What SaaS refused to build to protect its moat is exactly what a customer's agent needs

Portability, open schemas, a real API at the centre, data you can take out, capabilities you can call from outside: for twenty years these were treated as churn risks and starved. Now the customer's agent turns up wanting exactly that list and finds a product built to prevent it; the moat has become the thing the water cannot get past in either direction. Strip the interface and most of these companies are a database, a messaging system and a state machine, and that can be built, though it is hard to build well. A founder builds the list from the start.

Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).

Note. Pairs with the-fork-next-door and open-source-removes-the-moat-excuse: the newcomer's version of not having a moat to protect.

Where it comes from

The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI The irony, which is the whole article in one paragraph; Strip the UI and see what is left (newsroom)

What it answers in the 2018 book

Open Source answered written, MVP for Gen Z Dev
Legacy Applications answered outline, Concepts

Where it goes

Chapter Be a founder: the expert founders, part Start the company (drafting); topic Open source: contribute, fork, and why it protects everyone.

Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Be a founder: the expert can build first now, and the test is whether they miss it, There is a company in this: a code review that reads every layer, for somebody to build, The expert founders, in numbers: 45 is the mean age, experience doubles the odds, a third of US startups have one founder, The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI, because AI is available to both sides, Users were never happy: 91% frustrated, 80% of features rarely or never used, $21 million a year in idle licences, A company sits in the two moves on the map: a guess becoming a product, and a product becoming a commodity.

Node idea:what-they-refused-to-build-is-what-the-agent-needs in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.