“If only 10% of companies do this, the market's 10% smaller. That's devastating to SaaS companies. I feel like a lot of these discussions about AI are like, everyone's not going to do that. And it doesn't take everyone to do it, because then the remaining customers, you've got more price competition, worse margins for business. It's just everything gets worse if even a small percentage are dropping off.”
Startup to Last · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026
Context
On whether customers will vibe-code their own SaaS, Tyler King argues you don't need everyone to leave for the economics of a software company to break.
Transcript
…should SaaS companies worry about that? And then he used what I said in the last episode as an anecdote that we are experiencing our customers vibe coding it. And it, you know, kind of had the debate about whether that's a real threat to SaaS or not. Which, yeah, interesting. What was that shot?
What was like the was there? Was there convergence on a viewpoint?
Not really. I think the big difference is like, so it's Aaron and Ian. Ian runs a very old school SaaS company like Basecamp Era SaaS that sells to like hospitals and universities and very like the heart, like the most enterprisey enterprises. And he's like, no one's going to vibe code anything because like there's all this compliance bullshit and there's. Like this procurement process. And I think I mostly agree with him that hospitals and universities won't vibe code this. But I think Aaron's point is most businesses are not hospitals and universities. And there's probably some that are more likely to Vibe code. Vibe code is the wrong word to build their own internal SaaS tools. And there's some that are less likely. But if the whole market, if only 10% of companies do this, the market's 10% smaller. That's like devastating to SaaS companies. That's not like, I feel like a lot of these discussions about AI are like, everyone's not going to do that. And it's like, it doesn't take everyone to do it to create, because then the remaining customers, you've got more price competition, worse margins for business. It's just everything gets worse if even a small percentage are dropping off.
It sounds like the, you know, the compliance like regulatory thing is a is a theme still. Like, why won't hospitals and universities? Well, they're heavily regulated.
I don't sell to any hospitals, but we do have a lot of universities with clients, but it's like a five-person career center team. It's not like university-wide procurement, but it still goes through that process. I do think universities are uniquely terrible at buying software. Like our, I don't…
funding. Like there's so much like CYA to make sure that they're using their money the right way. Like it's, it's crazy. But
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