AI-assistants/tools rush, thousands of startups. Not perfect, but good/fun enough.
Only a few will survive, infra is in profit in any cases. The gold rush pattern, when shovels and picks sellers are in a plus.
WHAT’S NEXT?
1. There are 30–40+ writing assistants similar to Jasper.ai. My guess:
- Many of them are small money-printing machines right ATM.
- When the market cools off and pricing comes down, only a few will survive and thrive (driven by critical mass and economies of scale).2. IMO there are some really interesting opportunities for writing assistants in highly specialized areas (e.g. accounting) or verticals (e.g. legal or healthcare).
It’s unclear to me (and way beyond my technical understanding to predict) if:
- specialization in a certain domain will give startups a sustainable advantage based on better model performance; OR
- future versions of GPT and its competitors will be so good that they’ll excel across all domainsBUT, back to the point above, UX is key! Vertical SaaS startups win by:
- having a deeper understanding of the customers in their industry
- solving their specific problems in the absolute best way
- marketing/selling exclusively to a narrowly defined segment of companies
- adding more layers of functionality over time, increasing ACV and stickinessA lawyer *could* run their practice using generic project management and CRM software. That doesn’t mean they *should*. And it didn’t prevent Clio from getting to $100M+ ARR.
Similarly, SaaS startups will be able to win in (large) segments against the big foundational model providers if they leverage unique insights, data, workflow integrations, and design talent to solve the biggest customer problems and deliver the best UX.
3. Every SaaS company right now is thinking about how to add a conversational interface (if not, they should). Chat won’t be the best UI for ALL use cases or ALL users. But it will be for many use cases and many users. [link]
We have mental models of the world in our minds that allows us to simulate what will happen.
That’s what gives us common sense.
LLMs don’t have that.
But, no matter of that.
