AI Just Changed the Rules of SaaS: What Every Founder Needs to Know
The SaaS Operators do deep dives on eCommerce B2B issues, and reached out to see if we’d to their podcast. We did and it ended up being a great deep dive on just how AI is changing the entire B2B software industry. Profoundly. And what you need to be doing about it.
The brutal truth about how AI is reshaping B2B software—and why the playbook you used to scale to $10M won’t get you to $100M anymore
Top 5 Takeaways
• The $10M to $100M path is no longer inevitable — High NRR + good team used to guarantee growth, but AI disruption means every customer is back in market shopping for vendors
• AI native advantages are real but temporary — Startups can exploit the “installed base debt” of established players who are too busy servicing existing customers to go all-in on AI transformation
• Deploy, don’t just buy AI tools — Every founder should personally deploy one new AI tool monthly; managing AI requires daily iteration and is as much work as managing humans
• Platform attachment is now existential — In e-commerce, Shopify is the entire game at $12B ARR; VCs won’t fund pure ecosystem plays anymore unless they’re Stripe-level disruptive
• Fire the resisters immediately. Kindly, but immediately — Most management teams don’t want to adapt to the new reality; you’re better off with half the company that embraces change than keeping people who resist
The Old Rules Are Dead. Period.
If you’re still building your SaaS company like it’s 2021, you’re going to fail. Not struggling—failing. The amount of disruption happening in B2B software right now is unprecedented, and it’s accelerating faster than most founders realize.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The pre-AI products and lifestyle business model that worked beautifully in 2021? It’s dead. The “set it and forget it” SaaS playbook where you could push out one feature every year or two and ride demand? Gone. The predictable path from $10M to $100M ARR that felt almost inevitable if you had good unit economics? Now it’s a “maybe” instead of a “will.”
Why Everything Changed (And Why It’s Still Accelerating)
AI is the accelerant, but it’s not happening in isolation. Three massive forces are converging:
1. The Platform Consolidation Reality
In e-commerce, Shopify has become the entire platform. Everything else has died. Shopify grew 30% last quarter at almost $11 billion in revenue—that’s up from 20% growth a year ago. At coming up on $12 billion, they’re destroying everyone else while simultaneously going deeper into AI and enterprise.
This isn’t just about e-commerce. We’re seeing similar platform consolidation across B2B software, where the winners are accelerating and the rest are getting steamrolled.
2. The AI Native Advantage
Companies founded before 2023 aren’t automatically disadvantaged (OpenAI and Anthropic prove this), but they face a unique challenge: servicing existing customers creates AI debt.
When you have 10,000+ customers demanding regular feature requests and bug fixes, you can’t go all-in on AI transformation the way a startup can. This creates a massive opportunity gap—but only for founders who move fast enough to exploit it.
3. The Defense Contractor Awakening
Look at Palantir. This company went from 13% growth to 49% growth at $4 billion in revenue. The fastest-growing public B2B company today. How? They went ultra-deep on AI, ultra-deep for real. And they were founded in 2003—so what’s your