"Are restaurants dead because you can cook at home?"
My friend hit me with this when we were discussing the whole “Is SaaS dead?” debate. It was meant as a gotcha, but it’s a great way to think about why and what you should build.
Why do you go to a restaurant? You don't have the right ingredients, skills, or time to cook at home. For businesses: ingredients (your core products and services) and time (or lack thereof) hasn’t changed. But agentic coding has fundamentally changed the skill variable. SMBs can cook a lot more in-house than they realize.
Many will start with, “What’s our biggest SaaS expense? Let's replace Salesforce!” No. Large SaaS providers have deep enterprise integrations and functionality that make replacing and maintaining those solutions an absolute nightmare. These are your Thanksgivings or BBQs: unique ingredients, specialized equipment, logistics, and hours of prep. You aren’t doing that daily.
Instead, success is taking a hard look at your internal processes, or your weeknight dinners. Your internal process is what sets you apart. Trying to tailor a generic SaaS app to your org is clunky and makes you operate like everyone else. Working with Excel, standardizing documents, research enrichment, data exploration. Which parts of your critical workflows can be automated and enriched? The opportunity goes beyond in-app copilot best practices. Building internally is about reducing wasted time and freeing up your employees to live in the strategic: extend your moat.
When only 21% of organizations have adopted AI at the org level (Zapier, 2025), but 41% of executives say delayed adoption is already costing them ground against the competition, my best advice is to experiment your way into early adoption.
My friend, Alec, a chemist with zero coding experience, used Cursor to build a browser extension that helps him parse and visualize dense scientific papers, making it easy to track and read reference papers. I spent ~2-3 hours teaching him the tool. He spent 6-8 hours building. Now he’s using it regularly and improving it on his own, further tailoring to his unique process.
Anthropic’s 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report backs this up: non-technical teams in sales, legal, and operations are building their own tools without waiting on engineering. That said, fair warning: AI solutions still require testing, debugging, and heavy SME feedback loops. Find the isolated, mundane, and repetitive work in your critical processes and start there.
We were paying for Software as a Service because the in-house math wasn't mathing. Agentic coding changed that math. Reach out if you want to talk about what new dishes your team can cook up.
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