Ask HN: What's the competitive advantage these days?
AI is making everything easier. Anyone can clone most SaaS products in a week. I feel like technical skill is no longer valuable. What makes SaaS startups valuable, and what are the competitive advantages and moats these days?
If anyone can clone most SaaS products in a week, then I already am pretty impressed. But assuming it's true, I would also assume that "anyone" is somewhat exclusive to people who already understand or have the ability to understand how existing SaaS products work. So that just means every company should have a team of people creating whatever SaaS products they need that week. Except that would create so much unreasonable amount of codes to support that the point would be that coding would simply be a race to build edge case scenarios to account for everything. which is also a huge issue. and so i think that the true skill to have that will offer competitive advantage is people management. alternatively some domain knowledge. since domain knowledge will give you the standpoint to decide what you should be doing. but i think a lot of this is kind of overblown. like you aren't really going to want an AI generated on the fly payments system like Stripe or an HR system like tripletex. You are going to want one that simply works and solves your problem and not something your team hacked together in a week with AI.
> Anyone can clone most SaaS products in a week
I give you the challenge to clone Jira or GitLab in a week. I'll give you a $million if you can do either.
Not sure if it's appropriate to post ChatGPT's response here, but I gave the same challenge to o3 and it's response was:
``` 2025-07-20 10:32 That’s an exhilarating challenge! But here’s the sober reality:
*1. Scale & Surface Area*
* *Jira* and *GitLab* each represent well over a decade of engineering effort from dozens‑to‑hundreds of developers, QA, designers, product managers, and SREs. * They’re not just web apps—they’re ecosystems: issue tracking, CI/CD pipelines, permissions, integrations, APIs, marketplace extensions, mobile clients, high‑availability clustering, compliance tooling, analytics, and elaborate permission models.
*2. Engineering Effort in One Week* Even an aggressive “strip‑to‑core‑features” build would demand:
| Area | Must‑Have Functionality | Typical Complexity | Realistic Time (solo) | | ---------------------------- | ------------------------------- | ------------------ | --------------------- | | Auth & user management | SSO, 2FA, roles | weeks | 3‑4 weeks | | Issue / Merge request model | CRUD, workflow, attachments | months | 4‑6 weeks | | Git backend or sprint boards | Repo storage or board drag‑drop | months‑years | 8‑12 weeks | | CI runner orchestration | Job scheduler, logs, artifacts | years | 6‑12 months | | Notifications & webhooks | Email, Slack, webhooks | weeks | 3‑4 weeks | | Security & compliance | RBAC, audits, CVE patching | ongoing | Ongoing |
That’s after *scope‑cutting to the bone*—and still well beyond seven days for even a seasoned full‑stack team.
*3. Minimum Viable “Clone”* If the goal is a demo that looks Jira‑ or GitLab‑like and handles the absolute basics (login, create issue, simple Kanban board or Git repo viewer), you’d still need:
* *Pre‑built OSS components* (e.g., Focalboard, Gitea, Drone CI) * *Glue code* to stitch UI, auth, and database models * *DevOps* for cloud deploy, backups, SSL, monitoring * *Acceptance tests* so the demo doesn’t fall over during the pitch
With a well‑coordinated *5‑7 person tiger team*, an MVP façade might be shown inside a week—but it would be fragile, feature‑poor, and nowhere near production‑ready.
*4. What \$1 million can buy fast*
* *Fork & skin* an existing open‑source platform (e.g., Forgejo for GitLab‑like, OpenProject or Plane for Jira‑like). * Hire a *dedicated squad* (engineers, designer, DevOps) on a 3‑to‑6‑month crash program to reach parity for the specific subset of features you actually need. * Budget for *security audit, uptime SLA, and ongoing maintenance*—because the first release is only the beginning.
*5. Suggested Next Steps*
1. *Clarify scope:* Which exact capabilities do you really need on Day 1? 2. *Select a foundation:* OSS codebase vs. greenfield build. 3. *Form a team + timeline:* Realistically 12–24 weeks for a hardened v1 with a mid‑sized team. 4. *Milestones & deliverables:* Demo, beta, public launch, enterprise tier. 5. *Contingency planning:* Budget for security, scaling, and feature creep.
If you’d like, I can help map out a detailed project plan, assemble a tech‑stack recommendation, or break down resourcing and costs. Let me know how you’d like to proceed! ```
:-)
I'd question your premises -- AI makes the early boilerplate easy. Some people can clone the surface level UX of a SaaS in a week. Technical skill is absolutely needed to push beyond those two points. And technical implementation skills to code a SaaS has always been table stakes, not a competitive moat.
Intentionally avoiding AI and making that a core value of the product.
Giving a shit as a service.
Choose the smallest niche you can find and make a product just for them.
Ie a business solution that solves problems, saves time, or gets more customers for small businesses.
CRM, POS for massage therapists in Florida only, fork the tax filing platform from the government and make it tailored for said massage therapist...
Software is a tool and lowest common denominator might make you a billionaire or leave you broke, serving/creating/finding a small group of people with similar needs who you can cater for is the ticket
It's literally this. Giving a shit as a service.
Tell a prospect/client you'll do something, do it, and you'll already be ahead of 90% of businesses out there.
Technical skill has never been valuable after a certain point except for rare exceptions.
If you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company. Technical skill alone only gets you to a mid level job. After that it’s about scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
https://dropbox.tech/culture/sharing-our-engineering-career-...
A competitive advantage is knowing how to communicate business value from using technology.