Introducing Back to BaSaa(c)S
Author: Yousif Hanna
I'm starting a series of posts. Nobody asked for it, but I've been doing some deep SaaS contemplation so thought I'd write it down.
There's a strange thing happening in software investing at the moment. On one side, you've got the AI maximalists telling you that SaaS is dead, that agents will replace every application, and that anything built before 2023 is basically a legacy system waiting to be disrupted. On the other side, you've got a cohort of quietly defensive operators and investors insisting that nothing fundamental has really changed, and that the same playbook that worked in 2018 still works today. I've concluded that both camps are wrong and have resorted to this to try convince you why.
I spend my days evaluating vertical SaaS businesses. The kind of software that runs specific industries rather than generic business functions. Think food safety compliance, automotive retail, field operations, clinic management. Not the sexiest categories in tech, but some of the most durable businesses I've ever come across. I've spent the last decade doing this, and the last few months have genuinely made me rethink parts of how I evaluate businesses, what makes them defensible, and where the real risks lie. Not because the fundamentals have changed, but because the context around them has.
So what am I reading?
Back to BaSaa(c)S (a witty play on 'back to basics' - AI could never come up with that!) will work through what I think AI actually means for vertical software, for the businesses building it, the customers using it, and the investors evaluating it. It's not a doom piece and it's not a puff piece. It's an attempt to think clearly about something that a lot of people are currently thinking noisily about.
Putting my neck out with a commitment on some themes I'd like to write about as part of a 10-part series:
The case for vertical SaaS being more resilient than the headlines suggest, and what's actually worth worrying about
Why vintage, the age and depth of a business' market relationships, is becoming one of the most important indicators of defensibility
Why replicating a product and displacing a business are two entirely different things, and why go-to-market and customer success are more important now than they've ever been
Whether the person running the business is actually oriented to compete in a world that's changing this fast, and why proud, defensive leadership is as much of a risk as anything a competitor can do
The build vs. buy question, properly filtered through regulatory risk, ACV economics, and what 'slightly less reliable' actually means when your software sits inside a compliance workflow
Whether SMEs will genuinely start building their own tools with AI, or whether that's mostly a story told by people who've never had to maintain software they built themselves
The vibe-coding hangover that's coming, and why the next eighteen months are going to produce a lot of instructive cautionary tales
Why your vertical software vendor is compounding an advantage that nobody is talking about enough, built from years of aggregate customer experience that no internally-built tool can replicate
What happens to horizontal software when the application layer gets hollowed out, and where the value migrates
And finally a prediction: the market coming full circle, with a cohort of businesses that defect to general-purpose AI solutions discovering that the 5% to 10% they gave up mattered more than they thought
"So why are you deciding to do this now, Yousif?" I hear you ask
Because the conversation is moving fast and a lot of it is shallow. The hot takes are getting hotter and the nuance is getting thinner. I think there's a real gap for analysis that's grounded in how these businesses actually work, written by someone who's sitting across the table from founders and operators every day, not just reading about them.
If you're an investor in software, a founder building a vertical product, or just someone trying to make sense of where all of this is heading, I hope this is at least interesting and at most useful.
Yousif
Article 1: Vertical SaaS isn't dying. It's evolving coming soon(ish)..