Invert the SaaS Paradigm

For twenty years, the deal was the same. You bought software by the seat, and in return you reshaped your company around a vendor’s idea of how your work should go. The pricing model — $x per user per month — quietly dictated the operating model. You conformed.

That trade made sense when building software was expensive. It isn’t anymore.

The immediate opportunity is to run the trade backwards: build the software a business actually runs on, shaped to its real workflows, owned outright. Not another subscription your team bends around — the operating layer itself, fit exactly to how the work is done.

This is where the first durable returns will come from. Bespoke used to mean slow and costly. Today it means precise. The winners of the next decade won’t be the companies that adopted the most tools. They’ll be the ones whose tools were built for them.

This is a stub for the repositioned site — full essay to come.