This article is a summary of an idea/project I worked on throughout 2024. It went through various forms - a Strava group, a website, and an unfinished eBook. In the end I decided I didn't have time to maintain it, so here's some of the content I created boiled down to a summary, mainly so the concept doesn't just get lost to the passage of time.
You've stumbled across the strange and exciting world of Ultimate Rucking. Let's get you up to speed.
Writing this at the start of 2025, I can say with a high degree of certainty that this piece is unlikely to age well, but at least we'll be able to look back and laugh about just how wrong we were.
Jumping right in - why might SaaS be 'dead'?
For context, let's restate Microsoft's Satya Nadella's December 2024 assertion that SaaS as we know it is dead:
I think the notion that business applications exist, that's probably where they'll all collapse right in the agent era, because if you think about it, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. The business logic is all going to these agents and these agents are going to be multi-repo CRUD right, so they're not going to discriminate between what the backend is - they're going to update multiple databases and all the logic will be in the AI tier so to speak. And once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the backends.
It's fair to say this interview sent shockwaves through the industry - not because it was the first time anyone had floated the idea that SaaS was moribund, but perhaps because it was such a concrete formulation of how it was going to happen coming from a senior industry player. But combing through the comments on YouTube, reaction videos and subsequent blog posts, it was clear just how polarised opinion was on how this might play out. A lot of experienced engineers refused to countenance the possibility that backend logic could be subsumed by LLMs, exemplified by comments like this:
If you've got here because you've worked yourself up into a state of rage because the fancy accounting/ERP/web system you pay all that money for each month has produced an invoice that doesn't match up with an invoice you've been given, or a customer has complained that the totals on an invoice you've produced are incorrect - take a deep, calming breath and know this: there is no single, correct way to calculate VAT.
Be honest - if I asked you what the resulting margin would be on a 50% markup, how quickly could you answer?
Given how fundamental margins and markups are to any product business, I think it's time we cleared this up once and for all. If you can't be bothered to read this, just grab the "cheat sheet" at the bottom of the article, print it out and keep it in a safe place.
Well, honestly, they probably just eyeball it. A lot of business owners have been “in the game” so long they can probably just guess at how much to buy.
I ran a company that supplied restaurants and hotels for a good while and can tell you that precisely 0% of our customers were doing anything other than calling us from inside their walk-in cold room with a list scratched on the back of a chopping board directly from memory.