The Future of SaaS | 2025 Trends You NEED to Know

- Rob Walling tells the audience about his five predictions about where SaaS and the startup market as a whole is moving. Rob will share a prediction that has opportunity written all over it at the end of the video. - He predicts that traffic for Google's organic search rankings will drop by at least 15% in 2025 due to AI. He also predicts that the term AI will start to have backlash. - Speaker A predicts that ads in AI chat interfaces will become commonplace in 2025. He thinks this creates an interesting opportunity for savvy entrepreneurs to build a better interface if a new ad ecosystem pops up.

Over the holiday break, I sat down with a notebook to think about where SaaS and the startup market as a whole is moving. I came up with five predictions that I think have some pretty massive consequences. Some of these changes will be great for founders. They represent millions of dollars in opportunity. And some of these changes are going to make starting and running your business a lot harder. I'm Rob Walling and after spending nearly two decades building software, investing in 212 SaaS companies and and writing five books for entrepreneurs, I've learned that calling your shots like this is a good way to learn. Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're not. And if you stick around to the end of this video, I'll share a prediction that has opportunity written all over it. I wanna remind you that these are predictions that means I think there's a decent chance they will happen, but they are not facts and I cannot predict the future. So take things that I say here with a grain of salt. But my first prediction is that traffic for Google's organic search rankings will drop by at least 15% in 2025 due to AI. AI is answering a lot of questions at the top of the search engine results right now, and I know that at least half the searches I'm personally doing these days are answered just fine by that box at the top. I don't have to click on any of the blue links. I'm not saying SEO is dead, I'm not saying SaaS founder should not be doing SEO. But they're the typical 10 blue links that has already been overtaken by Google's zero click content where they used to just have a static summary and then with Google Ads that they make not look like ads and just this constant pushing down of organic results has resulted in overall drops over the past several years and I'm predicting that we're going to see at least 15%. And frankly, I just got out of an interview with Lars Lofgren, who has generated tens of millions of SEO page views over the past, you know, whatever 10 to 15 years and has spoken at Microsoft Conf several times about SEO and after talking to him I think maybe 15% is low. It means that the questions someone has will be answered by something other than your article or blog post that ranks in Google for that term. My second prediction goes along with the first that Google's going to see its biggest ever drop in revenue in 2025 due to the transition of people getting their answers from AI instead of just direct search. If you think about Google's business model. I forget what the exact numbers are, but it's well over 90% of their overall reven is from AdWords, it's from advertising. And right now ads are baked into the 10 blue links on the Google search engine result pages. And as AI, whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Claude, whether it's Gemini, whatever you're using, there really isn't an ad infrastructure there yet. These companies are still in the roll it out, land grab, get as many users as possible phase and they have yet to start to really monetize it. And so once they do, there's going to be a transition here where I think AdWord revenue will be falling and Google has not yet figured out how to monetize their AI answers yet. And I'm sure obviously they're working on it now, but there's going to be a little bit of a delay there. And so we are going to see interesting ramifications of this. Like is Google going to have to do a bunch of layoffs? I don't know. Depends on their cash situation. As a sidebar, if you agree with any of these predictions, will you give this video a like and a subscribe? It really helps grow the channel. And if you disagree, please weigh in in the comments. My third prediction is that the term AI will actually be used less and less in the coming 12 months as it becomes ubiquitous. As AI is just baked into most or all of the apps we use, you'll just expect it to be there. And I can see more specific terms being used like smart or auto generated. You know, it's, it's smart emails, it's one click generated emails. I'm not coming up with these on the fly very well, but I think the term AI is actually going to start to have backlash. Think about like crypto and NFT and blockchain and web3, each of those, maybe not NFTs, but each of those actually didn't have a bad reputation when they started. But over time as people overused them and abused them, those terms kind of became negative for a big group of people. Right? They became a negative way to describe something. And I think AI is going to see a similar turn against it. And therefore, as innovators, product people and marketers, I do think that we're going to come up with other terms or phrases that describe more of the end result, not how the end result is accomplished, because the end result is accomplished through artificial intelligence. But I don't actually care about that. What is it over here that I'm actually making and how can I describe that product or that that email that I'm writing you, is it a smart email? Is it a auto email? Is it a another term that I'm not doing a very good job of coming up with on the fly, but you get the idea. I think AI will be overused and it will actually maybe reduce in prominence in the coming 12 months. My fourth prediction is that platform risk will intensify for bootstrap founders in 2025 as they face increased challenges with platform dependence. So in addition to this YouTube channel, I have a long running podcast been going for almost 15 years. And in episode 735 of that show Startups for the Rest of Us, I went deep, deep on Platform risk and the eight levels of Platform risk. And what's interesting is this here video actually started as a podcast episode in that same Startups for the Rest of Us feed. You can find that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, you can even find it here on YouTube just by searching for Startups for the Rest of Us. For full transcripts and easy search, head to Startups for the rest of us.com My fifth and final prediction for today is that ads in AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT and Claude will become commonplace in 2025. Commonplace may be a stretch, but I do think that these will start to figure this out. Related to my prediction above that Google's going to kind of struggle to figure it out, especially in the early days. But I do think this creates a very interesting opportunity if a new ad ecosystem pops up. Because when new ad ecosystems pop up, usually the tools that the big companies are building to manage the ads are crap. And so you look at like Twitter's ad tool, whatever it's called, you look at LinkedIn's ad interface to actually place ads. They're not very good. And that's where opportunities arise for savvy entrepreneurs who want to hook into their API and build a better interface or build a way to schedule and turn things on and off that their interface does not allow. Through my startup accelerator Tinyseed, I've actually invested in a company called Linklo at Linklo IO that has done this for the LinkedIn ads interface and hits their API to give you an interface that provides much, much more functionality and control. And so the opportunity here could be that if ads are being placed in AI chat interfaces, is there a similar opportunity to build a better tool that the big players aren't going to build? So what do you think about these predictions? I'm curious if you see any big disruptions coming that I missed, let me know in the comments. If you've enjoyed this video, you should check out this next video about the SaaS trends we learned after surveying 700 bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders. Make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos like this. Thanks for watching.