SaaS Isn't Dead. The Moat Just Moved.

SaaS isn't dead. UI is. The moat just moved.

Assaf Weinberg (Co-Founder & CEO, SetSale) joins Andrew Duncan to dismantle the LinkedIn narratives about software in the age of AI: "code is free," "SaaS is dead," and the founder myth that hiring a developer is the bottleneck.

Chapters

• 00:00 The biggest limit on AI is what you believe it can do
• 01:23 Building SetSale before AI tools existed
• 04:31 Supastarter and the portal boilerplate origin
• 06:47 Why the cost of software isn't zero
• 07:43 The "I just need a developer" myth
• 11:09 Every software company is a data transformation engine
• 13:58 Why SaaS isn't dead
• 17:08 Capture your data or AI can't help you
• 22:20 The Austin distributor story: four days to ship
• 27:34 Artists don't sketch in marble
• 33:30 A developer's job is specification, not code
• 44:13 The new bottleneck is customer adoption

Topics

• Why AI made code cheap but didn't make software cheap
• The "I just need a developer" myth and why it was always a crutch
• UI as commodity, data and process as the only durable moat
• Why every software company reduces to a data transformation engine
• The Austin distributor visit: notetaker, AI PM, Cursor, four days to ship
• Six-week bets as the new unit of org change
• What roles look like when designers don't make mockups and developers don't write code
• The new bottleneck: customer adoption now lags engineering velocity

Guest

Assaf Weinberg, Co-Founder & CEO, SetSale

https://www.setsale.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/assafweinberg/

https://x.com/assafweinberg

Resources mentioned

Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden: https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Respond-Successful-Organizations-Continuously/dp/1633691888

Granola (AI notetaker): https://www.granola.ai/

Supastarter (Next.js SaaS boilerplate): https://supastarter.dev/

Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/

Connect

Andrew Duncan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-b-duncan/

Vertice Labs: https://www.verticelabs.io

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