“A lot of B2B SaaS is: I have a tool, I'm selling that to a business owner, and that business hires somebody to click on my tool in order to have some outcome happen… Somebody is going to come along and say, you don't have to click on this thing anymore, we're just going to sell you the outcome. If you think that's likely to happen in the next year or two, you should be the one to do that.”
Startups For the Rest of Us · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2026
Einar Vollset's "go on offense" advice to SaaS founders worried about AI: become the worker. His case is that labor budgets are much larger than software budgets, and an existing vendor with customer trust is well placed to sell the outcome.
Transcript
…Oh, you're like under spam attack or like some of your spammers in Nigeria started sending like 10,000 emails out of your one good IP that your one number one customer uses. You got to wake some dude up at 2 a.m. And it's like, look, like, do you want to do that or you want to pay $249 a month?
…and you want to get four, like, how do you do that? So there's a lot more to this conversation than just this identifying of them. But that was us going on defense, right? How do we, how do we not get sideswiped by AI? You've talked a lot about going on offense. Why don't you take us from there?
So going on the offense side, like basically there's sort of three moves, effectively, I think, in this world. And sort of the obvious one is the one that people are kind of already doing, which is like keep improving the business. Use AI to make, you know, to go out and just build more software faster. It's sort of similar to like kind of what you've always done. It's like, okay, for me, like maybe you identify that you have a bunch of these modes. Actually, your business is in great shape, no problem. And actually, like, it's just an opportunity, and you just go out and, like, you just have to build more features. And AI gives you that capability, and great. So, that to me is almost like you know, table stakes as it relates to what you could do here on the offensive side. And I think everyone can do that. The second part is, you know, one of the one of the things we identified is this notion that people will have more agents, there'll be more agentic things happening. And so, like, agents are going to be interacting with your software, most likely, in some way, shape, or form. And there are kind of two stances to do here: one is to try to lock them out, which is sort of…
So the opportunity there is become the worker. And I can already imagine all the objections that I would hear from this, from bootstrappers and such. To me, if I were a founder still, if I was, let's say, running drip, I'd be like, God, that sounds like I'm, that sounds like a lot of work. I'm…
That is it. I mean, I think that's it. And like, one of the things that it allows you to do is that if you're going to do the worker, the stuff, then kind of naturally, this moat of like this sort of learning loop that we talked about, this like notion that you're observing how things are going and…
Yeah. And I want to call out to folks listening, like the first offensive move is to become the worker, Agent ExaS. And related, but a second and different offensive move is to implement a learning loop, like you've said. Right, not the old school learning loop, but the actual like you have data…
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