Comment by fragmede
16 days ago
like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep.
But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".
Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.
What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.
The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena.
My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes.
A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow.
I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people.
as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music
Salesforce is and pretty much always has been a set of code generation platforms. If you can produce a decent code generation platform, do it. It's one of the most sure ways to making money from software since it allows you to deploy systems and outsource a large portion of design to your customers.
Spotify is not the audio player widget in some user interface. It started off as a Torrent-like P2P system for file distribution on top of a very large search index and file storage. That's the minimum you'd build for a "whitelabel [...] Spotify clone". Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on.
Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify and you're set for retirement if you only grab a reasonable salesperson and an accountant off the street. Robust file distribution with robust abuse detection or robust ad distribution or robust user prediction would be that valuable in many business sectors.
If building and maintaining actually is that effortless for you, show some evidence.
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> as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here - that this website is comparable to Spotify? Even if you are talking about just the "core experience", this example supports the opposite argument that you are trying to make.
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Sure, yeah, go ahead, do it. Seriously! Build a SaaS business in a week and displace an existing business. Please report back with your findings.
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