Homegrown apps amongst the B2B SaaS monocrop

• In its current form, the off-the-shelf, prepackaged, and bloated management software, Salesforce, Jira, and Smartsheet, is dead.
• You can think of these as the monocrop: GMO, kill the soil, standardization. Your tomato is going to come out looking great - round, red ... and tasting like shit - mealy and watery.
• Unless: Buy into the cult / super high-quality niche: Linear, Superhuman. User obsessed, tight ICP. But they still have this tension to grow with VC. OR see below.
• What's been coming - Homegrown and flexible: Close to the people using it, flexible, adaptable, natural and organic, evolve with the needs (sometimes weeds spring up or don't play out how you'd expect. You're inviting nature and unpredictability, but that's how you create sustainable and resilient systems)
• No-code/low-code: Notion, Coda (Grammarly AI), Airtable (AI builder). (getting into AI). And you can see it happening with Sheets, too!
• AI: OpenAI's Chat, Anthropic's Claude. (getting into collab surfaces with Claude Artifacts).
• Why is this happening?
• We're moving up the abstraction layer. This is the top layer, whether you're "designing/coding" software visually with drag-and-drop elements or using natural language. You don't have to worry about pixels, databases, APIs, or wiring up anything. Just describe and understand the problem and begin making solutions.
• ROI: Salesforce saw a 15% productivity increase, and Jira saw a 20% increase. We're seeing crazy ROI (but sometimes negative) with these other cutting-edge tools. Use case knowledge and evaluation testing are becoming increasingly crucial for understanding the impact on the organization. And it's coming from the field, not the vendors, because these are generally applicable solutions.