Why You Should Stop Buying SaaS and Start Building It

Startups often fail because founders prioritize building products over developing deliberate distribution strategies that help potential customers discover, value, and purchase them. Examples including Anthropic’s advertising, MongoDB’s developer community investment, and PostHog’s value-first free tier illustrate that strong products still require intentional customer acquisition. The author argues that early-stage founders must personally prospect, speak with potential users, and track outreach rather than relying on automation or assuming demand will emerge. To support this work, the author built Radar, an LLM-assisted internal tool that combines contact history and product-usage data, identifies inactive prospects, drafts follow-up emails, and measures prospecting activity. Radar’s broader lesson is that LLMs have made custom internal software faster and cheaper to create, allowing founders to build tools tailored to their own distribution workflows instead of settling for generic CRM systems.

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