# The Future of SaaS | 2025 Trends You NEED to Know Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGu-2suChAg Duration: 7 min Language: English Words: 1418 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/mGu-2suChAg --- [0:00] over the holiday break I sat down with a notebook to think about where SAS and the startup Market as a whole is moving I came up with five predictions that I think have some pretty massive consequences some of these changes will be great for Founders they represent millions of dollars in opportunity and some of these changes are going to make starting and running your business a lot harder I'm Rob Walling and after spending nearly two decades building software investing in 212 SAS companies and writing five books for entrepreneurs I've learned that in your shots like this is a good way to learn sometimes you're right and sometimes you're not [0:34] and if you stick around to the end of this video I'll share a prediction that has opportunity written all over it I want to remind you that these are predictions that means I think there's a decent chance they will happen but they are not facts and I cannot predict the future so take things that I say here with a grain of salt but my first prediction is that traffic for Google's organic search rankings will drop by at least 15% in 2025 due to ai ai is answering a lot of questions at the top of the search engine results right now and I know that at least half the [1:08] searches I'm personally doing these days are answered just fine by that box at the top I don't have to click on any of the Blue Links I'm not saying SEO is dead I'm not saying SAS founder should not be doing SEO but the typical 10 Blue Links that has already been overtaken by Google's zeroc click content where they used to just have a static summary and then with Google ads ad that they make not look like ads and just this constant pushing down of organic results has resulted in overall drops over the past several years and I'm predicting that we're going to see at least 15% and [1:42] frankly I just got out of an interview with Lars lren who has generated tens of millions of SEO page views over the past you know whatever 10 to 15 years and has spoken at microcom several times about SEO and after talking to him I think maybe 15% is low it means that the questions someone has will be answered by something other than your article or blog post that ranks in Google for that term my second prediction goes along with the first that Google's going to see its biggest ever drop in Revenue in 2025 due to the transition of people getting their answers from AI instead of [2:16] just direct search if you think about Google's business model I forget what the exact numbers are but it's well over 90% of their overall revenue is from AdWords it's from advertising and right now ads are baked into the 10 blue links on the Google search engine result pages and as AI whether it's chat GPT whether it's Claude whether it's Gemini whatever you're using there really isn't an ad infrastructure there yet these companies are still in the the roll it out land grab get as many users as possible phase and they have yet to start to really monetize it and so once they do there's going to be a transition here where I [2:55] think AdWords Revenue will be falling and Google has not yet figured out how to monetize their AI answers yet and I'm sure obviously they're working on it now but there's going to be a little bit of a delay there and so we are going to see interesting ramifications of this like is Google going to have to do a bunch of layoffs I don't know depends on their cash situation as a sidebar if you agree with any of these predictions will you give this video a like and a subscribe it really helps grow the channel and if you disagree please weigh in in the comments my third prediction is that the [3:23] term AI will actually be used less and less in the coming 12 months as it becomes you Li quitous as AI is just baked into most or all of the apps we use you'll just expect it to be there and I can see more specific terms being used like smart or autogenerated you know it's it's smart emails it's uh oneclick generated emails I'm not coming up with these on the Fly very well but I think the term AI is actually going to start to have backlash think about like crypto and nfts and blockchain and web 3 each of those maybe not nfts but each of those actually didn't have a bad [4:01] reputation when they started but over time as people overused them and abused them those terms kind of became negative for a big group of people right they became a negative way to describe something and I think AI is going to see a similar turn against it and therefore as innovators product people and marketers I do think that we're going to come up with other terms or phrases that describe more of the end result not how the end result is accomplished cu the end result is accomplished through artificial intelligence but I don't actually care about that what is it over here that I'm actually making and how [4:35] can I describe that product or that that email that I'm writing you is it a smart email is it a auto email is it a another term that I'm not doing a very good job of coming up with on the fly but you get the idea I think AI will be overused and it will actually maybe reduce in prominence in the coming 12 months my fourth prediction is that platform risk will intensify for bootstrap Founders in 2025 as they face increased challenges with platform dependence so in addition to this YouTube channel I have a long running podcast been going for almost 15 years and in episode [5:09] 735 of that show startups for the rest of us I went deep deep on platform risk and the eight levels of platform risk and what's interesting is this here video actually started as a podcast episode in that same startups for the rest of us feed you can find that on Apple podcast Spotify you can even find it here on YouTube just by searching for startups for the rest of us for full transcripts and easy search head to startups forther restof us.com my fifth and final prediction for today is that ads in AI chat interfaces like chat GPT and Claude will become commonplace in 2025 Common Place may be a stretch but I [5:49] do think that these companies will start to figure this out related to my prediction above that Google's going to kind of struggle to to figure it out especially in the early days but I do think this creates an very interesting opportunity if a new ad ecosystem pops up because when new ad ecosystems pop up usually the tools that the big companies are building to manage the ads are crap and so you look at like Twitter's ad tool whatever it's called you look at linkedin's ad interface to actually Place ads they're not very good and that's where opportunities arise for Savvy entrepreneurs who want to hook into their API and build a better [6:25] interface or build a way to schedule and turn things on and off that their interface does not allow through my startup accelerator Tiny Seed I've actually invested in a company called linkow at link. that has done this for the LinkedIn ads interface and hits their API to give you an interface that provides much much more functionality and control and so the opportunity here could be that if ads are being placed in AI chat interfaces is there a similar opportunity to build a better tool that the big players aren't going to build so what do you think about these predictions I'm curious if you see any big disruption [7:00] coming that I missed let me know in the comments if you've enjoyed this video you should check out this next video about the SAS Trends we learned after surveying 700 bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SAS Founders make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos like this thanks for watching --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI 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