SaaS Says: Please Build It

Please Build It

Olivia Williams keeps a recurring item on her calendar. "I have a weekly meeting on my calendar that is called Kill Culture Amp."

Vercel's head of HR means it. The last straw this cycle: "culture amp does not have functionality to understand time zones." Her team built its own review tool inside Slack and cut the review cycle from 11 weeks to two. Workday still runs, but employees never open it. The culture she describes has one answer for expensive software that falls short: build it.

Last week vendors argued the system of record survives because it holds the context. Buyers agree. They are keeping the database and dropping everything on top of it.

Arnnon Geshuri, Snowflake's chief people officer, buys applicant tracking and workforce management externally and builds the rest. His recruiting team wrote a job-description tool without engineering. "In 3 days, they've coded it, and they've sent it out there and got it into production for themselves, and they built it." The measured result: "with the same amount of people. We were 20% more productive." Snowflake builds on its own platform, so read it partly as a showcase.

Marketing is doing it too. Jess Cook of Vector: "We just took our website off of Webflow, and we hardcoded it, and we moved it over to like GitHub." Dave Gerhardt of Exit Five says buyers now ask why they need a six-figure software product when they already have Claude.

The vendor answer is to sell the part that breaks. Ryan Roccon, Zapier's COO and CFO, concedes the build: "Anyone can stand up something that works in a demo in a demo environment or an app very, very easily." Production is where it fails. His team audited the agents customers run: "we found that about 9 out of 10 of those agents were actually running deterministic code". His verdict: "It doesn't need, doesn't need inference to do that. It needs a rule, right?" Rebuilt on rules, they cost about 75% less.

Pricing is moving with it. A seat is a login, and headless deployments exist to remove logins. Intercom already bills its Fin support agent at $0.99 per resolved conversation, and Gartner predicted last year that 40% of enterprise apps would carry task-specific agents by the end of 2026. A renewal priced on seats is priced on the thing buyers are working to eliminate.

Not every buyer is building. Samsara's CMO, Meagen Eisenberg, bought more than 25 AI-native tools in a year. Taylor Britton, who closed a year at 495% of quota selling for UiPath, names what that does to the sale. "everybody can kind of get the job done in some way or another."

Last week vendors said they owned the context. This week buyers took the rest.

Sources: Interviews from The Modern People Leader (Sep 26, Olivia Williams of Vercel), Digital HR Leaders (Sep 21, Arnnon Geshuri of Snowflake), Exit Five (Sep 25, Jess Cook of Vector and Dave Gerhardt of Exit Five), CFO Thought Leader (Sep 21, Ryan Roccon of Zapier), FINITE B2B Marketing (Sep 21, Meagen Eisenberg of Samsara), and Sales Success Stories (Sep 22, Taylor Britton of UiPath).