Why most SaaS companies are missing the AI opportunity
AI has moved from novelty to necessity, yet most SaaS teams are still layering it on top of legacy workflows. The result? Marginal product improvements, higher infrastructure costs, low adoption, and minimal revenue lift.
Meanwhile, a small group of SaaS leaders are turning AI into a true growth engine. They’re transforming user activity into defensible content, replacing static dashboards with chat-first workflows, and building media flywheels that attract qualified demand every day.
At SaaSiest Amsterdam 2025, Nathan Latka shared a clear message: the winners aren’t those with the biggest models or budgets, but those who design product, distribution, and media to reinforce each other. His thesis is simple — AI should manufacture moats, not just features.
Why Nathan’s perspective matters
Nathan Latka combines operator insight with investor discipline. Through Founderpath and The Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, he’s helped hundreds of SaaS companies unlock capital, scale revenue, and build defensible growth—without giving up equity. The insights in his SaaSiest keynote come from observing thousands of data points across companies like Miro, BeeFree, Submagic, Spendflo, Collibra, Younium, Veed, Gainsight, and Lemlist.
These are not abstract ideas — they’re repeatable frameworks that any SaaS company from €2M to €200M ARR can implement within one or two quarters.
The 3 AI factories driving SaaS growth
Nathan breaks down AI strategy into three factories that compound value:
- The Lumber Mill Principle – Turn user “sawdust” into SEO and defensibility
- Chat Cash – Replace dashboards with chat-first workflows that deliver outcomes
- The Attention Factory – Build compounding brand visibility through owned and earned media
Each system converts underutilized assets into growth levers. Connect them, and your cost of acquisition drops, activation accelerates, and your brand equity compounds.
1. The Lumber Mill Principle: Turn user byproducts into growth
Every SaaS platform produces byproducts — templates, snippets, reports, usage data — that most teams ignore. Nathan likens this to sawdust from a lumber mill: what looks like waste can become your next AI-powered growth engine.
Turn user activity into SEO assets
Companies like Miro and BeeFree already do this. Each new template or board their users create becomes an SEO-optimized page that drives organic traffic and sign-ups. Over time, those libraries evolve into defensible moats of searchable, user-generated content that competitors can’t easily replicate.
The same idea can apply to almost any SaaS product:
- Turn anonymized dashboards into industry benchmarks
- Convert user workflows into public templates
- Feed usage patterns into recommendation engines
From templates to AI agents
The next evolution is turning static templates into runnable agents. Instead of “here’s a layout,” it becomes “run this workflow.” These agent libraries will become the new SEO surface, driving discovery directly from large language models (LLMs).
Nathan’s advice: stop hiding behind “we’re too B2B for virality.” Even “serious” verticals like cybersecurity are adopting free tools and public reports to attract top-funnel interest.
The lesson is simple — structure your digital sawdust into searchable, usable form, and you’re halfway to your next scalable growth channel.
2. Chat Cash: How chat-first SaaS workflows are reshaping engagement
Traditional dashboards once looked powerful. Today, they feel static. Modern users don’t want to browse; they want to ask, act, and get outcomes.
Nathan predicts that the future of SaaS interfaces is chat-first — a system where the product thinks and responds like a partner.
The “copilot and canvas” model
Companies like Spendflo, Collibra, and Younium are leading the shift. Instead of a wall of data, users are greeted by a chat interface: a copilot on the left that prompts and learns, and a canvas on the right where outputs are generated — reports, charts, or memos.
This isn’t just a UX upgrade; it’s an economic advantage. Founderpath now manages a quarter-billion dollars in funding with a five-person team because the chat layer automates the “human” layer of conversation.
Measure engagement by conversation depth
Nathan uses one key metric: First Session Messages (FSM) — the number of back-and-forth exchanges during a user’s first session.
- 1–2 FSMs = low engagement
- 6+ FSMs = meaningful interaction and retention
How to drive FSM up? Suggest follow-up questions automatically, guide the user deeper, and make every exchange generate a tangible output.
Own the customer’s business memory
The ultimate moat lies in integration. If your system connects with your customer’s CRM, billing, analytics, or support stack, you don’t just answer questions — you own their context. And as Nathan puts it:
“If you own their context, you’ll eventually own their cash.”
3. The Attention Factory: Build compounding brand demand with owned media
Even the best product needs oxygen. Paid acquisition is temporary; attention compounds. That’s the idea behind Nathan’s third framework — The Attention Factory.
Convert owned media into SaaS growth
Nathan urges founders to build long-lived content assets — podcasts, GPT integrations, courses, and communities — that generate awareness and trust at scale.
Take Veed.io: by launching a simple GPT that captures “video editing” queries inside ChatGPT, they now route traffic directly back to their site. No expensive ads — just smart placement inside another platform’s ecosystem.
Gainsight proved the same principle years ago with a book that defined the “Customer Success” category when they were still at $8M ARR. That content didn’t just market a product; it built an entire movement.
And Lemlist turned education into lead generation. Their founder-led course validated demand, became a lead magnet, and built a 20,000-person community that now fuels product growth.
Media as a profit center
Nathan practices what he preaches. His own media brand — podcast, newsletter, and magazine — fuels Founderpath’s pipeline. It’s a closed growth loop: content drives leads, leads fund content.
As Nathan says, “Your media business doesn’t have to lose money. It can be your most profitable growth channel.”
Books, podcasts, or courses are not vanity projects — they’re compounding attention assets that algorithms can’t fake.
The payoff: what success looks like
When these three AI-driven systems work together, growth compounds:
✅ Organic and AI-sourced demand grows without equal ad spend.
✅ Users arrive already educated through templates, agents, or media.
✅ Revenue per employee increases as chat workflows replace manual steps.
✅ Your brand earns trust through “monuments” — real proof that AI can’t imitate: a bestselling book, a thriving course, or a searchable user library.
In short, this is how you build an AI-powered SaaS company that scales efficiently, with compounding attention and defensibility baked in.
The takeaway: AI is a system, not a side feature
AI winners in SaaS won’t be the teams with the flashiest demos or largest budgets. They’ll be the ones who:
- Turn user behavior into growth assets
- Replace dashboards with intelligent, conversational interfaces
- Build attention systems that continuously fuel product growth
Start small. Identify one piece of user “sawdust” you can turn into content, one workflow that deserves a chat interface, and one media channel to amplify both.
Connect them — and watch how quickly your AI strategy stops costing money and starts compounding it.
🎥 Watch Nathan Latka’s full session at SaaSiest Amsterdam 2025 here
