Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:30:41 · Shawn Wang
[00:30:41] S0: Let me introduce the the the overall context. Yeah. My budget for running a conference is somewhere between 3 to 10,000,000, depending on the size of the conference. Roughly about 300 k of that per conference is software. I'm paying... Like, that's, like, 10% of my budget. That's, like, 10% of my margin that I could be Yeah. Getting back. That is to just somebody else's software that is shitty, slow, ugly, not exactly what we want. And, you know, so I'm paying 300,000... Maybe I'm calling you paying 1,000,000 a year in just, like, SaaS. Like, you want this, you want that to do your work. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Like, as the boss, like, my employee comes to me and wants to use this thing and they say, is it important for their work? Yeah. I'm gonna say yes. But like, when it all adds up, like, it's a lot of money. Supposed to be, yeah. And then like, and then I use it and they use it, they're like, yeah, it doesn't give me what we want, it's like, has, it's slow, like they request, like, as a customer of a SaaS, what happens is you are in a queue for support, right? You want this feature, and they're like, okay, months from now, you know, we'll do it. We'll put you on the q three roadmap. You're very important to us. But, like, it's... You know, we are an AI conference company, and this is 2026, and there's coding agents. Right? Like, we can do this. So the idea was I took a $40,000 SaaS that my employee was proposing to pay, and I said, will pay somebody $10,000 to clone this whole thing. It's open source, and it's exactly what we want. And from here, we can use whatever coding agent, Codex, Claude, coding, Devin, to just customize it, whatever. Right? And we did it. We, you know, announced the competition. We had 69 submissions. When you have a competition like that, you offer free money. Uh-huh. I... I've offered to cover everybody's coding agent subscription. Right? So you have a lot of bad submissions. And so I just, like, this is obviously stop. Like, I didn't I didn't give money for that. But we have 69 good ones, and most of them were, like, usable, about five, I would say, that we would pay for. Like, it was just, like, good. Like, it was done in one week. Yeah. Yeah. As an owner of a SaaS business, you have maybe, like, 50 customers, all of them paying you 40 k.
00:32:55 · Shawn Wang, S1
Imagine that all of them realize this, and then they just turn In one year, your business is gone. You went from earning $20,000,000 a year to nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. It's very scary, I think, for a business owner. And I think that's the tricky thing of owning a SaaS, right? Like, I own a physical business, so that's not going away anytime soon. Robots are cool, but they're not organizing a conference. But like, people who do software B to B, who own this, like, mid tier SaaS. Salesforce is fine. Like, nobody's worried about Salesforce. But, like, the mid tier SaaS where, like, you know, a lot of small mid... SMB? Do you [00:33:31] S1: guys call it SMB? SMB. [00:33:33] S0: SMBs, they're gonna really struggle, or they are gonna pivot to something that's better. And I think they they really better figure it out now because all of us business owners who are their customers, also can code. Yeah. And it doesn't take that much long time. [00:33:47] S1: We are actual competitors to to their own software right now. [00:33:51] S0: And by the way, the models are very good at clicking through every screen of your software and then replicating it in the... Independently. [00:33:59] S1: Oh, yeah.
00:33:59 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:33:59] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:34:00] S0: Right? So the moment I have access to your software, I can clone it. So good luck. And so I think that is the the reality. I would say that if you're a SaaS owner, nobody knows that the right answer. Mhmm. I think that you basically end up having to pivot to being an agent builder. So you have to become, like... The US equivalent is, like, Harvey or Open Evidence or... Yeah. Yeah. You own a vertical and you're the top agent in that vertical. Or you own some specialized data and you're basically a data vendor. Anything in between, someone else is gonna just code their own thing. [00:34:34] S1: Yeah. Probably can I follow a question? Because you already answer my first question. Yes. You already give some advice to those those [00:34:42] S0: I'm more interested... Like, so I'm not I'm not so sympathetic to the the the SaaS owners. SaaS owners, they they're big big boys, they can figure it out. Actually, I'm more I'm more keen on advising the business owners. [00:34:51] S1: Oh, business owners?
00:34:51 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:34:51] S1: Oh, business owners? [00:34:52] S0: Yeah. I I run a small business. I'm an SMB. Yeah. There's a million people like me. They're all trying to just I make an honest living, I pay employees, I pay my taxes, and it's a good life. It can be better if you vibe Yes. With your own Yes. Right. And like my customers are happy, my employees are happy, I'm happy, it's a cool story to tell. Yeah. And, you know, SMBs, I think, is a golden age for us. If you do anything in the real world that are... You're just trying to do your job, and there's a lot of shitty software between you and your your your intended outcome, you can suddenly shorten [00:35:27] S1: your Buy cloud and tinker it out. [00:35:30] S0: Yeah. I mean, like, you know, dollars 40,000 worth of cloud is a lot of cloud. Yeah. It's a lot of cloud. I can spend 10,000 and, like, have a lot of money to, like, do whatever I want. Yes. So I think that's why I I call this as a business owner problem, not a developer problem. A developer problem will say, like, oh, $200 is a lot. You know? Like like, I'm a business owner. I understand the productivity benefits of having 10 of my employees work together well. Like, 10 of my employees, I'm paying 1,500,000 for them. Right? Like, if if they work together 10% better, there's a 150 k. The... Potentially, it's not it's not 10% better. It's like five times better. That's like 7,500,000. Great. And that is all the agent work that is being done on my behalf that people used to say like, well, okay, I'll come back next week with a proposal. No, I want it this afternoon.
00:35:30 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:35:30] S0: Yeah. I mean, like, you know, dollars 40,000 worth of cloud is a lot of cloud. Yeah. It's a lot of cloud. I can spend 10,000 and, like, have a lot of money to, like, do whatever I want. Yes. So I think that's why I I call this as a business owner problem, not a developer problem. A developer problem will say, like, oh, $200 is a lot. You know? Like like, I'm a business owner. I understand the productivity benefits of having 10 of my employees work together well. Like, 10 of my employees, I'm paying 1,500,000 for them. Right? Like, if if they work together 10% better, there's a 150 k. The... Potentially, it's not it's not 10% better. It's like five times better. That's like 7,500,000. Great. And that is all the agent work that is being done on my behalf that people used to say like, well, okay, I'll come back next week with a proposal. No, I want it this afternoon. [00:36:25] S1: Yeah. My thought is that once you created so many softwares yourself, would that... The maintenance, the work will be something, you know, difficult [00:36:34] S0: or Yeah. It's it's real. Right? It's not zero. [00:36:36] S1: You should have to use it. [00:36:37] S0: It's not zero, but we have coding agents. [00:36:40] S1: Oh, yes. Maintain that. It's self self maintaining.
00:36:40 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:36:40] S1: Oh, yes. Maintain that. It's self self maintaining. [00:36:42] S0: Yeah. And a lot of it is... And this is why I would say, like, mid tier SaaS. You are not Salesforce. You are not Google. You are not AWS. You're not this like mission critical 99.999 uptime thing. Right? You are just like a database where people type in their thing and they get that something out. Yes. So, yeah. Okay. It goes down for a day, like whatever. And you can fix it in a day. Right. Right. And there's a lot of coding agents where, like, I I think I I would argue, I would take that downtime for... In exchange for, like, I can customize. Yes. I can customize anything. It's amazing, you know? And and so my team is so much more productive. You know, I actually put this in the episode in Kill My Sass. One of the favorite features, let's say I have... So for example, for AIE code, my my next conference next month, I have 1,000 submissions and I have 25 seats. Okay? I have to go to 1,000 people to get 25. And in the current SaaS that we use for that piece of software, we have to click one by one by one by one by one. Every screen click click click click click click. And so in the kill my SaaS competition, one of our contestants just changed everything so that you can sort of reorder in one table. This view doesn't exist in that Sass. Okay. To... In order to get this view, we have to request for [00:37:56] S1: six months. But And they just clone it, [00:37:58] S0: they just You just request whatever you want. Yeah. And like, yeah, now I can do it, and I can see everything in one go.