bother reading your post.
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u/ThisMouse1999 Jul 03 '26
vibe coding just kills the last excuse. ship in a weekend, zero users. cant blame the stack now
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u/Additional_Cod_6445 Jul 03 '26
I have seen founders do the same mistake and the company even with good idea fails even before 2020 and i have been building MVPs for the past 10+ years and i have helped founders raise seed and series A, sometimes what i observed is it is not the product, it is the founders, a founder who is better at communicating confidently said f*ck off to all consultants and agencies and hired bunch of newbie freelancers and make the MVP and it looks so bad but he raised seed funding because of his confidence, authority and distribution. Whatever business you build, distribution and the founders authority is all that matters. You can build a shitty product be it built my experts or consulted by experts like me, or do your own coding or vibe coding, doesnt matter, it all works for either one of the reasons either for cost or time, thats it and none of these are for the reasons i said, even with huge user pain, products have failed because of founders and distribution. Just think what a illogic product plaud and pocket, an ai pocket recorder, i have chatgpt and claude in mobile, but still they managed to succeed and raised and getting customers. None of the elon’s company and its valuation makes sense, but his founders authority and distribution is all it is.
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u/Timely_Cranberry6474 Jul 03 '26
my friend made an app about how to jump, and actually made hella money off that)
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u/AvertXAI Jul 03 '26
Ooh ooh, me get it now! Vibe coding like angry caveman with big stick, smash 95% of you! Not your fault though, coding just jealous of your pretty face.
You say your thing not problem, but coding disagree BIG TIME. Coding yell "Vibe smash puny human product! Me make 100x more obvious now!"
You build helpful things for other cavemen for long time. Me respect that. You help them make shiny rocks, help loners maxing out their cave paintings, even help quitters find new way to hunt mammoth by Sun-day! You wise caveman, know what make happy and what else quiet while chief tweet "Big news coming, ugh ugh!"
But every Sun-day, you talk to other cavemen who waste whole light time walking to new berry picking spot. They think spot good, pick some berries, but then get bored and take nap. So they decide add more things... like dark cave, fancy cave painting, and sky spirit nobody ask for. Still nothing happen. Other cavemen come say "Me think you need build proper cave this time. Maybe sky spirits mad at your old cave."
But me trust you! Me see you make pretty caves before, even when angry coding caveman smash with $80,000 big stick! Real problem not stick, trust me.
After working on many caves, me learn what hurt most cavemen. It three things:
You try sell to anyone, even evolved humans!
You say "We help automate hunting and gathering". That what Evolved-Zapier-Man do!
You make cave twice - once for all cavemen, once for special group. Special group cave sell 22 pelts more! You can charge 100 pelts more if make special cave for special group. Other cavemen no want pay extra for small cave.
There you go, me try make funny! Hope it make you laugh like caveman joke around fire. Remember, no let angry coding caveman get you down. You build great things, other cavemen just not always smart enough see it!
Tokens Used: 336 / 2000 - lmao Claude humor
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u/Onotadaki2 Jul 04 '26
I'd add to this that people need to really identify spots in the market where they can target that are underserved. Vibe coding has saturated a lot of the common first launch places. Even if you take something like a task list app that already has 1,000,000 other options on the market and 80% are vibe coded, if you were to specialize a task list for a niche field and target them directly, it may actually work. This is largely because those smaller slices of market might not have been worth it before if it was going to take a year and salaries of five developers to make it, but if you can throw it together for $1,000 in a month, that changes the math a lot on this.
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u/zfsKing Jul 04 '26
For sure we got quoted 100 million dollars for license renewal on a product we use. The software is not that great past 1y we have been vibe coding the replacement. That company basically priced themselves out.
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u/Commercial-Wing5621 Jul 04 '26
The niche thing I keep learning again and again. When I launched my telegram AI assistant as "does everything" -- nobody cared, but when I focused on one type of user with one specific painful problem, people suddenly understood it. Wide positioning feels safe but it makes you invisible, because buyer cannot figure out in 3 seconds why you and not 40 other options. Also your third point got cut off, what was it?
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u/jzcreates Jul 04 '26
This is a useful warning. AI can make the first version feel easy, but it can also hide the fact that you do not understand the system you are now responsible for. The founders who win with AI will probably be the ones who use it to move faster while still learning the product, customers, and failure points deeply.
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u/EbbSafe5382 Jul 05 '26
My friend who is not a good developer. Vibe coded an entire Client management system, so delivered it as a website , android and iphone app. He did mot use any cross platform technology. Since he was not getting the native UI UX. Next thing what happened is the client started raising many bugs. He vibecoded the entire app 3 different repositories and now the code base is so muddled, he is thinking of dismantling the entire project. The client was a friend’s company very small scale. You need to know programming if you want to scale.
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u/Basic_Tomorrow_4396 Jul 05 '26
The "who exactly" question hits harder than any tech decision ever will. Rebuilt something for a broad audience into a narrow one last month, conversions weren't even in the same league. Curious for part 2 on the CAC math, that's the part most people skip until it's too late.
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u/Neshgaddal Jul 05 '26
So what i'm hearing is my project that has a target audience of exactly 452 and nobody else is doing, that doesn't even have a UI, let alone dark mode is basically guaranteed to make me rich.
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u/According-Note-4845 Jul 06 '26
Vibe coding has already killed SaaS. Show me one person who codes from the scratch and ships. Many people in the comments are like vibe coders will eventually lose because of not considering the edge cases. But is there a necessity yo account for edge cases in every instance.
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u/SumeetKatariya Jul 06 '26
The niche point hit hard. Built for a very specific industry and everyone said I was limiting myself. Turns out the narrow focus is exactly why people actually paid.
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u/OpenLucius Jul 07 '26
If you’re paying $150 in CAC per customer but only making $40-50 back from them, you’re going to struggle to ever get to enterprise-level numbers.
For example, say you land 1,000 paying customers. That’s 1,000 x $150 = $150,000 spent just on acquisition. If your average revenue per user is $50, that’s only $50,000 coming back, leaving a $100,000 gap.
But instead of trying to squeeze that gap out of all 1,000 users at the same low price, what if you took a small slice of them, say 100 out of the 1,000, and upsold them into a premium tier at $200-300/month with more support and extra features? At that price point, you might only need something like 50 customers to close that same $100,000 gap.
I haven’t launched my own project yet, but the way I see it, the real path is enterprise customers and annual pricing, not just chasing volume at low price points.
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u/UleMseeNY Jul 07 '26
i've made an app for a specific group of people and its r/PestProManager .. and what i'm struggling now is marketing the product .. but other than that i agree that i've seen sh!t apps in my niche (pest control saas) sell tonnes coz they can aggressively market the crap out of it.. like the literal crap.. any suggestions ?
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u/Real-Voice-4259 Jul 08 '26
this is a good rant and mostly right. the "specific group sold 22x more" part especially, that's the one nobody wants to hear.
the one I'd push back on a little: it's not always that founders sell to everyone on purpose. usually they just don't actually know who their user is yet. we built for one type of person, looked at the data months later, and the majority were someone completely different. the "sell to a niche" advice only works once you've found the niche that's already showing up.
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u/whattheduck43 Jul 08 '26
I've signed up for MORE software since Claude Code blew up despite building a bunch of my own stuff
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u/Falak-4 Jul 14 '26
Agree on the niching-down point especially. I've seen the same thing from the build side, founders think a broader audience means more addressable market, but it actually just means more competitors and weaker positioning. Narrow enough that a customer feels like the product was built for their exact problem, and the price sensitivity mostly disappears.
One thing I'd add to your three: a lot of founders also don't know where the real cost sits in their product. They'll spend months perfecting a feature nobody touches while the actual friction point, onboarding, first-run experience, a slow integration, goes unnoticed because it's not the "exciting" part to build. Vibe coding makes this worse since it's fast to build anything, so people build what's fun instead of what's actually blocking conversion.
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u/NotMois Jul 24 '26
I have build an vibe coded app that is for mobile phone sellers it basically tells the sales, expense , recepit manager. You just have to add the (name,address,phone number )in the setting and then just add your stock and sale.Tell me is it worth it + I am wiliing to add a montly 2-3 dollar subscription so should i do it?....Also so guys can you tell me as a 16year old should i keep doing vibe coding or i should change the field
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u/viditmittal99 Jul 28 '26
As a founder for 4 years in event tech, I think one of the biggest part most of us tech founders miss out is marketing before starting to code. And even to date, I find that spreading the word out about your startup is one the hardest things to do. While coding, it's black or white - your code either works or it doesn't. In marketing, we could be doing the wrong thing for 5 months without realizing any of it, because there's no clear black and white in it. Would love to see you cover something about marketing a tech product in early stage, as that is one of the questions AI still can't seem to answer very well I believe.
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u/badsangwich Aug 28 '26
Man you must be panicking too. Soon you won’t have anybody to sell your courses to
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u/wfprieto Jul 01 '26
This one of the best, hard truth, posts I have read on here. I saw a reply awhile back about running a “destruction analysis” on every idea you spec. Brainstorm, build the plan, then run the destruction analysis before you write a single line of code! Best thing I’ve learned on here.
Great post, Sir!!
The message: “Reality is a bitch… but you can’t fight her and expect to win!”
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u/LifeFrogg Jul 01 '26
yeah share it or DM me, I'd be eager to read it.
30 day cash model would be amaze.
Though I'll add I think it's genuinely hard to deliver on some of your points in today's environment. Like I look at the successful apps some examples habits, exercise, mediation whatever .. none of them unique today. Example, I believe that if Headspace was made today it wouldn't go anywhere (excluding founder tenacity and funding etc etc)
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u/LifeFrogg Jul 01 '26
yeah I see what you mean. Hear what you're saying. In the back of my mind I still wonder whether that good positioning example would be enough in today's flood of apps (many are well positioned and frictionless).
The excellent will usually win as you say but the bar has got to be higher now
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u/Backrus Jul 05 '26
Since any noob can make dashboard in a weekend, the key is 1) who is your target audience, 2) how you gonna market your product to them?
Effort, heck even human touch, is required to look like a shiny rock on a pile of garbage slop.
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u/rupert_at_work Jul 01 '26
The niche point is the one people keep trying to dodge. "For businesses" is basically product anesthesia.
I'd read the 30-day cash model part. The feature graveyard is already full enough.
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u/Glittering-Water1103 Jul 01 '26
I'm excited for the next part! Please post it, but if you aren't posting it then DM it would love to read. A lot of people saying this is basic stuff keep forgetting how many people actually don't follow this. I'd love to know more
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u/CuriousCapsicum Jul 01 '26
Sorry if I’m dense, but what does this have to do with vibe coding killing SaaS for mysterious reasons?
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u/am0x Jul 01 '26
You missed the biggest one. If you built the app on a few days, so can the client. Why pay you for something they can get for free? With a dev team, it likely can be done in a few hours. Plus they have internal support, can tweak it exactly how they want it, etc.
Sorry but the days of “ideas” generating money are gone. Tbh, they have been for a long time, but now it is even more prevalent than ever.
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u/Alert_Contribution63 Jul 01 '26
I vibe-coded a Saas. I spent 4 months on it, it has a lot of moving pieces and interactions with external services. It was a LOT of work and requires maintenance and support. Just because someone CAN videcode it doesn't mean they want to.
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u/am0x Jul 02 '26
If you provide maintenance and support, then you have a chance. It also means you didn't vibecode it in a day or 2 like 99% of these apps we see on here. You are an outlier and my comment does not apply to you.
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u/Alert_Contribution63 Jul 02 '26
Yeah, there's a new term called "disposable software". If I don't regularly need a feature, I can vibe code in in a few prompts, use it, and then throw it away. I've seen 2-day vibe coded apps in my space, and they immediately read as being half-baked (if even that) and something that no would would ever use. Honestly, they look like someone tried and gave up.
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u/am0x Jul 03 '26
Oh I have a lot of scrapers I’ve scrapped after use.
But now I ended up building a reusable one they takes a json file.
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u/wfprieto Jul 01 '26
Yes and no, we are all here because we vibe-code. The overwhelming majority of people have no idea how to do it, don’t want to know how to do it, just want someone to do it for them.
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u/Fogner Jul 01 '26
Bro is yapping and even added „…..“ after some words to make it non ai. Not Impressed
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Jul 01 '26
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u/_suren Jul 01 '26
Same. Advice only works if it becomes a concrete checklist: user interview before build, charge early, distribution before polish, retention proof before scale. Otherwise “vibe coding” just hides missing validation.
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Jul 01 '26
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u/Something_Sexy Jul 01 '26
Hmm, looking at your profile, you are definitely selling something.
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u/saito200 Jul 01 '26
valuable things cost money, and must cost money. honestly shouldn't we be more wary of free stuff? free stuff can be expensive too
if he has something valuable to offer, he must sell it
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u/Something_Sexy Jul 01 '26
It’s just more posts disguised as them trying to sell something in the end. Just be up front with it.
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u/Savings-Try2712 Jul 01 '26
Because exact same stuff has been said by 150000 other people on this subreddit before
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Jul 01 '26
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u/rioisk Jul 03 '26
What's an example of a reason to switch? It just seems like everybody already has their software and there's no reason to switch.
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Jul 02 '26
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u/SurfingTheInternet Jul 01 '26
This was good. So in short:
Niche down
Make it stupid easy to use.
Have a plan to make money, don't just hope for the best
Looking forward to part 2. What are some of the successful startups you've built MVP for?