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SaaS is Unbundling ChatGPT in waves

Here is the 1st wave:

Unbundling Excel

First Wave Excel Use-Cases → SaaS Companies

Invoices: FreshBooks and Jobber replaced the classic invoice template in Excel, making billing easier for freelancers and SMBs.

CRM: Salesforce and HubSpot turned basic contact tracking spreadsheets into super powerful sales and relationship management platforms.

Project Management: Asana and Monday .com came from Gantt charts and task lists in Excel to project management tools.

Unbundling ChatGPT

First Wave ChatGPT Use-Cases → SaaS Companies

Customer Support: Intercom Fin and Gorgias took the basic Q&A chatbot use-case from ChatGPT and packaged it into a 24/7, always-on, AI-customer support.

Content Creation: Jasper and Copy .ai wrapped around ChatGPT’s content-writing capability into dedicated features to create blogs, email writing, and marketing copy.

Data Analysis: Humata and Glean use AI to analyze documents and summarize trends, replacing manual data review.

The 2nd wave:

Second Wave Excel Examples

Industry-specific SaaS: Sandbox (childcare management), Swept (janitorial services), and Little Hotelier (boutique hotel scheduling) are examples of SaaS that go far beyond basic spreadsheets and into tailored features for niche markets.

No-Code / Low-Code Platforms: Airtable and Coda let people build interactive databases and apps, something Excel users never dream of doing.

Second Wave ChatGPT Examples

Industry-specific Copilots: AI “copilots” for legal, healthcare, finance, and construction that answer questions, handle compliance, and automate routine operational workflows.

AI Chief of Staff: AI that reads every document, data point, update, and conversation across an organization, then delegates tasks and keeps everyone aligned from the top down.

AI Voicemail & Communication: AI tools that handle, transcribe, summarize, and respond to voicemails and calls.

Taking on the PLG Role Back in 2022, I started leading PLG at my company. PLG was becoming a significant trend in the tech industry. Venture capital was pouring into PLG strategies due to their potential for rapid growth in SaaS tools. I believe I'd be a good fit because of my experience in founding my own SaaS back in 2016 and my consumer viral growth skills. But I soon realized there was still much to learn.

My Biggest Worry: Hitting Sales Targets One of my main concerns was meeting our PLG revenue goals. Our objective was to make the PLG motion self-sustainable. Our sales team is moving upmarket towards bigger enterprise customers, so PLG is helping disrupt the market, generate brand awareness, and create some buzz against the incumbent.

Hitting sales numbers can be tricky, especially when you're giving away your tool for free at first. We had to figure out the whole journey for customers using our compliance automation tool. Teaching customers about compliance is already hard, and we had to guide them through the various paywalls, advanced use-cases, and pitch the sell to them as well.

Dealing with Challenges Getting the team on board with this uncertain journey was tough too. We had to learn as we went, which can be uncomfortable for people who are used to knowing exactly what to do.

I started talking directly to our customers to deal with these fears and worries of leading. I used the Superhuman onboarding process, which gave my team and I more confidence.

By talking to customers, we learned a lot. I took what I learned back to our team and executive leaders. We improved the product, improved our selling, and fixed our pricing. Soon, we started to see some progress.

Things Got Better As we kept working, we started to see tractions. More people were buying, and others were telling their friends about us. These onboarding calls helped alleviate our anxiety and uncertainties.

Lessons Learned Learn Quickly: PLG often requires a willingness to learn and adapt quickly.

Focus on customer engagement: Direct interaction with customers provides invaluable insights and builds confidence.

Iterate rapidly: Use customer feedback to continuously improve your product and strategies.

Communicate openly: Share learnings and challenges with your team and leadership to foster alignment and support.

By facing my fears head-on and focusing on customer engagement and continuous improvement, we were able to build confidence in our PLG strategy and ultimately drive success for our team and company.

In the end, doing things that didn't always seem efficient at first, like talking to many customers one-on-one, gave me and my team the confidence to overcome our fears. We learned that it's okay to be unsure at first, and that by working closely with customers, we could figure things out and reach our goals.

We spent the first 3 months exploring ideas. Initially, we started with an automated product feedback tool, trying to uncover the “hair-on-fire” problems in that market. Eventually, we pivoted to building a customer success platform. While we validated there was real pain (after speaking with 15+ CS directors, 10+ CEOs, and 5+ sales leaders), we realized the ICP didn’t have enough influence to buy, and our solution didn’t fit seamlessly into their existing workflows.

What we needed for our early sales momentum: Finding hair on fire problem + Budget authority.

Across 30+ interviews, one thing stood out: everyone was drowning in emails. Whether it was CS teams doing reactive firefighting, sales reps staying on top of prospects, or founders trying to keep communication professional with partners, vendors, and customers—email was overwhelming. And they were juggling all this while managing family responsibilities.

The problem of needing help with their inbox really resonated with our first network connections.

We pitched to tech founders who have had exits and sales executives we already knew—and closed 5 out of 15 sales calls.

Part of this success comes from how universal the problem is: email drains time and energy for nearly everyone. But I also want to acknowledge that some of our early customers just wanted to be supportive—something we don’t take for granted.

No way have we figured it out. We are still doing things that don't scale...

At this stage, we continue to do 1:1 sales while validating and refining our roadmap based on feedback about people’s email workflows.

Kinda corny, but … Stepping back and reflecting like this helps remind me that the journey itself is the reward.