SOMETHING CHANGED IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS AND I DON’T MEAN MY COMPANY’S NAME.
Ten days ago I announced that SaaStock was becoming Shift AI. A decade-old brand, retired. The reaction was what I expected: some congratulations, some scepticism, a few people who thought it was a marketing exercise.
But one exchange in the comments stopped me. A category strategist named Olya left a note that I've been sitting with ever since:
"Everyone's going to read this as an AI pivot. It's not. It's a category pivot you just called the end of 'SaaS' as an identity, not just a pricing model."
She's right. And that reframing changes everything about what this newsletter is for.
THE OBSERVATION:
Here's what I've been seeing from inside founder conversations over the past month, and what the reaction to the Shift AI announcement confirmed:
SaaS founders have stopped calling themselves SaaS founders.
Not all of them. Not in every room. But enough that it's a pattern, not an anecdote. When I ask founders how they describe their company now, the answer is increasingly just: a tech company. Or a software company. Or, more pointedly: an AI company.
The SaaS label which was a badge of pride for a decade, which built an entire event industry, which unified a global founder community is quietly being set aside. Not with fanfare. Not with a press release. Just dropped from the way people introduce themselves.
Dave Kellogg EIR at Balderton, one of the sharpest SaaS minds in Europe pushed back on my rebrand announcement in a way that clarified the stakes:
"What SaaS companies have to do to pivot to AI is much, much deeper. Reinvent the product. Change their fundamental value proposition. Walk away from ARR in certain segments. Sell outcomes instead of seats. Change their sales model. That's burning the ships."
He's also right. There's a difference between a founder updating their LinkedIn bio and a founder rebuilding their pricing model, their product, and their sales motion from the ground up. Most companies are in the first camp. The ones who survive the next five years will be in the second.
But here's what I think Kellogg's framing misses, and what Olya's gets right: the identity shift is happening first. Before the product rebuild. Before the new pricing model. Founders are mentally decoupling from the SaaS label because the label no longer describes the company they're trying to build.
That's not cosmetic. Identity precedes strategy. When you stop thinking of yourself as a SaaS founder, you start asking different questions. What is the software actually for? What outcome am I selling? What does recurring revenue mean when the agent does the work?
Those are the questions The Shift exists to work through. In public. With real numbers from founders who are already inside the rebuild.
WHAT YOU’VE SIGNED UP FOR:
Every Tuesday morning you'll get one email from me. Not a digest. Not a roundup. One piece of original thinking, built around something I've seen or heard from inside the founder community that week.
The structure will be consistent. An observation from the field. A real rebuild story a founder's actual decisions and actual numbers. A framework you can use this week. A data point from our community. And a question back to you.
I ran SaaStock for over a decade. I talk to hundreds of B2B software founders a year at events, in private roundtables, in the kind of Chatham House conversations where people say the thing they won't say on stage. That's the raw material. That's what makes this different from another AI newsletter.
I'm not a pundit writing about the software rebuild from the outside. I'm a founder inside it Shift AI is my own version of burning the ships. You'll see that play out in these pages too.
ONE QUESTION:
Have you dropped the SaaS label in how you describe your company, your product, or yourself?
I'm not asking whether SaaS is dead as a business model. I'm asking about the identity shift whether you still lead with it, or whether you've quietly moved on.
Hit reply. I read every one. If enough of you say the same thing, it becomes the data point in a future issue.
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
P.S. Next week: the first Rebuild Report. A founder rebuilding for the AI Shift. Someone who may have cut three engineers, rebuilt their onboarding with an agent, and watched their activation rate move 22 points in six weeks. Real name, real numbers, real decision. If you know someone whose story should be in this newsletter, hit reply.
The Shift · Published every Tuesday · shift.ai
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