SaaS Moats in the AI Era: Sell the Outcome, Not the Tool

Synopsis

Einar Vollset, co-founder of TinySeed and founder of the SaaS M&A advisory Discretion Capital, argues that AI makes conventional software features easy to copy and pushes SaaS founders to sell completed outcomes from labor budgets. He presents three responses—shipping faster, charging AI agents, and moving into labor budgets—then explains how products that act, observe results, and improve through a protected learning loop can compound defensibility, illustrated with a collections SaaS and five tests for an AI worker.