SaaS Isn't Dead. The Moat Just Moved.

SaaS isn't dead. UI is. The moat just moved. Assaf Weinberg (Co-Founder & CEO, SetSale) joins Andrew Duncan to dismantle the LinkedIn narratives about software in the age of AI: "code is free," "SaaS is dead," and the founder myth that hiring a developer is the bottleneck. Chapters 00:00 The biggest limit on AI is what you believe it can do 01:23 Building SetSale before AI tools existed 04:31 Supastarter and the portal boilerplate origin 06:47 Why the cost of software isn't zero 07:43 The "I just need a developer" myth 11:09 Every software company is a data transformation engine 13:58 Why SaaS isn't dead 17:08 Capture your data or AI can't help you 22:20 The Austin distributor story: four days to ship 27:34 Artists don't sketch in marble 33:30 A developer's job is specification, not code 44:13 The new bottleneck is customer adoption Topics Why AI made code cheap but didn't make software cheap The "I just need a developer" myth and why it was always a crutch UI as commodity, data and process as the only durable moat Why every software company reduces to a data transformation engine The Austin distributor visit: notetaker, AI PM, Cursor, four days to ship Six-week bets as the new unit of org change What roles look like when designers don't make mockups and developers don't write code The new bottleneck: customer adoption now lags engineering velocity Guest Assaf Weinberg, Co-Founder & CEO, SetSale https://www.setsale.ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/assafweinberg/ https://x.com/assafweinberg Resources mentioned Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden: https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Respond-Successful-Organizations-Continuously/dp/1633691888 Granola (AI notetaker): https://www.granola.ai/ Supastarter (Next.js SaaS boilerplate): https://supastarter.dev/ Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ Connect Andrew Duncan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-b-duncan/ Vertice Labs: https://www.verticelabs.io Subscribe Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/64yoHwDdhBd0vik2sev6xs Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gh/podcast/shipping-excellence/id1794200466 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@shippingexcellence RSS: https://media.rss.com/shippingexcellence/feed.xml