AI, sand castles and company building
I was listening to an episode of 20VC yesterday, one of my favourite podcasts focused on tech, AI and venture capital.
In this episode, the host Harry Stebbings interviewed Daniel Khachab, CEO of Choco, an AI platform that handles food trade between distributors and restaurants and other food outlets.
Daniel tells the story of how they were ‘happily’ building their category leading SaaS platform when ChatGPT was launched, and having played with it for a few days, Daniel had a few consecutive sleepless nights staring into the dark.
In short, “the whole way we interact with technology is going to change and there are two things that can happen,
an AI-native company comes along and disrupts us
we disrupt ourselves and pivot to being AI-only”
One of their company values it to play offense, and so they took option two and reconfigured the company almost overnight.
Sandcastles and Boogie Boards
This idea of SaaS businesses getting disrupted had me thinking about the times when our kids were younger and we used to go to the beach.
They used to love building a big sandcastle when the tide was out, with ramparts and moats and channels, and as the tide came back in trying to reinforce it and keep the sea from getting in.
But as the minutes ticked by, the tide came further up, it was always a losing battle and to many cheers and cries finally the walls were breached and another epic creation was lost to the sea.
Having watched their sandcastle disappear, they’d run and grab their boogie boards and then dive into the incoming tide and embrace it in a very different way - surfing each wave as it hit, to more cheering and laughter.
As I look across what I and others are building, in the form of tech and companies, I think about sandcastles and boogie boards.
AI is the tide.
It is coming in, faster and faster.
Ethan Mollick, author of Co-intelligence, talks about the jagged frontier, the idea that AI’s advance is not liner - it is better at some things than others.
In the same way the tide comes in faster in some places along the beach than others.
In your category the tide may appear farther out, in some closer in.
But the tide keeps advancing.
There are many SaaS applications today that are above the tide.
Financial SaaS
HR SaaS
RevOps SaaS
Legal SaaS
Marketing SaaS
Sales SaaS
But the tide is coming in, and starting to bump up against your ramparts.
Before too long it will be easier to ask AI
What is my cashflow forecast?
How should we price this acquisition?
What is our workforce capacity requirement for 2025?
Than it will be to have humans filling in ‘forms’ on the pages of a SaaS UI.
As an example - here’s a buyer enablement assessment tool I built an MVP for in just 18 minutes.
What’s your boogie board?
If you look at your product, even your entire business, and see it as a sandcastle, then what can you do about it?
Consider what the boogie board is for your category.
How can you capitalise on the tide that is coming in and surf it.
Not with a chatbot on the side of your current SaaS, but a complete re-imagination where the core revenue you derive from your business is powered by AI.
I don’t have the answers, but I’ll be thinking about sandcastles and boogie boards from here on.