SaaStr 826: Why Only "WTF" Products Can Survive Today with Brett Queener Partner at Bonfire Ventures
episode
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
36 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Why do only “WTF” products survive in today’s fast‑changing SaaS market?
Welcome to the official Saster Podcast where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Saster Podcast.
Forty percent of the US population are using AI. We've never seen this. 80% of code is getting written by AI. Now, for large companies that have large legacy data b code bases, it's a little harder, but like you all are seeing that a lot of the coding is written by AI. And what's happening now in product development is what matters most is synthesis and prototyping. As a founder, how well do you understand the problem and the pain that your user has and the job to be done they want solved? How quickly can you synthesize, prototype, and iterate on that?
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Thank you for coming. So uh we're talking about the change economy. So just quickly who's this guy? I'm a partner at Bonfire Ventures. We got about a billion under management. Uh we write three to four million dollar checks at the seed stage. Traditional seed stage call it companies have half million to million revenue. Think about your big institutional round before you'd go and raise a series A. All we do is application software. Now one could ask, as we ask ourselves, what is application software? In this age, um If you think about how much has been commoditized in the platform stack, in two thousand three when I was working at Salesforce dot com, we took sixty cents of every dollar that we collected from customers and we bought servers.
And put them in our own data centers. So that was It was the first beginning of sort of the commoditization of the cloud at the lowest level before AWS and GCP, and basically so much of the tech stack is being commoditized as a service. Especially inference and reasoning, which gets interesting. I'm on the board of some companies, angel investor. Uh and before that was an early employee seventy at Salesforce dot com, build out go to market, build product. launched the app exchange at a lot of their platform there. Um And then I ran a pre revenue startup because I felt like it was a fraud, only working for two billionaires that worked for Larry Ellison. It was really hard. Which brings a lot of empathy. Companies now at a hundred million in revenue, but they were off sites of tears.
Cause I was in there running a playbook, Innovators Dilemma playbook that I'd used to sell to sales and marketing to sell to HR people. And this is our firm. We just raised a $250 million seed fund. Which I wish somebody had told me the economics of venture capital before I got into it. But a $250 million seed fund means he returned $10 billion. Net exit value for the for the LPs to get three times net. And when I got out of college, companies went public at twenty million in revenue. I don't know if going public is a thing anymore. But you know, for those that are investors in funds, T V T VPI is interesting.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do only “WTF” products survive in today’s fast‑changing SaaS market?
0:01–5:00
2
How does Brett Queener define “application software” and why is it being commoditized?
5:00–9:59
3
What impact does AI‑generated code have on product development speed and quality?
9:59–15:02
4
Why must founders iterate and prototype every 30 days to stay competitive?
15:02–19:24
5
How can founders build differentiated, job‑to‑be‑done products without endless feature lists?
19:24–23:26
6
What role does “ever‑boarding” play when products change multiple times a year?
23:26–27:45
7
How should SaaS companies rethink sales, marketing, and product‑marketing alignment in an AI‑first world?
27:45–31:44
8
What practical steps can founders take today to create fast, AI‑enhanced product loops?
31:44–36:06
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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