Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: SaaS 2.0
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Foundational models,
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/saas-20
- Read date:: 2025-07-11
Highlights
Salesforce helps people sell stuff by keeping lists, but it also helps people sell stuff by keeping opinionated lists. (View Highlight)
Linear, a task management application, did the same with product teams and engineers; now, Linear not only keeps track of your tickets, but it also tells you how you should prioritize them. (View Highlight)
But there’s third—and maybe even better?—way to replace Salesforce: Don’t use it all. What if, rather than buying Salesforce’s product, you just hired Salesforce’s sales experts and had them manage all your lists directly? Instead of buying a very approximate version of their expertise, delivered through oblique suggestions in a piece of software, could you just buy the experts themselves? (View Highlight)
Rather than building opinionated lists to help people sell stuff, you could imagine Salesforce building a completely different product to do the same job: AI bots explicitly instructed on how to run a good sales process, and a bunch of spreadsheets. Every morning, the bots check their spreadsheets. They tell you who they think you should call. (View Highlight)
The product is the prompt, and the prompt is the last sales guide you’ll ever need. (View Highlight)
In fact, this is probably the ideal version of an app—or, more generally, the ideal version of software. It’s a thing that I tell what I want, and it manages the rest. It’s an inverted version of SaaS: Not software as a hosted service, nor a custom piece of software that I have to build, but a service—a matchmaker, an EA, a sales operations team—that is replicated by software, and software that acts like a specialist and a spreadsheet. (View Highlight)