In this episode, the entire tech stack at Serious Land Capital is being audited for potential AI replacement as Claude Code and similar tools make custom software development accessible to non-technical users. The core thesis from Section AI drives the analysis: SaaS companies that force users onto predefined pathways will be outcompeted by AI solutions that adapt to specific business needs, and software must either solve a custom enterprise problem or become a commodity available to everyone. The LandPricer strategy has pivoted from a broad land investing tool to a fully custom enterprise solution targeting regional banks and larger lenders, with demos scheduled for the coming month.
Key Takeaways:
- SaaS survival requires extreme positioning Businesses must target either the richest customers in their segment or offer ultra-low-ticket solutions anyone can afford—the middle ground is where companies die, as evidenced by failed haircut chains like Supercuts and Costcutters being squeezed out by Great Clips and premium salons.
- CRMs and e-signature platforms are primary disruption targets These categories represent the lowest-hanging fruit for AI replacement because they’re expensive subscriptions that can be rebuilt as custom solutions in hours using Claude Code, potentially consolidating workflows and eliminating duplicate data entry across systems.
- Enterprise customization beats feature breadth LandPricer’s pivot to building 100% custom solutions for individual regional banks and lenders reflects the new competitive reality—generic tools with toggles won’t survive against AI that can create perfectly tailored underwriting systems for each enterprise’s specific needs.
Listen to the full episode to hear the complete analysis of which SaaS categories are most vulnerable to AI disruption and the specific criteria for evaluating your own tech stack for potential cost cuts.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious, we’re at Serious Land Capital. We’ve funded over $6 million worth of land deals with industry leading 41 % operating margins. So today I wanted to comment a bit on, you know, even more of a mainstream phenomenon about, you know, the Claude code, how, you know, nifty that has gotten for, you know, creating almost any type of
application you could think of, especially for personal use and also approaching business and enterprise use as well too. So I’ve lightly commented on this over the past couple of weeks, like how, again, just AI progress going at the probably faster than any of us can really fully keep up on. And even the frontier.
engineers are struggling with this as well too. And I know I wrote in Serious News, our weekly newsletter over the past month-ish, roughly where as far as AI disruptions go, the typical SaaS platforms and business models are probably at
the highest risk of being more significantly disrupted. Because again, I credit Section AI, which to me is the best enterprise focused newsletter and organization just as far as overall AI training for your workforce. Where they were just commenting that, again,
SAS companies and tools really since the dawn of computers has primarily focused on doing a handful of tasks very, very well, but forcing the user to stay on a certain pathway that these SAS tool defines. But in the age of AI, when you have LLM models that both
theoretically and practically can adapt to the specific needs of each individual user. Being able to do anything from the perspective of a software tool becomes the new status quo, or at least where we’re heading. And so if your software is not solving a
particularly custom problem for a particular business, then that business model and that tool will inevitably be out competed. And so just to mention a couple other examples, how we’re thinking about this as well too, I was having a meeting with the team anticipated to take over the operations for LandPricer and
it’s really more oriented towards developing or effectively bringing on developer partners at larger enterprises, particularly larger lenders, regional banks and so forth, where we would build out a solution that is 100 % specific to that particular company.
and then be able to expand to another enterprise, another enterprise, and so forth here. And so the early conversations have been pretty interesting from that regard because these regional banks or leadership teams recognize the potential of bringing in a software like this. And they’re also lower margin businesses. They want to make their existing workforce more.
efficient as well as reduce the anticipated head count that they were planning on hiring over this coming year. So it kind of fits within the model that works for them. You have to build these tools to solve a money problem for a business. Again, either by reducing the amount of supply they need in terms of workforce and talent or other tools and so forth.
or just boosting their overall profitability and ability to deliver their underlying service or product. Those are really the two levers that you’d have to pull either both at the same time or one individually. And so that’s why we’re more excited about going after a solution like this.
you know, because that fits exactly within what Section AI was talking about. And that really helped evolve my own thinking. Even since I had first considered land price her, you know, like a couple of years ago at this point, you know, even as recent as, you know, five or six months ago, you know, it was still just much more focused on, you know, our underwriting pathway in particular for land investing community.
And even though there would be certain toggles that you’d be able to use to fit, you know, your own specific underwriting needs, like it wasn’t going to be a fully custom solution, which I can again, just see the writing on the wall that any software company that is going to succeed longer term is going to need to be able to do that. So I’m more excited about the direction that, you know,
the operational team for LandPrice is planning on taking this. We have a couple of upcoming demos scheduled over this coming month to take these conversations further here. while that end user won’t be precisely who we imagined off the bat here, going the enterprise route.
generally is going to be smarter and more sustainable for most business models when you do go forward. you know, it’s like Hormozzi always points out, it’s like go for the, you know, you can either go for the richest customers in your particular segment or be, you know, the tool or the service that, you know, anybody can afford effectively. So you have to go like either.
very, very low volume, high, ticket or super low ticket that everybody can use. But if you’re in the middle, that’s where businesses go to die. was having a conversation about this for, I was getting my hair cut at like great clips. It was just expanded all over the place. And in Austin, I was talking about some of these other companies like Supercuts or Costcutters have just disappeared, like locker room haircuts and
I’m not too loyal to the to the haircuts. I was like, whatever is kind of convenient, but I’ve just seen, you know, some of these haircuts, lawns, some of them really, really figure out how to do this. Well, you know, figure out their model where, you know, great clips is, you know, a cheaper product, but it’s able to service a whole bunch more people. Or you have, you know, the salons that are going to be higher priced. But
you are able to offer more premium serving where it’s like the other ones, other brands that I mentioned, they were trying to do something in between and they’ve just been out competed and been going out of business or being bought out. So, I mean, you see this in, in, you know, any type of industry and you’re going to see this in the software space as well too. you know, honestly within the land space, as, as well, you have a whole bunch of people doing tons of volume or, you know, probably higher.
price properties on average, but you know, in between it just becomes harder, harder business model to, to sustain. So, you know, a lesson from that perspective. and so, you know, that’s all to say how we’re thinking about it from our future approach for landpricer. you know, again, whether I’m in the day to day or not, you know, I’d like to see something like that succeed.
in any case, because we still haven’t seen any other software be able to do what we anticipate, being able to customize the exact underwriting needs of a specific company with any type of land portfolio, whether you’re a larger lender or a smaller retailer investor. So that’s still the goal here. And then subsequently, the other piece to comment on
Again, in the advent of cloud code and some of these really well put together, I mean, you can spend an hour and just create an entire personal website or what have you and host it on GitHub and so forth and you get rid of your own hosting service. This is such a disruptive tool that’s at the hands of effectively anybody nowadays, which needs very little technical sophistication.
Um, and so, you know, I encourage you and what we’re doing internally as well, it’s just looking over our tech stack. And, know, the, again, as my business partner points out routinely, it’s like, you know, every penny counts, especially in, um, you know, more difficult markets. Uh, you know, he just sees so many companies, again, in the larger hedge fund and these are.
companies with you and hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of revenue that just get themselves underwater because they just let costs explode without routinely pruning services or headcount that aren’t necessarily needed anymore. And probably the biggest bloat that almost any company will see is just you’re bringing on monthly SaaS subscriptions and so forth. so like every single month we will take a look, what are we still utilizing? What is worth paying for? Can we do month to month versus annual?
whenever possible, unless we’re really, really certain we’re going to stick with something for at least the year and can get a discount on it. And so, you know, I start looking through, our tech stack here, are there, you know, potential cuts that we can make that might not have even been feasible a month ago, but if we utilize Claude code to build something even more custom to us that both improves the functionality of what
the SaaS software is that we’re paying for and also kills the cost, the monthly or the annual cost for what we’re paying for some of these softwares as well. Some of them are going to be more difficult, like an open phone or a Quo.
You know, I might be ignorant to the fact, but I don’t think, you know, quad code could, you know, recreate a VOIP SaaS solution at the moment here. Or like Zoom, for instance, you’re not going be able to, or even Loom, I don’t think that’s going to be possible. So some of these are still going to be safer SaaS problems or solutions at the moment.
But, you know, certainly not, not all of them, you know, like traveling mailbox and so forth. Like some of these that might have a bit more physical or very, very specific utility that would be, you know, at the moment, hard to imagine, five coding taking over, you know, they’re again, going to be a bit more safe, but I’ll look more at like the CRM types. I think CRMs are probably the,
Biggest target, you know, a lot of folks will build up more custom notion solutions. A lot of the CRMs will plug directly into the various AI LLMs. So you can have more direct control over that, but it’s like, okay, why are you going to be paying a large, you know, and CRMs tend to be more expensive subscriptions for a lot of businesses. So it’s like, you know, if I can just build a more custom solution, just through a five coding.
session that fits the needs of our business even more. Why are we paying for a CRM solution here? So like that would be a top target to look at. E-signature, for instance, a lot of people use DocuSign. We use SignRequest, is, yeah, it’s definitely not as good as DocuSign. We’ve just had so much inertia. We’ve been using it for years. It services well, but it’s like, yeah, an E-signature web platform.
you know, how difficult would that be to recreate and potentially even be faster for filling in certain templates and maybe even connecting into our CRM so we don’t need to repeat the work and so forth. Can we save and consolidate more, you know, time and effort on behalf of our staff to get some of this. And I know some of the CRMs will already do this. Like, yeah, this is, you know, something that’s five to 10 years old at this point.
Nevertheless, I’m mentioning our specific situation at hand here too. So like those are key targets that I would initially look at. And then, know, probably the website design at the moment, you know, we don’t pay a ton for both our web hosting, but you know, we have a web designer with SEO kind of assistance there. It does really solid work and that’s been great for our lead flow.
but that, that is something like, you know, longer term are the LMS just going to be able to optimize that works? Like why even have any, you know, web designer SEO specific,
human talent, compared to just having a custom solution for, for your own business. Like you have to be able to think where again, the puck is heading here and what these tools can start doing. And you don’t really know until you start experimenting with them. I think you’d be surprised, but, I certainly have been over the past couple of weeks and, or like, again, like task management, Asana people throw in a notions. know it can like kind of combine with CRMs there, but those would be other,
areas that, you know, might be able to be, disrupted over the, you know, short to medium term here. So, yeah, again, those are just a couple of examples within our business where I think, you you have the lower hanging fruit, to where it’s going to be more difficult to you’d probably look at, at your own business and see, okay, yeah, where, where can we really start to chop down? on our overhead here.
And maybe you have human talent that’s specifically handling some of these solutions that might not be as necessary anymore either. So you have to look at it from multiple perspectives here. And again, I just think this is where the future of work is going, especially more white collar behind the computer type of jobs. Are you ever really going to see larger…
commercial offices and so forth and you know, high monthly rents for prime real estate and like heavier human headcount. I just, I think it’s going to become even more rare than it had been trending, you know, during and post COVID. So food for thought there. Hope you found this one interesting Serious Land dot Capital for any of your land funding needs, 50 K minimum purchase price.
Looking forward to next time, subscribe and share everybody. Take care now, bye.
