Although I absolutely understand the frustration expressed by the author, I find the notion that SaaS companies are somehow 'evil' because they optimize for the 80/20 rule a bit arrogant. Anyone working in SaaS - or really in any business- understands that you need to prioritize. In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits. And that's absolutely OK.
>In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.
Moloch demands babies be scarified to generate maximum profits!
For one, this is a very US concentric way of thinking. Secondly, if a human person thought like this we'd consider them to be an anti-social psychopath, which directly conflicts with the more recent SCOTUS ruling that companies are humans too.
So, yes, we have legally mandated companies be evil. It's been working out well for us in the US as prices skyrocket and any competition is bought up or abused with patents/IP.
> In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.
No denying that. SaaS started with a user problem at the center of it and as they scaled, forgot about an individual user. This only presents the user frustration and a possible solution to it.
If you're building for individual users you're not going to succeed. We all prioritize for broad success from the beginning.
I'm very into the idea of inversion of control and giving users this flexibility but I agree with GP that the SaaS company critique is misplaced. I hope you find enough success with 100X that you end up coming to the same conclusion.
I'll also add that one of your video examples is essentially a Twitter spam generator; is that the kind of feature you think SaaS companies should be prioritizing?
I created that twitter responder after reading this post (https://qht.co/item?id=47568028). That wasn't to call out what SaaS companies should prioratise but to show how easy it would be for a user to do it.
You add "hidden" inputs to your HTML form that are named like "First Name" or "Family Name". Bots will fill them out. You will either expect them to be empty or you fill by JavaScript with sth you expect. It's of course reverse-engineerable, but does the trick.
They often do actually ignore truly hidden fields (input type=hidden) but if you put them "behind" an element with css, or extremely small but still rendered, many get caught. It's similar to the cheeky prompt injection attacks people did/do against LLMs.
I am not hiring but I wanted to say that I stopped scrolling down your page on your website when I saw this "perspective" thing you do. It's weird, but in a good way so now I am writing this comment.
What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added.
For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.
Same here. I like bringing ideas to life; code is just a means to an end. I can now give detailed designs to an AI and let it write the hundreds of lines of code in just minutes, and with far fewer typos than I would make. It's still not perfect - I have to review it all - but if I give it a proper spec in generally creates exactly what I had in mind.
Agree, it’s made programming so much fun. The other day I wrote a C# app just because it was the best language for the job, I’ve never touched .Net in my life. Worked great, clients loved it.
I can actually build nice UIs as a traditional ML engineer (no more streamlit crap). People are using them and genuinely impressed by them
I can fly through Rust and C++ code, which used to take ages of debugging.
The main thing that is clear to me is that most of the ecosystem will likely converge toward Rust or C++ soon. Languages like Python or Ruby or even Go are just too slow and messy, why would you use them at all if you can write in Rust just as fast? I expect those languages to die off in the next several years
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