Lovable on thefuture of SaaS

Lovable is making the applications people build on its platform usable by agents. In Richard MacManus’s interview with Lovable CTO Fabian Hedin, Hedin describes what he thinks this means for SaaS:

People are not going to have as many tabs open in different tools as they have historically. That experience is going to consolidate, but the vertical capabilities those tools provide will remain valuable.

A lot of B2B SaaS is good at showing you all the work you still have to do. The owner can see which customers need a follow-up and which jobs are waiting on an estimate, then spend the evening working through them. The software helps organize the work, but still expects someone in the business to do it.

Agents can actually do work. An accounting system and CRM are still useful, but for the agent that uses their capabilities to prepare something, follow up, or update the records. It is related to what I wrote about in No one can show me how: an owner wanting a job off their list, without having to adopt and manage another workflow. i.e. I agree with the experience consolidation above. It actually needs to happen.

Hedin also connects that with the context a system holds:

“It should have as much context as possible about you, your company and the world around you,” said Hedin. “Then it needs the capabilities to perform both general tasks and actions that are specific to your organization.”

In a small business, much of that context lives with the owner. They know why a customer gets different terms, or why last year’s estimate is a bad comparison for this job. They connect what the software records with what they know about the business.

An agent needs access to that reasoning, and a way to retain the owner’s corrections, if it is going to do useful work across those systems. Otherwise, the owner is still reconstructing the situation and explaining it every time.

Hedin makes another point I agree with:

Making sure they are well connected, built correctly and reliable is the hard part.

An owner needing help with a job should not have to figure out how to connect all those pieces and make them dependable. In reality, they have no desire to do that. They don't wake up in the morning and think "I can't wait to use someone's SaaS".

There's plenty of value along the way to full automation btw. As I wrote in What is the agent’s work worth?, preparing a useful estimate for review can save hours even when the owner still needs to adjust it. The relevant records and calculations should already be in front of them, with the assumptions that need their attention made clear. They can spend that time deciding what to approve instead of assembling everything from scratch.