This is where the money is going in software
It's finding new problems to fund. Now it's up to us to solve those problems.
I’m a software founder. so yeah, I want to believe software wins even in a world where everyone wants to build their own tools.
So when Markie Wagner published “Return on Tokens“ -- AI is a compiler, not a runtime, it has no goals, work decays into slop without human direction -- I felt that old familiar pull of agreeing with things that confirm what I want to believe.
And when Elena Verna dropped her “Mom-and-Pop SaaS“ frame -- build costs collapsing, domain experts spinning up their own tools, Jevons paradox meaning more software gets built not less -- I nodded along to that one too. Not quite happy about it, but also kind of encouraged...?
Both ideas are probably right. And both ideas are quietly threatening SaaS products.
If build costs drop far enough that a VP of Sales with no engineering team can just build their own sales intelligence tool -- why buy ours?
If domain experts can make something that fits their domain exactly, the generalist product starts to look like a giant spaghetti mess.
So I’ve been trying to be honest with myself about where SaaS products provide value today and tomorrow.
Where software still wins
I keep landing in the same two places.
Where reliably repeatable outcomes are needed.
As close as possible to decision points.
Let’s look at Accoil as an example.
The signal layer is becoming free. Or close to it. Messy data can be made clean with agents or agent-built software. It’s cheap to do this.
By signals, I mean things like a company just hired a VP of Sales, a competitor got acquired, a prospect visited your pricing page. These are legible and getting cheaper to access by the week.
First-party data, specifically product usage like Accoil ingests, is different. Higher fidelity. Harder to fake. The problem is, the data doesn’t tell you what it means.
Behavior is visible. Intent is not.
To get reliable behavior patterns, you need reliably repeatable interpretation of the messy data.
The what is visible. The why is the unsolved part. The why is where the money is moving because that’s where decisions are being made.
Yesterday I wrote that the signal is solved -- the action is the open frontier. That was one step. This is the step behind it, the one that makes the action problem hard: signals don’t interpret themselves.
Knowing a customer’s usage dropped 40% tells you something happened. It doesn’t tell you whether they’re about to churn, or whether they had a vacation (common and kind of predictable), or whether they’re quietly evaluating a competitor. The signal is legible. The situation is not.
The defensible layer isn’t the signal. It’s what the signal means for THIS customer, in their specific situation, right now. Not in aggregate. Not in general. For a specific “them.”
That’s where interpretation becomes the product. Action becomes the value.
(Accoil -- sigh, this is what we do -- lives in the signal layer. That’s exactly why I’m hunting the edge of it. If I’m sitting on a layer that’s becoming commodity, the useful thing is to see it clearly, not defend it.)
Ben Williams put the right frame on this: own the verb, become the default, expand from there. The verb is the action. Not the data, not the signal. The thing that actually changes what happens next for a customer.
It’s going to be ok
I’m optimistic for us software builders.
Markie’s right that AI has no goals. Elena’s right that build costs are collapsing. But what Jevons paradox tells us is that lower costs don’t shrink the market -- they expand it. More software gets built, not less. More signals exist, not fewer. More interpretation is needed, not less.
Everybody wins. But the people who win big will be optimistic enough to keep looking for problems to solve. As new tools emerge -- what problems get solved, and what new problems does that force us to find?
There’s more to build. It’s just not where we’ve been building.
Peter
PS: What do you think? Where do you see opportunity? Or do you feel like it’s all converging into agentic soup?