The 100% software company

If you know Stripe, Mailgun, or Zapier you might know what I’m talking about. They are all just a bunch of APIs. They are created to make running companies easier through automation. So we know that payments can be automated, billing, mail-delivery. But where is the limit?

What if there was a 100% software company that did client prospecting on it’s own, responded to clients on it’s own, resolved legal problems on it’s own and (blasphemy!) created a product on it’s own.

You get the picture.. everything on it’s own.

The people who I talked to about this said I was crazy (and that I want to destroy humanity). Here’s what they say:

There is no way to get the accounting right (in France!!?! Crazy!!! Jail time!).

How would you even begin designing a product for users, have interviews with them, etc.. you would need a Hard AI! You totally 100% require a human for this.

They are right of course, but.. given that there are so many amazing tools that allow us to automate so many parts of our business then what remains unorganised, unstructured?

What if you don’t need human level intelligence if you just have better structured information? At least to make a stupid simple product.

I’m now going to borrow something from my art friends and say that I’m proposing an Art project. Look.. this is just an experiment, a joke, a way to show that building a business has nothing to do with having a human brain.

Of course, what I’m not going to try to implement this Art project. What I’m really after is finding the remaining parts of a business that are difficult to automate and try to make it automatic. Isn’t this what we are looking for? Look at all those SaaS companies trying to remove the pains, scale and automate stuff that wasn’t automated before? And they are so cheap too! Where does this all going to lead?

My prediction is that soon all we’re going to have is a bunch of Cronjobs and message brokers lousily connecting the different APIs together controlled by some reinforcement learning algorithm that looks to increase that Stripe balance. Think Zapier, but without you creating all the rules.

While this swarm like AI is probably not technically feasible at the moment I personally use it as a framework for thinking about the products.

What hole is this product filling in my 100% software company?

Btw, if you’re looking to improve your customer support through automation. Come check us out at Gorgias.