For a long time, I thought I understood SaaS. I didn't.

What I thought SaaS was, in hindsight, was closer to platform building, stack worship, or even infrastructure speculation. I saw technologies emerge, watched people make money around them, and assumed the game was about picking the right stack early and building on top of it. That assumption was wrong — and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise why.

SaaS Doesn't Start With Technology

The SaaS paradigm is brutally simple once you actually see it. You identify a real operational problem, build a tool that specifically removes that pain, and charge a recurring fee for continued relief. That's it.

It's not about building something clever, or building on the right chain, or assembling a beautiful architecture. You start with the work people already do, the friction they already tolerate, and the inefficiencies they already pay for — and you remove one of them. If customers keep paying, you were right. If they churn, you were wrong. SaaS is a feedback loop, not a vision.

The Spreadsheet Problem

Most coordination problems live in spreadsheets. Information gets scattered across tabs, versions diverge, updates get missed, context gets lost. Everyone has their own copy of the truth. This is where real friction lives — not in the absence of technology, but in the gap between how people actually work and what their tools assume they need.

Enterprise platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot promise to solve this, but they come with 10,000 features when you need 10. The bloat creates its own friction. Training, configuration, consultants, integrations — suddenly you're managing the tool instead of doing the work.

The alternative is smaller. Custom tools built for how you actually work, not how a vendor thinks you should. Fewer features means fewer bugs, less cognitive load, lower costs. Start small, iterate based on real usage, stop when you're done.

The Real Power Is Multi-Party Problems

Single-user SaaS can be useful, but multi-party SaaS is defensible. The most interesting SaaS products don't just help one business — they help multiple businesses work together better. Think suppliers and buyers, contractors and clients, firms and regulators, or partners who don't fully trust each other.

The moment your product improves coordination, verification, reconciliation, or accountability between organisations, something important happens. It becomes sticky. It gets recommended organically. It's hard to rip out. This is where SaaS quietly becomes infrastructure — without ever marketing itself that way.

Where I Went Wrong

I spent years looking at stacks instead of customers. I saw a technology I believed in, saw others building on it, and assumed value would emerge simply by participating. That mindset is incredibly common in crypto and developer culture more broadly.

But stacks don't create value. Solved problems do. Technology only matters after the pain point is clear.

Reframing Blockchain

The real breakthrough for me came when I stopped thinking of Bitcoin as a financial instrument and started thinking of it as something else entirely — an immutable data layer, a shared source of truth, a compliance and interoperability rail. In other words: boring infrastructure. The kind businesses actually want.

Seen this way, blockchain has more in common with TCP/IP, databases, or accounting standards than with stocks, bonds, or speculative assets. Its job isn't to moon. Its job is to work, every time, at low cost, without surprises. And that has a profound implication.

Price Speculation Is a Bug

Successful infrastructure trends toward reliability, predictability, and low falling costs. Businesses don't want volatile inputs. They don't want ideological risk. They don't want dependencies that might be hot this year and gone the next.

If a system is genuinely useful as a compliance or interoperability layer, the market will naturally treat it like plumbing — not a lottery ticket. That's not failure. That's success. It also explains why serious builders should largely ignore crypto market noise altogether.

Why Incumbents Move Slowly

Large institutions don't adopt new base technologies because they're exciting. They adopt them when they know they work — over long time horizons, under boring conditions, without drama. That takes time.

Meanwhile, challengers don't need certainty. They need advantage. They quietly adopt cheaper, simpler, more reliable rails and build products that cost less, are easier to audit, are harder to dispute, and reduce friction their competitors still accept. By the time incumbents notice, the advantage is structural.

The Invisible Rails

What emerges is a comprehensive, deeply interconnected web of new companies doing business on rails where they cannot be spied on, cannot be front-run, and cannot be competed with on price. Not because of ideology or crypto tribalism, but because the infrastructure is genuinely better for coordination between parties who don't fully trust each other.

Multi-party SaaS built on an immutable compliance layer. Interoperability without intermediaries. Audit trails without surveillance. This is how new generations of companies emerge — not through hype, but through quiet operational superiority.

The Real Lesson

The lesson for me wasn't "believe harder in technology." It was the opposite.

Start with the workflow, the friction, the dispute, the cost someone is already paying. Build a small tool that removes it. Charge for the outcome. Let the infrastructure disappear. If a technology helps, use it. If it doesn't, ignore it.

No multi-year contracts. No vendor lock-in. No 10,000-feature platforms when you need 10. Just purpose-built tools that solve real problems, iterated continuously until you're done.

That's SaaS. And now, finally, I understand it.

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