Using AI to generate your first version and using AI to learn your market are two different activities. The code is now cheap to produce. The insight that tells you what to build is not. Founders who conflate the two end up with faster-produced products that solve the wrong problem.
You have a question. A real one. Maybe you’re wondering if that new market segment is worth pursuing. Or whether
Most SaaS pricing pages are designed around what founders believe the product is worth rather than how buyers actually make decisions. The result is pricing that satisfies the founder and confuses the customer. Pricing is a buyer decision tool, not a founder value statement.
Retention metrics measure whether customers stay, not whether they succeed. A product with strong retention built on habit rather than value is one product improvement cycle away from a churn event. The distinction between customers who stay because they are succeeding and customers who stay because switching is inconvenient determines whether your retention is an asset or a liability.
Category creation as a go-to-market strategy is only viable when the existing category is actively failing the customer. Positioning as a new category when an existing one is working is not differentiation — it is confusion that makes the buyer’s decision harder, not easier.
The founders extracting the most value from AI coding tools are not using them to write more code faster. They are using them to explore more problem spaces per week before committing to any. Speed is a secondary benefit. Optionality is the strategy.
The next wave of SaaS consolidation will not be driven by feature parity but by data gravity. Whoever holds the most operationally critical data will determine which platforms survive and which become integrations. Features can be replicated. Data accumulation cannot be easily reversed.
Most founders building on foundation models worry about model failure. The real risk runs the other direction: the model improves, and the capability that justified your product is now a built-in feature. This post explains how to identify which parts of your differentiation are exposed to this risk and how to build around it.
Smart SaaS founders validate first, build second. And there’s one validation method that’s both profitable and incredibly revealing: creating an online course.
