Generative AI v/s SaaS, a battle ⚔️ or an union 🔗?
Impact of Generative AI on the SaaS Landscape and 3 exciting AI tools to try out this week 🗓️
In the ever-evolving AI landscape, I'm always on the lookout for unique perspectives.🔭
Will Generative AI impact the SaaS industry? 📲
Having begun my career during the heyday of SaaS, I've seen firsthand how SaaS platforms, offering standardised solutions for a subscription, face several challenges. To highlight a few:
Product-Market Fit: Early stages of building a SaaS solution involves validating “assumptions” about the market need and establishing a strong product-market fit. This is core to acquiring users and finding a place in the market.
User Education: SaaS requires significant effort in guiding users to effectively utilize the software, often needinh tutorials or intuitive UX cues. Educating the users to use the software and providing technical support to respond to every user problem takes a lot of time and effort.
User Retention and Acquisition: A subscription doesn't guarantee user satisfaction. The real challenge lies in retaining users who have mastered your system and attracting new ones, especially in an era of exceptional design and seamless experiences.
The beginning of the AI era, seems to set off these challenges.
Joe Procopio, known for his insightful 2019 piece "Why Startups Fall Apart at 50 Employees," offers a thought-provoking view on Gen AI's impact on the SaaS industry.
Joe hits the nail on the head with his piece, Um. Hi. This is What Generative AI Is For. It’s For When SaaS Is Dead. The piece, for an optimist presents AI as a complimentary force which is here to help SaaS products become better!
AI has been around for a long time now, even before it became a head-turner.
It was in the form of algorithms that were applied for vast data sets to make decisions at scale. But then Generative AI suddenly swoops in and becomes the friend using these same algorithms, yet gives you more understandable response in the form of text, images or even music.
And I really love that part!
Gen AI lets anyone easily use AI. If you have an AI tool and know what to ask for, you can quickly get answers that would otherwise take a long time to find.
What does this mean for the SaaS industry?
So the SaaS industry is far from being dead and many of them heading to join the AI race. But here’s what should change;
User-Specific Journeys: They can use AI to tailor the solutions and give the user exactly what they want. Don’t underdeliver or overwhelm them. This hands the reins to the user, giving them more control to ask.
Simple Interfaces: With increasing number of great products, this is the way to win more users, simplified design and interfaces. Multiple screens with animation is a trend from yesterday. Always ask, “What’s the simplest way to do this?”.
Make recommendations: When you read Joe’s piece, this is one simple yet most effective takeaway- Make more recommendations! Your goals is to make your user’s life easy and provide convenience. With AI, you can understand their needs from their past experiences and make recommendations!
To conclude this thought with a byte from Joe’s piece;
And as their AI gets better, they can not only tell the user what they should do, but also offer to do it for them.
That, in a nutshell, is how we should be thinking about and using Generative AI. Fill in the holes, eliminate the guesswork, give the user confidence about their choices and actions. We’ve been saying this is what we want our software to do for the customer for years.
Now’s the time to make it happen.
- Joe Procopio
STELLAR TOOLS ⚒️
#1
Meet Pika, a text-video AI
The startup made an announcement yesterday with the launch of its AI video platform “Pika 1.0”.
You describe an idea (e.g. "Elon Musk in a spacesuit, 3D animation”) → Pika transforms it into an animated video!
Their demo video:
#2
Never forget anything with Rewind.ai
My last piece was a futuristic view into the role of AI shaping our memories.
Here’s a tool that makes it impossible to forget anything about work and improve productivity through AI!
Rewind is a personalised AI powered by everything you’ve seen, said, or heard.
It runs in the background capturing your screen and audio to compress, transcribe, encrypt and store your data locally so only you have access. You can then ask Rewind to summarise meetings, draft an email, and much more.
#3
New update to Notion AI!
Your personal assistant for all things Notion. Notion AI released Notion Q&A to upgrade your levels of productivity.
Notion’s new Q&A feature lets you ask any question about your entire Notion workspace:
What action items came out of my meeting with my manager last week?
Where can I find my class notes on the nervous system?
Summarize the my expenses from Travel budget
and much more!
That’s all for a hopeful week in the golden era of Ai! 💫
See you soon,
Monica