By Vincent Chan I've been reading a lot about the SaaSpocalypse lately, and for the most part I agree with the following stuff people are saying:
- Recurring revenue as the SaaS monetization meta is dead.
- Vibe-coded in-house tools will largely (but not fully) displace a large chunk of enterprise software.
- SaaS multiple contraction is real and here to stay.
- The moats of incumbents will be eroded daily by smaller, focused players consisting of 1–5 people.
So why am I building a SaaS company when the future looks so bleak?
TL;DR is this: While SaaS is changing, the overall problem SaaS solves is not. The WHY and the HOW have always mattered more than the WHAT in product development, and in 2026, as AI commodifies the WHAT entirely, the WHY and HOW become the only remaining things that matter. Both are rare, elusive, and require far more art than science to solve. There will always be opportunity in SaaS for people who can answer both with clarity at every level of decision-making.
This idea of WHY and HOW has been framed many ways. Clayton Christensen called the WHY "jobs to be done." 1 In
Zero to One, Peter Thiel calls the HOW
"unique knowledge that others don't see."
2But one of the most vivid examples of WHY and HOW comes from one of the iPhone's first builders. Ken Kocienda spent years at Apple iterating on the original iPhone keyboard — a surface that didn't physically exist. The conviction and clarity of the WHY was delivered by Steve Jobs: people needed to type on glass with their fingers. Hindsight tells us Jobs was spot-on about a great many WHYs, and fingers on glass was one of those things. "Nobody wants a Stylus" he said, and he was right. The HOW, however is a story less people know. Ken ran hundreds of internal demos, chasing a feeling that the keyboard should predict not just your next letter, but your intent. The autocorrect algorithm he shipped, while not perfect, wasn't derived from a product spec. It came from "tasting" thousands of small interactions until something felt true. That's what HOW looks like at its peak. 3 No one at a competitor could have reverse-engineered it from the outside — because it wasn't engineered, so much as intuited into existence. While it's incredibly frustrating when Autocorrect gets your intent wrong, try turning it off, and you'll realize the invisible impact it has had on the usability of the smartphone.
While there's much to agree with regarding the SaaSpocalypse, here's one thing I've heard numerous times, which I don't believe will happen: "LLM providers will eat every vertical, making vertical SaaS obsolete."
A lot of early builders (mostly engineers) believe this because they think product development is about shipping features. It usually comes from limited experience with distribution, traction, or a shallow understanding of how good product decisions are made, or how society adopts products. I empathize — I'm an engineer too, and I've thought this way too many times in the past.
But if anyone can spin up features in hours and the WHAT gets commodified by a handful of LLM players... surely the whole industry is worthless, right?
Wrong.
Product development has never been about what to build — it's about what problems are being solved, and how to solve them. Imagine you're a vertical SaaS company for arborists, 15 years deep in the tree care business. Some LLM might recreate your software in two weeks — but who's prompting it? Does some engineer at Anthropic making $500k/year know that:
- Arborist crews schedule almost everything around municipal permit cycles?
- Recurring revenue lives or dies with HOA contracts, and renewals bid months in advance?
- Half of the user base operates the software wearing work gloves from the cab of a truck?
I think not.
The WHY takes years of proximity, and large amounts of product intuition to learn. The HOW takes taste, craft, and the courage to hold a strong opinion about how something should feel. Neither can be automated. Both are increasingly rare masteries. In a world drowning in vibe-coded apps, the noise will continue to grow, but so will the diversity of people who figure out the WHYs and HOWs of their niches.
A software entrepreneur's role has ALWAYS been about solving problems, not writing software.
In 2026 creating SaaS means understanding the WHY and HOW more deeply than ever before, and channelling superintelligence to build the WHAT. When building is cheap, what remains is focus, taste, and conviction. That is all that matters now.
For a sneak peek at what I'm building: capy.sc/about Soft launch is T-minus 8 days.
Footnotes #
Clayton M. Christensen —
(1997). The foundational argument for why established companies fail to see disruptive threats — and why understanding the customer's job-to-be-done is the only durable answer.The Innovator's Dilemma↩ - Peter Thiel —
(2014). On building companies that create genuinely new value, and why unique, non-consensus insight is the only real moat.Zero to One↩ - Ken Kocienda —
(2018). A first-hand account of the taste-driven, demo-obsessed process behind the original iPhone keyboard — the best description of HOW in practice that I've ever read.Creative Selection↩