Personal SaaS ≠ Enterprise SaaS
It sounds obvious. But a few weeks ago, in the heat of the SaaS-pocalypse moment, Jasmine W. and Deirdre Bosa vibe-coded what they described as a clone of project management tools from enterprise SaaS company monday.com in under one hour. Kudos to them! That, they suggested, shows that SaaS companies are an endangered species, if two non-coders can create a clone of a multi-billion $ company's products. I think we can all agree that SaaS is undergoing a transformation, if only in how it should deliver and price offerings. But their vibe-coding example is not what it seems. Consider their understandable awe of what their vibe-coded tool could do: "The real magic happened when we connected the clone to an email account, essentially spinning up a customized project manager for our personal lives. The AI found Dee’s forgotten calendar invite for a kid’s birthday party (which she definitely didn’t have a gift for yet) and it added reminders to book tickets for an upcoming trip and sign a waiver for another kid’s birthday party." And that is exactly why consumer-facing, personal SaaS is much more in danger than enterprise SaaS: an enterprise product or service is not a naked piece of software, it comes with a gigantic "harness" around it, to use the popular term for the infrastructure that needs to be built around AI to make it useful. The harness consists of all the features that are needed for an enterprise to adopt a product with confidence: reliability, robustness, guarantees, security, accountability, compliance, maintenance, customer service, and many, many more. By the time you have vibe-coded all of these features, to the extent that they can be, you will have spent a lot more money and time, to the point where you may need capital to make it happen. In other words, "consumers" are being empowered to create their own personal apps that do exactly what they need, just for them, because they are experts of their world and their needs. They don't need the enormous set of what, to them, seem to be bells and whistles but are critical to the enterprise.
