Will they lose a small customer or two to custom vibe coded solutions, yes. Will they be "competed away" due to vibe coding, definitely not.
You have to remember that no one gets fired for selecting an established software provider. Zoho is a 'safe' pick for SMBs because you know it will work compared to some custom CRM that Bill from accounting vibe coded in an afternoon.
He will be right at some point. The question is when.
I'm already vibe coding complex things like GUIs, my desktop environment (NixOS), and last week a Wayland layer shell client that would have taken me quite a lot of work if I had to do them myself from scratch from docs, and I have 20 years of software experience.
The things I spend time building and polishing today with my own time are just next year's vibe-coded minutia.
Some people are going to have a very hard time swallowing this pill, though.
> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend?
I don't get his suggestion. I'm paying Zoho for email hosting. What am I even supposed to vibe-code successfully for me to drop Zoho? There's no shortage of open-source IMAP/SMTP servers, in fact Zoho is probably using them too. Sure I can spin one myself, but I'm paying for Zoho for the *service*, not the software.
I kinda hope so. When I started my career companies and orgs had in-house developers to make custom software for the org. The developers understood the business and were part of the culture. Then the labor market got tight, developers left for higher paying jobs, managers became afraid of going custom because they would lose the developers, so they starting buying overpriced SAAS products and contractors. If the job market is flush again with capable devs armed with AI, maybe we can go back to in-house developers again.
Well, then I claim that it will be the companies themselves that try to replace Zoho (or any other CRM for that matter) with a vibe-coded replacement, the ones going out of business. As someone said once: focus on what makes your beer taste better.
Let's say I'm a manufacturer of widgets, and instead of buying an off-the-shelf CRM I decide to have the resident IT whiz on the team vibe-code a custom solution for our needs. Now I'm a manufacturer of widgets AND a CRM SaaS shop, responsible for software maintenance/deployment/reliability/feature roadmap/bug remediation. I guess the idea is that AI agents will take care of all of those things too - to which I guess my perspective is "good luck! I hope that works out."
Most probably all VCs will go out of business as the cost of creating software companies approaches zero. The need to create an army of software developers is no longer needed.
He said `would be first`; I 100% agree. If vibe coding was going to take over the world, then Zoho going out of business is a very good leading indicator. As soon as that happens, I will invest heavily; till then it is safe to ignore it.
> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend?
Feels very disingenuous. I'm a huge proponent of AI drastically increasing efficiency of creating software but we're a long ways away from nontech people replacing and supporting collaboration tools used by medium sized businesses.
Technology alone rarely wins a market ... success usually comes from marketing, referrals, and network effects.
It’s the same reason why vibe coding a better version of Airbnb (even if it’s just a simple CRUD app) wouldn’t actually threaten Airbnb as a business. The product isn’t the moat; the ecosystem is.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] threadhttps://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210
"If you own an NFT..." you are an innovator among innovators. - Garry Tan, 30 September 2021 [quote tweet]
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450
Web3 vs Earlier incarnations technology adoption curve [image tweet]
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584
"airdrops going mainstream could truly upend some % of the centralized ad-based economy of Web2" - Garry Tan, 25 Dec 2021
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448
You have to remember that no one gets fired for selecting an established software provider. Zoho is a 'safe' pick for SMBs because you know it will work compared to some custom CRM that Bill from accounting vibe coded in an afternoon.
I'm already vibe coding complex things like GUIs, my desktop environment (NixOS), and last week a Wayland layer shell client that would have taken me quite a lot of work if I had to do them myself from scratch from docs, and I have 20 years of software experience.
The things I spend time building and polishing today with my own time are just next year's vibe-coded minutia.
Some people are going to have a very hard time swallowing this pill, though.
I don't get his suggestion. I'm paying Zoho for email hosting. What am I even supposed to vibe-code successfully for me to drop Zoho? There's no shortage of open-source IMAP/SMTP servers, in fact Zoho is probably using them too. Sure I can spin one myself, but I'm paying for Zoho for the *service*, not the software.
Why do you need 3 platforms to vibe code a solution? Are each one of them not good enough?
Of course he endorses slop coding (Pichai's endorsement is criticized by the Zoho founder for those who do not click through to X).
Zoho will now be a very interesting company for the vast majority of people who hate "AI". I'll have to check it out.
Feels very disingenuous. I'm a huge proponent of AI drastically increasing efficiency of creating software but we're a long ways away from nontech people replacing and supporting collaboration tools used by medium sized businesses.
These statements are so out of touch with reality, I generally wonder where will YC be in 5-10 years.
It’s the same reason why vibe coding a better version of Airbnb (even if it’s just a simple CRUD app) wouldn’t actually threaten Airbnb as a business. The product isn’t the moat; the ecosystem is.
Using same logic, why use Replit, EmergentLabs, or Taskade when you can vibe code your own vibe code platform?
Seems ironic to post that - doesn't that same logic imply that most YC companies are worthless?