My hard drive is littered with projects I started so I could learn something and then abandoned once I learned what I wanted. One of those projects is a clone for mermaid.js. I wanted to see how hard it would be to build it out in PHP. (I like PHP, deal with it) Turns out, it's not that hard. I got 2 types of charts running in an evening. But I have no interest in build it out and releasing it or building a company around it...but I could.
Which brings me to the point today. AI makes it incredibly easy to build from scratch. I see companies paying thousands of dollars per month for SaaS and APIs. How long before they realize they can simply take one of their developers, build a version of the SaaS or API that they can use for free and that is specifically tailored to their needs?
If you run a SaaS, what's your moat to protect you from this? (Hint: it's NOT your existing codebase, no matter how large.)
What's to keep a company from building out the parts of Salesforce they really like, and then walking away from the overpriced and bloated system they don't really need, but like this one feature?
I wonder if there is a developer out there with a clone of SalesForce's most important feature that they built already but abandoned. 🤔