Episode 28: If Anyone Can Build Your SaaS, How Do You Still Win?

Software has never been easier to build.

AI is accelerating product development, reducing technical barriers, and allowing new competitors to enter markets faster than ever.

That creates a new problem for SaaS companies.

If someone can replicate your features faster than before, where does your competitive advantage come from?

For Andrew Davis, Chief Innovation Officer at Paddle, the answer increasingly comes down to distribution.

In this episode of Leaders of Growth, Milan Savov and Andrew explore how the fundamentals of SaaS growth are changing and what companies need to rethink if they want to build a sustainable advantage.

They discuss product-market fit, distribution, enterprise sales, AI search, community, events, founder-led growth, company culture, and the lessons Andrew learned from building and exiting his own SaaS company.

For CEOs, CMOs, founders, and growth leaders, this conversation is a look at what becomes important when simply building a good product is no longer enough.

1. Distribution Becomes the Competitive Advantage

Building software is becoming dramatically easier.

That means features alone are becoming harder to defend.

A competitor can appear quickly. AI can accelerate development. And products that differentiate purely through functionality risk being copied or even absorbed into larger AI platforms.

Andrew believes this makes distribution one of the most important competitive battlegrounds for SaaS.

But distribution is more than picking a marketing channel.

He breaks sustainable go-to-market down into four interconnected elements: product-market fit, product-channel fit, channel-model fit, and model-market fit.

The challenge is that all four are changing simultaneously.

Customer expectations are evolving. New channels such as AI search are emerging. PLG models are changing how companies acquire customers. And enterprise buyers are researching products differently.

The companies that succeed will need to keep adapting all four.

2. Scaling from $1M to $10M ARR Requires Focus

Imagine a SaaS company at $1M ARR with a strong product, good retention, founder-led sales, and very little brand awareness.

How should it reach $10M?

Andrew’s first response is revealing:

“What’s the deal size?”

A company selling a $10 product to a massive horizontal market requires a completely different growth engine from a company that needs to close ten enterprise customers.

For enterprise SaaS, Andrew believes two things need to be solved before discussing channels.

The first is knowing exactly which accounts you want.

The second is having a message that matters to them.

If there are only 50 companies likely to become ideal customers and five buying personas inside each, marketing suddenly becomes much more focused.

You do not need to reach everyone.

You need to become relevant to the 250 people who can materially change your business.

That changes the role of marketing from generating maximum reach to creating maximum resonance.

3. Product-Market Fit Is Now a Moving Target

Product-market fit used to feel like a milestone.

You found something customers wanted, demand became sustainable, and then you scaled.

Andrew believes that model is changing.

Today, product-market fit is closer to a treadmill.

New competitors launch constantly. Customer expectations change. AI creates new capabilities. And products that looked differentiated six months ago can suddenly feel ordinary.

That means SaaS companies need to keep finding product-market fit rather than assuming they have permanently achieved it.

The definition of an MVP is changing too.

When software is easier to build, a minimum viable product may simply be too easy for competitors to replicate.

Andrew points toward the idea of the minimum lovable product instead: something customers genuinely want rather than something that merely works.

And as companies scale, focus becomes increasingly important.

Instead of continuously expanding their ICP, Andrew likes seeing companies narrow it.

The better you understand the customers who are most likely to succeed with your product, the easier it becomes to build better products, stronger messaging, and more efficient distribution.

4. AI Search Is Becoming a Real Acquisition Channel

Search is also undergoing one of its biggest changes.

People are no longer simply entering keywords into Google and clicking through a list of results.

They’re having conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI systems.

For SaaS companies, being discoverable increasingly means being mentioned, cited, understood, and recommended by these systems.

Andrew says Paddle is already seeing AI search become an acquisition channel.

The company monitors how it appears across AI-generated answers, tracks referral traffic from AI platforms, and uses self-reported attribution to understand how prospects first discovered Paddle.

That final signal has been particularly valuable.

More prospects are explicitly saying they discovered Paddle through tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.

One of Paddle’s strongest advantages came from something the team had built before AI search became such a major topic: detailed developer documentation.

Because Paddle’s technical information was comprehensive and machine-readable, AI systems could understand more than its marketing messaging. They could understand the product itself.

The lesson is important.

In the next era of search, companies will increasingly need to create information for both humans and machines.

5. The Human Advantage in an AI-Driven World

As more marketing becomes automated, Andrew believes human interaction becomes more valuable.

That is one reason events remain important to Paddle.

For a company responsible for critical payment infrastructure, trust matters.

Meeting customers, prospects, partners, and ecosystem leaders face-to-face creates something difficult to reproduce through another automated email sequence.

Events also provide better feedback.

A form might tell you what someone clicked.

A dashboard might show you where they converted.

A real conversation can tell you what they actually think.

Andrew applies the same principle personally.

After attending events around the world, he believes memorable people tend to do a few simple things consistently.

They show up.

They care about the other person.

They listen.

And they connect people without immediately asking for something in return.

As AI makes digital communication easier to produce, genuine human interaction may become one of the hardest things for competitors to replicate.

Final Thoughts

The SaaS advantage is shifting.

Building features is getting cheaper.

Launching products is getting faster.

Creating content is getting easier.

And information is becoming available everywhere.

That means companies need advantages that cannot be copied overnight.

• Distribution.
• Audience.
• Brand.
• Community.
• Customer understanding.
• Trust.

And the ability to keep adapting as the market changes.

Andrew’s message is not that product matters less.

It is that a great product alone is no longer enough.

And for founders going through the difficult periods that inevitably come with building a company, Andrew leaves one final lesson:

Survive long enough to succeed.

Your most scarce resource may not be capital, customers, or technology.

It may be your own energy.