53 chunks · 43 episodes
I was debating with someone if the vertical SaaS business model[anx] will persist in the world of AI. I think it will, but that the new businesses will fight over ever-smaller niches. The vertical SaaS business mo...
...customers of vertical SaaS tend to be atoms-based businesses; they use the same business model as their competitors, just in a different geographic area. Then the hyper-stickiness of being the system of record or "operating system" for the cust...
...t, those bundles no longer need to coalesce, and they also don't need to have a business model inside: the fixed cost is zero, there's nothing to pay for! Software today does not actually have zero marginal cost: it has a distribution cost. The...
...ble giving the app the data it needs to do the use case. That requires a viable business model to exist for the app to be viable. That's a very high bar! Imagine a power-law curve of all conceivable use cases. Only the ones that are extremely v...
...e sense together for user journeys and more about the ones that have a coherent business model?
...th; to be useful enough it has to glom together enough use cases (plus a viable business model!) to convince a user to install it. This leads to chunky apps: apps that are larger than they could be, and monolithic, one size fits none. What if y...
...ious examples of open aggregators: email and the web. Those didn't have obvious business models, because they were built with fixed-cost software. It's hard to charge for software that is written once and doesn't change. But private cloud encla...
...cumbents to successfully retrofit to their existing technical architectures and business models.
An app is an agglomeration of use cases surrounded by a defensible business model. Apps are organized primarily by viable business models, not by amount of user value. The same origin model creates a cave where the origin's owner c...
...e experiences can do anything with data they have access to. 5) The only viable business model for consumers is ads. But if you were to have an alternate set of physics that changed some or all of these, you might have a significantly less stro...
... motivated to use: a low ceiling. If you skip infrastructure, there's no viable business models for entrants into the system. If you skip protocol, then you get something like a traditional aggregator. You can't build this frankenstein with jus...
...mental. Here's a sketch of what that fundamental thing might be. Enterprise B2B business models require stickiness for the CAC/LTV math to work. Stickiness requires customizability (the ability for a customer to glue themselves to a product.) P...
...r savvy users could do" Of course, you need to have a solid core (e.g. a viable business model that generates net monetizable value). If you also have some kind of self-hoisting product quality (e.g. a network effect) then you have not only via...