I just spent two days in Comporta with thirty SaaS founders. ARR ranging from £500k to £15 million. Chatham House rules, so no names, no companies.
But the conversations were as honest as I’ve had in a long time.
The clearest thing that came out: we are very early. Nobody has the blueprint. Most people are figuring this out in real time, and the ones who say otherwise are probably selling something.
Here is the signal worth paying attention to. On GTM, the honest answer from most of the room was: not much has changed yet. People are curious about where AI fits in, testing things at the edges, but the fundamentals are holding. Brand is still the moat. Distribution is still the hardest problem.
One founder put it plainly:
“You can build a product faster now, easier than ever, but the thing that determines whether it goes anywhere is still GTM.”
Faster building means more products competing for the same attention. The gap between a good product and a successful one has not closed. If anything, it has widened.
AI has not changed the hardest problem in SaaS. It has raised the stakes for it.
FOCUSING ON THE CUSTOMER IS KEY, STILL.
The retreat was part of the Shift Collective. Deliberately unstructured peer conversation, no panels. What came up organically said more than any agenda could have produced.
On team and headcount, the conversations were more charged. Some had already made cuts. Most had not yet. Two founders in the room were running one-person operations and sharing what that actually looks like day to day. There was real curiosity there, not judgment. People trying to understand what lean actually means now.
A few things stuck with me. One founder had given everyone in their company the title of AI manager, with each person responsible for managing multiple agents. Another said there were six months left to become an AI-first business. Not a prediction. A conviction. Someone just back from San Francisco talked about frontier developers becoming a performance filter, and companies handing employees £300,000 worth of tokens with a KPI to use them, partly to surface who was genuinely adapting and who was not.
The one that landed most simply: focus on the customer. That’s still it. Everything else is in service of that.
One morning I was in the gym with one of the founders. He was on the treadmill watching a YouTube video about AI. Later I heard another had been awake at 2am doing the same. Not because they were anxious, exactly. Just because there is so much to understand and not enough hours. That image stayed with me. People learning quietly, on their own time, because they know the cost of being behind.
What struck me most across the two days was not any single insight. It was the value of the room itself. Content is everywhere. Podcasts, YouTube, newsletters. All of it commoditised, including this one. What you cannot get from content is knowing where your peers actually are. Not the polished version. The real version. What they’re building, what’s breaking, what they’ve tried that didn’t work. That peer-to-peer understanding is what the Shift Collective exists to create.
ONE QUESTION:
If one of the founders in that room is right, you have six months to become an AI-first business. Not as a prediction. As a working assumption for this week.
What would you need to stop doing, start doing, or change about your team to hit that?
Hit reply. I'm building a broader dataset from these conversations. If enough of you answer the same way, it becomes next month's benchmark issue.
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
P.S. The founders working through this exact question will be in the room with us in Barcelona 13-14 October. Tickets are live at europe.shiftai.events.
The Shift · Published every Tuesday · shift.ai
You're receiving this because you subscribed. Unsubscribe any time.