Your $10M ARR SaaS is Just a Feature in Next Week's ChatGPT Update
The VC checkbooks have closed. The era of 'GPT Wrapper' startups is over. If your product is just a prompt, you are already dead.
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I sat in a pitch meeting last week where a founder asked for $5 million for an "AI-powered legal contract analyzer." I asked to see the architecture. It was a React frontend, a Stripe integration, and a single Python file that sent the PDF to GPT-4 with the prompt: "Summarize this contract."
I didn't just pass. I wanted to call the police. This isn't a business. It's a toll booth on a road that OpenAI is about to pave over.
Getting 'Sherlocked' by Sam Altman
Remember "PDF Chat" startups? There were dozens of them. Some making $50k MRR. Then OpenAI added the paperclip icon to ChatGPT. Overnight, their value dropped to zero. They were "Sherlocked"—a term from the Apple days when macOS would release a feature that killed third-party apps.
Now it's happening every week. Marketing copy? Done. Code generation? Done. Data analysis? Code Interpreter killed that. If your entire value proposition is "I prompt the model so you don't have to," you are not a founder. You are a temporary interface.
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The Wrapper Epidemic
We are drowning in wrappers. The barrier to entry for building software has collapsed. You can build a SaaS in a weekend.
The problem is, so can everyone else. If your moat is 10 lines of code, you don't have a moat. You have a puddle.
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The Only Way Out: Vertical Integration
The only AI companies that will survive are the ones that go deep. They don't just generate text; they do work. They own the data. They own the workflow. They integrate with the messy, legacy systems that ChatGPT can't reach.
Don't build a tool that helps a lawyer write a contract. Build a firm of AI lawyers that negotiates, signs, and files the contract automatically. Don't build a "writing assistant." Build a publisher.
The era of GenAI is over. The era of Agentic SaaS has begun. And agents don't need wrappers.
