Which SaaS Survives in AI Era? 7 Things You Must Do to Survive

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In this episode of my micro-podcast, I'm breaking down 7 things every software founder must do to survive while AI eats the SaaS market around them.

Pulling from 8+ years working shoulder-to-shoulder with software founders, here's what separates the products that become indispensable from the ones that get copied over a weekend:

1. Educate your customers — if they can't figure out your product without emailing support, your onboarding is broken. Build real walkthroughs, not help docs
2. Fix customer experience — pick up the phone. Email support is a churn accelerator. Adyen does it right. Stripe doesn't. That gap is a competitive advantage
3. Be more than software — stop selling a login, start selling outcomes. Dig Insights and Vsimple bundle services with their product. That's how you become a growth partner, not a vendor
4. Sell value, not features — Leadfeeder calculated my 25x ROI in the first five minutes. ContactOut just sold me contacts. One closed the deal, one didn't. Train your team accordingly
5. Remove UX bottlenecks — your users aren't telling you where they're stuck. They're just leaving. Use heatmaps and session recordings. Fix what's broken before it kills retention

If you own, fund, or lead a software product, this episode gives you a practical 7-point checklist to audit your product right now — before your customers start building their own version.

👉 Want to talk through how to make your SaaS indispensable? Email ogo@procoders.tech or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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Salesforce is down over 20% in 6 months. Legacy SaaS tools are getting crushed. Everyone is saying AI is eating software, and they are right. If you're a software founder, you need to hear this. I'm breaking down 7 things you must do to survive and thrive while the market shifts around you. My name is George. I've worked with dozens of software founders over the past 8 years. I've been in the trenches with those who won deals and build successful SaaS products, but I've also seen their mistakes and failures. Spoiler. I've put together a SaaS survival checklist you can grab in the description below. It's free and it will help you audit your product against everything I'm about to cover. Before we start, hit subscribe if you want to succeed with your SaaS product. I drop practical content like this every two weeks. And if this helps, I'd appreciate a like. Let's go. Here's what's happening right now. Investors are questioning every SaaS company. Customers are asking, why should I pay $50 a month when I can just build my own SAS? And you're wondering, is my product even relevant anymore? Here's the truth. AI isn't killing SAS. That SAS is killing itself. The products that survive will be the ones that become indispensable for their customers. Not just another tab in the browser. Let me show you how to be that product. Number one, educate your customers. Don't assume they will figure it out. Here's the first thing that separates winners from losers. Customer onboarding. Your customers are not mind readers. They sign up, they are excited, and then they get lost. They don't know what buttons to click. They don't understand the workflows, and three weeks later, they churn. Here's the fix. Build an onboarding system that actually works. I've worked with a gym management software company in California. Their CX team shows new customers how all features work in the platform. Not a help doc, not a chatbot, real humans walking them through. And when they ship new features, same thing. They reach out, they show how it works, give written instructions to follow up. Your minimum viable onboarding should be a video walkthrough for every corp flow. Show them exactly what to click, when to click, and why it matters. Don't make them guess. Here's the rule. If a customer has to email support to understand basic functionality, your onboarding is broken. Number 2. Customer experience. Here's something that nobody wants to hear. Everybody hates email support. I don't care how fast your response time is. If I have to type out my problem, wait 24 hours, get a templated response, and then type again, I became annoyed, frustrated, and start looking for alternatives. You know what I love? Getting on a call. Adian, a payment processor company, does it very well. And Stripe? Not so much. And that's a competitive advantage that Adian actually markets. We don't hide behind emails, instead, we pick up the phone. I work with a company called Same Day Courier Network. They literally call their clients on the phone. Like it's $19.95. And their customers love them for it. Here's a wild story. I once signed up for a product that had no proper support, no cancellation button, and I had to dig through LinkedIn, find the developer's phone number, and call them directly. That's how I got to their CEO, canceled my subscription, and finally received a refund. Can you imagine that? Here's the approach. Don't hide behind emails. Solve your clients' problems fast. Number three, be more than software. This is where most SaaS companies miss the boat. They think they're selling a tool. That's wrong. You're not selling software. You're selling outcomes. You're selling transformation, and sometimes that means offering more than just a login. And sometimes that means offering more than just a login. Let me give you two examples. A market research company, Dick Insights, built a product called Upside, but they don't just sell software. They sell market research consultancy services alongside a product. The software automates their research methodologies and delivers results much faster. Here's another example. vsimple, an AI-powered process automation platform, does something similar. They have a customer service team that doesn't just answer tickets. They actually help customers get results from the product. They study their customers' workflows, their legacy software, their spreadsheets, and they help them build the same process in the vsimple platform. Here's the shift. Stop thinking software company and start thinking growth partner. Next one. Number four, teach your sales team to sell value. This one drives me crazy, as I've seen so many sales calls where a sales rep just walks through features. We have this dashboard, we have this integration, we have this report. Cool, but I don't care. Here's what I care about. What is my return of investment? Once I talk to LeadFeeder, a tool that helps you capture website visitors. And their sales guy asked me, what is your average contract value? Then he calculated exactly how many deals I need to close to make the subscription pay for itself. And actually, my average deal size would give me 25x return on the annual subscription cost. 25x? It's insane. As you could have guessed, it was a tremendous value right from the start. And here's the contrast with Contact Out, a company that sells emails and phone numbers. They were selling me contact data, just contacts. They never asked me why I needed those contacts. What I was going to do with them. How it fits my sales process. Here's the thing. If you don't show investment returns to your clients, they will ask you for a 50% discount on your SAS. Because they know you can have an 80-90% margin. Here's the reality: people don't buy contacts. They buy the ability to reach prospects, start a conversation, close deals, and actually make money. Your sales team needs to connect those dots to sell value, not software. Number 5. Remove UX bottlenecks. Friction is what kills retention. Customers aren't telling you where they are getting stuck. They're just leaving. And you're sitting there wondering why the churn is up. Here's the fix. Look at the customers under a microscope. Use heat maps and session recordings. Watch where people drop off. Tools like Amplitude are great for this. You can see exactly where users abandon flows, where they rage click, and where they give up. You'll be shocked. That layout you thought was intuitive, users hate it. Those simple steps you designed, people get lost every time. And that clever navigation? Nobody understands it. Here's what customers want simplicity and clarity. That's it. Remove every unnecessary click, every confusing label, and every extra step. Number six, use AI for speed, not creativity. With all the tools out there, lovable, bold, all those vibe coding apps, it's tempting to generate the entire software design just with AI. But don't ship that to production. Here's my take. LLMs have zero taste in design. My clients are founders doing 105 million in ARR. All of them use AI tools for one thing. Presenting concepts, prototyping ideas, getting something visual in front of stakeholders fast. But production UX? Never. Because every lovable app looks the same. Generic layouts, same patterns, nothing distinctive. Your customers deserve better than a napkin sketch run through an AI generator. Here's the rule. Use AI to move fast and use humans to make it look good. Last one. Number 7. Build AI features that actually matter. This one is really important. I've seen tons of vibe coded AI apps. Most of them are weak. You don't control the agendic flows, you can't customize the prompts, there is no evaluation framework. It's basically a scrappy proof of concept pretending to be production software. And here's the real question. Why do I need a summarizer in your CRM if I can just use Claude or ChatGPT? You will tell me. We save you two clicks. Here's the thing. Two clicks cost me nothing. But if your AI summarizes something wrong, now I've lost time, made bad decisions, and I have to fix it manually. That's pain in the ass. Here's your competitive mode. Don't build AI features that Claude already does. Build features that require your domain expertise. If your product provides the specific flow for analyzing deals, scoring contracts, or processing industry-specific documents, that's value. And that's something that AI can't replicate. Generic AI is a commodity. Domain-specific AI is your mode. Here's the survival checklist. Number one, educate your customers. Don't assume they will figure it out. Build real onboarding. 2. Customer experience matters. Pick up the phone. Emails are last resort. 3. Be more than software. Offer services alongside the product. Be a growth partner. 4. Sell value, not features. Your sales team needs to calculate ROI, not demo dashboards. 5. Remove UX friction. Watch session recordings. 6. Use AI for speed. Prototype fast, but don't ship generic AI generated designs. 7. Build domain-specific AI. Your mode is expertise, not features that Cloud or GPT already has. Want the full checklist? Grab it in the description. It's free and it breaks down exactly how to audit your product against all 7 points. If this was helpful, please subscribe. I share frameworks like this every two weeks to help founders like you scale faster without burning cash. I'll see you in the next one.