The Great SaaS Stalemate

As the first transformer-based AI models started scaling, I remember how we went from the awkward chatbots who kept forgetting what you just asked to the holy-sh*t moment of talking to GPT4 and wondering if the singularity was just around the corner.?

I realized that AI would radically alter how companies work. Not because AI was about to pass all existing and future versions of the Turing test as doomers claim – but because most enterprise work is neither that complex nor important.?

It made me think about what kind of company you could create with AI as your baseline.?

Most companies are big because they need to be – with millions of workers in accounting, admin, finance, customer service, etc. Scale your customer base linearly, and unless you are a hyper-efficient tech company, your employee count will grow cubed until you get to that ~5% profit average that most Fortune 500s consider a balance between scale/ revenue. Even tech companies today are massive. They don't get to escape the gravity of scaling laws when serving consumers or businesses at scale.??

AI-enabled work will revolutionize this, not because it is predictable or a better worker, but because it will make a lot more "move 37s" – the term they use for the unexplainable outside-the-box winning move by Google’s AlphaGo Zero against human champions in the game of Go.?

The game of Go has more combinations than atoms in the universe. It is fair to say your average office job is less complicated than this.

Accordingly, the promise of AI to business is not just a better traditional worker – but one that can be more creative, think outside the box, and find unexpected superior solutions that aren’t limited by "the way things are done".

We have seen firsthand how hungry enterprises are for the results of AI-enabled work. But the greatest threat is this inertia of "the way things are done".

The software reinforces existing structures and solutions (not to mention their existing vendors), preventing new thinking or problem-solving methods. We cannot get to the next generation of business without radically rethinking the software we use and how it works. None of the existing enterprise applications would survive in a world where a Fortune 500 company of 150 people is possible.

Most SaaS companies mirror corporate structures that effectively are hundreds of years old and still sell software the way Ricky Roma sells real estate in Glengarry Glen Ross (always be closing!) On top of that, you have outdated corporate hierarchies with everyone wanting to be a VP, SVP, or President, and no one wants to build or do anything.

Luckily, at Beyond Work, we don’t have to start with “the way things are done”. We can break the dogma and think outside the box.?

So that’s what we have decided to do.?

We started with something simple: Beyond Work can only be 150 people. This forces us to think outside the box from day one. We have succeeded if our software can enable us to remain a small organization with a vast footprint. We believe constraints are healthy.

With 150 people max, we never need a huge hierarchy of VPs, Presidents, Directors, or the myriad departments that brings.?

Instead, Beyond Work has three practices: builders, impacters, and scalers.?

• Builders are our craftspeople who love building great products that people value – and seeing their impact on the world.?
• The Impact team drives the results for our customers – and since our pricing is consumption-based, we are fully aligned to get the maximum results possible.?
• Scalers constantly work on figuring out how to keep growing while staying true to our organizational size goal, how we can innovate our organizational structure and methods, and how to use our software and AI to keep scaling.

Most start-up and SaaS playbooks are written for a past world with zero interest rates and no meaningful AI. As an industry, we will have to relearn nearly everything for this new environment, which is why Beyond Work is taking a systematic approach to building our business.

We have already made radical choices, such as forgoing traditional commission plans in sales. Preventing bad software from being built just for the sake of a quarterly target (avoiding the uncounted cost of sales tech debt).?

The sum of all this is that we consider our GTM model a part of our core IP and platform and are iterating it in lock-step with our software. We won’t have a single traditional enterprise software tool in Beyond Work. We are instead creating an environment that enables us to leverage AI to the furthest extent possible to solve the job.

We are doing this because we want a much better work experience while creating a real impact for us and our customers – not just selling digitization theater.?

The best part is that it is working. Seeing our platform scale in production with great customer feedback has been amazing. We are already serving a number of large enterprise customers, learning at a rapid pace how to do AI first at scale with them. This is happening while we are still only ten employees and the company is less than twelve months old.?

So don’t join Beyond Work because you want to be a VP one day or for our fat commission plans. Join because you are curious and driven to push the boundaries of what is possible organizationally, technologically, and with real customer impact. Because we will only ever have 150 people, you know we will take great care with every hire. And you will find yourself alongside some of the best colleagues you have ever worked with. Finally, this also frees us from the need for crazy amounts of VC capital – so we can promise you equity that matters for those aligned with our mission.

We think this is a better way of working for us and our customers.