AI, ChatGPT, OpenAI - 5 Things SaaS Founders MUST Know...

0:00AI is in the news everywhere every day we're hearing about chat GPT open AI all these innovations that maybe they take everyone's jobs maybe they will put you out of business or maybe it'll make you work so much faster that you can grow a company a lot easier I think there's a lot of myths and misconceptions around AI right now so that's why in this video I'm going to talk through five things I think every SAS founder should know about artificial intelligence I'm Rob Walling I'm a Serial entrepreneur with multiple exits I've written four books on building startups and I've invested in almost 150 companies the first thing

0:35I want you to think about with regards to AI is how it might be applied within your SAS application as a feature or a way to level up your customers and make them more productive and in order to do that I've come up with a framework of sorts maybe a taxonomy you might call it of things that AI does well and I actually ask chat gbt and Google trying to figure out if there is is an existing taxonomy or classification of these components that AI does really well and I couldn't find one so I came up with my own and there are four components to it

1:09four things that I think AI does well and with each of these you'll be wanting to ask yourself does my SAS app do that or need to do that and can I use AI to do it so the first is generative AI so this includes AI that generates text from nothing it generates images from its Corpus it can take a blog post and turn it into a YouTube outline it's taking nothing and you know it's a language learning model so obviously there's something underneath but it's you giving it a prompt and it producing a result so if you have a social media posting tool or you have a tool that

1:42helps people place Google AdWords or Facebook ads you know that they need to come up with text for the headline and text for the body of the ad and maybe an image for if it's a Facebook or an Instagram ad so generative AI could be used in one of those cases the second category of AI is categorization if you gave chat GP t a list of a thousand different websites could it classify them as being e-commerce or content or SAS or something else it could you can train these models pretty easily with prompts to be able to figure out which categories that things fit into and so

2:15if you have a place in your app where someone might need to do manual work to categorize things such as for example support emails where you might want to categorize them into pricing tier or categorize them by topic this is something that you could think about integrating the third category of AI is summarization so this is taking a YouTube video and turning it into a two paragraph summary turning this YouTube video into a tweet thread taking a podcast episode and writing show notes for it that are much shorter than the transcript I realize that summarization is really generative and that it's taking a source and turning it into

2:50something else but for the exercise of thinking through how this can apply to your SAS application I think it's pretty important to separate generative from summarization and realize that if folks need to do something like this in your app it's probably time to think about integrating and the fourth thing that AI does well is prediction so you can imagine if you have a financial application something that has a lot of numbers in it frankly and any kind of graph that has a trend AI can take that and Trend it out not just in a linear fashion but it would take seasonality into account it could take a lot of

3:22things into account frankly so this might be a narrower use case and if you're not in financial or you know let's say you're a metrics dashboard anything like that I think predictive AI could be a compelling feature for you to potentially integrate so again those are the four categories and if I were a SAS founder today and what I'm telling my tiny seat companies is to think about whether any or all of these use cases can help your customers get there faster within your app so that was the first point of five things you should know about AI the second one is that unless you build something novel that is

3:57non-obvious and difficult to build AI is not a differentiator realizing that if you ask open AI or you hit their API and you create something that a year ago would have been unimaginable today it's really easy if it takes you a couple days to build that anyone could build it in a couple days that's the thing of AI is it's not a differentiator but it is something of an accelerant right everyone can use this and this reminds me when the rails web development framework came out for Ruby several years ago and when we first saw it we were like well now you can build Twitter in 20 minutes you know there's this

4:32great demo of doing it but what we realized is that it's not a differentiator because anyone who knows Ruby can use rails and so it became an accelerant where we can now build more things faster and developers become more efficient but everyone can use it and so it is not a differentiator in fact the differentiation is if you don't use it you will slowly fall behind so if you don't use a web development framework today like a rails or a Django or a laravel and you're coding in those languages is you will get a lot less done in the same amount of time the last point on this is the obvious ideas that

5:07will take you a week to build like hey take this YouTube video and turn it into XYZ they are already or they will soon be Commodities because these things are not that hard to build and so there is no moat right you need you still need a moat today like you needed a moat six months ago and these moats will be the same AI is just another thing to sprinkle into your application the third thing to know about AI is that the Big Ideas the huge horizontal plays like open Ai and like Google's Bard they're going to be dominated by the existing incumbents the Googles the microsofts

5:42maybe the Facebooks maybe IBM and obviously open AI which kind of cracked this whole thing wide open but there is so much money flowing into those companies into these efforts that we as bootstrapped are mostly bootstrap Founders we don't stand a chance in those spaces so don't think about building your own models because the models of Dolly and of chat GPT are moving so quickly that by the time you get yours trained their two three versions past you and it's so expensive and time consuming to build them that we now have to think about building on top of their models rather than thinking that we as mostly bootstrap Founders can

6:21possibly compete in horizontal AI the fourth thing you should know about AI is that it is an incredible accelerant within your company consider using it internally and in fact I think every SAS company can use AI internally whether it's to repurpose content like I've talked about a YouTube video into a tweet thread or a blog post into a tweet thread or a podcast into a you know a transcript or a podcast into show notes or ask Chad GPT to write cold emails for you based on a Persona or it can even help outline YouTube videos based on a title you know whatever else it can do

6:57to help you be more productive can potentially help you get there faster and grow faster and I'm not talking about ways to implement AI as a feature in your product I'm talking about a way to make your internal operations more efficient and more effective I think of it a little bit like in 2008 when suddenly I was able to Outsource work to a five dollar an hour virtual assistant in the Philippines and that changed the game for my little software company at that point AI can do something similar for you not every SAS app needs AI inside I think most do and I think most can use AI but I do believe that every

7:34SAS company in its own operations can and should be using AI namely chat GPT these days but there are also many tools that utilize open AI like automata or alright that you can be using in your day-to-day operations the fifth thing you should be thinking about in terms of AI is that some businesses some SAS companies are effectively ticking time bombs because AI is going to make your business obsolete or just really unnecessary very inexpensive very easy to accomplish because if you have a team of five or ten analysts that are analyzing data and summarizing things and doing operations that AI can now do for almost free in the snap of a finger

8:20the value of what you do is going to drop dramatically so something you could charge a thousand dollars a month for today might be worth 20 minutes of someone's time next month and that can really change the economics of your business and so I think a big thing to ask yourself is whether AI today can mostly replace what your product does and whether you need to integrate AI to make yourself more efficient or to stay ahead of this curve so that you don't wake up one day in a year or two and realize I don't really have a business anymore because people can accomplish what I'm charging them a lot of money to

8:55do they can accomplish this in a few minutes using chat GPT in a minute I'm I'm going to tell you the other AI video that you should watch immediately after this one but before I do that I want to let you know that microcomp Europe tickets are on sale you know this is the microconf YouTube channel and we run in-person events and our Flagship Europe

9:14event is in Lisbon in October of 2023. if you want to get in a room where you can chat with other Founders who are not only chatting about how AI will affect their business but all the other SAS stuff of building launching and growing head to microconf.com Europe and see if you can still grab a ticket it's October 1st through the 3rd of 2023 tickets are going fast and we do expect it to sell out speakers include Michelle Hanson of geocodio Dr Sherry Walling Stephen and Allah Craven of stridentist I'll be doing a talk I hope to see you in Lisbon in October so we know that AI has huge

9:49potential but also has major pitfalls and you should check out this other video on our Channel about how chat GPT blew up a SAS app in the worst way thanks thanks for watching