AI won’t kill SaaS. It will kill generalists.

Specialize. Specialize. Specialize.

A product leader I worked with used to say…

“A fool with a tool is still a fool.”

AI is about to make that painfully obvious.

It won’t turn everyone into a great builder.
It will separate those who know what to build from everyone else.

This isn’t just happening in software. Software is just where you can see it first.

For a long time, generalists won for a simple reason. Building was expensive.

If you were going to invest in software, services, or anything complex, you had to spread that cost across as many customers as possible. One product. Many use cases.

Everyone compromised a little. That was the trade.

I learned this early, in the first few years building my first company.

I sat down with two great brand strategists and walked them through everything we were going to do. Full service. All industries. Big vision.

They stopped me.

“No customer cares about that.”

I thought breadth was impressive. Clients wanted relevance.

So we cut. We focused only on ecommerce, then narrowed further to one platform, and eventually to marketing, not development.

At the time, it felt like we were shrinking the business. In reality, we were making it the best option for a specific audience.

Then something interesting happened. The more specialized we became, the more partners we had wanting to refer us business. We stopped competing with everyone and started becoming useful to them.

Once we focused, we started to see things others didn’t. The problems weren’t abstract anymore. They were specific to that platform, that client profile, that workflow.

So we built software around it. Not broad platforms, and not custom tools for each client, but systems behind the scenes that helped us serve that audience better.

We could move faster, make better decisions, and avoid predictable mistakes. Everything was shaped around what that niche actually cared about.

The value wasn’t in the software itself. It was in how precisely it helped us deliver for that user.

We bootstrapped from $0 to $25M in ARR this way, without outside capital, compounding at roughly 25% a year, 11 of 12 years.

It kept proving itself.

Back then, we had to specialize because building was expensive. We couldn’t afford to be unfocused.

Now AI removes that constraint.

Anyone can build.

That’s not the advantage anymore.

The advantage is knowing what to build, for whom, and just as importantly, what not to build.

The market won’t converge on one tool that does everything.

It will fragment into smaller, sharper products, each built for a narrow audience with a specific need.

We’re already seeing this.

The winners will be the ones who go deeper, not broader. That could be small upstarts, or incumbents that rethink how they build.

Relevance is what people love.

And once they feel that, everything else starts to feel generic.